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Years ago, a friend invited me out to the pub with a bunch of his friends. None of these people
were interested in God and all of that. But one of these men asked me somewhere early in the conversation, "What do you do?" Which is always either the death of a conversation or in this case it really lit it up. And I explained that I try and spend my time making sense of Christianity for people
And this man, let's just say self-made multi-millionaire from the northern suburbs of Sydney. And he said, oh, well, you know, Christianity's junk. And I took a deep breath and reminded myself of what the Apostle Peter said in 1 Peter 3. Always be prepared to give an answer with gentleness and respect.
And he launched into this little tirade about Christianity. He said that Christians were hypocrites, one thing on Sunday, another thing completely on Monday. And I think I did my best to be gentle and respectful toward him. He also said that science had disproved the Bible. And I did my best to give a few answers there. And then he brought up this other criticism that just really riled me.
He said, and Christianity only spread throughout the Roman world because it had a sword in its hand. It forced everyone to convert. And I said, are you sure? He said, oh, yes, scholars have proven it.
And then something went off in my head. I'm not proud of it, but I started to raise my voice and simultaneously make it a bit smug. I reminded him that I had several degrees in this stuff and that my PhD was in precisely how Christianity grew in the ancient world. I quoted authors from multiple languages. And as the words were leaving my mouth,
I realized I was a jerk and the look in his eyes was he's a jerk because I wasn't gentle. I wasn't respectful. I was just trying to win the argument instead of the person. It's a classic mistake and it's one I'm prone to, to be honest, but it's one I want to avoid in my life and in this show because
which is meant to be about undeceiving ourselves, not getting the one up on others. And so that's what we're doing in this Q&A episode together, hopefully with a little bit of gentleness and respect, undeceiving ourselves. I'm John Dixon, and this is Undeceptions. Undeceptions
Undeceptions is brought to you by Zondervan and their new book, 2084, Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Humanity, by Undeceptions' own John Lennox.
Every week we'll be exploring some aspect of life, faith, history, 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 this week, we'll be trying to undeceive ourselves and let the truth out. Music
Michael asks, what do you see are the facts regarding evolution compelling us to accept it as a significant scientific theory? Belinsky says the facts are unforthcoming, that is, there aren't any. And he says the theory is not compelling. He says it's not even persuasive. The only thing usually presented to us as compelling is the fact that most scientists accept the theory, which means it then becomes an issue of counting noses.
So what do you see are the compelling scientific facts of the matter? Michael's question is sparked by episode two of this second season called Six Days, in which I interviewed Jack Collins, who's the professor of Old Testament at Covenant Theological Seminary. I loved that conversation. We talked about the tendency for atheists and creationists to cling to a more concrete or literalistic reading of the book of Genesis.
And he said that there are other options open to us. It's well worth a listen. We'll put a link in the show notes. To Michael's question.
Look, I believe in evolution in the same way that I believe in, say, Genghis Khan and the expansion of the Mongol Empire toward the door of Europe, because I've read a book or two on that topic. And I think I've worked out pretty much what the scholarly consensus is. So I just accept it. Ditto evolution, actually.
And the thing is, I regard the theological significance of evolution as about the same as the theological significance of the Mongol Empire. I really think the early chapters of Genesis are plainly metaphorical. So I have total freedom to accept the consensus of scientists on evolution. I don't hold it dogmatically.
I'm not sort of dogmatic about the science of evolution, just as I don't hold dogmatically what I know about the Mongol Empire. I'm pretty relaxed about both. And I know other Christians don't see it like that, and I'm relaxed about that too. Mary asks, if Genesis isn't meant to be read literalistically, what do we make of the biblical account of Jesus' genealogy, which traces Jesus back to Adam?
Yeah, we received quite a few questions about the historicity of Adam and Eve, and of course that followed the Jack Collins interview as well. Again, Christians come to different views on this. Personally, I don't think the story of Adam and Eve is a concrete story. There are, for my liking, too many indications of its symbolic nature.
The word Adam actually means mankind more than it actually being a name. There's the tree of life, a tree of the knowledge of good and evil. These sound like pictures, not actual trees you can go and see.
Talking snake as well. All of these sound more like parable to me than history. I'm open to it. I mean, if this fell in a plainly historical text and there was a talking snake as a Bible believer, I would accept the talking snake. It's just that the form of the literature suggests it's more of a parable.
That said, I think it's a parabolic retelling of a true event. This is where the subtleties come in. I mean, there had to be a first human pair who were in relationship with God. And this is a picture of their fall from that relationship.
And it's told as the story of that first pair, but also it's told as the story of Israel who were given a land or garden, given a law. They disobeyed the law and were kicked out of the land, out of the garden. It's Israel's story, but it's also the story of all of humankind who know the will of God and reject it. Did Jesus and Paul think Adam was factual? I'll be honest and say it's hard to know.
The references to Adam in the New Testament, particularly the way Jesus is said to be the new Adam, could be concrete references. They could also be literary references, just as Adam in the Genesis story is said to have brought spiritual death, so Jesus brings eternal life. It could be like my saying, I love Buff just as Romeo loved Juliet.
The reference to Romeo and Juliet is just a literary reference. It doesn't matter that Romeo and Juliet didn't really exist. My love can still be concrete, even if I'm referring by way of literary reference to Romeo and Juliet. By the way, there is one clear example of this kind of literary reference in the New Testament itself. So in the little book of Jude, verse 14, Jude says that Enoch, the seventh generation from Adam,
prophesied saying. And then there's this quote that Enoch is meant to have said, "See, the Lord is coming with tens of thousands of his holy ones" and so on. Now, where is that a quotation from? It's not from the biblical text. There's nothing about Enoch's words in Genesis.
There's no way we actually have the words of the seventh generation of human beings. No way. Jude is just citing a well-known non-biblical Jewish text from the second century B.C.,
There was a book called One Enoch, and he's making a literary reference to it because everyone in his audience would have known the reference. We're not expected to think these are the actual words of the seventh generation of human beings. It's a literary reference. The Adam and Eve story is a parabolic retelling of a genuine historical event. That's how I see it.
It's the first human pair in relationship with God defying God. And it's retold in literary form as our story too.
Mr. Dixon, it's nice to talk to you. Another thought a friend of mine had is in the biblical account of the Tower of Babel. It discusses how God changed all of the languages of the people. I don't know if it would be an unreasonable reading of scripture to infer that God did not stop there. That they were a homogeneous group of people prior to that, but he perhaps also created a
different colors of people and perhaps even changed different genetic traits of people at that time. So just a thought. I thought I would pass on. Thanks for all you do. Hey, well, Blake, you won't be surprised to hear me say, I think the whole Babel story is a parable.
It's told in a really stylized way, quite unlike historical prose. In fact, if you look at the technical commentaries on that passage in Genesis chapter 11, it's a perfect chiasm.
A chiasm is a literary form we know from the ancient world where the first bit of the story corresponds to the last bit of the story. The second bit of the story corresponds to the second last bit, the third to the third last, the fourth to the fourth last. And then there's always a middle section that doesn't have a mirror, doesn't have a counterpart. And that's usually what tells you what the story is about. In this case, the middle line is God came down.
My basic view, and it's a view shared by many biblical scholars today, is that the first 11 chapters of Genesis are very different from the historical narrative that begins in chapter 12 with Abraham.
And one of the keys to the whole way that this works, how Genesis 1 to 11 is, as it were, answered by everything that comes afterwards, is the way the word curse appears in Genesis 1 to 11 in five key places. And so it's like this idea that human beings are cursed, that the earth is cursed, that this is what's wrong with the world. And then suddenly at the front of chapter 12,
where it suddenly is the history of Abraham. In just one paragraph where Abraham is called to follow God and be the first person who's part of the people of God, the word blessing, which is the antonym of curse, appears five times.
It's like all that's come before in the prehistory is now answered in the history that we're about to read in the story of Abraham and the Jews and the unfolding grace of God in Jesus Christ and so on.
And while we're on the topic of the Old Testament. Over the past decade and a half, really, I've been kind of maneuvering myself towards writing a book which explores where I think ultimately the values of humanism, of secularism, of liberalism that I hold actually come from. And this was a quest that was sharpened for me by writing a book about the origins of Islam, where I was essentially making the argument that a
A lot that Muslims believe about the origins of Islam are actually mythic, are back projections. And it was a repeated complaint of Muslim critics that I would never dream of doing the same to my own beliefs and values. So in a sense, Dominion is an attempt to do that. That's author and historian Tom Holland talking about his book Dominion, in which he discovers that all of the West's most cherished scholars
values actually find their origins in the Christian faith. He's a fascinating scholar. I love him. Rebecca asks a question arising from some of Tom's other thoughts. Rebecca asks, can we historically trust the Old Testament?
I'm currently reading the book Dominion by Tom Holland, and in the chapter Jerusalem, he discusses the idea that Judaism was initially a polytheistic culture that was revised to a monotheism in the many rewritings of the Old Testament. The evidence for this, he writes, is in the Bible itself.
Rebecca helpfully gives us some of Tom Holland's proof texts, Psalm 82, 1 Kings 12, Hosea 8 verse 6, where multiple gods are mentioned. Look, I must say Tom's view is a very common one amongst Old Testament scholars. Monotheism is such a puzzle as to where it came from that many scholars find it difficult to believe the Jews could have held onto monotheism as long as they did.
There are all these hints in the Bible that Jews were polytheists, believing in many gods. And you know what? The archaeology indicates the same thing. Lots of little shrines and idols have been found throughout the biblical period, throughout Israel.
The problem is all of this evidence also fits with the story the Old Testament openly says about itself, that God's people were slow to throw off the old ways of Abraham and its Mesopotamian polytheism, of Egyptian polytheism, of the polytheism of Canaan.
But that's kind of the punchline of the whole Old Testament. God's own people who knew there was just one God actually worshipped lots and lots of gods. They sinned against the Lord. This is a striking theme through the whole of the Old Testament. The Bible and the archaeology don't contradict
the kind of biblical claim about monotheism. They are the biblical claim. The people of God disobeyed what they knew was the truth. None of this changes the fact that the Israelites, for as long as they were conscious of being Israelites, knew they were meant to worship just one God.
And just in passing, another question from Lynn came in about Tom Holland, saying that he suggested in the same book that Jesus was actually a slave and his manner of death, crucifixion, proves it. Look, frankly, I'm not super confident that Tom really argues that. I mean, it's true that slaves were very frequently crucified because crucifixion was like the lowest of the deaths. But...
So are many other people, many other kinds of people faced this extreme punishment because it was reserved for extreme criminals, especially those guilty of sedition against Rome. And that's what Jesus was accused of. There is plenty of evidence that non-slaves were crucified. And that's as neat a segue as we could ask for for Mark's question.
Mark writes, I just finished listening to Rhett and Link of Good Mythical Morning fame share the deconstruction of their faith. Rhett especially focused on the intellectual challenges he'd had with his Christian faith, particularly around the trustworthiness of the Gospels after reading Jesus Interrupted by Bart Ehrman. I'd value your thoughts on the arguments made by Ehrman against the Gospels.
Look, Bart Ehrman is a fine scholar. He's not one of those nutters that you see wheeled out at Christmas and Easter time. But the thing I've always felt about Bart Ehrman in both his popular and his academic work is that he's one kind of author in his popular work and another kind in his academic work.
I mean, his main academic specialty is textual criticism, the study of the various manuscripts we have for the New Testament. That is the thing he's well known for in scholarship.
And in that work, he notes the variations that we have in our New Testaments, the sort of things that we talked about actually in episode one of season one. What was that called? Old papers or something like that. And he makes comments about the certain influences that might have led to the variations we find in the New Testament copying.
But the thing is, his scholarly suggestions are usually couched as suggestions. And then suddenly in his more popular works, he, I don't know, he amps it up. Maybe that's the right way to put it. He makes it sound like the New Testament is unreliable because of all these variations in the text. But frankly, no.
I think a lot of this is aimed at Bart Ehrman's American context. He used to be a fundamentalist Christian, he says, and a lot of his work seems to be aimed at throwing bombs into fundamentalism.
where you do meet people who almost think that the Bible fell out of heaven without any variation. And in that context, I guess Ehrman's complaints make sense. But Bart Ehrman knows, as well as anyone, that the New Testament is still the best attested text of the ancient world, better than Tacitus, Josephus, the Aeneid, and all the other texts historians rely on for understanding the ancient world.
Our next question comes from someone who is puzzled about the approach of those weird people called historians. Anthony writes, In talking about miracles and the resurrection, and then talking about that faith is based on the evidence of witnesses, why can't the secular historians then say that the evidence is strong or weak for trusting the resurrection?
They make this judgment for other events in history and archaeology by saying there is a 90% chance that this is the place or that this event occurred. Well, Anthony, history is a game with certain rules like other games. Some historians happen to believe in God and miracles and some don't. But we've all sort of worked out that if we're going to play on the same field together, we have to settle on rules that we can all share.
And one of those rules is that we won't, in our historical work, invoke anything miraculous or theological or philosophical. We just deal with the evidence and we talk like we're in a naturalistic world. And that's fine. It's actually the same with Christian scientists like Ard Louie from Oxford or Ian Hutchinson from MIT, whom we've had on the show before.
They believe in much more than the natural world, of course, but for the sake of good science and talking to other scientists, they only talk about the natural world and not its philosophical implications or underpinnings. And it's the same with history. Historians conclude, when we're talking about the resurrection, that there was an empty tomb and that many people thought they saw Jesus. Them's the facts.
That's what's true in the natural world. But they won't take the next step and say that Jesus actually rose again because that's to step beyond the pitch that we've set for ourselves. That's beyond the rules of the game. And that's okay. It's only history.
I mean, as a human being who's more than a historian, I can take that next step and say that the best interpretation of the facts is that God raised Jesus to life. But when I say that, I'm saying it as more than a historian, as someone who is a human being who can bring in philosophy and theology as well as history.
And one of the reasons the evidence of the Gospels is regularly dismissed is because of the assumption that they're riddled with little errors. And so the reasoning goes, if they can't get these little details right, how can we trust the whole thing? That's the thinking behind our next question.
TJ says, I was told recently that Matthew misreads the prophecy in Zechariah 9.9 regarding the cult. Matthew says Jesus used both a donkey and its cult. The prophecy says a donkey, a cult, the fall of a donkey. Apparently there's minor punctuation that makes Matthew's misreading likely. The implication is that Matthew misread the prophecy, then adjusted his story to make it look like Jesus was the Messiah.
I know Matthew uses a lot of liberty when referencing Old Testament passages, however I find this one a little disturbing because it seems to show Matthew making a mistake. I'd like to know how you approach that issue. Well, if it's a mistake, it's a tiny one. The sort of thing you find in all ancient sources. I mean, Tacitus, the greatest of all of our imperial sources.
calls Pontius Pilate procurator. But that's a little mistake. We know he wasn't procurator. He was what's called prefect. But that little mistake doesn't affect the general historical worth of Tacitus. And so historians don't fret about little details. The Gospels might have got wrong or might have changed. But here's the thing. I don't think Matthew has made any kind of mistake here.
Matthew is the Gospel writer most obviously competent in Jewish and Hebrew traditions. There is no way he read the text of Zechariah 9 as requiring two animals, a donkey and a colt.
He knows Semitic parallelism better than just about any other New Testament author. And in that text, it says a donkey, that is a cult, the foal of a donkey. It's just that Matthew probably knows the story to involve two animals and unlike the gospel writers, decides to record it that way.
There's also no way Matthew pictures Jesus riding on two animals at the same time. I mean, how is that even imaginable? When he says Jesus sat on them, plural, it's just a generalizing statement. Jesus sat on the colt with the mum right there. And from a troubling statement made by Matthew to a troubling statement from Jesus. Hi, John. In Matthew 12, I think it is, Jesus says he's
going to be in the earth like Jonah was in the wild for three nights and three days, yet we only celebrate Easter from two nights and three days. Can you tell me what the difference is? How do we reconcile that?
Cool. With things like this, you've got to pause and ask yourself, did the gospel writer not spot that Jesus said three days and three nights, but they go on to tell the burial and resurrection story as just Friday afternoon to Sunday morning? Were these guys complete idiots?
If they knew Jesus died on a Friday and rose on a Sunday and yet still recorded him as referring to three days and three nights, we have to assume there's a way of understanding three days and three nights as referring to the same period. The simple answer is by inclusive counting, Jesus was in the grave three days, a Friday, a Saturday and a Sunday.
Day and night is just an expression in the book of Jonah that Jesus takes as a literary reference to himself to mean three days. We can't get fixated on a literalism when it's clear the gospel writers weren't fussed by it at all. And while we're on the topic of Easter...
Pete asks, The New Bible Dictionary suggests that if the Jewish calendar is converted into the Gregorian calendar, then Christ was crucified on April 3rd, and elsewhere I've read that it could have been within a two-week period. If Christians preach a historical Jesus, is the case weakened by having the date falling within a two-month period so it can coincide with a pagan fertility festival, Oestra?
Shouldn't we be celebrating Christ's death and resurrection on the closest weekend to April 3rd? Well, the good news is we've devoted an entire episode to questions about Easter. It's episode four of this season called, appropriately, Easter Myths.
So let me refer you to that for a much more detailed examination of all this stuff. But for one thing, Easter has nothing to do with the pagan deity, Ostra or Ishtar or any of the other variations people have offered. Easter isn't even called Easter in its earliest days. It was called Pascha or Passover. And most languages still call it some variation of that.
So the linguistics just don't work. Easter goes back to the Passover festival. So the question is, which calendar should we follow? And it's a complicated matter. What about the Jewish calendar? In which case our Easter will move all over the place because the Jewish calendar has Passover falling on the 14th of the lunar month of Nisan. It rarely falls on a Friday to a Sunday.
So, you know, if we go with your idea of April 3rd, you know, try and lock it into the Gregorian calendar, that will also very rarely fall on a Sunday. And Sunday was a really big deal for the early Christians. So they had to work out a way that would be a kind of convention to mark the day without anyone thinking it was the actual day, like a birthday or something, that still made sense. So the early church invented a rule, at least in the West,
that basically said when the spring equinox comes around, which takes you basically into Passover season, we'll make Easter whichever Sunday follows the full moon following the spring equinox. I know that sounds complicated, but it's actually a pretty good solution to the problem.
And that's it for easy questions. We've saved all the really tough ones for after the break. St. Paul versus Jesus. Can women preach? The existence of God and the ultimate head-scratcher, God and the origins of evil. All of this after the break.
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.
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Duncan writes, Recently I heard an interview on Soul Search on the ABC. The guest stated that the Apostle Paul's message was one of a number of rival messages in the early church.
and that his succeeded because it turned an apocalyptic message by a poor peasant teacher into a grand aristocratic message about becoming royal children of the Lord of the Universe.
Look, that used to be a really popular view in the middle of the 20th century, but the evidence has basically brought it down. Both planks of that view prove to be wrong. I mean, it's pretty clear Jesus wasn't just a peasant teacher to the poor, and it's pretty clear Paul was no aristocrat.
Multiple lines of evidence in the earliest gospel sources, Mark, Q, L, and so on, make plain that Jesus was all about inviting people to become children of the Father of an eternal kingdom. The very thing people said only Paul invented. And plenty of passages in Paul make clear he was desperately concerned for the poor. The very thing people say Jesus was into, not Paul. I
I mean, from the evidence of his letters, we know he spent a decade collecting money from Gentile churches for the famine-ravaged people of Judea.
Look, the fact is research over the last, I don't know, 50 years makes clear Paul himself was deeply dependent on the messaging coming out of the original Jerusalem church. Although he was obviously a pretty inspired and independent thinker, he makes repeated references in his letters to things he received from the original apostles.
And there's a list of about 20 things in his letters that come from the actual historical mouth of Jesus. Stuff about divorce, about mission work, about the Last Supper and stacks more. So no, we can't really posit a gap between the original Jesus and the religion of Paul. And this connects us to the next question.
James asks, I was wondering if you could point me in the direction of any non-Christian historians who acknowledge that early Christians, pre-council of Nicaea, worshipped Jesus as God.
Hey, a quick explainer about the Council of Nicaea that James refers to here. It was a meeting convened in the year 325 by the Emperor of Rome, Constantine, the first Christian emperor. He called together all the leaders of the church because he wanted to settle a dispute that had broken out first in Alexandria and then all around the empire over the identity of Jesus. A priest called
Arius from Alexandria in northern Egypt was proposing a really cool Greek philosophical way of explaining Jesus' connection to God by saying that he was a kind of bridge between infinity and the finitude of
of humanity. See for pagans it was a really hard thing to get their heads around, to think of a human being also being God, that you could have the eternal in a temporal. So Arius kind of solves the puzzle in a way that made sense for more pagans. But the important thing is this was a new view, a new view. He was deliberately countering the much older view that Jesus really was God.
He'd worked out how to make that difficult thing sound easier to pagans. That's the view that was under discussion at the Council of Nicaea. And you know what? That view spectacularly lost. Only two of the 300 or so bishops in attendance went with Arius's view. There were blokes called Theonis and Secundus, in case you're wondering.
The rest went with the older view, even though it gave them more headaches when they're trying to reach sophisticated Greeks. Now, as for non-Christian historians who agree that Christians worship Jesus as God before the Council of Nicaea, the basic answer is all of them.
This is not a thing in dispute. I mean, there are quibbles about how early Christians worship Jesus as God. For example, Bart Ehrman doesn't think it was the very first believers, but even Ehrman knows it was well before the Council of Nicaea. And that's because the evidence is overwhelming. Now,
Not only do we have New Testament texts teaching that Jesus was fully God from the first century, we also have, for example, a letter from the pagan governor Pliny at the beginning of the second century, so this is two centuries before the Council of Nicaea, saying that Christians sang hymns to Jesus quasi Deo, as God.
And we even have an inscription in Megiddo, in the center of Israel, in the oldest church we've yet found, that declares Jesus to be God. You were with me, Mark, were you not, in that prison in Megiddo? I was. And we filmed a scene there. It was awesome. And this woman, Akeptus, offers the table, the communion table, in honor of the God, Jesus Christ.
And that is from about a century before Constantine and the Council of Nicaea. But that's not the only question we got about the early history of the church. Andrew asks, Can you tell me more about the formation of the New Testament? Specifically, why some books like the Gospel of Thomas were excluded? And when was the final New Testament completed? And why does the Roman Catholic New Testament have more books than the Protestant Bible?
Well, this requires a whole history lecture. In fact, I have one here on my computer somewhere. Perhaps we should do a whole episode on it, Director Mark, sometime in the future. How did the New Testament come together?
You just raised your eyebrows at me anyway. So first, just to clear up. I'm game. I'm game. Okay. Just to clear up one thing in this. The Catholic New Testament is identical to the Protestant New Testament. It's the Old Testament that's slightly different. The Catholic Old Testament has about six extra documents in it.
And that's simply because the Greek translation of the Old Testament in the ancient world was the one the early church used because they mainly spoke Greek. And that Greek version of the Old Testament had these six extra books in it. The Hebrew version, the one used by Hebrew speaking Jews over in Judea and Galilee, didn't have those books.
And Protestants opted to have the same Old Testament as the Jewish Torah. The Catholic Church opted to keep the extra books from the Greek rendition of the Old Testament. But frankly, nothing hangs on it. Those extra Old Testament books don't add or subtract any important point.
As for the Gnostic Gospels, they were never contenders for the New Testament because they were all too late. They popped out of nowhere in the middle of the second century, so well over a century after Jesus, in a period when the four Gospels were long accepted as the Gospels. The church was rightly suspicious of these sort of nouveau Gospels and just left them to one side.
As for how the New Testament came together, this is a big deal. But let me just give you the punchline. It's clear that the four Gospels, the Book of Acts and the Letters of Paul were all regarded as authoritative scripture by the early second century.
How do we know that? Because we have lots of other early Christian texts in the second century that quote the Gospels, Acts, and Paul as authoritative texts. It's true that there were later quibbles about
the book of Revelation, about James, 2 Peter, and so on. And it would take too long to explain why and how we got those books in the New Testament. But the crucial point is that long before there were any church councils to discuss the full extent of the New Testament, 80% of the New Testament was already universally accepted as Scripture. The first Christians didn't choose that stuff.
They just recognized that it came with apostolic authority from the apostolic period. Of course, asking where the New Testament comes from opens the door to a host of other questions, which we have coming up. Hi, John. My name is Ashley and I live in Houston, Texas, and have really grown up in church, mostly Southern Baptist, but part of a non-denominational church now, and was given your book, Hearing Her Voice, as a birthday gift recently.
a couple of months ago, and I just finished it. And then actually more recently found your podcast. So in my exploration of this topic of whether women can preach, I've done a lot of research on complementarianism versus egalitarianism. And it occurs to me that there's a lot of evidence for both sides of that argument. I would just love your insight and your thoughts on
How it's possible that both of those positions could actually be maybe not incorrect, but incomplete and how they are complete and
when they're put together, I would love to know the answer to that question. Thanks. Thanks for your podcast. Thank you for your book. It was beautiful and refreshing and I may or may not have cried at the end. All right. Bye-bye. Thanks, Ashley. Thank you. Look, to be honest, I didn't want to include this one, but director Mark and producer Kaylee said I have to. So
Here we go. Just before I get to that, though, let me do a quick point back to an episode just a couple of weeks ago, Remembering Women, episode 22. It's a brilliant discussion, not so much of this question of women's ministry, but of the role of women in early Christianity for the first five centuries. I thought our guest, Lynne Koek, was spectacular.
Now let's start by defining some of the terms. Egalitarianism, for those who don't know, is just the view that men and women can and should be doing all the roles in the church together equally. Complementarianism says that men and women are complements, not exactly the same, and that some roles are not completely the same for men and women. So to my view,
I think the Bible is totally cool with women preaching sermons in church. Here's my argument in a nutshell. First, the New Testament makes a clear distinction between different kinds of what we call preaching. So there's teaching, prophesying, exhorting. And actually in Romans 12, Paul explicitly says that these speaking functions are different ministries. So that's worth holding in mind.
Second, the only one of these activities Paul forbids to women in 1 Timothy 2 is teaching. He says he doesn't permit women to have the authority of teaching.
Then again, thirdly, elsewhere in Paul, he explicitly allows women to do prophesying in the church service. That's 1 Corinthians 11. And nowhere does he forbid women to do the other kind of speaking, exhortations in church. So here's the key double barrel question. What's the difference between prophesying, exhorting and teaching? And what is a modern sermon in connection with those things?
My view, in short, is that preaching sermons today is far more like exhorting and prophesying than it is like what Paul called teaching. And so women should be in our pulpits regularly giving sermons. What exactly teaching is and what's the modern equivalent? Well, you'll have to go to my little book on the subject for that.
Now, with all these kinds of controversies, I just want to flag that above all, we've got to cut each other slack. Over the years, I've come to genuinely believe that strict complementarians are not misogynists. I mean, some are, and I don't think egalitarians are compromises of the faith, although some are.
When decent arguments can be made on both sides of a question like this, Christians need to go easy on each other and just give each other the benefit of the doubt. Two final questions about God. Kathy says, I noted the comment you made that all things, whether good or sad, come from God. I'd like to hear you talk more about this. In particular, are you saying that sad things involving evil come from God?
Is God responsible for evil? Several listeners sent in this question, and it's not an easy one to answer. And you've got two minutes to do it in. Yeah, always the encouraging person, Director Mark. Thank you very much. Although I guess I deserve it, given our outros.
I was obviously too vague in those remarks Kathy refers to, and I'm sorry about that. I don't believe God is the author of evil in the sense that he's pushing evil along, directing people to do bad things like robots or causing mutations and viruses and so on.
But nor do I go to the other extreme and just say God has nothing to do with these things, that he's hands off, that the devil does them and God just has to permit them or something. My view of God's connection to evil ultimately derives from my general view of God's connection to all matter in the universe.
I hold the classical Christian view going back to Augustine in the 5th century and Aquinas in the 13th century. And of course, I think it ultimately derives from the Bible. This basically says that God is the only truly existing thing.
He's the only thing that has existence itself, who is existence itself. And he lends existence to every particle in the universe at every moment. So Hebrews 11 in the Bible says everything exists for God and through God. Revelation 4 praises God saying, you created all things and by your will they have their being.
Or Paul in Acts chapter 17 says, in him, God, we live and move and have our being. Or if you want a more nerdy philosophical way of putting it, Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century said, all things are subject to divine providence in as much as they participate in existence.
This doesn't mean God is pushing the murderer to murder, but it does mean that God is upholding, giving existence to every particle in the murderer, even at the time of the murder.
In that sense, God is present in and ultimately responsible for all things at all times, even though that doesn't make him the one doing the evil. There's a lot more literature on this, and I might point you to some stuff to read in the show notes.
The final question pushes back to an even more fundamental issue, the existence of a personal God. Steve writes, there's quite a gap between deism and theism. Theism, as opposed to deism, requires a suspension of science and philosophy. Without revelation, there is no Judaism, Islam or Christianity. Yeah, that's a thoughtful one.
Deism, for those who don't know, is the view that there must be some kind of vague mind behind the universe, but we can't say any more than that. And theism usually refers to a more personal belief in God acting in the world and so on. Well, my view is that science and philosophy definitely give you deism.
The more we know about science, the more obvious it is that there are fundamental, elegant mathematical laws that describe the activities of everything from the smallest particle to the furthest reaches of the cosmos. So there must be a rational mind behind all of this. As Einstein said, we all suspect there is an author behind the library of books we call the universe.
Okay, now I agree that this deism, this vague belief in a mind behind the universe, doesn't give you theism, a personal god. I don't think science and philosophy give you anything more than deism. And it's interesting, by the way, that even atheists like Richard Dawkins come close to saying they think a decent argument can be made for a vague deism. The thing is, theism isn't contrary to deism.
It doesn't require a suspension of science and philosophy. Theism is just deism plus a conviction that this vague mind behind the universe has given some disclosure in the world. It is deism plus revelation. Now, here's the thing.
Based on the science and philosophy, I'm convinced there must be some vague god or mind behind the creation, but I go further than that because I think the evidence of biblical revelation compels me to do so. Only in the Christian faith is there a tangible "X marks the spot" on the world stage, indicating that the vague god of our universal hunch has touched the earth.
The history of Jesus Christ, his life, teachings, healings, death and resurrection, can be studied and found to be solid even without first believing it to be revelation. But once you find yourself thinking it's solid, it's pretty hard to resist the conclusion that Christ's resurrection is the thing that pushes us past deism to personal theism. Science and philosophy teach me deism.
but the life of Jesus directs me to full-blown personal theism.
Well, I hope you enjoyed our Q&A episode for this season. And if you've got more questions, I'd love to hear them. You can tweet them via @Underceptions, send us a regular old email, [email protected] or go over to Underceptions.com website and click the record button and we get to hear your voice.
While you're there, check out everything else related to the show and to the individual episodes. If you've liked our show, then I want to nudge you gently to have a look at Life in Wartime with David Robertson and Stephen McAlpine. These are two great thinkers. This is a new podcast, part of the Eternity Podcast Network. And basically what they're doing is they're talking about this time of conflict and tension that we find ourselves in.
And these two guys from Third Space who are trying to make sense of the Christian faith for Christians and for doubters take hard-hitting issues and I think bring a pretty sensible approach to it. So go and check them out. Life in Wartime, eternitypodcasts.com.
Next episode, well, it's our final episode for the season. Man, that's gone quickly. But we end on a spectacular note. We're going to introduce you to Rachel Gilson, the author of a brand new book.
Born Again That Way. And she's going to try and explain to us how she can be same-sex attracted and a committed Christian. I promise you, this is not the story you're expecting. See ya. Music
Undeceptions is hosted by me, John Dixon, directed and produced by the ever-encouraging Mark Hadley, with some help from Kayleigh Payne, who is truly encouraging. Our theme song is by Bach, Johann Sebastian, arranged by me and played by the fabulous Undeceptions band, editing by Bryce McLellan. Head to undeceptions.com and you'll find show notes and all sorts of other stuff related to our episodes. God bless.