Confronting Christianity
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And when people say, "Oh, you know, I think the Bible condemns same-sex relationships," one of the things I want to be quick to say is, actually, I don't think so. I think the Bible commands same-sex relationships for Christians that are not sexual, but actually incredibly important and powerful.

Paul, who wrote many of the texts in the New Testament, he talked about Christians as being one body with each other, as being knit together in love. He's all this incredibly intimate language about how Christians should relate to each other. There's a beauty around the biblical boundaries on sex because it actually creates space for different kinds of relationships that give us different angles on what it means for Jesus to love us.

That's Rebecca McLaughlin and just a taste of the learned, feisty intellectual character you're going to meet in this episode.

You can read her full bio on her website, but among other things, she has a PhD in English literature from Cambridge University, a degree in theology from Oak Hill College, and a list of international writing credits as long as your arm. She was also the vice president of content for the Veritas Forum in the US, where she basically identified and equipped Christian professors in mainstream universities to speak about their faith in connection with their work.

She's also the author of 2020's Christian Book of the Year, Confronting Christianity, 12 Hard Questions for the World's Largest Religion. It's frankly brilliant. Rebecca basically asks, is Christianity a viable worldview or is there just too much going against it?

I caught up with her in Boston, or Cambridge, Massachusetts, to be precise. And she is rather precise. And I fired at her my top questions confronting Christianity. And then I shut up and let her talk. And I think you'll be happy about that. And I think you'll be surprised at some of her undeceptions. I'm John Dixon, and this is Undeceptions. Undeceptions

Undeceptions is brought to you by Zondervan Academics' new video streaming service, Master Lectures, featuring the world's leading Christian scholars.

Each episode, 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, we'll be trying to undeceive ourselves and let the truth out. ♪

It's often said that Britain's church congregations are shrinking, but that doesn't come close to expressing the scale of the disaster now facing Christianity in this country. Between 2001 and 2011, the number of Christians born in Britain fell by 5.3 million, about 10,000 a week.

If that rate of decline continues, the mission of St Augustine to the English will come to an end in 2067. That is the year in which the Christians who have inherited the faith of their British ancestors will become statistically invisible. Damien Thompson, The Spectator.

Christianity in decline seems to be a favorite media trope, the narrative that fewer and fewer people believe in God and go to church and all that stuff. And so it's going to go away any moment now. Is there any point defending Christianity? It might not even be around in a few generations. That's where Rebecca and I begin. Rebecca, just about everything we see in the media tells us that religion is on the way out.

that secularism is just the great march. You're not so sure? I'm actually quite sure that it's not, and that's not my opinion. Forty odd years ago, pretty much every sociologist of religion worth their salt thought exactly what you just articulated, that religion was on its way out. That as the world became more modern, more scientific, more educated, that religious belief would naturally decline.

But that prophecy has actually failed. And not only are we not seeing a less religious world now, but as sociologists now look out over the next 40 years to 2060, they're anticipating an increasingly religious world. Is this just because, you know, the ignorant masses outside our educated environment are religious and they're just, you know,

bigger populations than us? Well, so the irony is that part of the foundational thought behind what was called the secularisation hypothesis, this idea that the world as it became more modern would become more secular, was that this is what had happened in Western Europe. And there was this idea that where Western Europe led, obviously the rest of the world would follow. And that turns out to have been pretty much a kind of white Western centric arrogance that we're only just now realising.

And there's an irony in the upper echelons of the educated world in the West right now, which is that this idea of global secularization is still very much preeminent, but it's actually been proven false by empirical evidence. So there's an interesting guy named Fang Gangyang, who's a leading expert of sociology of religion in China. And he anticipates that the university in the West is going to have to go through a paradigm shift, much like a scientific revolution, he puts it,

when the failure of the hypothesis that the world is becoming less religious comes home to roost. Now, there is the reality that religious people have more kids.

So that's absolutely at play. But the idea that education necessarily produces atheism or agnosticism is actually pretty weak as a hypothesis. Western commentators seem to have overstepped the mark. To paraphrase Mark Twain, reports of Christianity's death have been greatly exaggerated. But there's plenty more I want to throw at Rebecca.

If there was a God who could do these things and demand these things of us, and it was eternal and unchanging, we would be living under a dictatorship from which there was no appeal, and one that could never change, and one that knows our thoughts and can convict us of thought crime and condemn us to eternal punishment. That's the late, great Christopher Hitchens, a champion of world atheism. I've often thought of him as God's favorite atheist because he was just so charming and witty.

Anyway, that's him railing against one of the many evils that Christianity imposes on the world. He puts our next question bluntly. Why embrace something that's obviously bad for us? You confront the claim that religion is bad for us by declaring the opposite. It's good for us in multiple ways. Are you just being a contrarian?

No, I mean, again, I'm literally just following very well-documented evidence coming out of places like Harvard. So there's a guy named Tyler Vanderbilt, who's one of the leading experts of the physical and mental benefits of religion. He's at Harvard School of Public Health down the road here.

And he argues from a wealth of empirical data that regular religious participation, so for example, going to church once a week or more, is good for our health and for our happiness and for our pro-social behavior. It's even to the extent that, for example, you probably know that smoking is bad for you and that if you quit smoking, then you have a sort of bump in your health outcomes. It turns out that going to church once a week or more is an equivalent health benefit to quitting smoking.

Also equivalent to eating more fruits and vegetables, which all of our mothers have told us to do at various points in our lives. So you could take up smoking and keep going to church and you'd be on a par with your secular friends.

A group of conservative evangelicals are now rallying around the president following a scathing op-ed in Christianity Today, which called for President Trump's removal from office. In a letter to the magazine's president, nearly 200 church leaders condemned the op-ed, writing this, "We are not far right evangelicals as characterized by the author. Rather, we are Bible believing Christians and patriotic Americans. Your editorial offensively questioned the spiritual integrity

and Christian witness of tens of millions of believers who take seriously their civic and moral obligations. Here to discuss now we have CNN reporting on President Donald Trump receiving the support of a coalition of American evangelical Christian leaders, which in this case was represented by a group of largely white aging men. Not that there's anything wrong with white aging men, but it does reinforce a stereotype that Christianity has a limited demographic.

Isn't Christianity white and male, and therefore the enemy of diversity? Gosh, again, this is one of the deep ironies of the secularisation hypothesis, because right now, despite this perception that atheism, or at least secular humanism, is the worldview of diversity and progress, it's actually the worldview of white Western men and communist regimes.

So if you look in America, the proportion of people who identify as atheist is much higher among white men than it is among the average population. And the most typical Christian, both in America and globally, is a woman of color.

According to the Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in the US, a pretty prestigious place actually, the Christian faith, far from shrinking, is growing at 0.07% faster than the world's population is growing. And it's anything but white.

Christianity is barely growing in Europe and only doing slightly better in North America. But it is growing in Oceania and Latin America, and it's exploding in Asia and Africa.

To many, Christianity appears absolutist. How could there possibly be one grand faith? One way in spiritual matters. I think there's an important insight at the heart of why people think that. And that is a sense that we humans naturally tend toward arrogance. And we tend toward wanting to prove that we're right and other people are wrong. We tend to want to feel morally superior to others. So I think that there is a

a good core insight that drives people to say actually maybe it's arrogant to say there's only one true faith. However, I think if we look at that more closely we'll find out that it turns out to not be a humble posture at all but actually quite an arrogant posture because in order to say that all religions are equally true you actually can't take the belief system of any religion seriously.

And you're ultimately saying none of these belief systems have any real claim on objective truth. And when it comes to Christianity in particular, one of the awkward things about Christianity is that it makes very specific, historically grounded truth claims, most importantly the claim that Jesus was raised from the dead. And this is not some sort of peripheral belief of Christianity, it's right at the heart of the gospel for Christians.

And Christians claim that this first century Jewish man named Jesus of Nazareth died on a cross and three days later was physically raised from the dead. Now if we look even at the two other great monotheistic religions, so the ones closest to Christianity in many ways, Islam and Judaism, we find that they make different claims about this historical event. So Jews and, for that matter, Buddhists and Hindus and atheists and agnostics would say that Jesus died but he was not raised. Muslims say that he didn't die but just seemed to.

So when it comes to a very specific concrete historical claim, the three great monotheistic religions take different views and only one of them can be right. And I think people sometimes find this hard to grasp because they think, well, you know, 2000 years is a long time ago. It's hard to prove exactly what happened that long ago. Fine. But it is still the case that either Jesus was raised from the dead or he wasn't. It's not a kind of both-and scenario.

My view is that morality, our human morality, is older than religion. So instead of saying morality comes from God or religion gave us morality, for me that's a big no-no. Our current religions are just 2,000 or 3,000 years old, which is very young. I'm struggling with whether we need religion. So personally I think we can be moral without religion because we probably had morality long before the current religions came along.

So I think we can be moral without religion. That's Franz de Waal, professor of primate behavior in the Department of Psychology at Emory University on bigthink.com. He's suggesting that religion is a latecomer to the morality party, that it was sort of tacked onto morality to bolster the moral authority and impulse. The historian in me wants to ask what he makes of the fact that most of the oldest religions didn't have moral systems.

But he does raise an interesting area of inquiry, whether religion is necessary for morality. How do you respond to secularist thinkers like Steven Pinker, who famously has said, really, it's secularism that has promoted the moral good in the West, and religion generally hinders the growth of morality? I'm reading a really interesting book right now by a British atheist historian called Tom Holland.

It's called Dominion. I think the subtitle is different in the UK and the US, but it's something like Dominion, how the Christian movement changed the world. And in it, Holland, who is not a Christian, is looking at the history of ideas

And he's pointing out to us that things that we today see as moral norms, regardless of your religious perspective. So, for example, the idea that all human beings are equally morally valuable, that humans should be given human rights, that men and women are equally valuable, that racial diversity is a moral good, and that people starving in the slums in Calcutta can make moral demands on us sitting in Cambridge, Massachusetts here now.

All of these seem to us to be self-evident claims, but actually if you look at the history of ideas, they're claims that have been brought to us by Christianity.

Hey, excuse me for interrupting Rebecca, but actually, if you want more on this particular topic, last season, episode four, Moral Classics, we interviewed Teresa Morgan, one of the professors of classics at Oxford University. And it was astonishing the way she described that Christianity brought into the classical world this notion that not only does God love us,

love human beings, as a result, human beings are to love one another. And she says that was the single greatest contribution of Christianity to the classical world. Anyway, back to Rebecca. So if you take a historical view, you'll find that even the moral standards against which atheists and agnostic leaders like Steven Pinker are evaluating are actually Christian moral values. Like, why do we care about the poor or the marginalised?

If you look back at the Greco-Roman world, you wouldn't have that expectation. You wouldn't have the expectation that women were equally morally valuable to men. You wouldn't have the expectation that the poor and the oppressed and the marginalized and the sick deserved the attention and help of the powerful and the strong and the rich.

Atheism wants to have its cake and eat it, Rebecca is saying. It wants an ultimately meaningless universe and yet to borrow some of the Bible's best lines, humility, care for the unknown vulnerable and so on. The obvious next question confronting Christianity is its history of violence, of denying the good. I put that to Rebecca 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. He's a

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.

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.

The obvious next question confronting Christianity is its history of violence. For years, I've been fascinated by this particular challenge confronting Christianity. Monty Python's Holy Grail puts it humorously, King Arthur about to smite someone for not believing he's God's chosen one. But it's a serious question. The lady of the lake, her arm clad in the purest shimmering samite, held a loft excalibur from the bosom of the water.

signifying by divine providence that I, Arthur, was to carry Excalibur. That is why I'm your king. Listen, strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony. Be quiet! You can't expect to wield supreme executive power just because some watery tart threw a sword at you. Shut up! If

If I went round saying I was an emperor just because some moistened bint had lobbed a scimitar at me, they'd put me away. Shut up, will you? Shut up! Now we see the violence inherent in the system. Shut up! Come and see the violence inherent in the system! It's a playful way of putting it, but there's no hiding from the harsh realities of church history.

But surely the history of Christian violence, from the Crusades to the European wars and so on, suggests that Christianity is incapable of promoting peace and may in fact be a trigger for violence. Again, this is a very widely believed view and one that it's important for us to grapple with. And the first thing I want to say is that a core insight of Christianity is that we human beings are utterly morally

depraved. Out of our hearts, Jesus says, comes all sorts of horrible things, including murder and including adultery and including, you know, the cruel things that we see in the world from a Christian perspective are what one would expect from human beings, given our understanding of what human beings are. And particularly in order to become a Christian, you need to acknowledge that you're a total moral failure.

and that you could only ever stand before a holy, just and righteous God on the basis of Jesus' goodness and not your own. So that's the first thing that's important to acknowledge. Christians are moral failures, not moral successes. As we look back over the last 2000 years, we see many examples of Christian moral failure. As we look around the world today, and as we look frankly inside our own hearts, we see many examples of Christian moral failure.

However, as I was just noting, Christianity has defined goodness for us to the extent that we only see some moral acts in the last 2000 years as horrific because of the moral standards that Jesus has given us. So in the ancient world, the idea of conquering another army or another nation and basically raping the women and killing all the men

That was just like, good deal. Nobody had moral qualms about that. That was like the sort of victory march that you would do. Because of Christianity, we're like, wait a minute, Jesus told us to love even our enemies. He didn't endorse this kind of behavior. And so we rightly look back at times when Christians have acted in violent ways en masse toward others with horror. But that's not because of Christian ethics. It's in spite of Christian ethics.

And if we compare the fruit of Christianity in terms of violence and what we now see as immoral behavior, if we compare the fruit of Christianity to the fruit of other competing worldviews, we actually find Christianity comes out very well. So, for example, I mean, horrifically, communism in the last 100 years has been responsible for

untold amounts of violence and murder and genocide. And communism at first blush sounds like a great idea.

But I think what communism doesn't take into account that Christianity does is the fact that we humans are fundamentally morally flawed. And so I think if you make a fair comparison between Christianity and Islam, between Christianity and communism, between Christianity and fascism, between Christianity and the other sort of big belief systems that have been going around in the last century, even just in the last century, Christianity comes out extremely well.

The Bible isn't just one book. It's a library of authors who write in a rich and diverse set of styles. So it's kind of cool that Rebecca has a PhD in English literature because she actually loves the way the Bible can be very prosaic at points and then classically poetic and everything in between. Take the book of Proverbs where wisdom walks onto the stage as a noble woman.

To you, O people, I call out. I raise my voice to all mankind. You who are simple, gain prudence. You who are foolish, set your hearts on it. Listen, for I have trustworthy things to say. I open my lips to speak what is right. My mouth speaks what is true, for my lips detest wickedness.

All the words of my mouth are just. None of them is crooked or perverse. To the discerning, all of them are right. They are upright to those who have found knowledge. Choose my instruction instead of silver. Knowledge rather than choice gold. For wisdom is more precious than rubies, and nothing you desire can compare with her.

You seem keen to observe the Bible's literary and metaphorical forms, but critics might reply that when Christians don't take the Bible literally, it's often because they're trying to avoid looking like idiots in the light of modern evidence. So is your love for metaphor and so on just a relic of your doctorate in English literature, or is it something more substantial? It's certainly partly a relic because I do love a good metaphor.

But so did Jesus. And this is the funny thing. I don't know, some of your listeners may have come across these red letter Bibles, which are Bibles where only the direct reported speech of Jesus is picked out and read. And there are some people who would even describe themselves as red letter Christians, where they say, I want to follow what Jesus says, just those red letters. And I'm kind of not so sure about the rest of the Bible. There are all sorts of theological problems with that. But let's just approach this from the question of metaphor.

Jesus uses more metaphors than basically anybody else. Now, you see metaphors throughout the scriptures, very importantly, and Jesus often taps into those metaphors. But when Jesus calls himself the true vine, we don't just lack faith to believe that he's really a plant. We recognize that he's tapping into this beautiful Old Testament metaphor in which Israel was a vine and that Jesus now is the true vine.

Or when Jesus says that he is the light of the world. Again, we're not thinking, well, Jesus was in fact just a collection of photons. Give that a sort of scientific analysis. We see that Jesus is saying something profound about the reality that without him there is nothing but darkness. Or when Jesus says that he is the good shepherd. We don't think, oh, well, clearly he spent a lot of his time with little furry animals.

we think, oh no, he's tapping into this Old Testament idea that God's people were like sheep and God himself was like the shepherd.

So the idea that you either take the Bible literally or you don't, that it's sort of an on-off switch, to use a metaphor, is thoroughly misleading because even if you only really want to take the words of Jesus seriously, which I don't advocate making that distinction at all, but even there, you're forced to recognize that God often expresses profound and important truths through metaphor. Let's press pause. I've got a five-minute Jesus for you.

One of Jesus' hardest teachings was delivered in metaphor. I'm sometimes asked if I believe in hell. I think I must give off the vibe sometimes that I'm a soft theologian who doesn't go with all those archaic hard bits in Christianity. I actually do.

I'm not sure I believe in the hell people usually think of when they say the word, but I do believe in the hell Jesus talked about. And he talked about it more than anyone else in the Bible. Fire, brimstone, and all the rest of it. But Jesus used picture language. That's really clear. Just as the Bible speaks of heaven having pearly gates, Jesus spoke of hell as darkness, one minute, and fire, the next, forevermore.

So in Matthew 8, we hear Jesus say, they will be thrown outside into the darkness where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. But in Matthew 25, he speaks of it this way. Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. So this is clearly metaphor on the part of Jesus. You can't have darkness and fire in the same place at the same time.

But what does the scary image mean? It isn't a theological scare tactic. Be good or you'll burn in hell. It's basically about justice. It's God's pledge to bring his justice to bear on every evil act. I mean, who wants human traffickers, for example, to get away with their crimes forever? Not me. Hell tells me they won't get away with it, even if they seem to get away with it in this life.

And one of Jesus' scariest parables makes this point about justice powerfully and metaphorically.

He speaks of a king separating sheep from goats. To the sheep on his right, he says, Take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat. I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink. I was a stranger and you invited me in. It goes on. It's all about how we treat the vulnerable. Those who know the love of God are meant to treat others well.

with that love. But then he says to those on his left, the goats, depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire, for I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat. I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink. And so on. He's talking about those who neglected the poor and by doing so were neglecting Jesus himself. The other interesting thing Jesus says about hell is that it's not the same experience for everyone.

some will receive greater judgment than others. And again, he puts this teaching in a metaphor. Here's Luke 12. The servant who knows the master's will and does not get ready or does not do what the master wants will be beaten with many blows, but the one who does not know and does things deserving punishment will be beaten with few blows. So there's a difference in judgment in this parable.

Jesus taught what you might call proportional judgment. If it makes sense for the human trafficker to experience some level of judgment, it also makes sense to me that the rest of us would experience a degree of judgment proportional to our own participation in evil. The metaphor corresponds to reality. And the most striking thing Jesus said about all this judgment stuff, he also put in a metaphor.

He said that his death would take the judgment of hell for any who want it. At his final meal, this is the way he put it. I'm quoting from Matthew 26. He took the cup and when he had given thanks, he gave it to them saying, drink from it, all of you. This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.

So here's the most controversial thing about all this judgment stuff. I mean, way more controversial than the thought that God might judge us is the promise that he would forgive us. Anyone, even the human trafficker who wants forgiveness. The fact that Jesus put all this stuff in images and metaphors doesn't for me take away from the reality.

it makes it somehow more confronting. These things are so profound, so significant, our normal ways of speaking just become inadequate. Only metaphor can bear the burden of such grave and beautiful realities. You can press play now. I think it's okay to tell a child the truth.

But I would prefer to encourage a child to make up her own mind and to think about the evidence and to believe things when there is evidence. What I think is not okay, what I think is deeply immoral, is to tell a child that when she dies, if she's not good, she's going to go to hell. That seems to me to be mental child abuse and an utter disgrace.

Richard Dawkins on ABC's Q&A program, making possibly the most uncomfortable criticism of Christianity. Its assertion that there is a hell to which people who reject God are heading.

You say that every other question pales in comparison to the problem of a loving God sending people to hell. I agree. Is this where Christianity just has to admit it has some views that are mean-spirited scaremongering? I don't think it's mean-spirited scaremongering. I do think it's offensive.

I think many Christian beliefs are offensive and in some ways I think we're better to kind of acknowledge that upfront and start those conversations there. I think that the question of whether talking about hell is mean-spirited and scaremongering depends on whether there is such a reality to be talked about. We're sitting in a building together right now and if this building caught fire and I didn't tell you, that would be extremely unkind and unloving to you.

If it wasn't on fire and I told you that it was on fire and got you terrified and wanting to jump out of the window because you thought the building was on fire, that would be cruel. So the question is whether this reality of hell is a reality or whether it's a fiction. And people sometimes, even atheists will sometimes say, well, we kind of like Jesus, we just don't like the rest of Christianity or the rest of the Bible and the Old Testament and all those sort of other awkward things. But, you know, we'll keep Jesus.

Jesus talks about God's judgment more than any Old Testament prophet. If we only listen to his exact words, we need to take the reality of hell very seriously. And I think it is cruel and unloving and mean-spirited to not warn people about something so incredibly important. That makes perfect sense from your perspective as someone who believes in hell. But I guess the question is,

Why would God, who presents as loving us, then end up condemning us in some awful eternal situation? It's the God perspective that is most problematic. Again, I would actually go back to the things that Jesus says about himself. If Jesus is, in his own words, the light of the world, then let's imagine we reject Jesus. Where does that leave us? It leaves us in utter darkness.

If Jesus is the bread of life, as he claims, and he was claiming that in a culture where bread was very much a staple diet, if we reject the bread of life, where does that leave us? We're just starving. If Jesus is the way and the truth and the life, as he claims, and we reject the way and the truth and the life, then we're lost. We're just stumbling around in darkness and death. So there is a fundamental logic to how the Bible works.

describes hell, which is contingent on how the Bible describes Jesus. When we reject Jesus, we might think it's no big deal because we don't realize how much goodness from God we have right now. You seem pretty comfortable with the progress of science. You don't seem like one of these anxious Christians worried that science is going to discover something that causes the faith to collapse. Indeed.

One of my favorite discoveries of the last five years is a wonderful man called Hans Halvorsen, who's a professor at Princeton in philosophy and particularly in philosophy of science. And Hans is one of the top four philosophers of science in the world. And I had some sense from reading other sources that Christians had literally invented what we now understand to be science, the idea of having a hypothesis and testing it empirically, etc., etc.,

And that's absolutely true. But Hans points out that it's not just a kind of historical accident that Christians happen to invent the modern scientific method because, you know, right place at the right time, but that actually it was because of their beliefs about God. So we sometimes see science as an alternative hypothesis to a creator God. But Hans says, no, the first scientists believed two things about God. Well, many things, but two particularly relevant things. First, that God was rational. And second, that God was free.

And because God was rational, which they picked up from the Bible, the fact that God seems to create with order and that he seems to be interested in giving consistent moral laws that apply across the world rather than just being very specific to particular places.

They thought, hmm, maybe this creator God created the universe according to rational principles or underlying laws that we as creatures made in God's image, as the book of Genesis at the beginning of the Bible claims, could figure out. But they also believed that God was free. And because God is free, he can create the universe any way he likes. So the only way to find out what those underlying principles are is to go and look.

And that was the philosophical basis for the modern scientific method. And Hans Halvorsen, again, one of the top four philosophers of science in the world, says that even today, Christianity and theism provides a better philosophical foundation for science than atheism does. In fact, he says atheism doesn't give you a philosophical foundation for science at all. I think some listeners will be going to purchase that book and argue with it.

Also on the list of arguments confronting Christianity is the church's long-established opposition to homosexuality. Several thousand protesters have marched in Washington against same-sex marriage as the US Supreme Court prepares to hear arguments on the divisive issue on Tuesday. The decision rests on whether same-sex couples have a constitutional right to wed. It's in the Bible and God says so. It's between a man and a woman.

and the Supreme Court has no authority to even redefine it, even talk about it. It's not in their authority at all. It's not even in the Constitution for them to discuss it. Representatives of the Protestant and Orthodox churches were present with the message that marriage begins with God and not the state.

The Bible's alleged homophobia is one of the most difficult questions today. How do you thread that needle, especially when this question isn't just theoretical for you? I think as Christians, we have noticed the boundaries that the Bible gives us around sex, which is not only prohibiting same-sex sexual behavior, but actually prohibiting any kind of sexual behavior outside the very specific boundaries

once in a lifetime commitment of marriage. And we've thought that's all the Bible has to say. But in fact, if you look at the Bible, and we're going to go back to metaphor here, you'll realize that the whole point of male and female from a Christian perspective, the whole point of romance and sexuality and marriage is actually not about us, it's about Jesus. And we see in Ephesians chapter five, a letter that Paul wrote to the early church in Ephesus,

He describes human marriage as like a little scale model of Jesus' love for his church. And Jesus' love for his church is unique in some particular ways. It's a love across difference, which is pictured for us actually in the fact that Christian marriage is male-female. It's a love built on sacrifice and it's a never-ending, life-creating, flesh-uniting, exclusive kind of love.

So I think before we can have any kind of conversation about what does the Bible say about sexuality, we need to understand the basic point that the Bible is trying to make to us through the fact that God created male and female in the first place. Now, for as long as I can remember, I was always romantically attracted to women. So this is a question that's been very personal and important for me.

and one where people sometimes say, "Oh, you know, you've looked at the Bible through a kind of lens of homophobia, wanting it to say that sex outside of heterosexual marriages is okay and that gay marriage is okay for Christians." And so you've come to that conclusion. Actually, I've kind of done the reverse. There are probably times in my life I would have been quite pleased to look at the Bible and conclude that actually gay marriage was fine for Christians.

But I don't think it is. And I think the Bible is very clear about that. But I think the other piece that's been really missing from the conversation is that the Bible doesn't affirm the kind of mantra love is love in the sense that we use that language today. It affirms that God is love, but it actually gives us different kinds of relationships through which to glimpse God's love. Marriage is one of them.

Parenting is one of them actually because God is described as a father and also compared to a mother in the scriptures interestingly. So he glimpsed a little bit of God's love through the best possible parent-child relationships but also through friendship. Jesus famously said that "greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends." And when people say "oh you know I think the Bible condemns same-sex relationships" one of the things I want to be quick to say is actually I don't think so. I think the Bible commands same-sex relationships for Christians.

that are not sexual, but actually incredibly important and powerful. Paul, who wrote many of the texts in the New Testament that prohibit or clarify that the Old Testament prohibitions on gay relationships continue in the New Covenant, he called his friend, Onesimus, his very heart.

He said he was among the Thessalonian Christians like a nursing mother with her children. He talked about Christians as being one body with each other, as being knit together in love. He's all this incredibly intimate language about how Christians should relate to each other. And in particular, I think that is a way in which Christians of the same sex should relate to each other.

So there is a beauty in my mind, and this is something over many years that I've come to, there's a beauty around the biblical boundaries on sex because it actually creates space for different kinds of relationships that give us different angles on what it means for Jesus to love us. How did you come to believe all this? What are the most important things?

factors that drew you to this place? I came from a very sort of religiously complicated family of a sort of Catholic family mother and an Anglican father and you know sort of mixed church setups and from an early age I was kind of the odd one out at the rather academic schools that I was going to because I was very serious about believing in Jesus and

And years of conversations with people who were either hostile to Christianity or skeptical of Christianity or just sort of confused by Christianity have had the effect for me not of disturbing or diminishing my faith, but actually making me more sure because

I've tried to be quite deliberate and I continue to try to be quite deliberate about spending time with really clever people who fundamentally disagree with me and hearing their best arguments and ideas, their best claims on truth, their best hopes for the world. And I'm actually increasingly sure that Christianity is true after those conversations with those very intelligent people.

I hope you enjoyed listening to Rebecca's spirited defense of all this stuff. There's much more, of course, in her wonderful book, Confronting Christianity. There's a link in the show notes for this episode. I'm not exaggerating when I say I think it's the best defense of the Christian faith to appear in a decade. Even better than Tim Keller's Reason for God. I hope that's not a heresy.

One challenge in particular we left out of this episode is that Christianity has no place for women. And Rebecca will be returning in an upcoming episode to undeceive us on that one. Stay tuned.

Got questions about this or other episodes? I'd love to hear them and we'll try and answer them in one of the upcoming Q&A episodes. You can tweet us at Undeceptions, pretty simple. Send us a regular old email at questions at undeceptions.com. And if you're brave, and I'd love you to do this, go to undeceptions.com and press the record button and actually record your question. Then you get to join me on the show. Love to hear your questions.

While you're there, check out everything related to this episode and sign up for the Undeceptions newsletter to get access to bonus content and plenty more from each episode. And if you like this show, I think you might like With All Due Respect with Megan Powell-Dutois and Michael Jensen, another member of the Eternity Podcast Network. What they basically do is chat about controversial topics and do it in a way that is pretty sensible and generous. Go to eternitypodcasts.com.

Next episode, a topic we've only just scratched the surface of today, the clash between science and religion. And we speak to the world-famous atheist-turned-Christian Alistair McGrath of Oxford, the author of Twilight of Atheism, The Dawkins Delusion, and, I don't know, too many books for one human being. See ya. ♪

Undeceptions is hosted by me, John Dixon, together with some precious maternity insights from Kayleigh Payne. Oh, I forgot to read that it's also directed and produced by Mark Hadley.

Our theme song is by Bach, arranged by me and played by the fabulous Undeceptions band. Editing is by Bryce McClellan. Head to Undeceptions.com. You'll find show notes and other stuff related to our episodes. Over the coming weeks, we're transforming Undeceptions.com into a whole library of audio, video, and printable stuff from lots of different communicators designed to undeceive and let the truth out.