Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
We have to face up to the fact that Christianity is in very significant statistical decline in the West. Now, it's not in the rest of the world. Latin America, Asia, Africa, Christianity is on fire. There are more Christians in China than there are members of the Communist Party. Christianity is a wildfire through Africa. So this is an eccentric cul-de-sac that the West has got to. But there is simply no denying the figures.
This is someone who knows the international scene. Greg Sheridan is one of Australia's best known journalists with something like 40 years experience in the business. Greg cut his teeth at the legendary news magazine, The Bulletin, before moving to the national daily newspaper, The Australian, where he's been foreign editor since 1982. He reckons Christianity isn't looking too good in the West.
In Britain now, a minority of people believe in God of any kind. In Australia at the last census it was 52% identified as Christians. That was a massive drop from the previous census.
and the bias was overwhelmingly towards older people. So as they are dying out, statistically, we're becoming smaller. Now, I don't think that's a council of despair. You know, I'm an Irishman, so the situation is always desperate, never serious. But I think one person you should never lie to is yourself. So you've got to look the situation square in the face. And, you know, the influence, the adherence, the numbers are in decline in the West.
So why in these allegedly post-Christian times would one of Australia's most widely read journalists publicly out himself as a Christian? I'm John Dixon and this is Undeceptions.
Undeceptions is brought to you by Zondervan Academics' new video streaming service, Master Lectures, featuring some of the world's leading Christian scholars. 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, we'll be trying to undeceive ourselves and let the truth...
The first time I connected with Greg Sheridan was over an article he was writing for The Australian. I can't remember what it was about, but obviously something to do with the Christian faith. And it sparked a series of emails, texts and phone calls since. Another time we missed each other on the same flight from Melbourne to Sydney. He called me three minutes after I got off the plane and said, were you on that Qantas flight just then? You want to have a coffee?
And I was already in the taxi on the way home. Since then, we determined to catch up a few times. This particular interview took place in Melbourne just before the COVID-19 thing brought air travel to a halt.
And always the journalist, Greg couldn't break the habit of admiring my new storytelling gear. This technology is nifty. I'm so impressed. When I interviewed Turnbull for the book, I had him on speakerphone and an old-fashioned cassette recorder next to it, which worked perfectly. But don't be fooled by his gentle manner. Greg is an astute observer and critic of all things political and international. He was on ABC Insiders just the other week.
China does need to come clean with us about the origin of the disease. I don't accept the proposition that it came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology and I think this is akin to Donald Trump claiming that Ted Cruz's father assassinated John F. Kennedy or something. His straight-talking approach is why his observations about the alleged slow death of Christianity in the West are so valuable. What's your hunch? Let's just take Australia. Why is it so on the wane?
Well, John, you're right. There's the huge, fabulous historical explanations of which Charles Taylor is a primary example. And then there are what I call the proximate causes, the short-term things.
Charles Taylor, by the way, is a major political philosopher from Canada. His 2007 book, A Secular Age, is regarded as one of the most important ever written on the subject of how the West lost its love affair with the spiritual, sort of. There are three or four things that I'd identify in particular. One is that we've had such sustained affluence for so long, and affluence is not just about
offers a particular temptation of the Christian because the Christian understands that everybody is in need of God's mercy at every moment of their lives. As human beings, we always stand on the brink of annihilation. But if you enjoy good health and you have been very affluent for a very long time, you're tempted to the view that you don't need God's mercy and therefore you don't need God. Another factor I'd cite is
is the sexual revolution. It's rather unbecoming for a man of my age to be talking about these matters at all. But I do think this highly sexualized environment that we've created in the West
is not really a natural environment. It's a very difficult environment for people to cope with. You know, industrial level pornography is available to them at any moment on their smartphone and so on. I'm glad, really, I'm lucky I think that that wasn't the case when I was a kid. I don't know what effect it would have had on me. I think that is a difficulty. Hey, Greg isn't just being a prude here. The pornographic industry is massive and dangerous.
It earns more than $15 billion a year in the US alone, making it bigger than Netflix, Viacom and Hollywood as a whole. Just one major porn site registers 35 billion visits in 2018.
93% of boys see porn before they're 18 years of age and 62% of girls. An estimated 5% to 8% of the population is addicted to pornography. We delve into the awful underbelly of online porn last season in episode 8 of Underceptions on cyber trafficking. Go check it out, but it's a disturbing listen. Back to Greg.
The digital universe opens up spectacular possibilities, but it also has become a sewer of abuse and a tremendous spreader of corruption. And then the final factor that I'd add is that for a whole host of complex historical reasons, a version of...
Cultural self-hatred has infected the West, especially its elite educational institutions, universities and so on. And although Christianity is a universal religion, open to every human being, and indeed the majority of Christians today are not Westerners, nonetheless, Western civilization is in a sense Western.
uniquely formed by Christianity. So if you come to the view that Western civilization is at its root a thing of evil, oppression, sexism, racism, exploitation, all the rest of it,
you tend to damn Christianity by association. So I think all those trends combined. And then there have been other specific things. I wouldn't deny the power of the child sexual abuse scandals, particularly in the Catholic Church, but throughout Christian denominations. I think all those things together have been influential. Which prompts the question, what's a nice journalist like Greg doing in a faith like this? Why
Why choose now of all times to come out as a Christian? My challenge in my own life has never been belief. It's always been living up to even the basics of belief. So I've just been a believing Christian all my life. Not to say I've never had challenges to belief, but generally the problem for me has not been belief. The problem has been behaving in a decent fashion. And I've been a rackety journalist, you know, with everything that that embraces.
But all through my journalistic career, I would occasionally write something from the sidelines which implied my sympathy for belief. But
I've been a professional journalist now for 40 years, and in that time I've seen the culture go from being notionally sympathetic to Christianity, passing through a phase where I think it was neutral, to now a phase where it's hostile. So it's important not to exaggerate this. Christians in Australia are not persecuted or anything, but the culture has become distinctly unsympathetic. A lot of things were being said, I think, that were not true. Then a couple of other things happened.
were in my mind. One is journalism at its best is a search for the truth and a search for a good story. Well, Christianity is true and it's the best story. So, okay, it might have taken me 40 years to realise this, but nonetheless, you know, even a blind pig finds an acorn occasionally. And nonetheless, it was quite a thing to come out, as it were, as a Christian. So now I encourage other Christians to do the same. It's all right to have made jokes about your own Christian background and occasionally to, you
raise a little cheer from the sidelines saying, good on you, fellas. It's another thing to come out and say, I believe that Jesus Christ is my savior. I believe in the bodily resurrection of Jesus and of all humanity, that we're all going to face the four last things, death, judgment, heaven, and hell. I believe in one everlasting God who created the universe and so on. But
I found that once you did it, it's really not so bad. I mean, people accept, generally speaking, that you're saying what you believe. And I found it to be an enjoyable experience rather than the reverse and much less hostility than I would have thought, perhaps also because it's so novel. MUSIC
Greg's convictions about God were prompted at a small train platform on the line that runs just to the north of Sydney. It's the train that runs past my place actually and I'm on it now. This is R Tarman, a reasonably well-to-do suburb on Sydney's North Shore. It's mainly neat houses and townhouses with some blocks of units. It's basically a middle-class suburb with families,
with 1.6 children and all that, and my producer tells me it has three times the national average of computer system designers. Not that that has anything to do with what we're talking about. This little suburb, this very train station, was the unlikely setting for a quiet and unexpected revolution in Greg's view of the world. It was here, one day, stopped at this station, that Greg tried to convince himself to be an atheist, and failed.
The circumstances were, I was a young man, it was a long time ago. I was going out with a very fine young woman who was a conscientious atheist. And you can see what a great entertainer I was of my lady friends because we discussed the existence of God exhaustively. I mean, we did one or two other more entertaining things too, but she was trying to convince me and I was trying to convince her.
And I was very optimistic at that time in my life. I just thought I could do everything. You know, sometimes young men, you feel you can run through a brick wall. The world is your oyster. I mean, a week later, you might be in the depths of despair and so on. But partly because faith is always about who you believe as much as what you believe. In my friendship with her, I was trying to explore whether her belief system could be true.
And I was on the train going from Chatswood to Wynyard and the train pulled up at Art Tarmond, as it does sometimes inexplicably, for 10 minutes. Needed a rest. It was a very hot day. And I was thinking, well, if atheism is true, then...
Those people that I'm looking at down there, they're no more significant than that bench that they're sometimes sitting on. From our time, and you could see down at the shopping center, and the people looked like slightly enlarged ants. And I thought, maybe that's all they are, just ants, just energy and matter. Maybe they have no significance. Maybe when they're dead, they're just gone, and that's the end of it. And
I couldn't argue myself into this proposition logically, but it also was just such an incredibly depressing thing. It just seemed such a bleak and barren and forlorn view of the human condition. And after 10 minutes, the train stopped.
pulled out of our time and I'd pretty well sort of said, I don't think I can be an atheist really. And by the time we got to Wynyard, I was, you know, fat and happy again. And I'd passed through my... Now, it may be an indication of a very shallow intellect that that was as close as I ever got in my life to a formal adherence to atheism. Maybe God has a thing for public transport because, of course, C.S. Lewis had his famous bus ride up the Headington Road in Oxford and
And when he hopped on the bus, he was an atheist. And when he hopped off the bus, he was not. I'd forgotten that. Oh, yeah. So public transport. But for Greg, the train didn't come to rest there. After more than 40 years of reporting stuff, he decided it was time to put down his own views. Greg has written several books over the years, mainly focusing on the power plays between Australian leaders and the political forces at work in Asia.
But this one is a health check on Christianity in a post-Christian West, and Australia in particular. It's called God is Good for You. You make the case for God rationally. You say it fits with all the sort of rational ways of looking at the universe, and you draw on Thomas Aquinas, and these are still philosophically robust ways of talking about God rationally.
But I'm fascinated that you lay a big emphasis on personal experience because loads of people think that's crap as evidence. Yes. So I think, John, myself, that personal experience is both critical as evidence and the predominant path that people take to Christianity. Even people who describe their conversion in intellectual terms, I think really are moved by evidence.
Well, they're moved by the Spirit, but they're very often moved by an encounter with a Christian. They see God, they see Christ manifest in somebody that they know. Although, of course, God can find his way into the human heart in a million different ways. But I...
was very influenced by a book by Roger Scruton, who has just died, called The Soul of the World. He has a lovely chapter on belief in God. And he's actually not a very orthodox Christian apologist. I don't even really know if he was a believing Christian altogether. But in this lovely chapter,
sort of subtle, sinuous chapter. I don't know that I agree with everything he said, but he says in the end, the long human experience of God is the most powerful argument for God. And when you think of it, when we really have to prove something, we go to a court. And what do we do in the court? We rely on human testimony. We rely on evidence. We understand that human beings are fallible. They can have imperfect recall. They can have poor judgment and so on.
But he makes the case that the most powerful rational argument for God in human history is the long human experience of God. Now, people can try to dismiss this in a million different ways. They might say it's an evolutionary bias that makes survival better. But of course, this is a very circular and difficult argument because what you're saying then is that evolution predisposes us to believe in lies, but...
The proposition that God does not exist is the truth. And evolution has led us to this truth, even though it's led us to a million other lies along the way. And indeed, if we are all just matter and nothing else, then our thought processes are just nothing.
more or less random consequences of matter and energy. So why should we privilege them in thinking that they can get to the truth? Now, I think you end up in a horrible bog of relativism and you go mad. It recalls George Orwell's remark that to believe certain things, you have to be an intellectual because no normal man could be so foolish. And for me, the human disposition to believe in God across all the eons is very persuasive. It's not an absolute...
Killer argument. I don't think there is a killer argument for or against God, but it's enormously persuasive.
Greg's book builds on this personal, practical experience of Christianity. It's broken into two parts. Part one outlines the guts of Christianity and various arguments against it, as well as highlights some of the contributions of the Christian faith to the social good. Part two interviews a range of major political personalities from the left and the right about what they think personally about the Christian faith. In my view, one of the problems for mainline Christian leaders is that they don't know
is that 50 years ago, they were shepherding, especially in areas of social policy, a social consensus and also, in a sense, a religious consensus. So they developed a style of leadership which was...
that maybe not perfect, but was suitable for that environment. The environment now today is completely different. It's radically different. Many of my Christian friends don't like how much I use military metaphors, you know, but there's a military term of art, situational awareness. You need to be able to integrate a lot of information into the battle space in real time. And the first thing Christian leaders need is to be
situationally aware of the fact that they are now in a minority. But being in a minority actually frees you in a lot of ways. Now, this might appeal to me because I'm a temperamental Irishman, so I like being in the minority. I like sort of using my gunpowder to blow things up rather than having to preserve things. Again, that's a clumsy metaphor. But for example,
It prepares you better to be attacked, not physically attacked and not wickedly attacked, but for your positions to be mocked and derided. If you understand already that you're in the minority, you're not then quite so outraged. You're still outraged that people are defaming the truth, but you're not quite so outraged how dare they say such a thing because that's what you expect. You also develop different ways of speaking to the society. The society has a
post-Christian elements, Christian elements and pre-Christian elements. Elements which are so innocent of any knowledge of Christianity that they can be reasonably described as pre-Christian. So you have to have new ways of speaking to those. Now
I don't make any comparisons of one denomination to another, favourable or unfavourable or anything. But I am impressed with the Pentecostals as a relatively young movement. They've kind of grown up with social media and contemporary music and so on. So they do contemporary stuff pretty well because that's the environment that they've formed their social being in. Now, I think...
The mainline Christian churches and the individual Christian activists and so on are much better positioned if they accept that they're saying something which is sort of radical and strange to the contemporary culture, both at the level of transcendent belief and at the level of personal behavior. And also, you need to be...
tactically adept. You know, if there are falsehoods that get out quickly, you want to be able to respond to them quickly. You don't really want to think it over and have a week's retreat and spend a month thinking about it, consult with everybody and then issue a statement which nobody reads. You know,
contemporary social movements are very agile. They live on social media. They respond quickly. The need even to get a hearing. You know, the culture doesn't give you a good hearing. One reason I wrote this book was because the previous book I wrote, I went to a whole lot of writers' festivals. There was not a single Christian book anywhere. Now, there are lots of great Christian books in Australia, you know, chief among them your own, but none of them was at any of these writers' festivals. And I thought, this is the secular society actually living
keeping Christian voices away. So Christians then can complain about that, but actually they need to develop strategies to overcome that situation. As an expert in domestic and international politics, Greg has a thought or two about how the church can cut through in a post-Christian society. That, 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.
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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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Christians have often found themselves compelled by Christ, grasping for the reins of power.
Christian politicians and protesters have made huge gains as they've brought Christ to bear on the political process. Think of the independent British MP William Wilberforce, who in the 18th century led the movement to abolish slavery. Or of course Martin Luther King Jr, the American preacher who led the US civil rights movement from 1955 until his assassination in 68.
And there are many, many other positive stories to tell.
But there are other occasions when the gospel of Christianity becomes too enmeshed with party politics. I'm thinking of the role of the Catholic Church in Latin America and being in bed with the various regimes there, or the controversial connection between conservative evangelicalism and a conservative White House from the Reagan era to today.
With my ancient history hat on, I mostly think of how Christians in the 4th and 5th centuries rushed to the seat of power when Emperor Constantine and others invited them in. Only this morning, I kid you not, just this morning, I was reading a 4th century text rejoicing at the way Constantine took the symbol of the cross and placed it on the Roman standards to fight apostasy.
Right under the banner of Jesus Christ, here's what I read: "The Emperor constantly made use of this sign of salvation as a safeguard against every adverse and hostile power, and commanded that others similar to it should be carried at the head of the armies." Yikes!
Anyway, Greg has strong political views and a deep conviction that Christians should own their faith in every part of life, including on the floor of the Senate and Parliament. I was interested to know if he thought there was such a thing as God's party. Many would describe you, those who have tracked your journalistic career, as on the right. You would probably quickly say centre-right. You'll accept that.
And I'm interested in the way you want to say that Christianity isn't right or left.
that Christianity can be just as robust on the right and on the left. So you as a right-winger conservative, you still actually think Christianity can be perfectly at home on the left. Oh, absolutely. I think this is a very important point. Quite complex and difficult to deal with in a way because there are so many things that intersect. One of the politicians I interview in my book is Penny Wong. There are loads of
Penny is a member of the socialist left of the Labor Party, and I'm grateful to her for being interviewed by me. For my international friends, Labor in Australia is roughly the same as the Labor Party in the UK, except here, for some reason, we drop the U in the word Labor. Even though the noun Labor here in Australia uses a U,
That's really weird. Now, my producer, Mark Hadley, assures me that he remembers something from politics at university to do with the Labor Party dropping the U because they didn't want to be associated with the unions, the whole labor movement. I think he's just making it up to sound intelligent. And by the way, Labor Party here in Australia is roughly equivalent to the Democratic Party in the United States.
My producer is looking at me very funny at the moment. Anyway, the point is Greg has talked to a wide range of politicians who identify as Christians or at least say they revere the Christian faith. And I'm not making any judgments about their politics.
But I certainly don't in any way doubt the sincerity of their Christianity, because in some elements of their politics, we may disagree. The last political party I was a member of was the Labor Party, and I've got many, many, many close, very close friends in the Labor Party. I probably have grown a little more conservative as I've grown older. I certainly don't think Christianity adjudicates between
well-intentioned policies on the centre-left or the centre-right. So to give you an example without labouring the thing too much, you might say it's a Christian desire that underprivileged people be better treated. Now one way of doing that is for the government to provide a welfare program. That's perfectly legitimate, good, honest policy response. Another way of doing it might be to
deregulate elements of the labour market so that more people at the bottom of the labour market get jobs. This is a very powerful argument in India, for example, where just having a job being in the formal economy makes you a thousand times better off than being in the informal economy. But it's hard to get in the formal economy because it's so regulated.
So if a Christian policymaker says, I want to help poor people with greater welfare, I think that's perfectly legitimate. If a Christian policymaker says, I want to help people by deregulating elements of the labour market, I think that's perfectly acceptable. And I think it's wrong of Christians to imply a religious authority to arguments of that kind. There are some issues, obviously, where there's a religious authority. If you're dealing with Nazis or Jews,
you know, genuine racists or whatever, that's not only bad policy, that is absolutely wrong. It's against the law of God and the law of men. And it's wrong and it's right to be denounced in that way. But very little that we have in Australia qualifies for that sort of extreme. Now, I think it's a pity that too much of the left have abandoned the
the traditions of Christian social democracy. The British Labor Party was what was it called, the Methodist Church at Prayer, you know, and the great papal encyclical Rerum Novarum by Leo, the whatever, insisted on the rights of trade unions and the rights of workers and so forth. Clement Attlee, who introduced the welfare state to Britain, talked about the Christian inspiration of socialism and
Now, I think it's a pity that the left has sort of itself turned against Christianity. So it's fair enough for us to say, I've come to this policy conclusion influenced by my values, which are Christian values. That's okay. Although I never really say that. I just try to argue a policy case on its merits. But it's wrong of us, whether we're on the left or the right, to say, if you don't agree with my policy on Christianity,
paid parental leave or on state aid for Christian schools or whatever it might be, you're a bad Christian. I don't think we should be in that business. And Christianity is not narrow and sectarian like that.
I'm glad Greg is clear that Christians can validly belong to any major party. I suppose some of my listeners will be surprised to hear that, always associating Christians with one or other. And others may flat out disagree with him from both sides of the equation. But Greg's most controversial political claim comes next. You go right out on a limb, as many would say.
in suggesting that Christianity actually gave the West feminism, liberalism, science. Really?
Absolutely. One of the great reasons to write a book is that you learn something in the process. And I was very influenced by a wonderful Oxford historian, Larry Siddentop, who wrote, I think, the finest book of history I've ever read called Inventing the Individual. And I had the great pleasure of having lunch with Larry Siddentop in London recently. And as I understand it, he's not a believing Christian, but he is a fantastic scholar, really one of the most august historians in the world. And he's a great
And in his book, Inventing the Individual, he argues that by the late Middle Ages, everything that we recognize as modern liberalism had been thoroughly thought through in the long dialectic of Christianity. So going back...
To the ancient world, the most radical pro-human rights statement is that God created humanity in the image of God. That was not a common view in the ancient world before the book of Genesis. The first statement, in a sense, in favor of secular government is render unto God that which is God's and render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's. Another historian, Rodney Stark, a sociologist of religious history, argues that one of the great drivers of early Christian expansion was that
Christianity created a sexual revolution which was the best circumstance for women and girls which had ever been known in the history of humanity until then. Christian morality meant that masters could not abuse their slaves sexually. It invented marriage as an institution of reciprocal love. It insisted on choice in marriage so that the overwhelming authority of the male head of the family was, in a sense,
trumped or beaten by the authority of Christian teaching. It conceived of humanity as individuals enjoying a divine relationship with their maker. And therefore, it was the individual who became key, not the family or the clan. And of course, from its earliest times, it was universalist. You know, the famous statement from St. Paul, there is neither Greek nor Jew, slave nor free, male nor female, you're all one in Christ Jesus.
Let's press pause. I've got a five-minute Jesus for you. I mentioned a moment ago that this morning I happen to be reading a fourth-century Christian text for a book I'm writing on the history of the Church. It was from the scholar-bishop named Eusebius, and
and he was writing shortly after the emperor, Constantine, announced that he had become a Christian. It was a momentous event. And according to Constantine's own testimony, just before a huge battle with his rival, Maxentius, he saw a vision in the sky of a huge cross
inscribed on the cross in the sky were the words in hoc signo vinces in this sign conquer constantine fought and won at the battle of milvian bridge on october 28 312
And henceforth decided to fashion his standards, the banners the armies fought under, with this huge sign, this sign of the cross. And this is what Eusebius was approving of. The astonishing thing for me is that for the eight years before that, Christians had been severely persecuted by Roman authorities.
Churches were destroyed, scriptures were burned, all Christians in high places were deposed, and many were tortured and killed. Eusebius lived through all of that. And now, in 312, the emperor gets converted and Eusebius is happy to have a cross on the Roman standards.
He writes,
And perhaps most bizarrely, the Christian sign of humble self-sacrifice, a cross, was now a formal part, the very symbol of the Roman war machine. It is just so hard to get my head around when I consider what Jesus had said about the cross, his cross, and its social implications. In Mark chapter 10, centuries before Eusebius,
We read that James and John, the sons of Zebedee, came to Jesus. Teacher, they said, we want you to do for us whatever we ask. What do you want me to do for you? They replied, let one of us sit at your right and the other at your left in your glory.
They're obviously thinking that Jesus is a conquering Messiah, such as many were expecting in those days. A Messiah who would lift Israel above Rome and crush the enemies of God.
You don't know what you're asking, Jesus said. The text goes on. And when the ten heard about this, they became indignant with James and John. Now, I stop there because this is almost comedic. The apostles are indignant at the other two apostles. Not because they're disappointed in James and John for their lack of humility. Oh, you should really have learnt humility. Haven't you learnt that yet? No. They want the glory James and John had asked for.
They're thinking of religion as domination and they were just annoyed that James and John got in there first. And this prompts one of the most precious theological and ethical statements you find in the Gospels. I'll continue reading. Jesus called them together and said, You know that those who are regarded as rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you.
Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be slave of all. For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many."
There's theology and ethics right alongside each other in this paragraph. The theology is Jesus' mission. He came not to conquer, but to serve and die, to give his life as a ransom for many. He pays the price of salvation. But there's social ethics built into this, like right alongside it, that has massive implications for the church's approach to political and military power.
There's hardly a more obvious reality in the world than that the Caesars and his cronies subjugated those under them, fiscally as well as physically.
You know that those who are regarded as rulers of the Gentiles, Jesus said, lord it over them and their high officials exercise authority over them. But his whole point is not so with you. Whoever wants to be great has got to be a servant. Whoever wants to be first has to be a slave. The great in God's eyes, in other words, the first, are those who serve and suffer in the way of the cross.
James and John and the others wanted first position in the kingdom. But Jesus says, no, those spots go to people shaped by the cross. Christians did live that way through the first 300 years of the church. Their brave resolve to suffer and serve is remarkable. And it's everywhere in our ancient sources, Christian sources and the Roman sources.
But those lines in Eusebius from the 4th century, praising the cross on a Roman military standard, are a complete reversal of what Christ taught and did. And I find it so depressing. Then again, there's much in the same period I find inspiring.
One of Eusebius' contemporaries was a philosopher teacher in the academy at Nicomedia near Constantinople. His name was Lactantius.
He was a Christian. He lost his job in the Great Persecution, because in the persecution, if you had a job teaching the academy and you were a Christian, you couldn't teach. He survived the persecution and then wrote an amazing treatise for his pagan intellectual buddies called The Divine Institutes, in which he writes this. There is no need for violence and brutality. Worship cannot be forced.
It is something to be achieved by talk rather than blows. Religion must be defended not by killing but by dying, not by violence but by endurance, not by sin but by faith. So it's mixed. Christian history is mixed.
There are some who have thought that power and even violence was an acceptable way to promote the truth. There's no denying that. But there are others who followed what Jesus said and did. Whoever wants to be great among you must be your servant. You can press play now. This is very self-indulgent, but...
One thing I loved in Larry Siddentop, which I read a number of other historians, was his treatment of medieval Christianity. It's not...
the black record of darkness that people pretend. So very early on in the sixth century, you get Benedict creating the monastic movements. The monasteries, the Benedictine monasteries, were the first democratic, egalitarian, self-governing, industrious communities created in the history of humanity. They elected their own abbot. The monks elected their own abbot. Whether you had been a prince or a nobleman or a slave,
You wore the same monastic habit when you went into the monastery. Everyone was treated equally. The rule of St. Benedict is on sale in bookshops today. You can see there's a special injunction. You must welcome the poor as if you were welcoming Christ himself. And then the monks, although living monks,
you know, obviously holy lives, worked six or eight hours a day in the field. So hierarchical societies typically have slaves or serfs doing the physical work. Here were the monks, the elect of God, working six or eight hours hard in the field. So the local people loved them. Also, they were very rational. So they improved farming techniques. The very discovery of experimental science
according to many historians, came from the Christian view of nature as both natural, therefore not inhabited by warring spirits, and also as reflecting the order of God's mind. So experimental science was an attempt to discover the order of God's mind manifest in nature.
Christianity, because of Revelation and the resurrection and so on, meant that history had to be viewed as linear rather than as an endless cycle of repetition. And a cyclical view of history assists fatalism and apathy, whereas a linear view of history means you can actually make things better. Now, I've done very poor service to that argument, but
And Siddhantop's book makes this argument in a magisterial fashion. Even systems of papal governance inspired states to improve their own level of governance. Subjection to a universal Christian authority meant that you were no longer fully subject to the local feudal lord who was overseeing you.
Now, there are a million other developments as well, but everything we like in liberalism, universalism, the distinctiveness and the universality of the human condition, the dignity of women, the dignity of all people, slaves, foreigners, etc., comes not from rejecting Christianity, but from rejecting.
fidelity to Christianity. But where can someone hope to find this authentic Christianity in an age of political opportunism, hyper-individualism, as well as multi-denominationalism? Greg says the answer is quite simple. Well, one of the legitimate criticisms of the book is that I didn't do enough to present the personality of Jesus in the Gospels. And I do
assert in the book that the personality of Jesus is central to Christianity. But so much of the attack on Christianity has been that our beliefs are somehow rather ridiculous. So I thought it's a real service to people just to say, what do we actually believe? And I thought the Apostles' Creed was a fairly universal statement of Christian belief. So there are Anglicans and Catholics and Pentecostals and Evangelicals and Baptists and Uniting Church and Coptic Church and
and other varieties of Christian in the book, and I think they can all subscribe to the Apostles' Creed. The Apostles' Creed is a simple summary of the Christian faith in just 83 words in the original language.
Although it's not said out loud in all churches today, its content is pretty much accepted by all brands of the faith. Catholic, Orthodox, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Anglican, Uniting, even Hillsong wrote a song about it a couple of years back. The creed itself goes like this. I believe in God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit and
I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins.
the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting. And the Apostles' Creed is a wonderfully clear declaration of what we believe. I believe in God, Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth. And it's very clear on the things which the culture really hates now. You know, on the third day he rose from the dead and will come in judgment and so forth.
And I thought, you know, you can't actually hold the view that Jesus was just a kumbaya social worker or a Mahatma Gandhi nice guy and had no normative or transcendent or religious claims to make if you actually read what he said in the gospel. But the Apostles' Creed says,
is a wonderful summation of Christian belief. And I think it is good for us as Christians to be very clear about how radical our beliefs are. You know, in reading about Christianity, I saw some description of it as, so you eat this dead guy's flesh and drink his blood, and then some super being in the heavens reads your mind, and if you commit thought crimes, he sends you to eternal fire and damnation. Now, that is a ridiculous caricature of Christian belief, but I thought...
how radical Christian belief really is to the secular culture. The Trinity, the mystery of the Trinity, the Trinitarian God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Christians have more or less always believed this from very early times. It's very clear in the Gospels. The Apostles' Creed makes it very clear. So in a way, it was a good amateur's device to say, look, you know, I haven't spent 50 years in professional, you know, study of theology as you have, John, but
But here it is. You don't actually have to be a PhD to know what the Christian belief is. It's all there for you in the Apostles' Creed. I couldn't agree more. Thanks so much, John. Got questions about this or other episodes? I'd love to hear them and perhaps we'll be able to answer them in an upcoming Q&A episode.
You can tweet us at Undeceptions, nice and simple. Send us a regular old email at questions at Undeceptions.com or if you're brave, record your question for the show by just heading to Undeceptions.com and you'll see the little button to record your voice. While you're there, check out everything else related to this and the other episodes.
Now, if you've liked this show, I'd love to give a gentle nudge to check out Salt Conversations with Jenny, another member of the Eternity Podcast Network. Jenny does these in-depth interviews with people whose lives have been challenged or changed by their encounter with God. Eternitypodcasts.com. Next episode, women.
Christianity gets a bad rap for its treatment of women through the centuries, much of it well-deserved. But I talked to Professor Lynn Koick from Denver, who's published more than just about anyone else on this topic, and she traces the role of women in Christianity in the first 500 years. It's ugly and it's beautiful. See ya. Music
Undeceptions is hosted by me, John Dixon, produced and directed by Marcus Hadlius with assistance from Kayleigh Payne. Our theme song is by Bach, arranged by me and played by the fabulous Undeceptions band. Editing by Bryce McClellan. Head to undeceptions.com and you'll find show notes and all sorts of other stuff. And over the coming weeks, we'll be transforming undeceptions.com into a library of audio, video and printable stuff, all designed to undeceive.
and let the truth out.