#67 | Do We Need to Reintroduce Christianity to the West? Pt. 1 | Mike Goheen

It's watering time, everybody.

It is time for Apollo's Watered, a podcast to saturate your faith with the things of God so that you might saturate your world with the good news of Jesus Christ. My name is Travis Michael Fleming, and I am your host. And today we're having another one of our deep conversations with my friend Mike Goheen.

Now, let me ask you a question before I talk a little bit about Mike. What is the gospel? What is the Christian faith? Can you articulate that to somebody? How about this? What is the mission of. Of God?

And what is your place in that mission? What is your place in that mission in your world in which you live? What does that look like? What does that look like if you are in a factory?

What does that look like if you're a plumber or if you are in investments in finance? What does it look like if you are home with kids all day long?

What does it look like if you're in the jungle or you're in the bush or you're in the desert? What does it look like in the city? What does it look like in the country or a small town?

These are questions that each one of us ask ourselves in one shape or form. We may not ask ourselves all of them, but we are always asking ourselves, what is my job? What's my purpose?

Today we're going to be talking to Mike Goheen. Now, Mike is a pretty fascinating guy. He is the director of theological education at the Missional Training center in Arizona.

He's also the scholar in residence for the Surge Network of Churches in Phoenix and professor of missional theology at at Covenant theological seminary in St. Louis. He is married to Marnie, and Together they have four adult married children and 11 grandchildren.

He splits his time between Surrey, British Columbia, Canada and Tempe, Arizona, usa. I had him on the show because he is a missiologist. Now, what is a missiologist?

It's someone who studies how the mission of God is to be accomplished in any given culture. Simply put. And today we discuss several things. We get to know Mike a bit and learn his story. We also learn what the mission of God is.

And we learn about a guy by the name of Lesslie Newbigin. That is a name that you need to know. Lesslie Newbigin. Now, they say that you don't remember something unless you've heard it seven times.

I've said it twice. Lesslie Newbigin. That's three times. Lesslie Newbigin is now four times. Lesslie Newbigin. Lesslie Newbigin. Leslie Newigan and Lesslie Newbigin. Got it.

He is a name you need to know.

He is really a prophet of sorts who is one of the first people who asked the question, how do we share the gospel with a culture that has already heard it? And we're going to get to him in just a bit.

But I would encourage you to pay attention to this conversation because we are talking about the way most of us who live in the west, and that's in cultures that are first world cultures, if you will, have largely understood and in many ways misunderstood what the Christian faith is. We've just boiled it down to a couple of bullet points. And then we've said those bullet points, and they are very important.

I shouldn't say bullet points, but we've boiled it down into its essence, and then we apply that to the entire thing. And we misunderstand so many different aspects that bring out the very fullness of what the Christian faith is.

And that helps us to understand and see how we are to. Or how we can rediscover the. The purpose of God's story and our place in it and how we are to embody it before a watching world.

Those are some very huge questions that have an effect on every single one of us. Without exception, no matter where our background is, what our culture is, what male, female, young, old, it affects every single one of us.

And that's why we need to pay attention to this conversation. And it is a pretty deep discussion. You're going to hear some names and terms that you're not familiar with, but I would encourage you stick with it.

While the terms are useful, they are not essential to understand everything that he is talking about.

And what he is talking about is extremely important because it affects each one of us and how we live out our Christian faith in our contemporary world. Happy listening, Mike. Welcome to Apollos Watered.

Good to be here.

Okay, we're gonna do our fast five. Are you ready?

I'm ready. Go ahead.

Okay, so I was looking at your CV and I saw you did some undergrad in Boca Raton, and now you're in Arizona. Florida or Arizona?

Arizona.

Arizona. Why?

Well, I like the dry heat as opposed to the humid heat. And quite frankly, just the community here is a community I've got to know and love deeply.

So I like the beaches in Florida, but I think I prefer the dry heat in Arizona.

Okay, all right. The raiheed of Arizona. So you got to travel a lot. You've taught in a lot of places, but where is the place you want to Travel to the most and why.

Boy, that's a tough question. I'm going to answer in two ways. I've asked my wife this, and we both had the same answer.

The question was, if you could go back to one place you really enjoyed, what would it be? And. And we one time had a conference in Rome, Italy, and we were able to have a vacation after with a friend of mine. His name's Al Walters.

We went as couples, and we spent time for a week in Italy, and we had a great time, and we loved our time in Italy, and we've never been back. So that was one place I love.

But if you ask me right now, what is one of my favorite places in the world that I go to regularly now, it's Northeast Brazil. Places like Recife. I don't know if you've heard of that city.

And there's a number of cities up in the northeast coast of Brazil that I love, and I spend a lot of time there, and it's one of my favorite places in the whole world.

So Brazil, I mean. And where is that out in Brazil? Where is that at? From Rio de Janeiro.

I like Rio de Janeiro, too, but it's very commercialized. But the Northeast is not nearly as commercialized. So Rio de Janeiro is down towards the center of the state, and Rio de.

And the Northeast I'm talking about is up in the northeast corner of South America.

Okay. All right, cool. Here's the next one then. What is your favorite book? Not the Bible. Over 50 years old. Has to be over 50 years old.

Are Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. lewis over 50 years old.

It is. It is.

Okay, there. There you go. My wife reads those to me. She's a very good reader, and she reads them. And that's one of the.

That's one of the things we enjoy doing together. She reads Chronicles of Narnia. She's read them more than one time. And I enjoy Chronicles of Narnia. And then discussing what we think C.S.

lewis might have been talking about with some of those characters.

Yeah. He was a genius writer. Amazing, amazing writer.

For example, those duffel putts, those duffel puds, where they have one big foot.

Yeah.

And they follow one another around, and the one duffel puddle. Say something like, it sure is sunny today. And all the other duffel puds will repeat, yeah, sure, sunny. Sure is sunny.

And then it'll be raining, and they'll say, sure as wet today. And they'll. Duffel puds will all repeat.

I'm pretty sure he was talking Talking about scientists there, and scientists think they're so brilliant and they have such brilliant insight into the world, but really all they're doing is observing the world God's made. And all the other scientists simply repeat what they're saying. So we like talking about, who do we think these characters are representing?

That's awesome. I love that. I love that. That's so good. I'm a big Lewis fan. I never thought of that, but it makes total sense. Okay, here we go. The next question.

What is one food that you absolutely can't stand?

You know, here's the problem. Most food I do, I do not like eating what I've done.

My students tell me, because I'm always on their case about having a bad doctrine of creation and how evangelicals in North America have a very poor doctrine of creation. Creation.

And they will tell me regularly as they begin to develop a doctrine of creation in my teaching, that they say, you know, you live into most of what you teach, but when it comes to a doctrine of creation and food, you really do not live into what you teach. And they're right. I'm afraid they're right. I have to admit they're right. Because if I had my choice, I would eat one time a day.

It would be the fastest thing I could make. To me, food is a social thing. And so if I'm by myself, I eat once a day, and I just am quick. So there's a lot of food.

But if I had to choose one food that makes me gag. And see, part of the problem here is when I visit other countries, I got what's called a gag reflex.

And if I taste something I don't like, I'll start to gag. And I'll tell you. You go to somewhere like South Korea, where I've been a number of times, and Koreans are wonderful host.

But if you gag when you eat their food, that would be one of the worst insults you could do. And so I've had to negotiate this. But if I One thing that would literally make me sick if you made me even put it in my mouth, would be sauerkraut.

Really? That's not that bad of a thing. It makes you gag.

Oh, that would not just make me gag smelling. That would make me probably more than gay.

Okay, then, what's the craziest food? This isn't one of the questions, but what's the craziest food you've eaten?

Well, you know, probably I can't answer that question because I don't eat crazy food. I mean, whenever I go to a place like this, I'll take the safest thing.

And so if I've, you know, I've learned to clear ahead of time with the people that host me, I just tell them, look, I don't want to embarrass you by gagging. Here's my problem. And so they'll often fix it for me in such a way that I don't have to worry about it.

I remember one time speaking to a faculty group at a Korean university, and I told them, here's my problem. That whole faculty had to eat American food because of me. So I feel bad for them. But part of the. Part of the thing is, I've never been.

I've been very safe. And so if, like, I go to Korea, for example, I'm on Koreans right now.

And if I end up going to a Korean restaurant, I will not take the dangerous stuff. What I will do is I'll eat. I'll eat lettuce and anything I'll eat, maybe chicken or anything I recognize because I am so afraid of what I might eat.

So I am not an experimenter when it comes to food.

Now, that surprises me, considering you're a missiologist. I mean, you've written a lot on mission, and missiology usually means I'm engaging with other cultures and having some pretty crazy dishes.

And you're probably the first missiologist I've ever met that has said, I can't eat it.

I engage with the cultures at all kinds of levels as best I can. And my favorite thing is engage with their theology. I'll tell you, when it comes to food, food.

And, you know, part of the thing is that I'll bet you most missiologists have changed today. Globalization has changed everything. So you. You can go anywhere in the world and people will. Will enjoy eating whatever you eat in.

In Western culture. So it's not a. It's not a bigger problem anymore. I just have to be careful to let people know ahead of time. And it's never been a problem.

You know, it's interesting.

When I travel, the only time I ever get sick when I'm in another country is if I eat American food in that country, because they don't know usually how to take care of it or prepare it. And so I ended up getting sick. So I've learned, just stick with what everybody else is eating for the most part. For the most part, and I'll be okay.

But I've had some pretty bad situations eating. It's not American food. Other food That I didn't even know what it was. That's why I'm very careful. I'm very careful.

So just aside, I was in Liberia. We pulled over on the side of the road, and there was this car carcass stretched across two poles. Flies everywhere.

And my host gets out of the car, and I'm like, what is that? And he's looking at it like, this is really good. And he just looks at it. I said, what is that? He goes, bush meat. I went, what's bush meat?

He goes, whatever they found in the bush. I was like, I'll pass. Pass. I'll pass. But here we go. Here we go. This one's a little bit different.

Now, if you were a car, what kind of car would you be and why?

What kind of car would I be?

What kind of car would you be?

I'd be a Toyota. Because Toyotas are not very flashy and they're dependable. And I don't. You know, they're.

They go forever.

They go forever. And I have a lot of energy, and I. People say I go forever, and I do have a lot of energy.

I have, you know, now that I'm older, I say that I'm down to about. I have the energy of maybe one and a half people, maybe two then.

It used to be a lot more than that because I would go and go, But I really don't like the show, don't like the lights, and I don't like to be flashy, but I like to think that I keep going. I'm dependable, but I'm not flashy.

That's awesome, because Toyota's will go forever. I remember seeing a special where a guy had a Toyota Tacoma and it hit 700,000 miles, original engine. So that's you.

You're the guy that just goes on, keeps going.

My wife has called me the Energizer Bunny.

There you go. Tell us about yourself. Tell us about your story, where you grew up. Tell us about your family. I know you're married, you have four children.

I mean, you're in missiology. So tell us about how you grew up and what brought you into missiology.

Boy, that would be too long a story. I grew up in Canada.

Okay.

And I grew up in southern Ontario, Canada, near Toronto. And I suppose I'll just hit some highlights, but I was an athlete in high school. I was a very good wrestler.

And I ended up aiming my life at being the best athlete in my high school. And at the end of high school, I'd been very successful.

And I was looking at this huge picture of myself on the wall that was put up there as athlete of the year. And I remember thinking I was in grade 13. And that's when Canadians had grade 13. I was in grade 13 at the end, and I was looking at that thing.

And I went to high school in the late 60s, early 70s. So my hair is down past my shoulders, and it's like this down past my shoulders.

And I got my wrestling outfit on, and I'm standing there in my wrestling.

And I remember looking at that picture and I remember saying to myself, in about 10 years, everybody's going to be looking at that picture and saying that and laughing at my haircut and saying, I look like an ugly woman. And you know what? 10 years later, that was true. But here's what. My sister was in school and somebody asked me, is that your brother?

He looks like an ugly girl.

And I remember saying that was a very serious thing for me because as I looked at that, I remember I said to myself, what happens if you chase fame, money, something else, and you achieve it? But at the end of your life, you're going to be. At the end of your life, you're going to have to. Have to achieve what you wanted.

But now you can't change course. Then what? So I remember that was the occasion that started me off on a new path that eventually led me to Christ.

That's why I tell that story, because my success in sports left me empty and it led me ultimately to Christ. Two or three years later, I came to Christ dramatically and met my wife a short time later. She was a very godly and beautiful woman.

At the time, I'm afraid that I was looking for more for the beauty than the godliness. I was still fairly new Christian, but I knew there was something there, and she condescended to marry me.

She doing penance?

Yes.

Taking up your cross? Her cross daily?

Yes. That was 41 years ago. That was 41 years ago. So we've had a wonderful marriage. For 41 years, I've been a church planter and pastor.

Then I've spent most of my life in the university, not teaching in seminaries, but in the university. And I studied missiology. Not because I was first and foremost interested in mission. I was interested in contextualization as a worldview scholar.

So I was interested and I started.

My first introduction into gospel and culture issues came from the cultural theologians, like people like Niebuhr, and like people that were interested in studying Bruner. And they're studying it From a theological standpoint. I then deepened that when I understood some of the issues in the Korean tradition.

And I realized that Kuyper's worldview studies had taken it a notch deeper than these theological studies that I had seen.

And then when I discovered Newbigin, I realized that they had taken it a notch deeper than Kuyper and were looking at gospel and culture in ways that I had never looked at it before before. So that's what drew me into it.

Plus, I've been a church planter was very disappointed in the church and it led me into studying missiology as what is the church? And how does the gospel and the church relate to culture? That's what moved me to study and do my PhD work in Lesslie Newbigin.

So let's talk about Newbigin here for a second because many people still aren't familiar with him. I mean, within missiology, of course, he's well known. Many even consider him a prophet.

So tell us about Lesslie Newbigin and why he is so important for us to read and study today.

Okay. There's a lot of reasons. You can read my first chapter in Church and Vocation where I give reasons why we need to study Newbigin.

And the reason was he had spent 40 years in India and he came back to Britain and he realized that the way he would put it is Europe is a mission field, it always had been, but we just have never recognized it. And he brought all the insights of a cross cultural missionary to bear on Western civilization, Western culture, and began to write.

And I remember reading the first chapter of Foolishness to the Greeks and to me, I can say almost without exaggeration, it was stunning and breathtaking. I couldn't believe what I was reading. He was so turning my world upside down because he was looking at Western culture in ways I had never done.

So and I see this now on a regular basis with my students here at MTC in Phoenix where they have their world turned upside down in the first year of their of their time here because they start to understand the dynamic that Newbigin was working with where he says, you start with the Gospel. The gospel has to be understood in terms of the biblical story. The biblical story is more than just this narrative.

It's claiming to tell the true story of the world and explaining everything. And he says, therefore you have to understand that the center of that story is a people who are called to embody the meaning of that story.

And that's what mission is for embodying the end of the story for the sake of the nations.

And then he went on to say, and therefore to embody that story means you're going to encounter other cultures that understand the world differently, that are rooted in a different understanding of the world, in idolatry. And so there will always be a missionary encounter with culture.

Well, that dynamic, which I would argue is at the heart of the Christian faith, is a dynamic that is almost unknown to American Christians who think they have something of a Christian culture.

If they understood that culture, you would not have the kind of things happening in the last that we've had happening in the last five years in North American evangelical Christianity. You would have not people, people defending the right or the less left politically.

You'd have Christians who were just as adamant in critiquing Black Lives Matter. Lives Matter as well as white nationalism, recognizing that both of them have insights and both of them have idolatries.

In other words, you'd have very different church if they understood this dynamic that Newbigin's talking about.

So that's why he thinks he's very important, because he doesn't simply understand the Bible as one story and he doesn't simply have a big gospel of the kingdom like in the Bible, but he understands that that gospel must be embodied by a people who are living in a culture that understands the world differently than the Bible, and they must have a missionary encounter that learns to say yes and no to the culture in which they are living.

So why do you think? Because I'm in total agreement with you, especially as we look at the end of Christendom within the culture and we're seeing such a shift.

But it's so interesting to me the insights that he had as he's coming from India back into the uk, seeing it as a real mission field and applying those insights.

But with the movement of so many people within diaspora and the different nations coming in and you're just seeing such a shift, why is it so important now to recover this idea of narrative and story for us in the scripture? And you've written a lot about this, because I think that we've lost this with our post modernity. There's no story. There's no one story.

It's people fighting with one another. I mean, why is the importance of recovering story number one? Number two, how do we help our churches and leaders with this idea?

They're just trying to survive. Many of them, they're trying to figure out how to shepherd, how to continue to go. How do we help people find their part in this story?

So there's a lot, a lot of stuff there, but go ahead and talk about it.

I mean, we can go on for now for six hours. Yeah, let me start with this.

Actually, I was teaching the Book of John this morning, and we were pointing out that John was particularly adept at using the cultural categories and language and terminology of his day. He was able to use the terminology that people would have recognized immediately.

But what made him such a brilliant communicator is that he was able to use this pagan religious language but fill it with new content. And that's because he has such a deep sense of the Old Testament story giving meaning to the person of Jesus Christ in the Gospel.

And so he was able to use language like Logos, which would have been had a very pagan background for many of his listeners. But he was able to fill it with biblical understanding because he had such a strong sense that the story fills the content of who Jesus is.

And in much North American Christianity, it's not this biblical story that fills the content of who Jesus is in the gospel. It's a story of individual salvation which can easily be taken up into all kinds of other narratives, including a consumer narrative.

So let me just pause on that for a minute and go back to a story I love to tell.

When people ask this question, imagine you are the first theologian in the church, and as the first theologian in the church, you do not have a theological tradition to depend upon. But now you've got a bunch of people coming into your church that are leaders, and they're using all the language of the Bible.

They're speaking of salvation, they're speaking of Jesus as Savior and Lord, and they're using all the language you're using, but they're using it in a way that's clearly heretical. It is not. But they're filling the content, Savior, Lord, salvation, with different meaning because they're bringing their own cultural idolatry.

What do you do? Well, that story is not nearly as theoretical or imaginary as you think.

This is the situation of Irenaeus in the second century, and he's got gnostics who are becoming leaders in the church.

And they are filling this biblical language with different content because the narrative in which they are placing Jesus is a narrative of a soul coming down in dwelling bodies. But now Jesus has given us this knowledge, the secret knowledge whereby we can be saved.

That's the gospel whereby we can be saved by our souls being separated from our bodies and going back to heaven. And Irenaeus, how is he going to combat that?

Because he can't use just the language of the Bible because the Gnostics are using the language of the Bible. Well, says Irenaeus, the only way to understand who Jesus is is by putting them in the context of the biblical narrative.

And so he writes a catechetical document that tells the biblical story from creation to consummation and puts Jesus at the center of that story.

And basically he's saying if you want to know who Jesus is and want to know how to fill the content of these words with biblical meaning, you got to know the biblical story because Jesus is the culmination of that Old Testament story. But he does a little more than that because he starts before he starts to tell the story.

And he says now to read this story rightly, you've got to have the rule of faith.

And the rule of faith is basically a Christocentric lens, or if you want Christocentric trinitarian lens that would later actually become the Apostles Creed. But he starts by saying if you want to read the story right, you have to start with Christ.

And so people like Neubigen and Bauckham, these are two people I've read recently that have said this and others NT Wright would say the same thing. If you want to understand the heart of the Christian faith, it is this.

You've got to understand Jesus in the context of the biblical story, number one. And secondly, you have to understand the biblical story in the light of Jesus.

And it's that continuing dynamic of reading Jesus in the context of the story and reading the story in the context of Jesus. And I think Luke 24 and John 5 would probably tell you much the same thing, that that is the heart and soul of the Christian faith.

And so I would argue that if you want to, the reason narrative is so important is not simply because so you can live faithfully in your culture and do what John did. I would say that's certainly true. I would say apart from the biblical story, you're vulnerable to idolatry.

I would say the starting point, the very starting point, why it's important to understand the Bible as one story is that's what the Christian faith is. That's what the Christian faith is. Matter of fact, Tom Wright actually makes that statement.

He basically says that the Bible is the true story of the whole world and that's what the Christian faith is. In other words, creation Sin, choosing Israel to be the means by which he's going to deal with sin.

The failure of Israel, Jesus coming and taking that role of Israel and his life, death and resurrection, dealing with sin, gathering of people, sending them out to make that known in all the cultures of the world and the coming consummation. That unfolding story is not just one way of speaking of the Christian faith. That is the Christian faith in its very essence.

And any other story surrounding Jesus is going to. Maybe. I'm going to say maybe is going to distort who Jesus is. For example, I don't think it's going to always do it unless you understand, as.

Let me give an example. Much of our systematic theology and much of our evangelistic presentations of Jesus go like this. God is a holy God. We are individual sinners.

Jesus has died for us so that we can be forgiven and justified if we have faith and go to heaven. Now, there's a lot of truth in that, if we present the gospel that way. But that's not the Christian faith.

That is a presentation that is dealing with the needs of people who have a concern about the guilt of their sin. And you might be able to present the gospel with it, but that's not the Christian faith.

But unfortunately, to read certain systematic theologians and to read certain presentations of the gospel, they say that is the gospel. That is the Christian faith. It's not.

It's a distortion of the Christian faith, which takes the lens of individualism and causes us to view Christ through that lens. So I want to say no.

Christ has to be placed at the center, not of a holy God, an individual sinner, and believing in Jesus, death to substitutionary atonement and so on.

There might be truth in that, but to understand the Christian faith, you have to put Jesus at the heart of the biblical story, and you have to read that biblical story in the light of Jesus. Okay, I've said a lot. Maybe you have. You're sitting there with a number of questions.

Oh, no, you got me fired up.

This stuff gets me going.

I get so excited about this kind of thing. Okay, so we're talking about this in this individual narrative, in this individualism that's going on in the United States.

And that's something that's been at the root of the United States from the beginning. You know, Alexis de Tocqueville went through and he noticed how individualistic it is.

But I'm of the belief that the gospel challenges something in every culture and confirms something in every culture or affirms it. When I interact With Africans, for example. Africans, usually that I've met don't do debt. I want to affirm that.

But there are instances within an African culture where you might go to the witch doctor. You just see certain sins in every single culture, without exception. Every single culture has it.

And it's up to us to help show that the gospel addresses that wherever we are. And oftentimes we don't think about that in American culture.

Because in many ways, if you said, we united God with country, now we are to be patriotic, but not nationalistic. And there is a difference between those two things.

The question is, when I hear this individualistic aspect of things, I stop and I go, well, wait a minute. Because God does speak to me. We talk about how the Bible acts as a corrective. And again, you have the collective idea within Scripture.

And yet we need to know that God speaks to us still. You know, I think of a song that my wife would listen to often, and it says, God, be small enough to hear me.

Meaning, I know you're big, I know you're great, but right now I need. To know you're near for me, and.

You'D'Re close to me. How do we separate that out? Because on one level we want to affirm it, and another way we need to challenge it.

So how do we go about doing that within this realm and context of story?

Let me do that historically, and then I'll just say systematically, let me do it historically. Andrew Walls has made the. He's a church historian, I think one of the greater church historians that's alive today.

He's made the comment that we have not yet come to terms with the fact that the gospel was contextualized in a tribalistic culture in its first contextualization. And I think what he means is that the first contextualization really was the movement from Hebrew culture to Greek culture.

But then that sort of Greco Roman, if you will, classical contextualization of the gospel then was translated into a tribal culture when the barbarian tribes flooded into Europe.

And the European contextualization of the gospel over the Middle Ages, right up until I would say you're talking about the Renaissance into the Reformation, was a contextualization in tribal culture. Now, there's a lot I'd like to say about that, but tribal culture basically has no room for the individual. It has no room for the individual.

It is only community.

You were part of, of and melded into the community and you just played your role.

Are we talking about, like these tribes are like the Borg from Star Trek, like we are Borg? Resistance is futile because I don't even know how to conceptualize this.

I know neither do we don't, because we're so individualistic. But for them, they would just say, well, life is about being part of a community and playing my role in the community. There is no.

As a matter of fact, they would say, as a friend of mine says, there is no such thing as individuals. And he's right. The word individual talks about to individuate, to separate someone, and you cannot talk about who I am.

You know, we never got to this, by the way. We really need to get back to it.

You can't talk about who I am without my wife, my four children, my 11 grandchildren, my being a professor, my being a writer. You can't talk about me except for my relationships. I live in community. Well, back to this history.

Basically, what Andrew Walls is saying is that the Gospel was contextualized into that form, and we cannot understand it till we understand that it was contextualized into this tribal form.

And that when we come to the Renaissance, where these new winds of individualism are blowing across Europe as a result of humanism and the Reformation, those winds are beginning to blow in the Reformation. People like Luther, what they're discovering for the first time is I must believe, I must be justified.

Up until this point, what you've got is group conversions. If you look at the history of medieval Christianity, everybody was converted and one mass group. And so you've got a tribal, communal Christianity.

And all of a sudden in the Reformation, you're discovering the individual. Oh, I shouldn't use that word, the personal dimensions of the Christian faith, because they're there in the Bible.

The communal and the personal dimensions are there in the Bible. And so I would say that what you find is that in the Renaissance, Reformation, the Renaissance individualism is born.

And now we have come and in the United States, we've reached the pinnacle of this movement of humanism which separates the person from all, or thinks they can separate the person from their relationships, their community and so forth. And so the individualism, if you want to use that terminology, that starts in the Reformation, was a good thing.

It was rediscovering dimensions of scripture that had been suppressed today. Yes, it's a corrective. Today. I say to my students, we don't need to recover those dimensions. They're so deeply built into us.

We got to recover other things. So that's my first way of coming at it historically. Let me come at it systematically.

And that is to say this, that I would argue that the structure of the Christian faith narratively is cosmic, communal, personal. In other words, the structure of the faith is the Bible tells a cosmic story. I think that's undeniable.

It begins in creation and ends in new creation. This is a story about the world. It begins with the creation of all things, and it begins with the renewal of all things.

The Christian faith about a cosmic story that's much bigger than even humanity. The first covenant made in Noah is the covenant with all creation. And that God is going to not. Is going to preserve and not destroy that creation.

He's going to redeem it. That's the first covenant. It's not with Abraham. He's going to. It's the whole creation. So it's a cosmic story. At the center of that story is.

Is a community that God chooses who will embody the end and the goal of that story. And he begins with Abraham to do, to build and form a community who he will bless and bring blessing to the rest of creation.

So in the cosmic story is a community at the center, within that community are persons who are individually, if I can use that word, responsible, to be faithful and obedient and to be covenantally faithful. And so I would say that you see this very way of thinking in Ephesians 1.

I'll use that example and Colossians 1, where Paul basically says the Gospel is to unite heaven and earth. It's cosmic, and he's made a body. And then he turns both times in Colossians 1 and in Ephesians 1 to say, and you.

And I like the way he says in Ephesians 1:13, and you have been included in all of this by your faith in the gospel. And in Colossians 1:20, he turns and says, and you are part of this now by the good news that you've embraced in Jesus Christ.

And so if you want to tell me that including the personal dimension of faith within the communal and the cosmic takes away, I would say no, no, I think it's precisely the biblical context. And I would even say it even brings more urgency to our call to be. To repent and believe the good news and to be faithful.

In other words, I like Paul, I just like Ephesians 1:13, the best. You have been included in all of this by your faith in Jesus.

And so the call to persons to live faithfully within the community and to be part of God's big cosmic story, the cosmic and the communal, don't take away from it. It's this big cosmic God whose creator, this God who rules all of history that's going to usher in.

It's this God who is the head over the body that is also the God of each one of us and calls each one of us to repent and believe the good news. These don't stand in tension. But I think the structure is cosmic, communal, personal.

That's good, especially since I think that is the corrective. But you're enabling them to have that personal understanding within a greater understanding and sphere of what God is doing in the world.

And how is it that we in the west, in our postmodern culture, have really kind of lost this idea, though, of story and seeing the Bible that way. I mean, when you write, you talk about the true story for the whole world.

I mean, I know this is a shorter book, a longer book that you've done, but why is that so important that to write. I mean, why write this book?

What is it that you saw within culture in your discussions with students and people that you went, we got to write this book? I mean, what was the impetus behind it?

I'll just give you the initial impetus.

Okay.

The initial impetus was that I was being shaped by the Dutch neo Calvinist tradition.

I had gone to Westminster Theological Seminary, and I had been taught to love people like Herman Ritter Boss and Herman Bovink, and that they read the Bible in terms of one story. I was taught that in hermeneutics class. I was taught to do biblical theology at Westminster.

But when I got out of Westminster and I started pastoring and then started teaching at the university, I started realizing that these Dutch folk. I'll talk about Ritterbass, who shaped me more than anybody in the world, Herman Ritterbass. He wasn't doing hermeneutics and biblical theology.

He was bringing this story to bear on politics and education, scholarship, that for Ritterbass, the Bible was the true story of the whole world. It wasn't biblical theology and redemptive history like I was taught at Westminster. And so I started realizing, man, this is way bigger.

And then as I started teaching in the university.

My task was to train young men and women who are coming into the university who are going to be business people, educators, going to work in politics, going to work in work and social work. They weren't interested in theology, if you want to use that terminology in a narrow way. But they had to be formed by a biblical worldview.

And a biblical worldview was more than simply the categories of creation, sin, and redemption. That a biblical worldview was creation, sin and redemption told narratively.

And that redemption had started with Israel, went to Jesus Christ, went to the church's mission, went to consummation. The redemption was much bigger than simply God's restoring all things. End of story, Jesus died, he rose again, and that's it.

There's a whole story of this redemption that fills in who Jesus is and what redemption is. And I began to see this very quickly teaching worldview.

And so I went to my friend Craig Bartholomew, who's a biblical scholar, and I said, craig, biblical scholars are afraid of the notion of the Bible as one story. And I said, and furthermore, when they do write about it, they narrow it to hermeneutics or theology.

I said, I need somebody who will write this in terms of the Bible as the true story of the world for somebody who studied politics. And Craig says, I won't write it unless you write it with me. And that was the mistake that I made.

I agree, because it ended up changing my life in many ways. And so I agreed to write this with him. But what we were doing was here's how I would start every class with my students at the university.

I'd say the title of this course is Biblical Theology. But let me just tell you, we're doing more than theology here. We've called it Biblical Theology.

So you can transfer this course to other places if you put it on your manus, if you put it on your transcript, you can transfer it to another university. I said, because here is what I would call it if I had my choice, the true story of the whole world.

And because this is the story you're called to live in. And the rest of the next two courses that I taught were, here's the biblical story, here's the Western story. You're called to live in this story.

Not this story. This story makes Jesus Christ Lord, and this story makes other idols Lord, and this is the story you want to live in.

And so this story is not a matter of getting your theology straight or the proper narrative right. It's a matter of living faithfully as followers. Of Jesus Christ and making him Lord.

So getting the story right is a matter of being faithful to God and being faithful to following Jesus Christ. That's how I start every one of my classes on biblical theology. This is not a theology course. This is the true story of the world.

And you better come live in it, because if you don't, you're going to live out of default by another story. And that other story is the Western story. And that other Western story is deeply humanistic.

It serves other gods and so choose you this day whom you will serve. Will you serve the God God of the Bible and Jesus Christ, or will you serve the gods of our culture?

And it's basically saying the same thing as choose which story you're going to live in, because that story is going to be who you're going to be living faithfully too. So that's how the whole thing started.

I mean, that's why we originally wrote it, because I was deepening my understanding of how these kids were going to have to live out of some story. If I were to. If I was to talk to you today about it, that would still be at the heart of what I'd want to say.

But then I would go on to say, but you know, the way I started with Irenaeus, this is what the Christian faith is all about and has always been what it's all about.

This is what Jesus was doing in Luke 24 when he basically told the story on the road to Emmaus and saw himself, his death and resurrection as the culmination of that story. I used to think when I used to preach or teach on Luke 24, if I could be a fly in the wall, well, there wasn't a wall on the road.

But if I could be in one place in the biblical story, it would be in Luke 24 so I could listen to Jesus tell the story. I used to say that to students.

But gradually, when my understanding of the culture into which Jesus came, I started realizing, I really don't have to guess how he told the story, because what was unique was not the way he told the story. He was telling the story like all the other Jews.

The difference between Jesus and the other Jews was not how he told the story, but how it culminated. It culminated in the astounding shocking events of his death and resurrection, which is what most people couldn't take.

And so as I started to realize the way the Jews were telling the story, I started realizing Jesus was probably telling in a very similar way, but then just showing the shocking climax to the story in his death and resurrection. So now what I would say is what happened is that the Jews, the early church, this is how they understood the Christian faith.

This is clearly how the early church understood the Christian faith.

There's a great article that talks about how all the catechisms, beginning with Irenaeus and others of the early church, were telling the story of the Bible. All of the catechism told the story of the Bible.

And the way one author puts it, an early church historian puts it, to detoxify them from the Roman story before they were baptized. So to detoxify the pollutants that got into their blood so that they could be detoxified from that idolatry and live faithfully.

But that I would argue that what we see in the medieval period is a church who assumed the biblical story. They just assumed it. It was everywhere. It was part of their culture.

Yes, to some degree it was compromised by Platonism and Aristotelianism, later with Thomas Aquinas. But basically the biblical story was in place.

And when Luther and Calvin start speaking about the Gospel, they don't have to talk about the biblical story in the same way, because in many ways a doctrine or creation and the biblical story, however it was understood, was in place.

And I think that the book by Hans Frey, which the title is the Loss of Biblical Narrative, where he argues and he's speaking to biblical scholars, but I would want to speak much more broadly than biblical scholars that the loss of biblical narrative comes in the enlightenment, in the 18th century, when people begin to understand. Understand the world differently. And they're not understanding the world now in terms of narrative anymore.

And assuming the biblical story, they're understanding the world through the Newtonian paradigm, where Newton broke things down to their smallest bits and then built them back up into bigger systems.

And what is happening now is we break the Bible down into little bits, if you're a historical critical scholar, into historical critical bits, if you're a simple Christian, you break it down into devotional bits or moral bits or theological bits.

And then we build it back up into our own systems, maybe our systematic theologies or our evangelistic presentations or our statements of faith or whatever. But we break it down into bits. And I think that was at the Enlightenment that we lost the biblical story big time.

And we started to understand our knowledge in terms of atomistic bits and pieces that we put into our constructions, that we build up. And I think that the United States is, I think, without a doubt the most Enlightenment nation in the world.

It was the Only nation that was actually formed during the Enlightenment period. Europe has to deal with their Christendom passed. Countries like Canada and Australia were formed after the Enlightenment was thoroughly in place.

And so as a result of that, I think that the Enlightenment worldview, although it's shaping more and more of the world through globalization, has shaped Europe and Canada and Australia and New Zealand. Probably the United States probably is more religiously devoted to the tenets of the Enlightenment than probably any other country of the world.

And so in many ways it's probably harder for an American to get hold of story as the main truth about the world, because for them, systematic theology is a lot stronger because of certain view of truth that comes from the Enlightenment.

That was the first part of my conversation with Mike. I told you it was deep. There are a lot of terms, a lot of things that we're talking about.

They're not easy always to digest, but I know that you can, and I know that you can arm yourself with this stuff so that you can go out and accomplish the mission that Christ has called you to. There are so many things that are warring against you, just the busyness of life. But the world is not meant to be as busy as we have made it to be.

So not only are we warring against this fast paced, crazy world in which we live, in which we are so busy, and we are busy because we are taught and told that we need to be busy to be successful. And while we are to be industrious, we are to be going about the task diligently that God has for us.

God has never called us to try to do every thing that we could possibly do in our world to achieve some type of worldly idea of success. No, that is not what he has called us to. And we battle against this spirit of the age.

We battle against our flesh and we battle against the powers of darkness, because the powers of darkness want to keep us at a superficial level where we don't think deeply. Now, I'm not saying that everyone needs to think and understand everything that he said today. No, that's not what God has called us to.

But God has called us to be faithful, to understand our world. We don't have to understand everything that the Enlightenment taught.

We don't have to understand post modernity and everything that goes along with it.

But we do need to understand the factors that influence how people think and then understand how we are living out the Gospel and how we are to truly present the Gospel to people so that they might have a greater understanding of who Jesus is and what God is doing in the world and what everything is coming to its consummation is really about.

So I would encourage you with this and to pay attention to next week's episode as we continue this discussion and we continue going down deep in order to understand how we are to live as disciples in the middle of this crazy world in which we find ourselves.

And I want to let you know that today's episode, as we have just announced a couple of weeks ago, that it is brought to you in part by the new living translation, the NLT.

And if you go to Tyndale NLT, use the promo code NLTBIBLES, it will give you 15% off of anything@tyndale.com we want you to be equipped so that you can you can water your world for Christ and we'd love for you to have an NLT Bible in your home. So do it today. And if this episode has helped you so that you can water your world, then hit that subscribe button.

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Go to ApolloSweater.org hit the support us box in the upper right hand corner and pick the best level for you. You will be glad that you did and thank you in advance. And before before I close this out today, please allow me to pray for you.

Heavenly Father, we thank you for the conversation today and Mike and I talked about some seriously deep stuff and some some feel a little overwhelmed like they truly did drink from a fire hose.

I pray Lord that you might show them that they don't need to understand everything that we talked about, but they do need to understand who you are and that what you are doing in the world and that your story is great and it's important for us to know and understand and be able to articulate. And Lord I pray that they may not be discouraged. I pray that they may not feel that they are caught up or they're not good enough.

Lord, I pray that they might find grace and mercy and that you might be small enough to meet each one of us where we are. We know that you are a great big God and that these are deep subjects.

But yet at the same time we have a simple faith that we believe help our unbelief. So Lord, show us. Be with us and be with all of those who are listening to my voice right now. Equip them, strengthen them.

Let not the enemy keep them down. But may they find the forgiveness and peace and purpose that is only in you. Be with us and bless us now. In Jesus name, Amen. Amen and amen.

I pray that God may bless you with this conversation and that he might truly equip you so that you might water your world. Well, that is it for today. We can put a bow on this episode. I want to thank our Apollos Watered team. Kevin, Rebecca, Eliana, Donovan, Melissa, Chris.

And Chris and Tony. This team just keeps getting bigger. Water your faith. Water your world. This is Travis Michael Fleming signing off from Apollo's Watered. Stay watered everybody.