Latest / The Speak Life Podcast / Questioning Christianity || Interview with Dan Paterson || SLP371

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Questioning Christianity || Interview with Dan Paterson || SLP371 · The Speak Life Podcast

• 0:06
  SPEAKER_01: Hello and welcome to the Speak Life Podcast.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_01: My name is Glenn Scribner.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_01: I've got the great privilege today of interviewing Dan Patterson.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_01: He is the author of the book Questioning Christianity, and we get to talk about that great book, which I highly commend.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_01: Are you subscribed to the Speak Life Podcast?
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_01: You can do that on any of your podcatches of choice.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_01: And if you would like to give us a rating review, that would really help us to get seen by more people.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_01: But without further ado, here is my interview with Dan Patterson, the author of Questioning Christianity.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_01: So Dan, tell me a little bit about your Christian story.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_01: How come you're the Christian that you are today?
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's a good question.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, my dad has had a big influence on me.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: He's always been a strong follower of Jesus for as long as I've known him and just a really quiet, loving, humble guy.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_00: But we grew up, my sisters and I, sort of with a pretty practical faith expressed to us.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: My folks looked after people in youth drop-in shelters and drug addicts.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_00: I had a foster sister for all of my early childhood from one of those sort of broken relationships.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: And uh and so they were just wonderful Christian people who loved Jesus and cared for those in their orbit.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, but I never really understood much of Christianity in those young years.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: We were taken to church and to Sunday school, but probably my best understanding was there was a big guy up there in the sky who was powerful and apparently wanted things to go well for us.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: Uh something about Jesus in there too.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: Uh when we were, I was nine, uh, we went on a family holiday and uh had a big car accident where my mum sort of headbutted a truck at relatively high speed and had huge head injuries as well as sort of her legs pinned in the wreckage.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and so that was just a life-altering event.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: She had to be cut out of the vehicle and airlifted to hospital.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: And they performed an emergency craniotomy where they removed sort of a third of her skull so that she wouldn't die from intercranial pressure as the swelling of her brain increased.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: And so there was years in the aftermath of that accident where she had to learn to do so many things again, uh, loss of memory, loss of degrees of sight and taste and smell.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, but biggest part of her that was affected was just the part of her brain that controls all of your chemical release for emotions and hormones.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: And so, with that gone, she was just all over the place, sadly, from super happy one second to suicidal or full of rage and throwing chairs through windows, and just none of it able to be controlled.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: And so it was pretty harrowing as a youngster, uh, just seeing that shift where you go from having a parent to having to parent your parent for a number of years.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: Because you and I kind of dislodged.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I was young, and uh and so that experience kind of just I don't know, torpedoed my childlike belief in God.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: It just didn't quite make sense to me that if God apparently has a wonderful plan for our lives, how this sort of fits into it and why he wouldn't step in and stop it.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: So I did what most obviously teenagers do is my childhood years bumped on.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: I moved more into uh keeping the God question at arm's length.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: I would have described myself as an apatheist, just didn't really care much about the God thing and and took a backseat when it came to church or to youth and just kind of dropped off the radar.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: And it wasn't until after I finished school and uh having been exposed, I guess, to that suffering early on, kind of makes you think about life's big picture.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: And I was just trying to figure out what do I do with my life.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: I did two weeks of an IT science field degree, dropped out, one of the fastest dropouts in university history, I'm sure, and just said, man, what am I gonna do?
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: And uh picked up a tray, just worked installing filtration systems and swimming pools that year.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: And it was over the course of that that I had a mate who, as I was opening up and saying, trying to figure out what my life is about, uh, he encouraged me to pick up the Bible and to see whether or not God had substantial answers to those questions now that I'm older.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: And so I took him at his word.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't realize that when a Christian says read the Bible, they usually mean read a part of the Bible, like, hey, read the gospel of Mark or of John.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: And so I just started like any anyone, kind of right at the beginning and worked my way through.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: And it was confusing.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't have your book back then, Glenn, the 321, how to make sense of how this Christian story.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_00: So I found most of the Bible unbelievably confusing.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and it wasn't until I got to the stories about Jesus that my heart of maybe a coldness towards God, my skepticism just began to melt.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: Because when Jesus said, You've seen me, you've seen the Father, I and the Father are one.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_00: If I'm looking at Jesus, I'm looking at what God is like, and just his way of interacting with people in suffering and who are hurting and grieving or feeling left out and trying to figure out their way in the world.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: There was something about him that I just found enigmatic and alluring and trustworthy.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: And I just got to the end of John's gospel where it says that these things are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and believing have life in his name.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_00: And I I couldn't describe my mental processes or what had happened, but I just remember getting to that verse and saying, That's me.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: I I believe in him now.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_00: I I trust Jesus.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: But I still had a ton of questions, and so I hadn't been in church for a long time.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and I went back to uh the church that my parents had had taken me to, and there I I bowled up the youth pastor at the time and said, I've got these questions.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: And uh and in those early years, he really helped me to learn how to read the Bible and gave me a stack of books to read to try and make sense of these questions.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: And no point was I invited to shut down that inquiry, but instead he said, No, well, part of worshiping God is to think right about his world, to think hard and to dig deep on those questions and to see whether or not truth really does invite questioning.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and so I just found that first sort of first 12 or 18 months of being a Christian just the opening up of an intellectual world of making sense of the world and my own experience and the biblical story and just trying to connect the Christian story to last deepest questions.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_00: And I've been doing that kind of ever since.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_01: And and that's fascinating that that was your journey, because I I think the way we come to faith often leads to the way we think others should come to faith.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_01: It it shapes the way you evangelize.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_01: The what the the the evangel that that sort of grabs you is the the evangel that you kind of pass on to others.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_01: So fascinating that you went on this big scriptural journey, encountered Jesus, figured out what it meant for you, and then started dealing with the questions, which is the you know the the shape of of this book, which we'll we'll get into in a second.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_01: But I just want to press into this idea of if you've seen Christ, you've seen the Father.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_01: Because I I just think that's that's just massive.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_01: I I I remember meeting a an Iranian woman who had, you know, come to faith through her uncle smuggling to her the Injil, the four Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_01: She said halfway through Luke's gospel, I realized God could not be the God of the Ayatollahs.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_01: He must be the Jesus God.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_01: And I've been using that phrase the Jesus God ever since, because I think it's just beautifully captures.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_01: And it's not just if you live in an authoritarian Iranian society that the God that you've always believed in, you know, might not match up to the Jesus God.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it's in the West today.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_01: You know, the the God that we grow up with might just be, you know, indistinguishable to the God of the ayatollahs.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_01: Um and it's really Jesus that makes the difference.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_01: Wouldn't you say how how does that help you in your evangelism now as you seek to persuade others?
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, absolutely.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I mean, my experience of talking about the faith or trying to take Jesus public is that people have all kinds of barriers to being able to consider God.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_00: And I mean, right now, probably Christians in the church, the dark deeds of the church's history, probably one of the biggest barriers.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_00: But almost inevitably, whenever I bring up the God question or spirituality or religious belief, people have a list of things that they bring up.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: But what about?
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, and most of them have to do with this vague concept of God.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_00: But what about all those times where I prayed and nothing happened?
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: Where it felt like in C.S.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_00: Lewis's words, you know, my prayers are posted to a non-existent address.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_00: And so this wrestle with a big, powerful, but disembodied and unknowable.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, can we really trust the intentions of God?
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: Almost like the serpent in the garden, uh, right at the beginning of the Christian story.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: It's like, what can you make of a God like that?
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: How can you really know him?
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_00: How can you lean in and trust his intentions?
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: But as soon as Jesus starts speaking and saying, I only say what I hear the Father saying, I only do what I see the father doing, that if you've seen me, you've seen him.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_00: And this oneness that we have, it's like, well, well, if you're staring at Jesus, you're staring at God.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_00: And if that's what God's like, then Jesus has made this invisible God visible.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_00: He's put human flesh on eternal spirit.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: And all of a sudden, this just I think opens people's up and they're like, Oh, I'm actually quite warm towards Jesus.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_00: I I think I like Jesus.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_00: And you say, Well, if you like Jesus, then you like the Father because he and the Father are one.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: And so I I find it's an incredibly helpful way to get past a whole lot of abstract objections that people have and say if the Christian story is true, then the person that you should be considering whether or not they're worth believing is Jesus, because that is the very heart of the glory of God, the beauty of his character is as made known in Jesus.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_01: Right, right.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_01: And so catch us up then.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_01: You're falling in love with Jesus, he's rocking your world, he's starting to answer your questions.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but where where do you go to next?
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_01: You're you're in this this church in Brisbane, I assume.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_01: Um where's next for you?
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I was uh, I mean, I started just trying to help other people figure out their questions as well.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_00: So almost whenever you find stuff that you love or you find really interesting, you you try and share it.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_00: And so got pretty into uh running kind of small groups through there and helping other people understand the Christian story through the Bible.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and it wasn't long before I had a couple of leaders at the church tap me on the shoulder and say, look, we think you should start training because I think there's a a call towards doing gospel ministry here.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: And so I did my undergrad degree in theology and then actually was invited to join team at a church in Brisbane, uh, where we're still our home church here at Ashgrove Baptist.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and so I spent sort of five or six years wrestling with youth and young adults, many of whom didn't come from a church background, but just had questions.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_00: And that was where I cut my teeth, I guess, in terms of having big God conversations with people that are brand new to the whole God thing to church, uh was just with average, Aussie, teenagers and young ads in university who really had uh open slather to ask their questions.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_00: And so that was much of the style of the ministry that we did.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: And it was really cool part way through um that stint as a pastor.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, I had a year off to do some study over in England and uh the Oxford Center for Christian Apologetics and so do with Wycliffe Hall and do some stuff at the University of Oxford, but then also to be able to have these extra lectures with John Lennox and Alistair McGrath and some guys I really look up to in the world.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and so I just love that year as well, uh, and kind of led into something new that at the end of that year was invited to join our sort of international team of evangelists and apologists that at the time was known as RZAM.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_00: Um so that was sort of would shape the next sort of five years of my life after that.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_01: Very much so.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_01: So did you meet Ravi Zacharias?
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_01: And if so, like what uh what impressions did you have of him at the time?
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, no, very much.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I'd read a few of Ravi's books, it was part of the trigger for going and doing this OCCA course, and so had sort of an admiration for him uh from afar, just really appreciated the way that he brought together history and philosophy and arts and romanticism and just descriptive and beautiful language with the Christian story.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_00: And um, so yeah, met him a couple of times while we're at Oxford and then uh sat down with him to explore the idea of uh coming on team as well at the end of that year, uh, and then many times in the years since to speak in same places and do a couple of travel trips together and uh that sort of thing.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_01: Uh to the point where I mean you were invited to kind of start up RZIM in Australia, is that right?
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_00: So I mean, uh for the time that I was there, RZIM went from 25 speakers-ish when I joined the team.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_00: It was still a relatively small team to about a hundred by the time that I finished in March of 2020.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_00: And so uh it was in a rapid expansion phase of really trying to identify young potential speakers and just to help lead and develop this kind of ministry in other parts of the world.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_00: And so I was the first boots on the ground in Australia, not the first Australian on team.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_00: There's some in other parts of the world, um, but certainly here to help try and get the thing launched within Australia.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_01: So when things started to break about um Ravi, I mean, we we had, you know, Lorianne Thompson and the and the NDA um in back in 2017, is that right?
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_01: Um I mean what was what was happening in your world as you know a story or two was breaking with uh Christian Christianity Today and that and that kind of thing.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_01: How how were you processing what was happening?
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's a really good question.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, I mean it really throws you back.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_00: For the most part, it was myself and one other team member at the time uh who lived on the other side of the country.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_00: And I remember reading through the Christianity Today article back then in 2017 and just being perplexed and having no idea what to make of this.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_00: And then it was the first we'd heard about it, that there was nothing that had come internally from the team, just felt strange.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, surely this would be something if there wasn't anything to hide that that you might pass on.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_00: And so it was just strange to hear about it from the outside.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_00: And so our first port of call was always to chat together.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_00: And so we're reading through this, we're back and forward on various scenarios, how we meant to make sense of the information that we're being given.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_00: And little bits and pieces were coming out in in subsequent blogs, um uh bits of information, uh emails that are leaked, uh, motivations, further documents, all kinds of stuff was coming out in drips and drabs.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_00: And uh so we basically just were uncomfortable and had questions and posed those questions upwards uh on the chain.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, there's a reasonably clear chain of command, but at the same time, it was like a big family.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_00: So even though you have someone that you directly report to, you you're asking questions across the pond to people in different positions who um would maybe know something more seriously, and nothing really came until we would get a one paragraph response, which was the official press release.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and it just felt inadequate.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_00: It felt inadequate to waylay our own questions and concerns.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_00: And we had really reputable ministry partners or friends here in Australia who are involved in gospel ministry or different Christian institutions who would be saying, What do we make of this?
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_00: And and you can go back and look at our message history.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_00: My honest answer is I don't know.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_00: This is what we're being told.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_00: This is the information that we're being given.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, over time, a broader story was developed around it and then backed up by other kind of key figures within the ministry leadership team who said, you know, we've seen the evidence, we trust Ravi, here's the story, it's extortion, and and certainly painting Brad and Lori Ann Thompson in a really negative light.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_00: And we just had nothing else to go off at the time.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, we I think I made an admission later after the um uh initial report was released, and I said, Man, there's just there was harder questions I wish I had asked at the time, but it was our first contact with what was an unfolding culture within the evangelicalism of abuse, and you just couldn't imagine it of Ravi, to be honest.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_00: Um, right.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_00: People since have asked me, like, have you seen red flags in him?
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_00: And I wasn't around for any of the traveling massage therapist stuff.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_00: I wasn't aware of slush funds, I wasn't aware of any of that, and yet just from my interactions, people would say, What did you make of it?
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, I still I still struggled to believe at knowing him from just the interactions.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_00: Um so not, yeah, it just did not fit easily.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_00: So you're in that weird world, but where you see, man, these look like difficult things to explain why he would launch a uh lawsuit like this, or why an NDA.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um, there were just things that didn't fit, but then you know the character of the personal thing that you do, and uh you're getting told here's the story, and you can trust it, people have seen the evidence, and you're just kind of left in that uncomfortable space of well, I haven't seen it.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_00: So, so what am I doing?
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_00: I'm trusting, trusting other people's eyewitness testimony.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so that's kind of where we were, relatively uncomfortable.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_00: And that would happen multiple times as different stuff leaked, would just go back and forward saying, I don't know what to make of this.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_01: And you're trusting some eyewitness testimony and not others, and and how do you make those decisions?
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_01: And you're surrounded by a community that's that's all saying one thing.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_01: Uh what a mess.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_01: What a mess.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_01: Um now by the time the Miller and Martin report came out, um, you were no longer with RZAM.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_01: Is that is that right?
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I stepped down from RZAM in in March of 2020.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_00: So, right when the COVID lockdown kind of snapped in was when I'd stepped off team.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_00: So that was you know about the time just after, I think, when when Ravi was diagnosed with cancer and a couple of months before he died in May.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_00: Um so pretty tumultuous period of time just in life generally, but also within the ministry.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_01: So, what what was going through your head um when you read the Miller and Martin report basically a a year on from that?
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_01: Um, back in was it was it it was end of February, wasn't it?
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_01: It was about February this year of 2021.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_01: Um that came out.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's that's a very, very um raw question.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_00: Uh there was a lot of emotions, and there was probably a fair bit of information that was passing back and forward from people who were trying to figure out how to make sense of the depth of the accusations and the stuff that was coming out.
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't think there was a lot of the shape of that report that shocked me, um, given how those conversations had unfolded.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_00: But it was a lot of the details um that I just made me simultaneously cry um and and made me angry, really angry.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um, particularly around just thinking the extent of how much spiritual harm and trauma had been done to people who God loves and who, as spiritual shepherds, should have been protected uh not just by Ravi, but but by the leadership um as well, who and myself included at times, like I said, who who should have asked harder questions rather than be satisfied with the gray.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um and so yeah, just just angry to to hear of the religious justifications that were given for keeping them silent as well.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_00: Uh yeah.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_00: It took me almost remember dropping the boys off at school, uh reading a couple of paragraphs of it, and then just saying I can't do any more until until they're gone.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_00: I just need some space to process that.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah, really heavy time.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_01: And you did a fantastic interview with Dominic Steele on the pastor's heart, um close close to that time, and I I very much recommend it.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_01: I'll put put links um in the show notes to to that interview that you did um with Dominic.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_01: But what one of the questions that came up there was was you know, how how do you speak to others who like you would have read Ravi's books, would have been perhaps persuaded, perhaps perhaps even they would name Ravi as the person who was you know the the biggest um advocate for advocate for Christianity by which they ended up trusting in the Lord.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_01: And now it it turns out it turns out that he he's been a wolf in sheep's clothing um all along.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_01: What what do you say to such a person?
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, a great question.
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I mean in the end it just comes back to we are only ever imperfect signposts to the good, true, and chief shepherd.
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_00: That the role of anyone in Christian ministry, no matter what leadership role they play, is to be an under-shepherd.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_00: And they will give an account for the souls of the people over whom they've cared.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_00: And that's something that the Lord will take very seriously.
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_00: But for those who have been warmed by what Ravi said, nothing about what he said about Jesus is untrue.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_00: Jesus is every bit as real and warm and loving and gentle and powerful and gracious and inviting as the way that Ravi so beautifully and eloquently painted him in his messages.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_00: And so the truth of the Christian story is not undermined by the dark deeds of those who claim to follow him.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_00: We can very easily draw a wedge between Jesus of Nazareth and these horrendous and religious evils, uh, because you just there's no way you can extrapolate from him to that being okay.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_00: And so my encouragement would be for those people who feel a little bit homeless or disoriented, would be to make sure that you run to Jesus, that he's the safest haven for anyone who's hurting and needs to find some kind of healing through this whole process.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_00: But also that it's okay to trust people again into the future.
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_00: And this is the hard thing of something this dislodging is you tremendously look up to someone.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_00: But the challenge of the internet age and of print and podcast is that we think we know people better than we actually do.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_00: And so often the best spiritual shepherds are the people that are actually already in your orbit, the people that you can be close quarters with, where their spiritual DNA can be caught rather than just taught from afar.
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, and that it's it's important that we don't close up our hearts towards relationships because people can do evil, but that we find people who have in their character, in their accountability, in there being no red flags or areas that you can't ask about, uh, that you really can lean in and build trusting relationships with.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_00: And so I think the reaction with this and the growing window into the sickness of some evangelical culture uh is that it's very easy to grow cynical and cold hearted towards God's work and gospel ministry and the church.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_00: But Jesus loves the church and he is committed to dragging these religious evils out into the open to deal with them so that she can be purified and everyone can take their rightful place in helping to see her built up and beautified.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: So that she'll be a beacon of hope to the world.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_00: And so I hope people don't take because of the dark deeds of some a huge back step from the mission that Jesus invites us to into building up the church, um, rather than just throwing stones now.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and that's fascinating.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_01: You say about um bringing this stuff out into the light is to serve the church and to serve the cause of the gospel.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas, as the Miller and Martin report um noted, Ravi would say to those he was abusing, um, don't blow the whistle on this, or millions of souls will be jeopardized.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_01: And just the the horror of saying that, because the horror of that is the opposite of what you've just said.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_01: Um, it it is to whitewash a tomb for the sake of Jesus.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_01: Totally.
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_01: When Jesus totally says the opposite.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_00: The opposite is the true.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_00: But it's one of the things I love about the Bible, you know, is that God never sweeps religious evils under the rug, he constantly exposes them.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_00: And whether he uses prophets to do it in the Old Testament or pagan nations, uh, or in our own modern world, you think of something like the spotlight film and how it's detailing an investigative team over in Boston who were doing the work of God by exposing evil in the church so that it has to be dealt with.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_00: God always starts judgment with his own house.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_00: And the church has to be purified if she's going to fulfill the calling that God has to do real meaningful reconciliation work in the broken and fractured world.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_01: And how have you started to think about that as uh as an evangelist, an apologist, and someone who seeks after lost sheep?
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_01: It's certainly, I mean, I put myself in that same category, but the last year, year and a half, it's certainly made me think um uh we must never divorce the seeking of the lost sheep from the provision and protection of the flock.
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_01: And what on earth are we doing going out and bringing more people into a fold if it's full of wolves, or if we are indifferent to the wolves that are there?
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and so has it has it made you think about the way in which the evangelist fits into the broader work of the church?
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, absolutely.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_00: Uh part of my real impetus actually is just to see evangelists not on the fringe or not seen as the strange, weird Christian cousin, but to be seen as a vital part of local church bodies.
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_00: And so, even in what I've been doing since stepping down from RZIM, to be embedded in your own community, to have a ministry that is within driving distance of your own home, to be going back repeatedly to places and people that already know you.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, and so you're serving both your church and then just beyond in a in a smaller local area, and then doing stuff digitally, which we're so much more used to now, to be able to reach people in other places, but just to have that focus on actually an evangelist a part of the gift to the local church in Ephesians 4.11, so that it'd be built up and reach maturity, equipping the saints for the works of ministry.
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and so I think that's something that we really need to recapture is the evangelists are not the people out there on their own as lone wolves, just catching and then throwing them back into the boat, but are actually working alongside pastors and apostles and prophets and are accountable to them so that people can ask all kinds of questions on how you're spending your time, who are you spending it with, uh, and just what are the measures that you're putting in place to guard yourself spiritually and guard yourself against temptation and to guard yourself against accusation so that you really are building up a healthy culture.
• 25:35
  SPEAKER_01: Very wise words.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I I notice in your book, um, you've you've got three parts to the book.
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_01: You you sort of take us through the the scriptural story and and and then you take us through uh what it looks like to live the Christian life, and then you deal with uh these seven sort of common objections.
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_01: The last one is how can God be good when the church is so bad?
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_01: Um were you writing this um in the midst of all this kind of stuff?
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_01: Because I imagine a book coming out now, you would have been writing it.
• 26:02
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know, when when were you writing it?
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's good.
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_00: Um this was actually just a COVID project, so this would have been done prior.
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, I think we hand in the final manuscript in August, so before the CT article even broke.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_00: Um and so that's all sort of after the fact.
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, but certainly this is something that I've been dealing with in Aussie culture for a number of years now, ever since we had the Royal Commission into sexual abuse crimes in institutions broadly, but certainly within the church.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_00: And the way that that's damaged the public psyche in how it thinks towards the church, it's still relatively warm sometimes towards Christians.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_00: The majority of Ozzys would say Christians are caring, loving, supportive rather than hypocritical or judgmental.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_00: The the good verbs outnumber the bad verbs.
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_00: But when they think of the church, all of a sudden that word is a shadowy institution that conjures up all kinds of negative feelings.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, and so really trying to just say this is where people are right now, I want to tackle things head on.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_00: I want to steel man the objection and then say, how does the Christian story make sense of religious evils?
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_00: How does God respond to them?
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_00: And should Christians behaving badly stop you from considering becoming one yourself?
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, because I think that's sort of the key justification.
• 27:13
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, look, Christians are no different, so uh maybe I'm too good for church rather than not good enough.
• 27:19
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 27:19
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, exactly.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_01: And and sort of it leaves your book with certainly it leaves the Christian with the sense that actually, you know, the best apologetic for the gospel will be Christians who actually believe it, believe it and live it.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_01: Um who actually are the kinds of communities that answer that objection well.
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_01: Um brings these things together.
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_01: So so tell me about the shape of this.
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, part one, you tell us the Christian story, and you kind of you go back to the beginning, you go back to the garden.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_01: Um before then talking about the personal invitation that Jesus makes to to kind of hop on board and uh and and live um as a follower of Jesus before you deal with the questions.
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_01: What's the what is the logic behind that, right?
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_00: It seems strange totally.
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I um I mean I've cut my teeth in terms of more public speaking by speaking in high schools, and there are a number of elite private schools in Brisbane that I speak in every year.
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_00: And you can imagine walking into a grade 11 or grade 12 group of about 150 teenage boys in a boys' school, a big rugby culture, a huge intellectual culture, and so you've got the absolute nerds and geeks on one side and the boys who definitely don't want to be there down the front being rowdy in the football crowd.
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_00: And how on earth do you go in there and talk about whether or not science has buried God or God exists?
• 28:36
  SPEAKER_00: They are not interested, or they're so convinced that what you were saying is baloney.
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_00: And it's been really interesting to me whenever I speak, I always do a short talk and then a ton of QA, and they just love the QA.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_00: It uh it always gets really, really exciting.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, but what's interesting to me is how often their questions actually presuppose false ideas or stereotypes or caricatures of God in the Christian story that I have to spend most of my time actually just correcting what the Bible says or what the Christian story teaches about what God is like and the shape of the story, that I said, I'm getting, I'm getting tired of uh of these questions.
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, I would much rather start with the story.
• 29:15
  SPEAKER_00: I'd much rather commend to you a beautiful and true vision of how God has made himself known in Christ and how he's enacted a rescue plan to deal with the heart of our human problem.
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_00: And so if I lay out the vision for how the Christian story actually connects with life's deepest questions first, it goes a long way to disarming a lot of false ideas about God or incorrect uh kind of caricatures of the Christian story.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_00: So that when it does come to question time, I find that some of these questions just don't get asked in light of that.
• 29:45
  SPEAKER_00: Or uh I'm able just to refer back to the story and say, Oh, remember how I said this and just connect a couple of pieces so that they're like, ah, okay, now that makes sense.
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_00: And so if I jump straight into convincing them that God exists and that Jesus really did rise from the dead, but in their mind, they think, well, if God exists, he's a jerk, exactly like how Richard Dawkins used to describe him, you know, he's a homophobic and infanticidal and genocidal and philosidal, megalanomaniac, satamatistic bully, right?
• 30:13
  SPEAKER_00: And you're just thinking, and if I'm trying to convince you that he exists, there's all kinds of resistance in your heart and mind.
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_00: You don't want him to be real.
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_00: But if the Christian story really is good news for all of life and for everyone, if I can lay that out first so that when it comes to the question time, you're just thinking, man, can I believe this?
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_00: Kind of the blaze Pascal, you know, make them wish it were true and then show them that it is.
• 30:34
  SPEAKER_00: Uh that's certainly been much more of my approach and just found it really useful to do it that way.
• 30:39
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I I often use the analogy that I I I actually got it from Al-Masira, which is um a ministry that reaches out to Muslims, and um the their um analogy, which I've stolen, which is you know, the Christian house is this weird-looking house from the outside.
• 30:55
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but you don't you don't yet know enough to ask your questions about it.
• 30:59
  SPEAKER_01: Let let us throw open the doors and give you the grand tour.
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_01: And what we're not gonna do is build stepping stones from your world to the Christian world because we don't really think it works like that.
• 31:08
  SPEAKER_01: We think it's it's actually an act of hospitality, it's an act of love, and that the bridge we want to build out into the community um is one of love rather than just you know intellectually scratching where you're itching.
• 31:19
  SPEAKER_01: Um but what it means is initially you're uh uh confronting people with this bonkers like thing that like because you're you you're you're kind of you're not trying to build on common ground, actually.
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_01: You're you're you're you're trying to say, okay, sit down, have a cup of tea, let me tell you a story.
• 31:37
  SPEAKER_01: And you begin the story where the Bible begins with a talking snake.
• 31:41
  SPEAKER_01: Dan, what's that what's that all about?
• 31:45
  SPEAKER_00: I actually love this part of the book.
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_00: I normally make uh you know the warning that, hey, if you're gonna start talking about your faith, please don't get stuck in the Garden of Eden with a talking snake.
• 31:55
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, and so that's sort of been my encouragement for years as people start having better God conversations, but all of a sudden we're writing a book and I'm like, we can't leave this out because what the snake introduces to the story is just so fundamental.
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_00: The question: can you take God at his word?
• 32:11
  SPEAKER_00: Can you really trust what he has to say?
• 32:13
  SPEAKER_00: Can you trust his intentions?
• 32:15
  SPEAKER_00: Can you trust that he really is good?
• 32:17
  SPEAKER_00: And what I've discovered in that every question I've ever been asked in a QA setting either boils down to one or two major questions.
• 32:25
  SPEAKER_00: Either people are asking me, can I really believe that this is true rationally?
• 32:30
  SPEAKER_00: You know, hasn't science disproved this ridiculous creation story?
• 32:34
  SPEAKER_00: How do I know that the Bible hasn't just been altered and it was written by goat herders in the Bronze era anyway?
• 32:39
  SPEAKER_00: Uh yeah, all of these questions really have to do with the truth of the Christian story.
• 32:42
  SPEAKER_00: But the most significant barriers for people, the ones like me with the car accident with my mom, those are the barriers that ask the question, is God good?
• 32:51
  SPEAKER_00: Can I really trust him?
• 32:53
  SPEAKER_00: And to see that this is the temptation or ground zero of doubt in the Bible, uh, just means that we have to grapple with both the existence of evil in the system that God has set up, that good has been distorted and moved away from who God is and in rebellion against him has become evil.
• 33:10
  SPEAKER_00: And that that is a huge part of the explanatory power of the Christian story, that there really is evil in the world, both human and otherwise.
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_00: But also to make sense of the underlying concern that everyone has of can I really lean in and trust that God has my best intentions at heart so that if I trust him, that's actually going to lead to my ultimate good.
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_01: So you press into the bonkers and uh and it turns out it's beautiful.
• 33:37
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you you press into the weird and it turns out it's beautiful, it makes surprising sense of the world.
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_01: Do you know Dan Strange at all?
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_01: He um he's written a number of different books on on um culture and and um reaching reaching the culture, but he he talks about subversive fulfillment, um, that the gospel is the subversive fulfillment of our heart's desires, and there is that journey that you go on.
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_01: And and first, first of all, this the subversion, it's a cross moment.
• 34:04
  SPEAKER_01: Um it's a no.
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_01: Uh no, actually, it's not quite like that.
• 34:09
  SPEAKER_01: But then there's the fulfillment aspect.
• 34:11
  SPEAKER_01: But yes, it's more than you'd ever you know dared dream.
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_01: Um and I I got that sense with with the book as well, in in terms of what you're trying to do.
• 34:20
  SPEAKER_01: Let's let's start with a snake.
• 34:23
  SPEAKER_01: Stick with me, people.
• 34:25
  SPEAKER_01: Um but as you as you dive into the bonkers, it's beautiful.
• 34:28
  SPEAKER_01: As you dive into the weird, it's wonderful.
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_01: As you get the subversive thing, um, you you find a fulfillment on the far side.
• 34:34
  SPEAKER_01: And it also made me think of um, you know, Jordan Peterson five years ago standing on a stage in Toronto.
• 34:40
  SPEAKER_01: What is it what's he talking about to a packed-out theater?
• 34:43
  SPEAKER_01: What's he talking about on these videos that have millions of views?
• 34:46
  SPEAKER_01: Um he's talking about the talking snake, he's talking about Genesis.
• 34:50
  SPEAKER_01: He's going back to the beginning and immersing people in the strangeness of the scriptures, but on the far side of the strangeness you find a familiarity.
• 34:59
  SPEAKER_01: Is is that what what you what you're kind of going for here?
• 35:01
  SPEAKER_00: I think that's gold.
• 35:02
  SPEAKER_00: I definitely think it is.
• 35:03
  SPEAKER_00: And I mean, there's a couple of senses in which uh, I mean, Tom Holland has leaned into this a lot for you over in the UK, but just so much of what we already believe and so much of the way we already live our life scripts, almost is as though the Christian story is true.
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_00: So people are more Christian than they realize.
• 35:20
  SPEAKER_00: But the other way is just realizing, pushing through questions, like let's take the suffering question, for instance.
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_00: The Christian story, in light of having been created for good but become damaged by evil, makes such better sense of our deepest intuitions when it comes to encountering evil and suffering in the world.
• 35:38
  SPEAKER_00: That there really is an evilness to evil and there is a wrongness to suffering, that this is not the way that the world should be.
• 35:44
  SPEAKER_00: Something has gone wrong.
• 35:45
  SPEAKER_00: And I think the Christian story answers that beautifully in a way that none of the secular or non-religious or even other religious stories kind of do in the same way.
• 35:53
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and so you're right.
• 35:54
  SPEAKER_00: The the more you lean into it, you're like, this makes surprising sense uh in terms of the tone of the book, which certainly trying to be more subtle and subversive and let these themes unfold over time until they reach sort of their climax in Jesus.
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and so yeah, I think as you're reading through the story, you're like, what is going on?
• 36:10
  SPEAKER_00: How is this connecting?
• 36:11
  SPEAKER_00: Where does this get real?
• 36:12
  SPEAKER_00: And finally the Jesus character appears and God writes himself into the story.
• 36:17
  SPEAKER_00: And there's just this wonderful way in which he ties together so many of these other threats in dealing with evil and binding up suffering and confronting injustice and painting hope and looking at what a meaningful life of rich relationships looks like that isn't run by selfishness or by sex or by pursuing your own satisfaction, but it is the kind of life that everyone really wishes they could lead, and just think, man, that's just dropping all kinds of depth charges into our modern culture.
• 36:45
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 36:46
  SPEAKER_01: And then uh in part two, you go to stepping into the story, a personal invitation, which is interesting.
• 36:51
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you kick that off with Jesus saying, Come follow me.
• 36:55
  SPEAKER_01: Um and you know, some evangelists would think, Oh no, Dan, you you put that at the end of your book, don't you?
• 37:00
  SPEAKER_01: You you you deal with everybody's objections, and then you invite them to follow Jesus.
• 37:06
  SPEAKER_00: Um and yet in the book, in the middle, you invite the job.
• 37:09
  SPEAKER_00: What's with the reverse logic?
• 37:10
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think um at the end of part one of the Christian story, we actually say this is a little bit of a choose your own adventure book.
• 37:17
  SPEAKER_00: Because for some people reading through the story, they may already have some background knowledge, they may already have some of their own experiences that make them think God is real.
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_00: And by reading the story, there's enough of the light bulbs in their mind and their heart have gone off to say, look, I think this is real.
• 37:32
  SPEAKER_00: Like for me, there's enough that draws you in, say, you know what, I think I believe this.
• 37:37
  SPEAKER_00: What would that mean?
• 37:38
  SPEAKER_00: And their biggest question right now is not how do I make sense of why God doesn't answer everyone's prayers or did Jesus really rise from the dead and how can we historically demonstrate that?
• 37:48
  SPEAKER_00: Their real question is, okay, I'm I'm grappling now with the idea of believing in Jesus.
• 37:52
  SPEAKER_00: What does that mean?
• 37:53
  SPEAKER_00: What does it mean to follow him?
• 37:55
  SPEAKER_00: And so we're like, look, if that's where you're at, jump into part two and let us just still down what does it mean to believe in and follow Jesus?
• 38:01
  SPEAKER_00: But maybe you've got questions and barriers and you're not ready to count the cost to put up your hand and and and follow and join Team Jesus.
• 38:08
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so why don't you jump to part three into questioning the story?
• 38:12
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 38:12
  SPEAKER_01: But I I love what that does because it does communicate very powerfully that you don't have to have every question of yours answered before you become a Christian.
• 38:22
  SPEAKER_01: Because that's that's not how Christianity works.
• 38:24
  SPEAKER_01: Like, I've got more questions today than I did 20 years ago.
• 38:28
  SPEAKER_01: And and I and that's not the way any relationship works.
• 38:31
  SPEAKER_01: You know, like when you when you get married, do you know everything about the person you've married?
• 38:35
  SPEAKER_01: Like, no, which is what makes the first year of marriage so very interesting.
• 38:39
  SPEAKER_01: It's like who are you?
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_01: Why do you do things?
• 38:43
  SPEAKER_01: That that's when the questions really begin.
• 38:45
  SPEAKER_01: So I I love I love that it's yeah.
• 38:47
  SPEAKER_01: Um okay, come come to Christ, and now let's let's figure out the the questions that people might have.
• 38:55
  SPEAKER_00: And uh we you touched on before.
• 38:58
  SPEAKER_00: There's I mean, why would people consider doing that?
• 39:00
  SPEAKER_00: And that's what we really try to lay out in that second part of the book on stepping into the story, because the the whole frame of the book is that everyone lives by a certain story.
• 39:10
  SPEAKER_00: Either we've consciously constructed it or come to believe it, or we've just adopted it from the culture or milieu or rivers and streams that we've grown up in.
• 39:18
  SPEAKER_00: But the idea of stepping into the Christian story, adopting it as the script for your own life, or making sense of where you fit according to God's story, uh, there's just a bunch of things that that gives to you.
• 39:29
  SPEAKER_00: And so what's on offer when Jesus says to come and follow me is that he offers you a new relationship with God, to reconnect with your creator and to be known as a child of God and to experience him meaningfully in the world.
• 39:41
  SPEAKER_00: And he offers you a family in the church, and as messy as we've discussed, the church can be.
• 39:46
  SPEAKER_00: At the same time, I've experienced the church in my last 15 years as being difficult, as all relationships are, but wonderfully life-giving and challenging.
• 39:55
  SPEAKER_00: And it's provoked me to grow and have experienced incredible blessing through the love and hospitality and support and prayers and friendship of so many of God's people right around the world.
• 40:06
  SPEAKER_00: And he also gives us a new purpose, you know, people that are desperate for it.
• 40:09
  SPEAKER_00: And a little bit the Jordan Peterson phenomenon.
• 40:11
  SPEAKER_00: Why am I here and where are the boundaries and borders and fixed and givens, and how do I navigate reality in a way that's good for me?
• 40:18
  SPEAKER_00: Well, Jesus lays out that vision uh in a really, really meaningful way and in his own uh commands that he gives, some 50 across the four gospels says this is what it means to love.
• 40:27
  SPEAKER_00: This is how that love takes real shape in a person's life.
• 40:31
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and so I just I think that section of the book, if people are wanting, and why would I consider become a Christian?
• 40:37
  SPEAKER_00: Why bother with God?
• 40:38
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it might be true.
• 40:39
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it it there might be eternal realities that that are affected by this, but real world stuff, why would I consider it?
• 40:45
  SPEAKER_00: And we tried to lay out some of that in that section.
• 40:47
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, brilliant.
• 40:48
  SPEAKER_01: And uh we we should have said um from the outset that you've uh written this book together with Rihanna Rue.
• 40:53
  SPEAKER_01: Am I saying it right?
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_01: Probably not, but that's right.
• 40:56
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 40:56
  SPEAKER_00: When I'm saying we wrote this, that's not some royal me, myself, and I kind of split personality.
• 41:03
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so dear mate of mine, Rihanna uh actually pitched this book idea to me.
• 41:06
  SPEAKER_00: He said, Man, I've always wanted a book that I just felt comfortable to put in people's hands that ties together these three things because so many good books do one or two of them, but not not often all three of them.
• 41:17
  SPEAKER_00: And so we uh we really wanted to be able to bring together these three big parts.
• 41:21
  SPEAKER_01: And how did you come up with the the the seven questions in part three?
• 41:25
  SPEAKER_01: So let me just uh let people know what the seven questions are.
• 41:27
  SPEAKER_01: What if the snake was right?
• 41:28
  SPEAKER_01: How could a good God allow suffering?
• 41:30
  SPEAKER_01: Why isn't God more obvious?
• 41:32
  SPEAKER_01: Has science disproved God?
• 41:33
  SPEAKER_01: Can I trust the Bible?
• 41:34
  SPEAKER_01: Did Jesus really rise from the dead?
• 41:36
  SPEAKER_01: And then how can God be good when the church is so bad?
• 41:39
  SPEAKER_01: Why those seven?
• 41:41
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, they're good questions.
• 41:42
  SPEAKER_00: And uh again, kind of wandering around schools and universities, doing public events, Christian staff at conferences and in churches, you get a sense for the questions you get asked when you've done hundreds of Q ⁇ A's.
• 41:54
  SPEAKER_00: Um there's very few variations on the major questions that keep coming up, and so we wanted to be able to meaningfully dive in and tackle just seven of them.
• 42:02
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, we're short on space, it's a tiny book.
• 42:04
  SPEAKER_00: We wanted to make it readable for people.
• 42:06
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so it's like, all right, pick the ones that you think you can tackle in 1200 words without doing so much damage to them.
• 42:13
  SPEAKER_00: It's like an extended blog.
• 42:14
  SPEAKER_00: And so we we left out.
• 42:16
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, here in Australia, by far the biggest barrier to belief in the Christian story for many secular Rossies comes down to sex and sexuality.
• 42:24
  SPEAKER_00: And on the sexuality and gender stuff, we just thought, man, I don't feel like we can do justice to what the Christian story has to say on these subjects uh within that space, and certainly not to do it with a pastoral tone that's helpful to a person reading it.
• 42:35
  SPEAKER_00: And so we just wanted to say I think there's better books and better long-form conversations with real people for that to take place.
• 42:42
  SPEAKER_00: So we want to take care of the ones that keep coming up that we feel like we could tackle in that space that tend to be the reasons why people would read the Christian story, say that's interesting, but I can't believe it because boom.
• 42:53
  SPEAKER_00: And uh and try and drop as many of those as we can.
• 42:57
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, let's get it, let's get a flavor of one of them.
• 42:59
  SPEAKER_01: Um I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna pick the science one.
• 43:02
  SPEAKER_01: Has science disproved God?
• 43:03
  SPEAKER_01: Just because I'm writing about it at the moment, and uh you can help me, you can you can help me with my writing.
• 43:08
  SPEAKER_01: So, has science disproved God?
• 43:10
  SPEAKER_01: How do you how do you go about uh answering that question?
• 43:12
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's a good one.
• 43:13
  SPEAKER_00: And I mean, with a lot of questions when people raise them, I'm if I'm in a personal conversation, I really like just asking back, what do you mean by that?
• 43:21
  SPEAKER_00: Because there are these phrases that people adopt that you hear, it almost becomes cultural law, but without anyone having a real conviction as to what that means, is that science has disproved God.
• 43:32
  SPEAKER_00: And I I think the claim is relatively ridiculous on its face.
• 43:36
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, if you just looked at the limits of science, science can explore and measure and test that which is part of creation, that which is part of the universe, that which is physical, right?
• 43:47
  SPEAKER_00: And since God, by definition is metaphysical, he's spiritual, he's eternal, he's beyond space time.
• 43:53
  SPEAKER_00: To say that science disproves God is just it's the wrong tool from the get go.
• 43:58
  SPEAKER_00: And I think there's another sort of percussive way that I like to respond.
• 44:02
  SPEAKER_00: It's not a substantive argument.
• 44:03
  SPEAKER_00: I just think it's helpful sometimes is to be able to say that despite perceptions, there are actually a lot of really high profile scientists who are also believers in a personal God.
• 44:13
  SPEAKER_00: And so a little bit of a survey of the 20th century or even just key figures in different faculties.
• 44:18
  SPEAKER_00: I mean just at Oxford University, wander through the chemistry faculty or the theoretical physics faculty, uh the mathematics faculty, and you just find some of the most wonderful believers in God in that space who don't compartmentalize between their faith and their science, but find the directive to do good thinking about God's world from the very first pages of Genesis.
• 44:39
  SPEAKER_00: And then we just explored in that chapter the way in which science is I think best explained in a Christian world where God does exist.
• 44:49
  SPEAKER_00: The idea that the universe itself follows repeatable or demonstrable laws and that we as human beings have the rational cognitive capacities to be able to discern those laws.
• 45:00
  SPEAKER_00: I just think fits so well with the idea that we're made in the image of an eternal mind with minds of our own that are patterned after his and given the command in Genesis one to be fruitful multiply subdue the earth and rule over it.
• 45:12
  SPEAKER_00: Where to cultivate God's good world it requires that we study it to be able to understand meteorology and and all kinds of fertilization processes.
• 45:21
  SPEAKER_00: To fulfill our command as gardeners and governors of God's world we have to understand the creation.
• 45:26
  SPEAKER_00: And so both the capacity and the command to do science I think are written into the Christian story.
• 45:32
  SPEAKER_00: And someone like Peter Harrison who's a lecturer here at UQ, he used to be the Andreas Idrios Professor of Science and Religion at Oxford just before Alistair McGrath took that chair he did groundbreaking history of science work in exploring the role of the Christian doctrine of sin in helping to formulate Francis Bacon's principle of sort of the modern scientific method that we need to have a way of testing nature that isn't just us as armchair philosophers making claims about it, but is empirical and is repeatable and needs to be able to be checked by a community of our peers because as fallen human beings who are sinful in our motivations and sometimes mismeasure things, we need checks and balances to make sure that what's being done is reliable.
• 46:15
  SPEAKER_00: And so how much even the Christian doctrine of sin can play into the into making sense of science.
• 46:19
  SPEAKER_00: So I just think there's a lot of space there.
• 46:21
  SPEAKER_00: I think the big aspect of this question though for most people is they assume that creation equals young earth creation.
• 46:29
  SPEAKER_00: And the whole conversation is create framed as science or God.
• 46:33
  SPEAKER_00: Either God started things six to ten thousand years ago or science explains that there is natural series of causes that traces back at least to the Big Bang to be able to make sense of reality.
• 46:43
  SPEAKER_00: And I just think that is a false dichotomy I think however God created whether it is young earth creationism, whether it is old earth creationism, whether it is theistic evolution a study of nature gives up good reasons to believe whether in the origins of the universe or the fine-tuning or for complex information being the language of biological life there are just good reasons studying nature like what Psalm 191 says that the heavens declare the glory of God or Romans 120 that God's invisible qualities have been clearly seen ever since creation being evidenced by what has been made.
• 47:16
  SPEAKER_00: So I just think a study of nature helps to reveal at least some fingerprints of a creator and the best thing is that creator has made himself known in Jesus and I find no scientific reason why you can't take Jesus claims or teaching or resurrection from the dead seriously and as a result I think it's still something we need to grapple with.
• 47:36
  SPEAKER_00: Brilliant.
• 47:37
  SPEAKER_01: Brilliant I just I just quoted from Peter Harrison um in the chapter that I'm writing so yeah.
• 47:41
  SPEAKER_01: Good he's a good dude.
• 47:43
  SPEAKER_01: He's a good dude that's good to know he's he's he's written some great books.
• 47:47
  SPEAKER_01: That's good to know he's a good dude too.
• 47:49
  SPEAKER_01: Final question Dan uh what do you hope for the book?
• 47:53
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah I mean so my friend Rihan, the way he sold this idea to me was he took me out for wings and a good cold beverage and we're sitting there I'm enjoying myself and he says look I want to write this book and I said no way.
• 48:06
  SPEAKER_00: We're 30s that's a dumb idea writing a book when you're too young and don't know what to say.
• 48:11
  SPEAKER_00: Uh you know Tim Keller the great Yoda of evangelicalism said you should be at least 60 before you start writing it up.
• 48:18
  SPEAKER_01: No but he knew he was going to make it to 60.
• 48:20
  SPEAKER_00: That's the thing like it always bugs me when he says like wait till you're 60 like how do you know you're going to make it that anyway yeah well I'm glad I'm I mean as as a as a friend I'm glad that Nabil Koreshi wrote his books before uh before he sadly passed.
• 48:34
  SPEAKER_00: And so I I I take that wisdom too.
• 48:36
  SPEAKER_00: But also we're just completely unknown where Aussies having a punt at writing a book and uh my hope would have been that a big name person wrote it and it was just easily accessible.
• 48:44
  SPEAKER_00: You know someone like a Grant Glenn Scrivener would have been great.
• 48:47
  SPEAKER_00: But uh but in the absence of that I mean our heart for the book was just it would be helpful.
• 48:52
  SPEAKER_00: And so whether uh I'm going and speaking in schools you're saying to senior high schoolers hey I've got something substantial that you want to read and I've just been giving away copies to people that I have good God conversations with or you're doing university stuff and you're doing week-long missions with campus ministries and you're like hey just hand these books out or for a church to kind of give them out to new new Christians or to people that are newcomers and exploring it's the kind of good introductory book or um so the big thing is you know I don't care if we sell five copies or 500 copies you just want it to be helpful for the people that it that it impacts and it's kind of great as someone who who does a fair bit of speaking in different places having something uh substantial that you can point people to and say hey you got to hear one thing but here if you want to dig into a bunch of other things here's why I think Jesus really is worth taking seriously um so chew on that.
• 49:39
  SPEAKER_01: Brilliant thank you so much for joining us on the Speak Life podcast.
• 49:44
  SPEAKER_01: We'd love to hear your thoughts about any of that you can always get in touch with us by emailing info at speaklife.org.uk that's info at speaklife.org.uk or perhaps join the lively conversation that's always had on Facebook.
• 49:57
  SPEAKER_01: Why don't you follow us there at speaklifeuk is the name of our page there.
• 50:02
  SPEAKER_01: So that'll be facebook.com slash speaklifeuk and uh we'd love to see you there.
• 50:08
  SPEAKER_01: Well thanks so much for joining us on the podcast and we'll look forward to your company next week.
• 50:12
  SPEAKER_01: God bless goodbye