Latest / The Speak Life Podcast / Dr Andrew Ollerton: The Bible is Trending - Here’s How To Respond || SLP622

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Dr Andrew Ollerton: The Bible is Trending - Here’s How To Respond || SLP622 · The Speak Life Podcast

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: Andrew, recently a guy showed up in my church.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_01: He had already bought a Bible from Amazon, and I said to him, What translation did you go for?
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_01: And he said, Well the old one.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_01: I I was like, King James?
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_01: He said, Yeah, that's the one.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_01: I I said, Have you ever read the Bible before?
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_01: He said, No, but I I've got this sense that the Bible has has built our world.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_01: I just don't know the first thing about it.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_01: And I said, So Amazon was the first place you thought to go?
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_01: He said, Yeah.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_01: Um I said, Where did you start reading?
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_01: And he just said, the beginning.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_01: Like I had three heads or something.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_01: Like, where else?
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_01: And I was like, that's good.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_02: Where else do you start a book?
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_02: Where else do you start?
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_01: Where else you start a book?
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_01: And I thought, well, isn't this interesting that the Bible now is step one in lots of people's journeys to faith?
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_01: It used to be step four, five, six, or seven.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_01: And now it's step one, and then they come to church and they've got all sorts of questions about Genesis and about King James English, let's be fair.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_01: And um, and you've got this book about the Bible, and and you want us to really stare full in the face of the Bible.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_01: Uh it's God's book, it's an honest look at the Bible's seven toughest topics.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_01: Um, are you noticing a guy like this guy who's shown up in in my church?
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_01: And if so, what do you start saying to such a person?
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_02: Not just noticing, I'm talking to these guys as well.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_02: And they are mostly guys, perhaps because we are, you know, that's a like attracts like.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_02: There's some, I'm sure it's happening with females as well.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_02: But as you know, the quiet revival uh statistics do suggest that um the interest in Christianity is tipping a bit more male.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_02: And absolutely, I think whereas until 2025, many of us were sensing something shifting, but it was a bit more anecdotal.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_02: I think there's something statistical now, isn't there?
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_02: We know Bible sales are up.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_02: We know from the quiet revival research that more young people are going to church.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_02: But specifically, as you say, um more more young people, especially are actually wanting to start with the Bible, perhaps because it's the first thing you can get.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_02: You can buy it on Amazon.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_02: You don't have to go through a challenging experience of turning up as a new person at church.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_02: You can just reach out for it, you can download it.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_02: U version have just celebrated the billionth download of one of their apps, uh, the Bible apps.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_02: So you can download it or buy it.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and I think this resurgence of interest in the Bible is fascinating.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_02: I've been using this phrase that the Bible is trending.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_02: And I think you see that at 30,000 feet, you know, you see the influences.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I I love the fact that a lot of sports, so we we we pick on the public intellectuals, you've had a lot of them on your podcast, which is brilliant, whether it's the Tom Hollands or the Louise Perry's or others, who are I guess who are causing that young man you mentioned to think maybe the Bible has more of a contribution than I've realized to the culture I inhabit, and maybe it has more importance to the future um challenges that we face than I realised.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_02: But alongside the public intellectuals, there's a lot of sports stars, aren't there as well, who are just so unashamed about their Bible.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_02: Um I love the fact that Maru Atoje uh delayed, I think he delayed uh the announcement that he had been made captain of the British Lions.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_02: If you're a rugby fan, there's no higher accolade than that in British sport, uh in British rugby, because he was at a Bible study.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_02: And I just think this is shifting the conversation a bit.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_02: The Bible's something that people are unashamed of.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_01: And what are those statistics?
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_01: It's something like 87% by Bible sales are up 87% on five years ago or something like that.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_02: I think different publishers debate the detail on that.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_02: Some are less, slightly less um positive about the scale of the trend.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_02: But what is certain, I mean, one of the interesting slides that um a colleague of mine, Rihanna, who I think you know as well, she's spearheaded the quite a vibe of research, she showed this slide that was just a slide from behavioral research of searches about the Bible.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_02: And basically, um on Google, it skyrocketed uh during COVID and since.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_02: So I think in terms of Bible sales are up, as you say, some as high as 87%, not quite that high in the US, but Steven, even in North America, there's a resurgence as well.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_02: Bible sales are up, but Bible searching is up as well.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_02: And I think this speaks to your point that a lot of people, some may buy the Bible um on Amazon.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_02: I spoke to one young man who I'm now friends with.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_02: I I have to say, I love, as you, you know, the guy you've mentioned, people I know, they're my favorite conversations to have now.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_02: Because what I love about these young people is uh yeah, not all young, but a lot of them are they're so sincere.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_02: They're not, you know, there's just this fresh sincerity to their search.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_02: They're curious, they're honest, they're not just taking it as for granted, but they're also not just taking it on trust.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_02: They want to investigate for themselves.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_02: One of the guys I'm in touch with now, you know, in his case, it was less an intellectual search and more a meaning crisis.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_02: He was actually at the end, he he nearly ended his life.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_02: And he felt a voice, he heard a voice speak to him and tell him not to do that, that this was not how his story would end.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_02: So instead of jumping off a cliff, which is what he was planning to do, he walked down and went to W.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_02: H.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_02: Smith in his case and bought a Bible on the shelf.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_02: And I, and exactly the same conversation as you.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_02: I said, What did you read?
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_02: And he looked at me like I'd never read a book before and said, from the beginning.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so I think it's it's several things going on there, but one of them is we cannot um ignore, never, we never should have, but we cannot ignore the Old Testament.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_02: You know, Jordan Peterson's teaching, which has been so influential, is often in the Genesis Exodus space.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_02: Another young man I'm I'm now getting to know, he's been on a four-year journey with the Bible, deep diving into scripture.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_02: He's read some of your books, he's read some of my books, he's read C.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_02: S.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_02: Lewis, all all all the great authors.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and uh in that order.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_02: He's never been yeah, exactly, in that order, yeah.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_02: Um he's never been to church yet.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_02: I I think he I mean, apart from his sister's wedding, he's not he's not been to church, and his grandma's funeral, he's not been to church, but he knows more about the Bible than pretty much anyone else in church, I think.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_02: So there is something peculiar going on, and we're kind of catching up with that, I think.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_01: I have gotten into so many conversations this year, and I thought that I am talking to a Christian because they've got a question about Exodus chapter 40 or something.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_01: Or or they've got a question about the Filioque clause of the Nicene Creed, or they've got a question about some issue of sacramentology, or or some really niche kind of Bible nerd kind of kind of question.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_01: And stupid me, I I kind of assume that they are Christian, and then 20 minutes into the conversation I say, what church are you going to?
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, I'm I don't go to church, but um I've just but the language they're using uh is uh they're using the language of I need to um get in I need to reconnect with God or I I need to deepen my faith and and things like that.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_01: The sorts of language that usually is is sort of the language of Christians, but now it's the language of the seeker.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_01: What do you what do you think is going on and have have you noticed a step change in this calendar year of 2025?
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_01: Because I I noticed I noticed a trickle in this direction before the calendar year 2025, but I've I'm noticing much more of a flow this year.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I would say this year has been a turning point.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_02: I don't think it's just that some of the statistical research has been published this year.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_02: I think it's that the the pace of the development is accelerated.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_02: I think again I would say some of that has accelerated at the influencer level.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_02: There's been some high-profile conversions, some high-profile conversations, conversions and conversations, whether the Joe Rogan show, whether it's Russell Brand, all these very controversial, but they are they are churning out an influence uh online that is causing uh people to take notice.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_02: So I would say 2025, I got a feeling historians will look back at this year as quite an important one in the cultural shift.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_02: And as you say, I think you know the online presence of content means that people don't necessarily need to belong to a community of faith.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_02: Some want to.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_02: So I've heard so many stories of younger people, especially turning up at church, and the first thing they're saying is, I want to be baptized.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_02: Um, they've already reached a point of making that decision.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_02: Perhaps they've you know been praying and and journeying towards that for some time, but when they actually arrive, they're ready.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_02: In their minds, they're ready.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so I think there's a lot of people online who are who are searching, and and 2025 will be a key point.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_02: The thing I would say at the same time is that the acquisition of more intellectual knowledge and understanding of the Bible is a great thing, but it has to be qualified, doesn't it?
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_02: We talk about a bit uh about Bible confidence, and I think Bible confidence is a head confidence, an understanding, but there's another form of confidence.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_02: There's also the confidence in the hearts, if you like, an experience of God.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_02: And there's the confidence with your with your hands, if you like, there's head, heart, and hands, the hands confidence is the the ability to practice the faith um in a way that is embodied and meaningful.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_02: And I was speaking to Archbishop Angelos, who heads up the Orthodox Church, um Coptic Orthodox Church in London.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_02: He was saying he's having so many young men, especially, who have been so down the rabbit holes of YouTube, uh, which is great, that they actually almost are many apologists for the Christian faith.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_02: They know so many arguments and they've rehearsed those.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_02: And his challenge has often been to them, but are you living with kindness?
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_02: And I like that.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_02: I sort of thought, yeah, actually, we need to be careful that we don't um we don't confuse the acquisition of knowledge and argumentation with the practice of Christianity.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_02: They're not the same thing.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_01: And if you've if you've learnt your Christianity in an online space, then it's probably not surprising.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_01: Um that kindness might be something you need to add into the mix.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um yeah.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_01: Now you you are the author and presenter of uh the Bible course, um, which has had a major refresh this year, which is which is great timing, I guess, as as people are becoming more more interested in the Bible.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_01: But to to begin with, and and and still, um, this is about giving Christians Bible confidence as well, isn't it?
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's about you know the the there's no use sort of going out to the world with with with a Bible and saying, read this book if we ourselves um don't love the scripture.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_01: If we don't think this is a magnificent book, um how are we ever going to commend it to our friends?
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_01: So so tell me something about your passion to give Christians Bible confidence.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I think this is strategic right now because really important, because I think potentially what what we've just been rehearsing there, the cultural vibe shift towards the Bible and deep diving, you know, this full fat idea of faith wanting wanting to go deep and explore it in all of its intricacies, including the Old Testament.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_02: The risk is, as I perceive it, that there's almost more competence and confidence in the Bible outside the church than in the church sometimes.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_02: And I think this is actually what uh what it what I'm hearing, you know, being shared is that sometimes young people are turning up and they have real questions, and they're questions that are honest, um, and they catch the church off guard.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_02: So sometimes there's almost no one there.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_02: I I one young man I met at a festival this summer, and he was saying, you know, he'd been in gang culture, drug culture, not an educated background at all.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_02: In lockdown, he reached out and for his Nan's Bible that was on the shelf, King James Version, um, and just started reading it.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_02: And he read himself through to faith.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_02: And the first thing he did when the lockdown lifted was went to a church down the road with loads of questions, and no one could help him.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_02: And it actually caused him initially to relapse into his old life because he just didn't find what he needed.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_02: So I say that all to say it is a crucial moment, I think, for the church to almost own the fact that it we've been sleepwalking a little bit.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_02: We've we've we've given a very low fat, um, as opposed to full fat version of theology, Bible, faith, and sometimes it's almost the world that's exposing the erosion and the lack in the church.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_02: So all of that is the burden.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_02: I think these resources, I I had no idea.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_02: When I started writing this new book, um, as you say, God's book, I entitled it rather rather grandiose, but God's book, An Honest Look at the Bible's seven toughest topics.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_02: I started writing that at least two to three years ago, tackling the seven most challenging topics in the Bible from Genesis to Revelation.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_02: And then we started refilming the Bible course.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I was scripting that two years ago as well.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_02: So we didn't know what was coming down the track.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_02: So I feel really fortunate actually, um, as if there was a greater purpose to all these things, um, because they've ended up landing in both being published in this year, where there's this resurgence of interest in the Bible.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_02: And I think they have a key part to play.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_02: I actually I almost slightly just push back at what you said because I know why you said it.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_02: But the thing that I'm intrigued by is when churches are running the Bible course, I'm hearing more and more that they're finding almost half of the people on it are not Christians.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_02: So we've, you know, we're still thinking if it's called the Bible course, that'll be for Christians.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_02: Meanwhile, the quiet revival is saying I think 35% of young men who are not going to church say they would like to understand the Bible for themselves.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_02: So, of course, if you publicly advertise the Bible course, you should be um prepared for the fact that some people might turn up who you've not seen before.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that's brilliant.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_02: And nearly always the people who turn up, they're not sort of hardened skeptics who are there to disprove.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_02: You know, again, we s we often brace ourselves for this kind of Richard Dawkins to walk in with a you know deep, deep conviction that it's false, and I'm gonna show you why.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_02: That's these are not these are not the people I'm speaking to.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_02: They could not be more sincere.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_02: This guy um I was mentioning earlier, he's been on a four-year journey.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_02: He'll send me WhatsApp messages with highlighting that here's this bit in the problem of pain by C.S.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_02: Lewis that I'm reading, and it's really speaking to me right now.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_02: Or it's so honest, it's so sincere, and I love it.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_02: So the church has got to get its confidence back because the world is looking for answers in the Bible.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_01: So what are the questions that they are coming to you with, coming to the Bible course with, coming to the church with?
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um if if it's if it's not that the Bible is necessarily backwards and bigot bigoted, there still are questions that that people kind of have and they've they've sort of picked it up in the cultural waters.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_01: Um what do people think?
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_01: Let's let's start off with with the Old Testament.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_01: Um let's say not the Richard Dawkins type, uh, who says that you know there's there's never been a more unpleasant figure in all the fiction than Yahweh, the god of the Old Testament.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_01: Um not very many people are exactly where Richard Dawkins is, but a lot of people have picked that sort of stuff up in the water.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_01: Um, what what is their attitude to the Old Testament as they come in?
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I think one two two challenges as I perceive it.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_02: One is a navigation challenge.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_02: I just can't find my way around this.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_02: You know, the idea that, you know, you and I might think it's obvious to say that the Bible forms one grand narrative, but it's not obvious if you get into it.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_02: It it feels like after the initial simple narrative of, you know, two humans, one family, suddenly the the narrative becomes far more complex.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_02: So there is a navigation challenge.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_02: Um, the Bible course particularly picks up on the, if you like, how do I navigate and make sense of how it all fits together?
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_02: But what I realized was that when you help people with that, and I think this is more where you're going, when you help people with the navigation challenge, so now I can find my way around, but having been trained and raised, if you like, in a Western culture, deeply shaped by Christianity, so that the you know, some of this is a result of what we've come to imbibe within the waters.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_02: When you actually find your way around the Bible, the next challenge you face is not so much I don't understand how it all fits together, but I do understand what it's saying and I don't like it.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_02: Or I find, you know, so it's it's not a comprehension issue, it's a plausibility um crisis, I think, that a lot of people experience.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_02: What would those topics be?
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_02: Well, the ones I picked up on, trying to think about it in sequence, is when you the first very first two pages of the Bible, beautiful descriptions of creation, tremendous deep truths about human equality and and uh and rights embedded in that opening commitment that we are made in male and female in the image and likeness of God, and yet apparently six days of uh creation, and a seemingly you would assume, young earth versus the sort of scientific consensus of old earth.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_02: So there's points of tension, I think, with modern science that people will recognize.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_02: And then when you progress beyond Genesis, you get into the laws of Moses, and some of those strike us as very strange, um, not necessarily offensive, but just weird.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_02: Like, you know, why can I why am I being told three?
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_02: I think the only law that's repeated three times is that you must not boil a kid goat in its mother's milk.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_02: And it's like, I wasn't gonna do that anyway.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_01: Go on, what is that about?
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_01: Come on, Dr.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_01: Andrew Olletton, what is that about?
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I think, you know, one of the things I say in the book is these laws are you know three thousand plus years old.
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_02: So part of our challenge is we have to recognise, you know, as as the as John Walton has said brilliantly, the Bible is for us, but it wasn't written to us.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_02: So we got to work our way back to an ancient culture.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_02: And sometimes the journey back, um, we can only go so far with certainties, and then we have to say we're we think it's likely, for example, in that case, that there may have been fertility rituals associated with that kind of practice.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_02: And that may also be the case that there were worship rituals associated with what we would think of as tattoos, skin markings of different kinds.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_02: So there's various practices, including mixings of things that are similar.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_02: These may well have been about fertility rituals, and so rather than thinking it's food hygiene, you know, I on the one hand, keeping meat products and dairy products separate is a great principle for food hygiene.
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_02: I don't think that's primarily what that law is about.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_02: I think it's about saying to the Israelites, you must not follow the rituals and superstitions of the surrounding nations.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_02: You are to be holy to the Lord.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_02: Ultimately, it's a holiness code.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_02: Um but all that to say, you know, we we can't be certain, I don't think.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_02: Even even the best scholars in that space will will recognize we're not we're not finding the hard evidence we need to prove that.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_02: That's that's the best guess.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_02: And some of the other laws not just are confusing, but they they do feel more offensive.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_02: I think that's I I categorize them into sort of the weird laws.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_02: We don't have a problem with it, but we just don't understand it.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_02: It's odd.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_02: But then there are other laws about holding slaves um and female, the treatment of females, especially female rights, that we struggle with for more ethical reasons.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so I think it's those kinds of things.
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_02: And then when you get beyond the laws of Moses, you get Israel entering the promised land, just to talk through the story.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_02: They enter the promised land and God instructs them to conquer the Canaanites by force.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_02: So there you there you have the it's not the only place you have the problem, but it's by far the most intense moment of warfare and violence in the Old Testament.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_02: And then when Israel, having entered the land, disobeys Yahweh, they are then thrown out of the land through the conquest of the Babylonians, in other words, exile and the problem of suffering.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_02: So, I mean, even within the Old Testament, the four topics I pick up on are science and the creation stories, the laws of Moses and slavery, violence in the conquest of Canaan and warfare, and suffering in the exile.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_02: And I think, you know, that's enough to um to cause people who are sincere in their search to say, is this definitely God's book?
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_01: And I guess there's a kind of a tension that we've got, because on the one hand, the Old Testament is old, and um the new covenant comes along to fulfill the old covenant, and we don't abide by the laws of you know, don't boil a kid in its mother's milk and all that sort of stuff.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_01: But at that point, like the more you distance yourself from the old covenants, the more you then like present the question to yourself, why even bother then with the Hebrew Bible?
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_01: Why not just jettison it altogether?
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I think the one person who um really wants to make a case for look, if Christianity is going to be plausible to modern people today, it really needs to unhitch itself from from the Old Testament.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_01: Um, that that somebody's Alex O'Connor, who uh was on uh the Times Radio uh YouTube channel recently, he was talking to Stig Abel, and um they kind of talk about the Old Testament in in these sort of terms that um it I think it presents well this dilemma that the Christian has.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_01: Um to what degree do we distance ourselves from ancient texts um that no longer apply in a moral sense?
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_01: And to what degree do we affirm the Old Testament and own it and celebrate it?
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_01: So here's Stig Abel asking about that.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_03: Again, the danger with with skepticism is it can seem snary and it can seem it can seem cynical.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_03: That being said, it's very hard not to see some of the buildup of religious thought from the Old Testament onward onward onwards as flummery, as artificial, arbitrary human beings trying to find a way of structure their society, human beings finding a way of of settling scores, human beings finding a way of ordering their society, from which behind which there might be this ineffable essence.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_03: But the distinction between God and religion seems to be such an important one in this thinking, which is religion is human, it's it it carries with it all sorts of prejudices and structures, and God might exist to the side of that, actually.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, yeah, I think so.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's a really important message of the New Testament as well.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_00: But if you read like the older books of the Old Testament, if you read Exodus and Deuteronomy, these are just legal texts.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, a lot of the time, you know, some of it's also narrative, of course.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_00: But yeah, it's just listing out laws, Leviticus, you know, and this is where you get the famous prescription.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: That are quite troublesome for Christianity, you know, prohibitions against certain kinds of behaviors like witchcraft and homosexuality.
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_00: And so that's clearly supposed to be a legal foundation for a nation.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_00: It's unclear the extent to which a lot of these laws are actually implemented in practice, but this was clearly the injunction.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas if you move on to, say, the wisdom literature, if you move on to the Psalms and you move on to the Book of Job and Ecclesiastes, these are quite clearly like nothing to do with that.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_00: These are these ancient mythological tales that are supposed to function like any myth, which is to tell you like an interesting story and give you some moral message.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_00: And that is so clearly nothing to do with the structure of organized religion.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_00: And so I think.
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_00: And we are dealing with um with a with a separable book here.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, the the Bible is is a is a is a library, you know, biblia.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_00: Um it's it's should be in the plural, um, because it's it's a bunch of books all put together, all of different genres.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_00: And so, yeah, like, you know, the extent to which organized religion is separable from God is is well, it's it's it's really important.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_00: And and Jews with the Hebrew Bible in particular, the Tanakh, they they separate out these elements.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_00: They separate out the law and the prophets from the wisdom, because they're they're different genres and they do different things.
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_00: Um, for me, the most troublesome part of Christianity for its truth, for me personally, is it clinging on to the Old Testament, is the fact that Jesus is portrayed as the fulfillment of the Jewish scripture.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_00: And so you cannot let go of this Yahweh figure in the Old Testament who's really troublesome.
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_00: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_03: And that's why they have to have him in Bethlehem to connect him to David and things like that.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_01: Aaron Ross Powell So people can check out uh more about uh that and where the conversation goes from there.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_01: It's a fascinating conversation between Stig Abel and Alex O'Connor.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_01: But Alex there is um is rightly distinguishing between different genres within the Bible and saying, look at 66 different books, and there are different genres, and uh you read laws in a different way to the way that you read wisdom literature, different way to the way you read the prophets in the New Testament.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_01: So he's he's wanting to distinguish things quite properly there, but why should we actually read it as a unity?
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_01: He's done a great job of forwarding the diversity uh within scripture.
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_01: Um, why should we see it as a united scripture?
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I think, I mean, point of explanation, just for those of you listening in, Tanakh, which is the sort of phrase that's often the word that's an acronym used for the Hebrew scriptures, effectively refers to the Torah, which is the first five books of, or the Pentatech, the first five books of the Old Testament, as we would call it.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_02: Um, we call that law, but really it's instruction, and it includes the stories of Genesis and Exodus.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_02: So, you know, even within, my point is, even within the Torah, it's not like these are all just legal codes.
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_02: Alex is highlighting the second half of Deuteronomy, uh, sorry, of Exodus and then Deuteronomy, but huge swathes of the rest of the Torah are narrative.
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and then you have the the Naveem, which is the prophets, you have the former prophets and the later prophets.
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_02: Again, they're incredibly diverse.
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_02: The book of Joshua um fits within the former prophets, um, which is a little clue in itself, isn't it?
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_02: That Jesus would have understood the Bible Jesus read uh the Hebrew scriptures, he would have understood the stories of Joshua to be described as part of the former prophets.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_02: So that's a little clue.
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_02: This is not whatever else will come on to this, whatever else is going on in the stories of Joshua, this is not the Oxford guide to the Canaanite conquest.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_02: You know, this is prophetic writings.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_02: And then you do have the more classical prophets, uh, the later prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and so on.
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_02: And then you have the Kusovim, which he's referring to there, the wisdom literature.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_02: But again, this wisdom literature, which includes, you know, psalms that say, Oh, how I love your law.
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_02: Um, you know, and the prophets appealing back to the Torah and the law code as the basis for Israel's judgment.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_02: Often, often it's God's people who are being judged because they have turned away from the compassion and justice embedded within the laws that they were meant to be uh displaying.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_02: So I think those categories are perfectly helpful.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, Jesus alluded to them, didn't he, when he talks about in the New Testament, it talks about things like the law and the prophets.
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_02: It's really just that's really just um a narrative device, uh, a literary device to conjure up the entire Hebrew scriptures because that's the categories that they were using at the time.
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_02: But to partition them, I think it's a false partition to say that these ones have nothing to do with those ones.
• 26:35
  SPEAKER_02: The hyperlinks between them are extensive.
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_02: So I don't think you can partition one bit of the old testament and say, you know, this bit's not this bit's problematic, this bit's wisdom, and this bit's helpful.
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_02: But you certainly can't partition the old testament from the new testament or the new testament from the old because they are so interlinked.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_02: Um I can't yeah, I understand where the the sort of, if you like, the simple literary explanation works, but when you start to make those partitions theological, I don't think it's helpful.
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_01: The motive seems to be front and centre, though, in in that dialogue between Alex and and Stig.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_01: The the motive is I like Jesus, I don't want him associated with Yahweh.
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_01: Um why why does that not work?
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I think you know you it's it's the Marcion, uh the Marcionite's a motive, isn't it, ultimately, to try and um disentangle.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so Marcion was a shipbuilder in the second century, um, who shipbuilder turned theologian who um was condemned ultimately by other Christians at the time.
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_02: He forced the issue, he forced Christians at the time to think about do we really own these Hebrew scriptures, especially as the church was becoming increasingly Gentile, non-Jewish, um, can we jettison this other story, this Jewish uh Hebrew story?
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_02: And Marcion uh made a move towards that and and effectively forced the issue of what is going to be included in the canon, the the scriptures that were seen to be authoritative.
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_02: And for Marcion, that should exclude not only the Old Testament, but that that in the New Testament which seems to endorse the Old Testament, and he felt that it was really only the writings of Luke and Paul that um that made made it through, made the cut, um, which means a whole load of the Bible.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, the vast majority of the Bible, according to Marcion, can be ditched.
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_02: I think the problem with that is um well, it is multiple, but in the end, when you look at Jesus, you see him in all of the gospels, including in Luke's gospel, you see him holding, literally sometimes holding the scrolls, asking for the scroll to be passed him.
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_02: Luke, you know, Luke was one of the gospels that Martian would have included.
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_02: Well, in Luke 4, he says, you know, pass me the scroll of the prophet Isaiah, and he reads from it and says, This is fulfilled in your hearing.
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_02: So constantly what we see in the in in the New Testament is Jesus points us back to the Old Testament, and what we see in the Old Testament is that it is pointing us forwards to the Messiah figure, Jesus.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_02: And they're so interlinked.
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_02: I I just think it his task was rightly condemned centuries ago, um, and doesn't work.
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_02: It it it leaves you with a version of Christ that you've invented if you're going to try and strip him of the Old Testament.
• 29:18
  SPEAKER_01: And Marcion finds himself in some pretty unsavory company in the history of the church.
• 29:23
  SPEAKER_01: When you think of those who've wanted to jettison the Old Testament, um, you you could think of the the slave Bible of 1807.
• 29:30
  SPEAKER_01: Um that that was largely trying to jettison uh at least 90% of the of the Old Testament in order for slave owners to give to their slaves uh uh a document that is safe, um, that will not give them any ideas above their station.
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_01: Um actually it it might be counterintuitive to modern people that you would want to get rid of the Old Testament if if you're a if you're a slave owner.
• 29:57
  SPEAKER_01: But that that was the the the the impulse of so many because of the year of Jubilee and and stuff that we might might kind of get into and and the the whole emancipatory trajectory of the scriptures that you know we might begin in in slavery in Egypt, but we're we're headed for the promised land and and all that kind of stuff.
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_01: So to jettison the Old Testament might put you in the company of you know the slave owners who who had a very a heavily edited Bible.
• 30:25
  SPEAKER_01: And then the other unsavory uh people who wanted to jettison the Old Testament um were the German Christians, uh Nazi affirming kind of you know national church uh in the Third Reich.
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_01: Um many prominent theologians among them were um were basically arguing what Marcion wanted to argue, which was you know, we need to we need to get away from uh the Old Testament.
• 30:48
  SPEAKER_01: And and um it just seems like actually, however counterintuitive it might be, we we we might think that if we want progressive liberal values, we we need to jettison the Old Testament.
• 30:59
  SPEAKER_01: Actually, those who have sought to do so um don't end up on the on the progressive side of things.
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and I think that's a fair point that anti-Semitism has been a problem that's plagued um Christian history in part because we've struggled to know how to reconcile Old and New Testaments ultimately.
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_02: And I think you know, you you look back to the Lutheran approach as well, um, which has a very heavy distinction, dis disjunction really between the law and the gospel.
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and it's a it's not that that naturally leads to anti-Semitism, I'm not saying that, but I think it has tendencies, as in Luther's case, that can head in that direction.
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_02: So, what to do with the Old Testament?
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_02: Do we, you know, to jettison it, the Marcionite approach is problematic for reasons we've said.
• 31:41
  SPEAKER_02: It it completely misses the uh way Jesus handled the Old Testament and the New Testament, other other other writers in the New Testament, but also it tends towards uh an anti-Semit anti-Semitic direction.
• 31:53
  SPEAKER_02: You could so to to jettison it is a problem, to allegorize it is another option.
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_02: I think some have headed more in that direction uh in Christian history, less in the early modern period, but in the more medieval and earlier and the church fathers.
• 32:06
  SPEAKER_02: But I think those, you know, that comes with some problems and challenges as well.
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and then you get more, you know, in the reformed tradition, more an approach that heads towards actually trying to see increased continuity between the old and the new, um, even in the sort of moral codes and moral ethics.
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_02: And I think all of these have challenges.
• 32:26
  SPEAKER_02: We should recognise we've got a problem here.
• 32:28
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, it's it's it's a centuries-old problem.
• 32:31
  SPEAKER_02: But what we can learn from those centuries at least is that there are certain solutions that present themselves that actually just cause more problems.
• 32:39
  SPEAKER_02: And I think you know, the Marcionite one is the is the obvious one.
• 32:42
  SPEAKER_02: I think allegorizing has some challenges to it as well, and the Lutheran approach of disjunction between law and gospel.
• 32:49
  SPEAKER_02: So, you know, but then if you head all the way down the other end of the spectrum, to think that you can take Old Testament laws and just pin them on the notice board today as if they now provide uh a permanent and lasting code of conduct, I think that's even more problematic, you could argue.
• 33:07
  SPEAKER_01: Um, it's becoming a very relevant topic of conversation, um, even among those who would not count themselves as Christians, um, but they've got their finger on some kind of cultural pulse, and they're starting to say to themselves, um, there's such a thing as Christian nationalism.
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and that phrase means different things in different parts of the world.
• 33:30
  SPEAKER_01: Um, if anyone's seen the coronation of King Charles, um, you you you could rightly describe Britain as a Christian nation from one point of view, you know, that the the highest priest in the land and the highest temple in the land was anointing the head of state.
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_01: Um there's something incredibly um uh messily entwined about church and state, you know, in in in um from from a modern secularist kind of point of view.
• 33:58
  SPEAKER_01: Um and so what what Christian nationalism means to different people um it is very, very contested.
• 34:04
  SPEAKER_01: But certainly those who want to see Deuteronomy on the statute books are a kind of a political force nowadays.
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_01: And I was I was very interested to see Brett Weinstein on on X kind of um here is a secular Jew, an atheist as far as as I'm aware.
• 34:25
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and he he says, look, the New Testament is a major revision of an ancient cultural operating system.
• 34:32
  SPEAKER_01: And then he goes on to say that this this updated code is fundamental to the modern West, which inevitably crashes without it.
• 34:40
  SPEAKER_01: So the West is running on an operating system that is the New Testament.
• 34:45
  SPEAKER_01: Um and he says our big problem is that we we don't know how um or there are there are many people who are trying to run the old operating system, which is how he um characterizes the old testament, and he says white nationalist Christians are an example of this.
• 35:03
  SPEAKER_01: It's an old testament mindset with Christian aesthetics and rhetoric.
• 35:08
  SPEAKER_01: So here is a a secular Jew saying the problem with the West is still we don't know how to relate Old and New Testaments together.
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_01: And then Neil Oliver, um I think he's on GB News and that kind of that kind of thing, but he he said the problem is the fact that the Old Testament was ever bolted onto the New Testament to make one book akin to strapping an elephant onto one wing of a light aircraft.
• 35:34
  SPEAKER_01: So there is Neil Oliver, who is, as far as I'm aware, identifies as a Christian, Brett Weinstein, who doesn't identify as a Christian, but they're both saying the issue in the culture now, it's not just an issue for theologians, this is an issue for politicians, this is an issue for everybody now.
• 35:51
  SPEAKER_01: How how do we unite old and new testaments?
• 35:54
  SPEAKER_01: Um, is this not the conversation you thought you would you'd be having 10 years ago, is it?
• 35:59
  SPEAKER_02: No, it's not.
• 36:00
  SPEAKER_02: And I think they're right though to acknowledge that um when the Bible rises in public value, if you like, in reputational value in culture, it's going to be um thought of as more relevant to and potentially more beneficial to public discourse.
• 36:15
  SPEAKER_02: So if you are politically minded and you have or have an ideology that you want to uh endorse, if the Bible can be seen to be supportive of what your position is, you know, the the more valuable the Bible is, the more support it offers.
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_02: So I think we shouldn't be surprised.
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_02: It's nothing new, is it?
• 36:31
  SPEAKER_02: Let's be honest.
• 36:32
  SPEAKER_02: What's relatively new is the secular narrative, which is is now tired, but the secular narrative that you can live um in the modern West without recourse at all to Judeo-Christian values and ideals.
• 36:46
  SPEAKER_02: Um that's the new that's the new thing.
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_02: If you look back through you know, 17th century history, for example, if you if you dropped yourself back into 17th century uh England, you would find a world in which which would be disorientating to us because of how uh the horizons of culture and scripture, of religion and politics are so merged.
• 37:07
  SPEAKER_02: And um so so I think we are we are we are wrestling with a problem that's not new, um, but it's but it is a problem that we've not lived with uh in the in the way that it's intensifying at the moment.
• 37:19
  SPEAKER_02: Things like Christian nationalism, the role of the role of the Bible in the political arena.
• 37:24
  SPEAKER_02: How do we respond to it?
• 37:25
  SPEAKER_02: I think one of the things I'd want to tease out really carefully from what you know you just described on that uh on that quote from X, Brett Weinstein, is we can't really, in this kind of conversation, talk about the Old Testament.
• 37:36
  SPEAKER_02: It doesn't, it doesn't help to sort of just take that as the sort of satchel, the handles that we lift up, the entire conversation is about the Old Testament.
• 37:45
  SPEAKER_02: Within the Old Testament, you've got covenants, and those covenants are quite distinct.
• 37:50
  SPEAKER_02: So within the Old Testament, you have the creation stories um which embed a certain understanding of the human person and human flourishing.
• 38:01
  SPEAKER_02: You then have the narrative of the full, what theologians call the full, where those ideals that male and female are made in God's image and likeness and are in union with God and are ruling over nature for its good and for its flourishing, those things come under curses, and as a result, the world that we inhabit is not that world, not the ideal, not the created order.
• 38:22
  SPEAKER_02: And then you have the call of Abraham, and a covenant is made with Abraham that through his offspring uh there will be blessing returning to the world, a reversing of those curses that came upon creation.
• 38:33
  SPEAKER_02: I think six times the earth is described as cursed in the early parts of Genesis, and six times Abraham is told his family will be blessed.
• 38:40
  SPEAKER_02: So there's a clear sense that somehow through this family, all families on earth actually, is the call and the promise.
• 38:48
  SPEAKER_02: All families will be blessed.
• 38:50
  SPEAKER_02: And you find in the New Testament that Paul, especially in his writings, often looks right back.
• 38:54
  SPEAKER_02: He goes back before the Mosaic Covenant, which comes later, the law of Moses.
• 38:59
  SPEAKER_02: The law of Moses is one temporary section of the larger Old Testament.
• 39:04
  SPEAKER_02: And Paul will often go back behind the old the Mosaic covenant to say, actually, it's always been this way that faith has been justifying, uh, that a man has been justified by faith, Abraham, that the blessings of the covenant come through those who believe the promise.
• 39:21
  SPEAKER_02: So I'm simply wanting to say, you can't say, you can't, I think it's not helpful to talk about the Old Testament in its entirety.
• 39:26
  SPEAKER_02: Let's tease out what we mean.
• 39:28
  SPEAKER_02: If by that we mean that Christian values like the created order, which transcends any specific covenant, such as the covenant with Moses, if by this we mean the created order, male and female made in the image and likeness of God and therefore having sacred value and inviolable rights.
• 39:46
  SPEAKER_02: If we mean that, then yes, that can be foundational for a nation-state, a way that a government can treat its citizens.
• 39:55
  SPEAKER_02: But that's not the same as the Mosaic Code, which is very detailed laws, gives very detailed laws about the details of Israel living in the wilderness, um, moving through the wilderness with a tabernacle with priests and animal sacrifices.
• 40:08
  SPEAKER_02: It's a completely different moment.
• 40:10
  SPEAKER_02: And even the fabric on which laws are written, I think, is a clue.
• 40:14
  SPEAKER_02: I pick up on this in my book that actually, if you're gonna write ten laws on stone, that's one kind of durable permanence etched into the fabric of the earth.
• 40:25
  SPEAKER_02: But if you're gonna write other laws on parchments, you're saying these laws have a permanence to them, and these don't, even in the very materials that are used.
• 40:35
  SPEAKER_02: So teasing out the permanence of some laws and principles and the temporary nature of others, I think is crucial to the argument.
• 40:42
  SPEAKER_01: That's really helpful.
• 40:43
  SPEAKER_01: And and two scriptures that come to mind there as you're speaking are Galatians 3 and Matthew 19.
• 40:49
  SPEAKER_01: And uh perhaps we can have on on the screen a diagram I'm always drawing about.
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_01: The argument in Galatians chapter 3 in the New Testament, Paul kind of says, Um, if you trust in Christ, then you are a child of Abraham because there has always been this promise, the way of promise is the way given to Abraham and to his seed.
• 41:10
  SPEAKER_01: And as soon as Paul uses the word seed, that takes us all the way back to Genesis chapter 3, 15, really, in terms of there's a promise given to the seed of the woman who will crush the serpent and bring victory to God's people.
• 41:22
  SPEAKER_01: And that promise is, as you say, very much connected.
• 41:27
  SPEAKER_01: Um, Genesis 12 is very much connected to Genesis 3, and the promises given to Abraham is this covenant foundation that there has always been in the purposes of God.
• 41:36
  SPEAKER_01: Laid over the top of that, Paul says in Galatians 3, well, from Moses until the incarnation, until the coming of that seed, um, then there is this Mosaic covenant, and there are, you know, don't boil a kid in its mother's milk, and and and lots of lots of stuff like that in that Mosaic covenant, but underneath it all always has been this gospel of of promise.
• 41:58
  SPEAKER_01: And I I think that's a really helpful kind of little um retelling of history, because we we often don't think of history like that.
• 42:05
  SPEAKER_01: We often think, um, I can put up a a a different uh picture at this point of the the bottom line is law, right?
• 42:12
  SPEAKER_01: The the bottom line is uh simply commandment and obligation and obedience.
• 42:17
  SPEAKER_01: And then we sort of think, oh, and then Jesus came and gave us this little thing called grace that sort of forgives us and gets us back to the legal foundation.
• 42:28
  SPEAKER_01: Um and Paul's like, no, it's definitely not law on the bottom with a little bit of gospel on top, it's definitely promise all the way through with a time-limited Mosaic covenant um between you know Exodus 20 and the time of the incarnation.
• 42:43
  SPEAKER_01: So that that's kind of Galatians 3, but then there's also Matthew 19, where Jesus does this sort of this narrative of the the topic of conversation at that time was divorce, and uh and and Jesus says, look, Moses permitted you to divorce because your hearts were hard, but it was not so in the beginning, and it is not so now with with Christ and his redemption.
• 43:09
  SPEAKER_01: So this this diagram is is in is very much from on high, uh a beginning in God that that has this sort of parad parad paradise like perfection, falling down into hardness of heart and non-ideal legislation, and then Jesus comes to restore us to that that sort of that that um original intention of God.
• 43:36
  SPEAKER_01: Um with that kind of New Testament orientation to to how we go back into the Old Testament, can you can you help us, Andrew, with something like let's let's go for something easy, like slavery?
• 43:48
  SPEAKER_01: Um how do how do we understand an Old Testament text where within the Mosaic covenant there is this practice?
• 43:57
  SPEAKER_01: And how are we to to think of that now on This side of the cross.
• 44:01
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I think it's it's worth acknowledging that it's not an easy subject.
• 44:04
  SPEAKER_02: And there are verses about slavery in the Old Testament that I wish were not there.
• 44:08
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so I'm I'm happy to say that.
• 44:10
  SPEAKER_02: Uh I don't believe the Bible, by the way, because I like it or because I give it approval in every area.
• 44:16
  SPEAKER_02: That you know, there's deeper reasons for trusting something than that it's as as you would have written it.
• 44:20
  SPEAKER_02: So I don't have a problem in saying there are parts of the Bible I don't like or I wish were different, but um there's a trust issue there.
• 44:28
  SPEAKER_02: Uh so that's worth saying on the outset.
• 44:30
  SPEAKER_02: But I think you know, in my in my book I talk about slavery and I I have a visual which I could probably um share, you could put on screen as well.
• 44:37
  SPEAKER_02: And effectively it has this idea that in the created order, uh which is the beginning point of scripture, we're seeing the world that God would want, right?
• 44:48
  SPEAKER_02: And then in the new creation at the other end, we're seeing the world that God would want.
• 44:53
  SPEAKER_02: And it's so important to note, isn't it, that those are the two moments within the Bible story.
• 44:58
  SPEAKER_02: The messy middle is where we're seeing a world that is needing rescue, needing restoration, needing salvation.
• 45:05
  SPEAKER_02: There's only two moments in the Bible story, arguably three.
• 45:07
  SPEAKER_02: There's three moments in the Bible story where I think you see the world God wants.
• 45:10
  SPEAKER_02: You see the kingdom of God in creation, you see the kingdom of God fully restored in new creation, and of course, in the person of Jesus, the kingdom of God has come, and we see in the way that he operated God's ideal.
• 45:21
  SPEAKER_02: And so it's worth just saying there's no slavery in the beginning or end of the Bible.
• 45:28
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that is an important starting point.
• 45:30
  SPEAKER_02: The bookends of the Bible reveal the world God wants.
• 45:33
  SPEAKER_02: God does not want a world where any human being is owned by another.
• 45:38
  SPEAKER_02: However, in the messy middle and after the created high point of men and women made in the image and likeness of God, no hierarchy within the human race in terms of, you know, kings being made in the image of God, but other subjects being slaves to those.
• 45:52
  SPEAKER_02: That's not the way the Bible sees the world, despite other ancient Near Eastern texts thinking of it that way.
• 45:57
  SPEAKER_02: So there's something special about the Genesis vision of humanity.
• 46:02
  SPEAKER_02: After that high point, there is then a fall, like we said earlier.
• 46:06
  SPEAKER_02: And part of what that means is that the fallen nature of the world includes things that were not God's ideal.
• 46:13
  SPEAKER_02: And this is why Matthew 19 is so important.
• 46:15
  SPEAKER_02: Jesus is recognizing there were things going on both in the other cultures of the day and even within God's own management of his people, the laws of Moses, that are not the way that he would want the world to be in the plan A sense.
• 46:32
  SPEAKER_02: And slavery seems to me to be one of those.
• 46:34
  SPEAKER_02: The instructions given, there are not laws given about slavery, in the sense of there's no command, you must own slaves.
• 46:41
  SPEAKER_02: There are instructions given to regulate the practice, to regulate how that will be done amongst the Hebrew people.
• 46:49
  SPEAKER_02: And I guess, you know, this is part of our challenge.
• 46:52
  SPEAKER_02: We are, thank goodness, in a world where slavery, and in the West particular, because of the Christian influence towards abolition, slavery is not a thing.
• 47:00
  SPEAKER_02: It's not acceptable.
• 47:02
  SPEAKER_02: But if you drop us back into a world where that was the common practice, I think what you find in those Old Testament texts is actually not the abolition of slavery, that comes later, but you are seeing the regulation of its practice.
• 47:15
  SPEAKER_02: You're seeing limits put on how that can be conducted.
• 47:19
  SPEAKER_02: You're also seeing even practices like the Sabbath, the day of rest, being enforced not just for free people, but for those who are slaves as well.
• 47:28
  SPEAKER_02: And of course, within that context, it's worth noting that slavery was not as we might imagine it.
• 47:34
  SPEAKER_02: We are also so affected by the early modern forms of slavery, which are race-based and include trafficking.
• 47:42
  SPEAKER_02: I think so often what we're seeing in scripture is a different form of slavery.
• 47:46
  SPEAKER_02: Um, some would prefer to call it uh people bondservants rather than slaves.
• 47:51
  SPEAKER_02: And I understand that.
• 47:51
  SPEAKER_02: I think there's a persuasive argument to be made that even the term slave is not certainly for Hebrew people is not the appropriate term.
• 47:58
  SPEAKER_02: So all of these things qualify in the in its cultural context, that God is working with where people are at, and he's seeking to bring a recovery, uh, a rescue plan into the world from a low point to restore the high points, which is where the Bible begins.
• 48:15
  SPEAKER_02: And I think you see that trajectory played out then in Jesus and in the New Testament church, it's clear that whilst the culture still has an endemic problem with slavery, within the church, within the culture that the new humanity in Christ is being formed under, as Paul says, there is no slave or free.
• 48:35
  SPEAKER_02: We are all one in Christ Jesus.
• 48:37
  SPEAKER_02: So the clear direction of travel, which for reasons you've indicated, you know, if you want to make sure that slavery continues, you have to edit the Bible because it's not allowing that.
• 48:50
  SPEAKER_02: It's not it's not permitting.
• 48:51
  SPEAKER_02: There's there's an emancipatory trajectory within scripture, and the slave Bible is evidence that you've got to chop bits out if you're going to keep it going, and I think that's in itself revealing.
• 49:02
  SPEAKER_01: And it was the abolitionists with Bible in hand um who were making their arguments, and um that is what is shaping our modern sensibilities about slavery, that there has been a shift in the moral sensibility of the world, and it's come about um by people taking taking this book seriously, this book read in that sort of sense that we've that we've been talking about in the Galatians 3 sense, in the Matthew 19 sense, not unhitching the Old Testament from Christ, but reading um all of scripture in in the light of Christ, this has had the greatest impact on the world as regards this question.
• 49:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um it has, but I I it has.
• 49:46
  SPEAKER_02: I think it's worth just uh sort of saying, isn't it?
• 49:48
  SPEAKER_02: It that's been slower than we might have expected, and almost just acknowledging that I think is is is honest.
• 49:53
  SPEAKER_02: I think but what I notice as I'm reading the New Testament, I was just reading one Peter uh this last weekend a couple of times, and I noticed that the the burden of the text is that the Christian community must not be revolutionary.
• 50:09
  SPEAKER_02: Um, this is a letter to the early Christians, and the clear burden is you must win people over through the example of Jesus, who, when he was treated as a slave, a slave's death and crucifixion, when they hurled their insults at him and he was wrongly accused, he didn't act as a revolutionary, sword in hand, taking on the Romans, turning over the Roman culture, the empire.
• 50:35
  SPEAKER_02: Instead, his way of um his way of, if you like, revolution will be the slow way.
• 50:42
  SPEAKER_02: It'll be through death on the cross, it will be through resurrection, it will be through sowing seeds of a whole other way of being human, a way that doesn't retaliate but offers redemption to even to his enemies.
• 50:54
  SPEAKER_02: And what one Peter is saying, to slaves, it it talks to those who are slaves even of unkind masters.
• 51:00
  SPEAKER_02: And I I find it difficult to read about that, but I think what the clear burden of the letter is you must follow the way of Jesus.
• 51:07
  SPEAKER_02: You won't change the world through a sword-in-hand revolution that has been tried and failed.
• 51:15
  SPEAKER_02: You will change the world through the Christ way of revolution, which is to suffer, even not to retaliate when you suffer, but instead to overcome the world with the love of God.
• 51:26
  SPEAKER_02: And I think, you know, for me in part, that's why I understand that the Christian revolution has been a slow one, uh, slower than perhaps we would have liked.
• 51:36
  SPEAKER_02: But it's the way of Jesus, and in the end, it's the way that wins, I think.
• 51:40
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 51:41
  SPEAKER_01: And it's the way of the scriptures.
• 51:43
  SPEAKER_01: The long, slow burn, you you can't read the Bible from Genesis to Revelation without realizing that God takes his time.
• 51:50
  SPEAKER_01: And uh there is a baffling, infuriating patience to God, actually, as he unfolds his purposes.
• 51:57
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, it's not the way of the Spartacus Revolution, but then the Spartacus Revolution uh was pretty pretty quickly um pretty quickly overturned.
• 52:05
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 52:06
  SPEAKER_01: Um final issue on on this, Andrew.
• 52:09
  SPEAKER_01: Um let's let's circle back to the Christian nationalism question and um can we bundle together if the Old Testament people of God they were not only a spiritual community, they were also a nation with a king and a standing army?
• 52:28
  SPEAKER_01: Um you might therefore um you might therefore expect uh Christians to be, you know, in the name of Jesus be soldiers and uh in in the name of Jesus forward kind of political ends in kind of Old Testament ways.
• 52:47
  SPEAKER_01: How how should a Christian think of the nation with its political rulers and its soldiers?
• 52:55
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I think this is where we have to acknowledge continuity and discontinuity.
• 53:01
  SPEAKER_02: On the one hand, I think um John Calvin was right when he argued that the people of God trace back to Abraham for reasons we've said.
• 53:08
  SPEAKER_02: But on the other hand, within that long history of the people of God, there is a major change in the covenant, isn't there?
• 53:16
  SPEAKER_02: So there's a there's the people of God old covenant where there was a theocracy, a form of government that was based on God as king.
• 53:25
  SPEAKER_02: This is why there's such a reluctance in the Old Testament for Israel to appoint a human king, because the ideal was that God was king and Israel's armies were God's armies.
• 53:35
  SPEAKER_02: That has been majorly reimagined, um, to put it mildly in the New Covenant, where God's king, the Messiah Jesus, uh the anointed one, refuses to take up a sword, um, but instead calls his people to love their enemies.
• 53:52
  SPEAKER_02: So there's a change of value system in that sense.
• 53:55
  SPEAKER_02: But there's the reason for that change of value system is because there's a change in the whole way that the kingdom is imagined.
• 54:00
  SPEAKER_02: The kingdom is no longer national boundaries and ethnic people.
• 54:04
  SPEAKER_02: The gospel has been reimagined, has reimagined what kingdom means.
• 54:07
  SPEAKER_02: The kingdom of God is now dwelling in people's hearts from every nation and tribe and tongue, and is actually uniting people from across the globe uh into the one family of God.
• 54:20
  SPEAKER_02: So the major shift, the disjunction between the old covenant and the new covenant is so important to notice, particularly on this issue of military warfare and nationhood, which is where Christian nationalism, I think, often falls down, because what it's trying to do is almost imagine that one border, an ethnic group and people group, can be the people of God, can be a nation under God.
• 54:48
  SPEAKER_02: And I personally struggle with that because I think whilst absolutely a government can operate with and can adopt Christian values in ways we've talked about, humans being made in the image of God, fundamentally, no nation is a is the people of God distinct from one other nation.
• 55:06
  SPEAKER_02: The people of God cross boundaries and transcend nationhood.
• 55:10
  SPEAKER_02: And so you find Paul saying, no, in in in his writings, particularly, he puts this so clearly because he was the apostle to the Gentiles.
• 55:17
  SPEAKER_02: It was his burden to show that the Christian message is no longer ethnically bound with the Hebrew people, no longer requires circumcision, food laws, Sabbath laws for obedience, that this is the gospel is now for all peoples.
• 55:34
  SPEAKER_02: And the fight is not against flesh and blood.
• 55:37
  SPEAKER_02: This is his point in Ephesians 6, isn't it?
• 55:39
  SPEAKER_02: Our fight is not against human beings.
• 55:42
  SPEAKER_02: Um, our fight is against spiritual forces.
• 55:45
  SPEAKER_02: So reimagining nationhood from old to new covenant, I don't I don't believe that leaves much ground for a form of Christian nationalism that seeks to make their our country God's people.
• 55:57
  SPEAKER_02: That is not the way the New Testament thinks of it.
• 56:00
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 56:00
  SPEAKER_01: Certainly ethno-nationalism uh is is kind of at odds with the New Testament in that the the nation, the the the holy nation, as one Peter would would have it, you know, is is the church and and very explicitly a multi-ethnic uh kind of body.
• 56:15
  SPEAKER_01: This is very rich stuff, and there's so much more of it in God's book.
• 56:19
  SPEAKER_01: But Andrew, as I finish, can you just um help us with two different people who might be leaning into this conversation?
• 56:25
  SPEAKER_01: One, um, they might not call themselves a Christian yet.
• 56:29
  SPEAKER_01: Um, what advice would you give to them as they contemplate grappling with scripture?
• 56:34
  SPEAKER_01: And then to Christians, uh, what advice would you give?
• 56:36
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, great question.
• 56:37
  SPEAKER_02: Because I think, you know, for all of our debates, the invitation is there, isn't it?
• 56:41
  SPEAKER_02: Well all the things we've discussed, there's an invitation, which is explore this for yourself, work it out for yourself.
• 56:46
  SPEAKER_02: The the brilliant thing about the scriptures is there's a democracy to it.
• 56:50
  SPEAKER_02: You can, you know, there's a there's an invitation and an openness um for you to explore for yourself.
• 56:55
  SPEAKER_02: I would so encourage you to do that.
• 56:57
  SPEAKER_02: I think one of the things I'd say is that curiosity is important, and I say that because you will bump into things in the Bible that will instinctively maybe make you want to close it.
• 57:07
  SPEAKER_02: My invit my encouragement is stay curious, um, lean in, see those those moments more as an invitation to dig deeper than just to slam it shut and think that's not for me.
• 57:18
  SPEAKER_02: What's the context here?
• 57:19
  SPEAKER_02: I think there are three there are three um three little tips that I've been using recently, and I've I've sort of woven them through this new book.
• 57:26
  SPEAKER_02: We need to read the Bible in context, um, in Christ and in community.
• 57:32
  SPEAKER_02: In context, we've talked a lot about that in this conversation.
• 57:35
  SPEAKER_02: What was the context in which the regulation of slavery was given?
• 57:39
  SPEAKER_02: What was the context in which warfare was conducted in the Old Testament?
• 57:43
  SPEAKER_02: So, Old Covenant, especially, Old Testament especially, context matters so much.
• 57:48
  SPEAKER_02: And there are helpful books, and mine is one of them, one of many that can give some context to these stories.
• 57:54
  SPEAKER_02: But then, secondly, read these stories in the light of Christ.
• 57:57
  SPEAKER_02: You know, if you're curious about scripture, you know, you have to understand that the central point of it all is the person of Jesus, and that when he was trying to help two disciples who were also despondent and confused, he gave them a sort of Bible study on the road to Emmaus back through the Old Testament.
• 58:17
  SPEAKER_02: And it was when they saw these scriptures, these same scriptures they'd read many times before, but when they saw them in the light of what Jesus had accomplished through his death and resurrection, then their hearts were set on fire.
• 58:28
  SPEAKER_02: So read the Bible in context, read it in the light of Christ.
• 58:32
  SPEAKER_02: But I think the most important thing is in community.
• 58:35
  SPEAKER_02: You know, the Bible is not meant to be read in isolation.
• 58:39
  SPEAKER_02: You can get so far on your own, but actually the community of people is where so much of the revelation comes.
• 58:47
  SPEAKER_02: And I think I mean by community, I mean in part the community that that spans over time.
• 58:52
  SPEAKER_02: There are scholars and traditions over the centuries that we can draw from.
• 58:56
  SPEAKER_02: So we're not in isolation in our cultural moment, in our modern moment.
• 59:00
  SPEAKER_02: Sometimes the most helpful books to read are older books because they come without our blind spots and they expose the things that, you know, we've talked a lot about things in the Bible today that we struggle with that people 200 years ago didn't struggle with.
• 59:14
  SPEAKER_02: And even just even that is a helpful point to note.
• 59:18
  SPEAKER_02: There's particular sensibilities that we have in our cultural moment, and the wider community of faith can help us with those.
• 59:26
  SPEAKER_02: But I don't just mean the historic community, I mean the local community as well.
• 59:30
  SPEAKER_02: There are there are people, if you're reading the trying to make sense of the Bible and you're on your own, I encourage you to reach out, um, find somewhere where they're running a course about Christianity or running or running a course about the Bible or turn up at church because we need each other.
• 59:44
  SPEAKER_02: Um, there's a story in the old, in the New Testament of uh an African man traveling home trying to read the Bible, and he he cannot make sense of it on his own.
• 59:53
  SPEAKER_02: He's a very educated man, so there's no problem with his intellect.
• 59:56
  SPEAKER_02: He's he's a brilliant, successful uh VIP, but he can't get there on his own.
• 1:00:02
  SPEAKER_02: And it's only when Philip, another Christian, comes alongside him, but the penny drops.
• 1:00:07
  SPEAKER_02: So read the Bible in context.
• 1:00:10
  SPEAKER_02: Um, hopefully, my book will help give some of that context along with others.
• 1:00:14
  SPEAKER_02: Read it in the light of Christ, um, but ultimately read it in community.
• 1:00:18
  SPEAKER_02: I think we need each other.
• 1:00:19
  SPEAKER_02: So, to be honest, I actually think those tips work for the curious seeker, the person who's not a Christian.
• 1:00:24
  SPEAKER_02: I don't think it's that different for those of us who are Christians.
• 1:00:27
  SPEAKER_02: We need each other.
• 1:00:28
  SPEAKER_02: We need to read the Bible in the light of Christ and in context.
• 1:00:30
  SPEAKER_01: You're absolutely right.
• 1:00:31
  SPEAKER_01: And um, yeah, you've done a great job of being a Philip uh to us all and running alongside our chariot and uh helping us understand more of scripture.
• 1:00:40
  SPEAKER_01: Um, just finally, um, how can people check out the book, the course, and any other way of keeping up with you, Andrew?
• 1:00:46
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, well, if you uh you can follow me on on social media at Andy Ollaton.
• 1:00:50
  SPEAKER_02: Uh you can find out more about the book on Amazon or any place you buy books, uh, it's available um to buy.
• 1:00:56
  SPEAKER_02: There is a discussion guide um for small groups and some video content that goes alongside the book so you could journey through that with friends as well.
• 1:01:05
  SPEAKER_02: And we mentioned the Bible course earlier, which is published by Bible Society.
• 1:01:08
  SPEAKER_02: If you just search the Bible course, Bible Society, that'll come up.
• 1:01:11
  SPEAKER_02: Both of those are group resources, and for reasons we've said, that would be a great next step.
• 1:01:15
  SPEAKER_02: Um, we make sense of the Bible in community.
• 1:01:18
  SPEAKER_02: So uh buy the book and do it together.
• 1:01:20
  SPEAKER_01: Dr.
• 1:01:21
  SPEAKER_01: Andrew Olerton, it is always so stimulating to talk to you.
• 1:01:24
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks for coming on.
• 1:01:24
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you, Glenn.