Latest / The Speak Life Podcast / John Dickson: An Honest Look at Christian History || SLP468

Transcript

John Dickson: An Honest Look at Christian History || SLP468 · The Speak Life Podcast

• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: Hello and thank you so much for downloading episode four hundred and sixty-eight of the Speak Life Podcast.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: My name is Thomas Thorogood, Media Producer at Speak Life.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: And today we bring you this conversation that Glen recorded in person with John Dixon back at the beginning of 2022.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_00: We released it on our YouTube channel, but now we're bringing it to the podcast as well.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: John Dixon is an Australian writer, speaker, academic, and public advocate for the Christian faith.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: You'll find out what he means by that term shortly.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: He's been on a very eclectic journey, starting out as the singer songwriter in the nineties rock band In the Silence.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: And he's been involved in various media projects, including a podcast that he hosts called Underceptions exploring all sorts of aspects of life and faith and history, culture and ethics that are either misunderstood or forgotten.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: In this conversation, Glenn speaks to John about his book Bullies in the Trans, an honest look at the good and evil of Christian history.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: So I I'm really excited to bring you this conversation.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: I think it will be a real blessing to you.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: It's very honest and Christ-filled and hopeful.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: Enjoy, and I will catch you at the end.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_05: I am with Australian ordained Anglican podcaster, rock and roller, author, and public advocate for Christianity.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_05: Who else could it be but John Dixon?
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_05: Hello.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_02: Hey mate, great to talk with you.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, you too.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_05: Now public advocate for Christianity.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_05: This is sort of the moniker that you like to wear.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_05: Why not evangelist, why not apologist?
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_02: Apologists tend to be thought of as using any argument, even bad ones, to promote the Christian faith.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_02: And so you often hear people say, Oh, that's just apologetics.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm thinking of my critical sort of audience.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_02: You know, the audience, um, I mean, even someone like Richard Dawkins sort of speaks of something being just apologetics.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_02: So I my perception is the the um connotation of apologetics is of not really doing anything academic.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_02: It's just using any argument that you can find your hands, you know, get on your hands.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_02: But I want to do good history.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_02: Um and so apologetics just doesn't seem right, even though I understand, especially when I travel in America, everyone introduces me as an apologist.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_04: Yes.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_02: And I, you know, I die inside in that moment.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_02: Um why not evangelists?
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_02: Well, look, if I'm honest with you, um I really do see myself simply as an evangelist.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_02: You know, if you strive everything back, that's all I've wanted to do, make Christ more public.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but I I do think evangelist is a damaged word in our in the general public.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_02: And so there seems to me no point um in trading on that as a descriptor.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_02: Because the very people I want to connect with see evangelists as someone, you know, oh quick batting down the hatches, the evangelist is coming to browbeat me, and so on.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_02: Now that's an incorrect view of what that word means, of course.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_02: But so what do I do?
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_02: I I I advocate for the Christian faith in public.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_02: I mean that's what an evangelist does.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_02: So I'm happy to just think of it in those terms.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_02: I'm a public advocate for Christianity.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_05: It's uh well, it's a nice moniker.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_05: I don't know if anyone else is wearing it.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_05: Like, who else is is do you do you quite like being the only person with that legend?
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_02: I've never even thought of it.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_02: Um maybe if uh you could adopt it, then I then I feel really comfortable.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_05: But then I'll I'd be the worst public advocate for Christianity in the world.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_05: And I I don't want to do that.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_05: Now I I remember 14 years old, I read The Sneaking Suspicion.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_05: Wow.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_05: Back when you were an evangelist, back when you wrote that kind of book.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_05: And so you've been in the game, whatever this game is, in in terms of setting forth the good news of Jesus to a sceptical audience over three decades plus, three decades anyway.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_05: Um what what's changed since the 1990s when I picked up your book on a sneaking suspicion?
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_02: Not much.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_05: No, no, it's all it's all the same.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I mean, I'm tired of um, you know, I I look at that book, um, it's been a while since I've read it, um, but I look at that book and I'm really happy with it, you know.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_02: Even I I I wrote it in, I guess, 92, 93, something like that.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_02: And there's just this nice blend um of stuff on science and the reliability of the Bible, but also a lot on beauty and sex and pain and suffering, and um and so that there's a a blend of the so-called modernist arguments against Christianity and postmodern.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_02: Um I don't accept those as categories really, but um in a way, what's happened in sort of the last five to ten years, especially, is a lot of the more aesthetic arguments have become the main arguments.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_02: And um questions of Bible authority and Bible reliability and so on are you know are are on the back burner.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_02: And I say that um cautiously, because it it seems to me if you if you give a pretty good answer to the aesthetic questions to someone today, they'll immediately default to, but how do you know the Bible's true?
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_02: Suddenly they've become a modernist.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_02: But if you if you're talking with someone who you know wants to know about science and God, and you do a pretty good job of that, they'll suddenly go to the aesthetics.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_04: Yes.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_02: So it's not like our culture has dropped either kind of question.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_02: Um, it does just seem that the aesthetic questions have come to the fore.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_02: And the other thing that has definitely come to the fore, which I don't even touch on in a sneaking suspicion, is the um moral credibility of Christianity.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_02: The thought that Christianity is harmful.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_02: You know, once upon a time it was pretty common to say, oh, the problem with Christianity is it's holier than thou.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_02: Goody two shoes and so on.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_02: Um no longer do you hear that?
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_02: Well, not much anyway.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_02: It's more Christianity has harmed the world, Christianity is harmful for uh the vulnerable today.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_02: And and you know, in in Aristotle's categories, there's logos, pathos, and ethos, right?
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_02: So there's the logos questions, the intellectual questions, the pathos questions, which is really the aesthetics, uh, emotions, and what he called ethos, he actually thought was the um principal part of persuasion.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_02: That is, we are drawn to things and people that are morally credible, yeah, and repelled by arguments and people who are um morally flawed.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that's a powerful insight.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_02: And um w we live in a day where the church and evangelists seem deeply flawed and part of a flawed organization with a flawed history.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_02: And so no wonder our logos and pathos isn't working.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_05: Right.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_05: And I wonder, I mean, because you got into studying history academically and you got your PhD, Macquarie University, wasn't it?
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_05: Tutor there, is that right?
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_02: I was a senior research fellow for for um eight years, yeah.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_05: And I wonder, I mean, did you get into that more answering the more modernist questions?
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_05: Well, when you got into history, was it more about the reliability of the Bible and now it's become more about the ethos question?
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_02: Um maybe.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_02: Um when I finished my theological degree, I actually started a master's at the theological college I was at.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_02: But it it soon became very clear that my interests were historical more than theological.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_02: And it it fits with my imaginative personality, actually.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_02: I, you know, would find myself in lectures on Romans, wondering about the situation in Rome and what it was like to live in those streets.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_02: And I wonder what shops were like, and how big would a workshop have been to host, you know, a group of Christians?
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_02: You know, not the sort of thing that um would have got me good marks.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but that's where my mind constantly went.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_02: And during my master's thesis, it was super clear that it was it was history I was doing, not theology.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_02: So I transferred to Macquarie University, which is the largest ancient history department in the country, and very widely respected.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, I had to jump through a lot of hoops uh to get in, and you know, did and my PhD really grew out of um not so much the sort of modernist questions of trying to prove the Bible or anything like that, but my love of the imaginative life of the historian.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_02: Um, imagining what life was like, what people did, um the context of the texts.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_02: And so my my doctoral work was really on how uh Greeks and Romans, Jews, and the first Christians in the first 300 years sought to promote their viewpoint.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_02: You could call it a PhD in ancient propaganda.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_02: Um and I tried to work out, you know, whether the early Christians inherited anything from their Jewish or Greco-Roman contexts in the way they went about trying to persuade society about the Christian faith.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_02: Because it remains a mystery how Christianity grew so rapidly.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_04: Yes.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_02: Um and no one's really got the answer, um, with all due respect to Rodney Stark.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_05: Um, sociologist, he kind of looks at birth rates and he kind of looks at, you know, compound interest, 3.4% over 300 years, and you get to half the empire.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it just you know, but history is really a more empirical discipline.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_02: You've got to find data to pin things on.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_02: You can't just come up with a theory or an algorithm and then just run it through three centuries.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I mean, he he he he argued, not I I think he's uh a fine scholar, and and I very much enjoyed his book, but um, he ended up saying something like half the Roman Empire was Christian by 300 and something, right?
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_02: Um well you won't find any historians who think that's the case.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_02: Um it's more like 10% is the happy figure.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_02: Um you find some scholars who think it's only five, some who think it's 15, but but really 10% of the empire, which is still a lot of people.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_05: By 312, by Constantine.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_02: By Constantine.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_02: So um that's still a lot of people, right?
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_02: In an empire of 50 to 60 million, five or six million.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_02: So the Christians stuck out, and they sure stuck out, because they started to get in a lot of trouble around the year 300, and uh Rome really turned against the church.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_02: Anyway, so um my love of history um fell out of those kinds of motivations rather than trying to prove the Bible.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, but I was very pleased to do a history doctorate in a mainstream university and learn how to do history instead of just um Bible exegesis.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_04: Yes, yes.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_02: Which is perfectly wonderful in the pulpit.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_02: Um but if you're trying to do history, you've got to do something more.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_05: And in in terms of being a public advocate for Christianity, how does the historical question come up in conversations with secular people?
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_05: What what's what sort of questions tend to be asked of you?
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I mean, it it depends, right?
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, um it if you're simply trying to commend something Jesus said to someone, you know, it could be as simple as my hairdresser.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_02: Have a great friendship with my hairdresser.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_02: And she might be cutting my hair and and I might, you know, say something uh that that Jesus said, you know, love your enemies, you know.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_02: Um and and some people, um, as it turns out, not my hairdresser, but but some people might go, but how do you know he really said that?
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_02: That's where it comes up.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_02: Because it's because the thing about Christianity is we're stuck with history.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_02: It's never not going to be a question.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_02: It's not like Buddhism.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_02: Buddhism is not a historical religion at all.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, the Buddha really existed, but his system doesn't rely on him.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_02: Um and he said as much.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_02: But Christianity really depends on a person that we say was executed by the fifth governor of of Judea, right?
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_02: So smart people are gonna go, how do you know that?
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_02: So it could it could just be trying to commend Jesus, then people say, How do you know that?
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_02: Well, that's a historical question.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_02: How do we know the Gospels in any way uh are related to the figure of Jesus?
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_02: That's a that's a historical question.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_05: Now you've written Bullies and Saints, love the book.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_05: People can check out my review of the of the book online where I say as much.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_05: And um you begin the book in the same place that you begin your documentary series, For the Love of Gods, uh, which again I commend heartily to people, it exists in lots of different forms, doesn't it?
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_05: So people can you know find For the Love of God online, you can watch clips, you can watch a six-part documentary, you can watch a 90-minute version.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_05: There was a 60-minute version that aired on ABC TV, the National Broadcaster.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_05: And that film series begins in 1099, July 15th, First Crusade.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_05: And so does your book, Bullies and Saints.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_05: Why begin your historical move in the middle of Christian history?
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_02: Precisely for that reason, it's the middle.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_02: And so it's a good place to sort of um describe and then say, how on earth did they get to that?
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_02: And has it changed since?
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_02: So that, you know, 1099 mark is a kind of uh a neat way in.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_02: It's also dramatic.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_02: It's a dramatic.
• 14:34
  unknown: Yeah.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_02: It's got people's attention.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_02: You know, thousands of European crusaders bursting through the walls of Jerusalem, having had days of being preached up into a frenzy by Peter the Hermit.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_02: They were out for blood.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_02: And they got it.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_02: They went through the streets killing men, women and children.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_02: They made their way up to the Al-Aqsa Mosque and onto the great platform there, the Haram al-Sharif.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_02: And they found Muslims, men, women, and children huddled up there.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_02: They thought, maybe they couldn't get up here.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_02: And the Crusaders, they got up there and they killed basically everything, everyone.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_02: Um and then they were overjoyed that it was, you know, divine victory.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_02: And the next day they held a church service in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, uh, 300, 400 metres away, um, to praise Jesus for the vindication of Christianity over the infidel.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_02: And we have the primary documents, we have the crusader documents describing their victory, describing how they felt about the victory.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_02: So we're not just making this up.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_02: They really saw this brutal massacre of women and children, non-combatants, yeah, as something Jesus approved of.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_02: So the question is how could that happen?
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_02: And part of the reason I started the book with it, I mean, it is the scene that opens the documentary, but what I couldn't say in the documentary is when I filmed that scene outside the Alaksa Mosque, on the very platform where it all happened, my Muslim guide, you know, given to us for the day to look after us, the mosque lent her to us to look after us, she's just off camera.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_02: And by the time I got my lines right, I could tell she she was crying.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_02: And I had to deliver you know the final line where I don't I got it correct, knowing that this Muslim girl had a tear in her eye for what Christians did 900 years earlier.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_02: And I thought to myself, um, you know, logically it makes no sense because you know it wasn't necessarily her forebears, etc., etc.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_02: And it makes no sense for me to feel like I was there that that I did that massacre, but I couldn't resist saying to her, Azra, I am so sorry.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_02: That was really I could tell that was really hard for you.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_01: And she said, no, no, it's fine.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_01: No, honestly, it's fine, it's fine.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_02: And I could tell it wasn't fine.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_02: And and my point was, you know, Christian bad behavior can leave a 900-year-old scar.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_05: Yes.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_05: And your approach, therefore, is quite different.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_05: So we've already mentioned Rodney Stark, so we've mentioned his rise of Christianity.
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_05: In his book, The Triumph of Christianity, he he has a whole paragraph on the I remember the final line of the paragraph, no apologies are necessary.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_05: Which is, there are certain historians that will take the route of, well, they started it, you know, and there's 450 years of of Muslim expansion.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_05: And there's that form of apologia, there's that form of apology, which is a not an apologetic apologetic.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_05: And I noticed that Tom Holland, the historian, said, of your book, yours is um a remarkable example of apologetic apologetics.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_05: Um, why do you think that apologies might be necessary and and what persuasive value does that have?
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_02: Well, that moment with Azra, my guide, is is a good example.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_02: Like, even though I wasn't there, it was just humanly in that moment the only thing I could say was sorry.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_02: Because in that moment I did represent the tradition.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_02: And she represented her Muslim tradition.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_02: And the reason that kind of Muslim started at first thing doesn't work for me is that they don't claim to follow the one who said, Love your enemy.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_02: They don't follow the one who you know came to give his life for others.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_02: They follow a warrior.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_02: And no Muslim listening to this will feel I've been unfair by saying Muhammad was a gloriously successful military general.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_02: It's a point of pride.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_02: So why would I um use a Christian ethic of humility and self-sacrifice and turning the other cheek and love to critique Muslims for whom that is not their tradition?
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_02: Um the expansive military tradition is a venerable tradition in Islam.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_05: And in Alexander the Great, and Julius Caesar and Genghis Khan and any any number.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_02: The Roman Empire and everything, yeah.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_02: So it's Christians who follow the crucified guy.
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_05: Yes.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_02: And that that changes everything.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_02: Um so I I accept, I mean, on the technical point, I accept that the First Crusade was a just war.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_02: In the first sense of just war.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_02: That is, it was a just cause.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_02: Because um Muslims had expanded uh rapidly.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_02: They were um knocking on the door of the Byzantine capital.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_02: Um saying, excuse me, could I talk to you about the Prophet Muhammad?
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_02: Um they, you know, the the Emperor Alexius um wrote to the Pope pleading for the Christians to come and help.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_02: Because there wouldn't be a Byzantine Empire, you know, within a few years.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_02: And so I understand and accept that the first crusade was a just war, in the first sense of just war, just cause.
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_02: But I don't accept that it was a just war in the execution of the just war.
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_02: Remember, just war uh is um just cause of war and justice in war.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_02: These two things have to be together.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_02: And there was no justice in the way they conducted the war.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_02: And July 15th, 1099 is the perfect example.
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_02: They killed women and children, and just war theory said you don't do that.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_02: So why did they?
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_02: They didn't have to.
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_02: Um they could have shown mercy, they could have they they had a stunning victory.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_02: Why did they go further and slaughter non-combatants?
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_02: And apart from anything else, as they made their way along the Rhineland, they slaughtered Jewish villagers.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_02: They they destroyed Jewish villages and slaughtered all Jews.
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_02: Now not all the not all the crusaders did that, but those following Peter the Hermit did.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_02: Peter the Hermit, the greatest preacher of the Crusades.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_02: Loved by everyone.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_02: And led these and led these massacres.
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_02: So you no apology necessary?
• 21:59
  SPEAKER_02: Sorry, that's not crazy.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_02: Christianity.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_05: Right.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_05: And and I think precisely because you're a confessional Christian, I think apologetic apologetics is necessary.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_05: Apologetics are necessary for those who sit under the banner of Jesus and are to forward the movement of Jesus in Jesus-shaped ways.
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_05: And therefore, so you go from 15th of July, 1099, and then you sort of hit rewind, go back to the beginning of church history, and you start to talk about the beautiful song, the beautiful tune that Jesus has taught to the world.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_05: I think it's a sensational analogy.
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_05: Can you tell us what that analogy is and how it helps us as we try to forward the Christian message?
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_02: Well, one of my favourite pieces of music is Bach's Cello Suites.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_02: And the opening prelude in the key of G is, in everyone's estimation, one of the finest pieces of mathematically pure music you could you could ever hear.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_02: Like the maths of it are extraordinary.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_02: The way it brings you to a mathematical resolution by coming back to the G is just extraordinary.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_02: And if people haven't heard it, you know, go put it on.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_05: Well you could, yes.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_02: We've destroyed it for our theme song.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_02: But you could go and hear Yo-Yo Ma or one of those greats play, just the prelude.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_02: Two minutes long, and it's extraordinary.
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_02: Anyway, so I I I imagine I imagine that the gospel message is the most beautiful tune.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_02: It's the Bark Shallow Sweeps.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_02: It's um love your enemy, do good to those who hate you, pray for those who mistreat you, not simply as an arbitrary ethic, but as the whole sweep of the story of Jesus, who loved his enemies all the way to the cross, gave himself on behalf of others.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_02: So our gospel is the beautiful tune.
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_02: Now, if you heard me play Bach's cello sweets, you know, you might wonder whether Bach really could write a beautiful tune after all.
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_02: You know, what's the big deal?
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_02: Why does he have that reputation?
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_02: But of course, you can't um confuse the beautiful composition with the terrible performance.
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_02: And I offer this as an analogy to say the gospel message and the gospel ethic is a beautiful tune.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_02: It is the cello suite.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_02: And Christians have sometimes performed it well because the piece can be performed well.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but it's often been performed terribly, right out of key.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_02: And sometimes they're playing something else altogether.
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_02: Not the gospel tune.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_02: And and for me, um, this is a fitting way of thinking about church history.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_02: Um, there is the beautiful tune that Jesus gave the world.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_02: And Christians have performed it beautifully.
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_02: And I do think, just empirically, for the first 250, 300 years, the Christians did a marvelous job.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_02: Now, of course, they were, you know, at the micro levels sinful and so on, but they they adopted this posture of self-giving in a very in a dramatic way.
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and then there are periods of history where they're singing right out of tune.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_02: But the great thing is, all the way through history, in in every period, even in the terrible periods, there's always someone who puts up their hand and says, Can you hear that?
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_02: That's the tune of Jesus, and we don't sound like it.
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_02: And they they create little reformations, little renewals.
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_02: And this happens in the 5th century, it happens in the 6th century, it happens in the 9th century, it happens in the 12th century.
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_02: Yep.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_02: And so the tune is always, yes, we depart from it, but it's always pulling people back into it.
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 25:43
  SPEAKER_05: And you mentioned 6th and 7th and 9th centuries, surely, as a good Protestant.
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, church history kind of ended in Acts 28 and it began again in 1517, didn't it, John?
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_05: Like, we can't say anything nice about the medieval church, can we?
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_02: Of course not.
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_02: Uh I mean, apart from Augustine's confessions.
• 26:02
  SPEAKER_02: Right, yeah.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_05: Free pass on him.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_05: Um and Wycliffe.
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_05: We'll drag up Wycliffe and yeah.
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, look, uh the Protestants are just the function of their education, the product of their education.
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_02: And they can they can say that, and and I used to think it too, only because um we don't know anything about those centuries.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_02: Um but the reality is there are extraordinary Christian thinkers and doers in every century.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I mean, some people who are a little bit theologically educated will have heard of the Cappadocian fathers, you know.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_02: Uh this is um Gregory, um Nyssa, um Basil the Great.
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_02: And and pe people, Protestants only know of them um because of their work on the Trinity.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_02: Like they really helped think about the Trinity, the communion of God, right, and Father, Son, and Spirit.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_02: But actually, in in their time, they were incredible social reformers as well.
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 27:07
  SPEAKER_02: They were the highest intellects, that's true.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_02: They were the greatest theologians.
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_02: But um they preached against slavery, for example, like full-on preached against slavery.
• 27:19
  SPEAKER_02: And no one in their churches could have owned slaves.
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_02: And this is um late fourth century, so we're talking 370s and 80s here.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_02: Um Basil the Great started what we think is the first public hospital with a giant hospital.
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_02: Don't think of it as just a little cottage that you could, you know, someone could wipe your brow on.
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, they had a whole section for lepers, a whole section for foundlings, the kids that the Christians picked up off the st off the streets who had been abandoned, uh, a section for the elderly, and a section for the truly sick.
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_02: And he employed Greek doctors.
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, the Greeks were the best at medicine in that period, and he he adopted secular Greek medicine skills, employed them along with nurses in his great, what he just called his poorhouse.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_02: So Basil, you know, starts this first hospital hospital, and we know by about a decade later there's another one started by a Christian uh in Rome.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_02: And within the next two centuries, there are literally hundreds of hospitals.
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_02: In fact, in canon law of the sixth century, um, bishops were obliged to build a hospital in their diocese as part of Christian ministry.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_02: Um by the ninth century, uh there are literally thousands of hospitals.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_02: The tradition of public hospital undoubtedly comes from the church.
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, yeah.
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_05: And there was similar stipulations about cathedrals and schools.
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_05: And so we've got hospitals, and we've got schools, we've got the our modern sense of what we believe by charity.
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_05: Um what else are some of the sort of the good news stories that we can speak of?
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_05: And we'll we'll we've we've addressed some of the drawbacks and some of the hypocrisy of the church.
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_05: But what else, what else can the Jesus movement kind of be proud of?
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_02: Well, you mentioned schools.
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_02: Um there was what scholars call the Carolingian Renaissance.
• 29:19
  SPEAKER_02: Um not to be confused with the Renaissance people get excited about today because it's more recent memory, but the Carolingian Renaissance is in the 8th century, so um mid to late 700s, and then through into the early 9th century.
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_02: And it really starts because Charlemagne, the great um Christian conqueror of Europe, nonetheless was smart enough to employ a deacon from York called Alquin, who was a devout Christian but also an educationalist, and he instituted throughout Europe a massive program of schooling for boys and girls, for poor rich and poor, where they had to learn the liberal arts.
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_02: They had to learn maths, they had to learn astronomy, they had to learn rhetoric and grammar and music.
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_02: Um and um within his tenure, 20 years as uh Charlemagne's advisor, he established hundreds of schools, all run by the church.
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_02: And um, you know, within a couple of centuries, this was the norm that we now think of as public education.
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_02: But it came from a Christian, and not just accidentally, it happened to be a Christian who did this.
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_02: If you read Alcuin's letters, it is crystal clear he's got a wisdom theology approach to life.
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_02: That is, the wisdom of God is imprinted on everything in creation.
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_02: It's imprinted in the ground and the stars, it's imprinted in grammatical rules, it's imprinted in music, and so learning everything about the world is learning more about the wisdom of God.
• 31:02
  SPEAKER_04: Yes.
• 31:02
  SPEAKER_02: And so therefore, learning is worship.
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_04: Yes.
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_02: And that fueled this massive educational revival in what we call the dark ages.
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_05: Right, right.
• 31:11
  SPEAKER_02: Which were not dark at all.
• 31:12
  SPEAKER_05: Right.
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_05: So the church has not been an anti-intellectual movement, has not been an anti-science movement, you can tell that story.
• 31:20
  SPEAKER_05: Um it has been, and and this is what I want to get to in terms of the beautiful tune, because I think the beautiful tune was really weird in the early centuries AD.
• 31:33
  SPEAKER_05: It was the most disruptive movement in world history, says Tom Holland, and and the most influential revolution in world history, and it's and it's been both, hasn't it?
• 31:43
  SPEAKER_05: Such that a modern critic of Christianity is assuming the Christian tune, are they not?
• 31:51
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_05: Is that worth pressing into?
• 31:53
  SPEAKER_05: I know Tom Holland does a lot of that.
• 31:56
  SPEAKER_05: Um you you kind of hint at that at at various points, but you don't press into that as much as a Tom Holland would.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_05: Is there a benefit to saying, you know what, the tune by which you judge the poor performance of the modern-day Christians is a Jesus tune.
• 32:12
  SPEAKER_05: How how valuable is that?
• 32:14
  SPEAKER_02: Um I think so long as you don't do it um and sound like a jerk.
• 32:18
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, yeah.
• 32:19
  SPEAKER_02: You know, because you can sound like, oh, all those good things you like, they're ours.
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, yeah, they're mine.
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_02: I gave them to you.
• 32:27
  SPEAKER_02: Um and and this is why it's doubly important for the Christian to admit they don't live up to them.
• 32:31
  SPEAKER_05: Yes.
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_02: To be to a humble posture.
• 32:33
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 32:34
  SPEAKER_02: But to point to Jesus as the source of these things, the secularist loves, I think is is incredibly valuable.
• 32:40
  SPEAKER_02: Because I want to raise the question with really thoughtful secularists.
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_02: I want to raise the question, how would you intellectually justify and ground these beautiful things like humility, charity, education for all, equality regardless of capacity?
• 32:57
  SPEAKER_02: How would you intellectually ground them with there being no God of love at the center of the universe?
• 33:03
  SPEAKER_02: See, secularists can see that I've got a rational ground.
• 33:06
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 33:07
  SPEAKER_02: Even if they don't believe in God, they can, as a thought experiment, see that if you do believe that God of the universe is loving, that does lead to those things.
• 33:14
  SPEAKER_02: But I want to say to the secularists, can you imagine a ground for these?
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_02: And if you can't, how long do you think they can remain in culture as givens?
• 33:24
  SPEAKER_02: Right, right, right.
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_05: And I think there's a there's an added bonus of saying, okay, so you already believe in compassion and equality and all these great things.
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_05: Okay, and and without a rational grounding for them, and do you not see how you're already a believer?
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_05: It's it's not as though you need to take a leap of faith.
• 33:43
  SPEAKER_05: You're already dangling midair, you need some ground beneath your feet.
• 33:45
  SPEAKER_05: And I I think there's a there's a great value in that.
• 33:48
  SPEAKER_05: Final question.
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_05: Um I love the way you you talk about the early Christians as good losers, um, and certainly a martyr is a very extreme example of a good loser, someone giving their life in love.
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_05: Um, but you say that's kind of the posture of the early church towards a hostile world.
• 34:07
  SPEAKER_05: And you're a big advocate for nowadays being good losers.
• 34:12
  SPEAKER_05: Um, what does that look like as we advocate for Jesus in in modern times, in which there are culture wars, in which there can be great hostilities against Christians?
• 34:21
  SPEAKER_05: What does it look like to be a good loser?
• 34:23
  SPEAKER_02: Looking and speaking like you don't think you've got any entitlements and rights.
• 34:28
  SPEAKER_02: Huh.
• 34:29
  SPEAKER_02: But you're cheerful and upfront about what you believe is the truth and ground of all things.
• 34:34
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_02: Um so when I talk about the early Christians as good losers, I don't mean they went around looking for opportunities to lose.
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_02: This is not the slave mentality that Nietzsche accused the early Christians of having.
• 34:46
  SPEAKER_02: Actually, they thought they'd won.
• 34:47
  SPEAKER_02: That's what allowed them to lose.
• 34:49
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 34:49
  SPEAKER_02: They thought Christ had been exalted.
• 34:52
  SPEAKER_02: And he'd been crucified and he'd been exalted.
• 34:55
  SPEAKER_02: So we just worry about the crucified part.
• 34:57
  SPEAKER_02: We just, you know, we we proclaim, and and if we die, we're still we're still winning because Christ is at the right hand of God.
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_02: And so, in fact, in a weird way, their uber confidence that they had already won allowed them to sit loosely to temporal legislative victories.
• 35:13
  SPEAKER_02: They did they didn't they don't worry so much about that, they just carried on cheerfully proclaiming Christ.
• 35:17
  SPEAKER_02: And if you think I'm an idiot, you know, hey, it's a Christian specialty going right back to Jesus.
• 35:22
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that kind of posture um really messed with people's heads in the ancient world.
• 35:28
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and uh it's the it's the gospel posture in my view uh for today.
• 35:33
  SPEAKER_05: Well, I love it, and I think you you exemplify it very well in your book.
• 35:37
  SPEAKER_05: I think you very much exemplify it in your online interactions with people, and I'd I'd uh commend uh following John online on Twitter and Facebook and that that that kind of thing as well.
• 35:48
  SPEAKER_05: And your Underceptions podcast, I think, as well.
• 35:51
  SPEAKER_05: You are um taking up that posture on the on the issues of today, and so uh yeah, hardly commend Underceptions and a wonderful book, Bullies and Saints.
• 35:59
  SPEAKER_05: Thank you so much for writing it.
• 36:00
  SPEAKER_05: Thanks for spending time with me.
• 36:01
  SPEAKER_00: Pleasure thanks for listening.
• 36:10
  SPEAKER_00: I hope you enjoyed that conversation.
• 36:12
  SPEAKER_00: I love John's image of the gospel being like this beautiful tune, and uh we've sometimes we play it uh very out of tune, we play it poorly, uh, but the tune itself uh is and and always has been this this beautiful song.
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_00: I'd like to draw your attention to the back catalogue of the Speak Life Podcast.
• 36:32
  SPEAKER_00: So we actually had John Dixon on before, if you go to uh episode 217 of the Speak Life Podcast, that was a conversation about how to witness well in a post-Christian age.
• 36:46
  SPEAKER_00: So y yes, the the back catalogue of uh the Speak Life Podcast is uh goes back about ten years.
• 36:53
  SPEAKER_00: So there are uh tons of episodes uh there about all sorts of topics, how to engage with uh big questions, how to uh talk to people of other uh faiths and uh a lot of those episodes actually went missing uh for quite a while as we shifted uh podcast providers.
• 37:12
  SPEAKER_00: But I I had a fun job of doing some some podcast archaeology recently and managed to uncover the first uh 275 episodes of the Speak Life Podcast uh from the the the the recesses of the internet.
• 37:28
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I managed to to draw them out, and so it's great that now we have uh all uh the the the back catalogue of the Speak Life Podcast available wherever you're listening to this.
• 37:40
  SPEAKER_00: So uh do go and have a look at some of those earlier episodes.
• 37:45
  SPEAKER_00: Time for some listener correspondence.
• 37:47
  SPEAKER_00: So each uh week on the Speak Life Podcast, I read out uh just uh a few comments that we've been getting from a from across our socials and also by uh email about uh the the previous episode of the Speak Life Podcast.
• 38:02
  SPEAKER_00: So the previous episode was with Ted Turnow talking about uh the battle for the imagination and how we can use storytelling to proclaim Christ.
• 38:14
  SPEAKER_00: So we we've had a few uh uh great comments on that conversation.
• 38:18
  SPEAKER_00: Uh Peter Thomas said, Loved this.
• 38:21
  SPEAKER_00: I so hope the church can turn itself around and get involved in the cultural conversations going on.
• 38:26
  SPEAKER_00: I'd be interested to hear what you think of Arrival, a very clever, critically acclaimed, subversive sci-fi film about a linguistics expert who is asked to help when aliens land on planet Earth and yet somehow manages to make a commentary about abortion that aligns with a Christian view, yet without ever appearing a Christian.
• 38:48
  SPEAKER_00: I still don't even know if any of the creators were Christian.
• 38:52
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for raising that, Peter.
• 38:54
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I I believe the film Arrival is based on the short uh story, uh story, I think it's called Story of Your Life, and it's by uh Ted Chang.
• 39:04
  SPEAKER_00: And I I it's really interesting to read his collection of short stories actually, because he he draws very overtly on a lot of uh Judeo-Christian uh themes and kind of subverts them.
• 39:17
  SPEAKER_00: So I I I I think he he has a lot of issues with uh uh Christianity that he tries to sort of present in his stories.
• 39:25
  SPEAKER_00: But nonetheless, he's he's very much uh grappling with these themes of of the sanctity of life and um yeah, he's he's a really interesting guy.
• 39:34
  SPEAKER_00: I had another comment from Josh Lama.
• 39:37
  SPEAKER_00: I've been reading the Wingfeather saga, which has been published as uh Christian young adult fantasy books, but could be read by anyone.
• 39:46
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's a great example.
• 39:47
  SPEAKER_00: I've heard a lot of good things about uh the Wingfeather saga, need to get around to reading it.
• 39:52
  SPEAKER_00: Um we're a big uh fan of we're big fans of Andrew Peterson here at Speak Life.
• 39:56
  SPEAKER_00: We had him on the show for the reset series, Glenn talked to him about creativity.
• 40:03
  SPEAKER_00: So there we go.
• 40:04
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, if you have any uh comments about uh this episode or previous episodes of the Speak Life Podcast, do email them to info at speaklife.org.uk and we will read some of them out on the show.
• 40:19
  SPEAKER_00: It's always lovely to hear from our listeners and uh get your uh perspective.
• 40:25
  SPEAKER_00: Well, thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Speak Life Podcast.
• 40:29
  SPEAKER_00: We will be back next week.
• 40:31
  SPEAKER_00: God bless, and goodbye.