Shifting Culture
On Shifting Culture we have conversations at the intersection of faith, culture, justice, and the way of Jesus. Hosted by Joshua Johnson, this podcast features long-form conversations with authors, theologians, artists, and cultural thinkers to trace how embodied love, courage, and creative faithfulness offer a culture of real healing and hope.
Shifting Culture
Ep. 423 Nijay Gupta - What Does New Creation Look Like Here and Now in Your Work, Your Money, Your Relationships
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Paul wasn't just helping people get to heaven. Nijay Gupta joins me to make the case that Paul's letters were written for people trying to figure out how to live, not how to escape. Drawing from his new book Paul for the World, Nijay walks through the Greco-Roman world Paul was writing into - its economic disparity, its philosophies, its hunger for meaning - and shows how we can see our world similarly. The conversation moves through economics, the arts, the Stoics, and the resurrection to land on a grounded, new creation vision of the Christian life. This is a conversation about meaning, hope, and what it looks like to be fully alive in the world God hasn't given up on.
Nijay K. Gupta (PhD, Durham University) is Julius R. Mantey Professor of New Testament at Northern Seminary. He is the coauthor (with A. J. Swoboda) of the book Slow Theology, cohost of the Slow Theology podcast, and founder of the popular Substack newsletter Engaging Scripture. Gupta is an award-winning author of numerous books, including Tell Her Story, Strange Religion, and commentaries on Galatians, Philippians, Colossians, and 1 and 2 Thessalonians. He is also a senior translator for the New Living Translation. Gupta lives in Portland, Oregon.
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A thoughtful, deep dive into one of the most talked-about movements in American history.
This is the main event. We're living the main event. You know, this isn't Paul, but I think Second Peter, or First Peter says, angels long to look into these things. I imagine the angels, there's a glass, you know, there's a glass ceiling of earth, and the angels are in heaven, stooping down with their faces pressing the glass, like, what's going on down there? Like we were wondering what's going up there. And they're, they're actually saying we're watching what's going on down there.
Joshua Johnson:Hello and welcome to the shifting culture podcast in which we have conversations about the culture we create and the impact we can make. We long to see the body of Christ look like Jesus. I'm your host. Joshua Johnson, you know, there's a crisis happening in the church right now. It's not really a crisis of belief, but it's a crisis of imagination. It's a creeping sense that this world doesn't really matter, that we're just biding our time until we get somewhere better. You see it in the escapism, the Doom scrolling, the fortress mentality. You see it in a theology that treats Earth as a waiting room. Our guest today, Nietzsche Gupta, has been studying Paul for 20 years, and what he's found is that Paul never actually taught any of that. I sit down with him to talk through his new book, Paul for the world, and what we uncover is that Paul's letters were never primarily about getting people to heaven. They were about teaching ordinary people how to live, how to work, how to handle money, how to relate across ethnic lines, how to make arts and other things. And he talked about this in a world that felt just as broken and hopeless as ours does now. So we're asking the question, what does new creation look like on the ground today in the life that you're actually living? This is a great one, because it reframes the way we think that we are going to be able to see new creation in every day, issues that we're dealing with today. I think it's really important that we get this right and that we can start to live and think and have a new imagination for what this world can be and what our role in it should be. So join us. Here is my conversation with nijay Gupta, nijay, welcome back to shifting culture. Excited to have you back
Nijay Gupta:on I know, like, how many times is this? It's like, I'm like, a regular, almost you are a regular. I think we talked about a smoking jacket last time, yes, and slippers or something, yeah.
Joshua Johnson:And I think you do that. I think we're gonna do the maybe we'll do the seven timers club. I think this might be number six.
Nijay Gupta:Yes, it's
Joshua Johnson:five or six. Okay, something like that. I got keep
Nijay Gupta:writing. I got keep writing. Okay,
Joshua Johnson:keep writing. We'll have you on then I'll do something good, because no one's hit seven yet. People have hit
Nijay Gupta:okay.
Joshua Johnson:Andy rube hit six. And so okay, you're too it is, it
Nijay Gupta:is.
Joshua Johnson:It's good. Excited to talk about Paul for the world. In your book, you write true spirituality is not thinking about something different than this world. Instead, it's thinking about this world differently. I think we often get the the the world parts wrong, especially when what Paul is talking about, What's he trying to say about the world? Why do we have to think differently about the world?
Nijay Gupta:Let me say some general comments, and I'm gonna come back to the word world. What I'm seeing, you know, in the last 10 years, for a variety of reasons, what I'm seeing from my students, who are many of them, are pastors, from folks that listen to my podcast, co hosted with AJ sabote, slow theology, I'm seeing a lot of despair. I'm seeing a lot of hopelessness. I'm seeing a lot of like, what I call quiet quitting life. You just sort of stop dreaming, stop hoping. And you know, that leads to kind of various forms of escapism. Some forms are, you know, like retreating into the church, you know, treating the church as a kind of fortress to hedge, you know, to give you a hedge of protection against the world, or as a portal to get you into another realm. You know, get me away from this world. Or you see people just receding into their phones, sort of zombies, just Doom scrolling. Or, you know, just trying to numb themselves. And when I look at Paul, Paul didn't live in great times. I mean, this was, yeah, I mean, the Roman Empire had nice roads and, you know, aqueducts, but, you know, they lived under empire. I mean, it's not what they wanted. And yet, you know, a man filled with so much joy, so much hope, where does that come from? And it doesn't come from escaping. It comes from a sense of like NT Wright uses the image that the church is meant to be working models of new creation. Oh my gosh. I can't tell you how much, how much encouragement that concept gives me. And so part of it Joshua, is how we translate words in Paul and I talk about this the very beginning of my book, but I. There are really two words that are translated as world in sort of older translations. One is Cosmos, which means world, and the other is ion, and I own doesn't actually mean worlds. I'm not sure why it ever got translated world. It means age or stage. And so often when, when the Bible uses negative language about what we're living in, it's often using I own. You know, do not be conformed to the patterns of this. And then in your mind, you might fill in world. But actually, the Greek says I own. It means the age we're living in. And when we talk about this world passing away, it's not actually this world, as in the earth. It's talking about this age that's passing away. So I'm trying to do some renewal redemptive work on how Paul and other New Testament writers and Jesus think about this world we're living in. You know, if you think about how we used to preach the gospel in the 90s. We're probably around the same age. I used to do door to door evangelism, and we used to, we used to knock on doors. I'm from Ohio. We used knock on doors and we'd say, something comes to the door. We'd say, what level of assurance in a percentage do you have that you'll go to heaven when you die? And if they say anything except 100% then we can say, Do you want more? Assurance? You can have assurance through Jesus Christ today. And what kind of message does that send? The message sent there is, we weren't made for heaven. We were made for Earth. Somehow, we're trapped here, and we got to get up there. And so what I'm trying to communicate in this book is that people like someone like Paul, who's really at the center of our understanding of theology, really never communicated that. That, you know, he almost never talks about heaven. He very rarely talks about heaven as a destination. And so what does he really think we're so the big question behind this book is, why are we here on earth? What are we here to do? And it's so funny, so few theologians, Pauline scholars, actually tackle that question.
Joshua Johnson:I've been reading and hearing like snippets in places where, where Paul has been getting a pretty bad rap lately, that people like, I love Jesus, and what Jesus says, And then Paul does something different, and he like, veers off to the side, and we go wrong, because Paul started it all off, wrong, and we're wrong. I think in this you're getting back into a practical gospel on the ground. What does it look like to embody the ways of Jesus through what Paul is saying, which I think is really helpful for people to say. Actually, Paul wasn't going with escapist theology or something. But he was actually saying, how does the gospel like? How does this resurrection message apply to our life here and now, through the lens of what was actually happening in the world in that day and age, when you hear some of those things, what do you think that people are like misreading or getting wrong, if they're saying Paul is veering off from Jesus message.
Nijay Gupta:Yeah, I think it's really we theologians of the past, pastors, preachers, they give us blinders to see certain things in Paul and to miss other things in Paul. And so some of the paradigms that we've inherited shape how we see Paul. So for example, there's an old expression that comes from a scholar named Alfred Loise, and it's Jesus called for the kingdom, and but then the church showed up, and it's this joke that Jesus preached kingdom of God, and then Paul's just talking about church, church. It's not quite like that. Paul does talk about the Kingdom of God, sometimes in some really important ways, and First Corinthians and First Second Thessalonians, but there is some different vocabulary there. I think what Paul is doing is broadening and adapting some of that language to Gentiles who don't know some of the inside Jewish speak, but also helping them understand, in relationship to the wider Roman imperial world, and how all of that works. I would say Paul is transposing some of that, I think. But there's the thing called the tunnel period. So the tunnel period is between the death of Jesus or the resurrection of Jesus. That's around 30 and when we have Paul's, the earliest Paul Paul line writings, which is, you know, early, early 50s, somewhere around there. So we have about 20 years called the tunnel period. We don't know what happened in that period in terms of Christian traditions, vocabulary, liturgies, rituals. So this explosive sort of origins of Christianity happen in a period. We don't have literature from that. We probably have things embedded within the book of Acts, embedded within the Jesus tradition that becomes the Gospels. But there's something going on there. So we actually lay a lot of Paul's feet. Right? How much is Paul just passing on what he's what he's received from? Remember, you know, Galatians says he's spending time with Peter, right? When he becomes a believer and he's learning, sort of, he's getting a backstory on Christianity, you know, that sort of thing, so that there's something going on there. But here's one thing, Joshua, I do think, that we often miss. And this was a kind of epiphany for me. I've been studying Paul for 20 years writing a book like this, you get an epiphany. You know, maybe when I first started reading the Bible in college and, you know, late high school or college, maybe even seminary, I would kind of scan Paul's letters, looking for the important theological stuff, first, Corinthians 15, or the Christ him, you know, really load bearing, heavy theological stuff. And I would sort of ignore the rest of the stuff, like the other stuff is just sort of decoration, sort of not that important. And I came to realization as I was writing this book, especially that even though Paul does say really, really profound theological things in his letters, the reason he writes his letters tends to be for very this worldly stuff, like a relationship problem between Philemon and Onesimus, or grieving the death of loved ones in first, Thessalonians or a problem with understanding work like hey you hey Bucko, you need to get a job. If you can, if you can't, that's one thing. But if you can, you need to be working. Second, Thessalonians deals a lot with that, helping out churches that are in need, you know, due to lack of funding in the churches of Judea, second, Corinthians, eight and nine. We often think wrongly that Paul's writing letters because he has big, important theological things to say. That's true in one sense, but I think he's saying those things to make an impact on how we live our lives in the here and now. I don't think people take that as seriously as they should
Joshua Johnson:take me into like, the church in Corinth is Corinthians. And I think a lot of times we're looking for those big theological questions, but he's pretty practical in this what? What were you seeing in Corinthians? Because you spend a lot of time in Corinthians.
Nijay Gupta:Yeah, I kind of geeked out in First Corinthians. I had so much fun with that. So it's helpful. Maybe we'll get into Corinthians in a minute, but it's helpful for me to maybe lay out a paradigm I use at the beginning of the book, which involves the language of worldliness. We often use the word in evangelicalism, we often use the word worldly in a negative way. I even use it in a negative way, right? Carnal, fleshly selfish, kind of lower order, primitive sort of thinking. And I was really influenced by Dietrich Bonhoeffer in his work on worldliness in, you know, probably almost a century ago. And his thinking was often in our spirituality, we think being spiritual is about sort of getting away from the world and its problems. You know, I got to go on a retreat. I got to spend more time in church. I got to be sitting in a pew in order to be spiritual. And Bonhoeffer in his fight against Nazi ideology and his fight against what was going on in his own time, he actually saw it as a problem that there are a lot of churches that sort of abdicated their responsibilities to be involved in what was going on, and they just sort of shrugged and said, I'm going to I'm going to stick this one out in the church and not get involved. And Bonhoeffer saw that as a failure of the church to roll up their sleeves and and really invest. And so Bon offer took, took a really serious theological inspiration from the incarnation. So God is up in heaven, and he sees that we are really suffering. And we made a mess. We made a complete mess of this place. And instead of saying, I'm not going down there until they clean that up, you know, God rolls up his sleeves and says, I'm gonna go gonna go down there myself. And I'm gonna not just sort of get my pinky dirty, but I'm gonna get I'm gonna throw all of myself fully into this world, not just on the outskirts, but the deepest parts of its of its mess and suffering. And so Bonhoeffer tries to reclaim a concept of worldliness in a positive way of being courageous enough to journey to the very center of all the problems in the world and bringing the Gospel to there. So I refer to this as holy worldliness. So when we look at so when we look at First Corinthians, you know the paradigm three, three kind of paradigms I use are there are two bad ways of thinking about how to live out our existence on earth. One is holy otherworldliness. Holy otherworldliness is, hey, I'm just sort of waiting. I'm sort of in a big waiting room on Earth, just waiting to leave. You know, I don't know if you remember when you were young, hearing. The Bible refers to basic instructions before leaving Earth. What a ridiculously wrong way of thinking about our lives, because then our lives here really have no purpose. So some people take that mentality, and that's wrong. Another one, though, and this is where First Corinthians comes in is unholy worldliness. So unholy worldliness is where we say, hey, because of Jesus Christ, I have access to resources in heaven and the divine realm. This is where spiritual gifts come in. And in this church, in Corinth, you have Paul says, right away in the in First Corinthians, this church was extremely gifted, just unbelievably gifted. One area that it was clear that they were gifted in was tongues. I refer to this as heavenly languages. And so they could speak in tongues, meaning they could tap into this unique heavenly language. And apparently it was really impressive to hear. I kind of think of this like today in the evangelical sphere, if you have a church where you have a singer, a singer who is just a dynamo, who is like star quality level singer, I'm thinking of somebody specific right now, and she is just, I remember hearing her sing, and I went up to her after her, and I'm like, You need to be on America's Got Talent or something, because, like, you are off the charts good. So I think it was like this in the Corinthian church. And they and they felt like, hey, they're using a worldly construct of like, How can I show myself superior to other people? And they saw, gosh, if I could pull resources from heaven, I could prove myself superior. And in first, Corinthians, 1314, 12, 1314, Paul actually talks about the difference between tongues and prophecy. Now, by prophecy, he doesn't mean like Nostradamus or what he means is God giving you, inspiring you with a word, usually of encouragement to give to a person in the church or the whole congregation. And it doesn't have to be super granular, like, you know, the world's going to end on, you know, may 10 whatever it sounded like, it was going to be just an inspired message to give to the church. And Paul says, Listen, I would rather speak one word of prophecy that's going to build other people up, then say a million things in a heavenly language that nobody understands. Yeah, it sounds cool. And Paul's not dissing tongues. He's just saying you could so easily twist it into a into a weapon to prove yourself better than other people, superior to other people. And so what we see in the Corinthian church really is a case study in abusing the gifts God has given us to turn them into something unholy rather than holy. Holy worldliness is how can I use everything God has given me to raise, raise the quality of life really, of everybody around me, versus raised me up over and against other people.
Joshua Johnson:All through the beginning of this year at our church, we've been going through the god story, working through every every Sunday, working through what we call the story diamond, which is creation, fall, you know, redemption, restoration, and talking through the restoration is that as Jesus shapes and sends us where we get to join him in the restoration, the reconciliation of all thing, right? We get we get to be part of this new creation here on earth, not just when we die. And one of the things we're trying to help people do is think through every aspect of life, and what does new creation look like when it comes to ethnic equality, when it comes to work, when it comes to the arts, what you're doing here in this book is what we've been trying to do for, you know, five months in the church. So if you're I
Nijay Gupta:love the
Joshua Johnson:other people and you're hearing this, get me Jay's book, and let's walk through it, because it'll help you. So if somebody's trying to look at some issues, how do we start to get new creation thinking of like, what are we do? Just like, basically, like an overview. What is Paul trying to do for the Corinthian church? What does it look like to start to think new creation? Thinking,
Nijay Gupta:great question. I love that your that your community is doing that, because I'm going to do, you know, a sub stack series coming up on the basis of my book, Paul for the world. It's not going to be stuff from the book, but it'll be stuff kind of inspired by the same topic, and it's called made for heaven on earth. So we think we're made for heaven, but we're actually made for heaven on earth, right? And one of the things I'm really going to emphasize in that series is debunking some of the assumptions we have about eternal life. So. If we have this mentality that eternal life in Heaven, which I don't think is true, and we could talk about that later, eternal life in Heaven is going to be basically a completely different type of human existence. We're going to stand around a throne and sing all day. We're not going to do regular human stuff, you know, we're going to wear white robes, and we're going to, you know, walk around on streets of gold, like when we exoticize that understanding of eternity, as cool as some of that sounds for like a vacation. The problem with that thinking is it downgrades our existence on earth, if it's like, oh, for eternity, if I'm doing all these other things other than the things I'm doing here, then it kind of downgrades what we're doing here. So what I encourage people to do is to look at texts like Genesis, Genesis one and two, and really get a sense of like, what were we made to do here? How are we made to live? So I talk, when I talk to my students, about how to study the Bible in terms of human existence, you know, you don't just sort of shake everything up into sort of theology potpourri and just kind of willy nilly apply things you think, especially about protology, how was it in the beginning, before sin and eschatology? How will, how will it be in the end? And some things we learn when we do a deep dive study of that is, we were made for relationship. So guess what? We're going to have relationships for eternity. So I had to think about things when I was writing this book. I'd never thought before. Will we have close friends in our in our eternal Of course we will, because to be human is to relate to others. That's, that's, that's built into our DNA. So we'll have friendships, the thinking about friendships here and now and the importance of those relationships. Will we work? Of course, that's one of the very first things that happens in Genesis. And then if you look at other eschatological texts throughout the Old Testament, in the New Testament, beating our swords into plowshares and things like that, we're working. And one thing I learned in researching for this book is often in an American paradigm, we make rest and work opposites, and in the Bible, they don't. You can have work and rest sort of together. It's sort of a rhythm of life. And so I actually think will work in eternity, and that sounds terrible to people. Oh no, oh no, but it's not the grind like think about doing something that you absolutely love. I love cooking. So think about the labor of making a meal that just is delicious and everybody loves and it's truly is a labor of love, so without sin. Think about how much we could get done in terms of labors of love. We were meant to be productive, that sort of thing. Will we have ethnic identity in heaven? You look at paintings this, I had a lot of fun with this in the book, you look at paintings for the Renaissance period, Baroque period, and everybody is the same color, everybody's wearing the same clothes, and all this. But if you look at Jesus, Jesus is still Jesus. I think we'll still call him Jesus. And guess what? Jesus is Jewish name, but it's a Jewish name they're actually pronouncing from Greek and so, or else would be Yeshua, right? So thinking through some of those things I've never thought through before, like I have darker skin color, you could guess from my name, but I do. Will I still have this skin color, or will I turn white? Why would I turn white? I don't know. It doesn't make any sense, right? So, so I have this skin color, and so I will probably have, you know, thinking through some of that, I think if we start to have a more textured view of our eternal existence, then we look back at now and we say, Gosh, I'll have this body, but in an upgraded form, versus swap me out for the generic one. That leads to all kinds of differences. You're asking, how does that change our day to day life? Everything we do on this life, Paul says helps to make us worthy of the kingdom. By that, he doesn't mean we have to earn our way in the kingdom. But he is saying something like, start start living it now. Start doing it now. And so if we say what we're doing eternity is going to be similar to what we're doing now, except without sin, holding us back. I think that means vibrancy to life. And it says, gosh, this work I'm doing planting in my yard. This work I'm doing mulching or whatever has meaning. This work I'm doing, you know, talking, talking with somebody at a party who's discouraged, and I'm encouraging them. That has meaning. All of these things have meaning, not just to get to a sales pitch for heaven, but to say this, this all matters. This all matters in the in the big calculus of life,
Joshua Johnson:there is hope and there's meaning here today, which is man so, so good for this world now, and we need it more than ever. It feels like I want to think through some context in the Greco Roman world, what, what was happening in First Corinthians? So let's. Talk it through economics. So what is Paul saying, how we should actually, like, treat one another with and use or utilize some of the wealth that we have or the disparity that there is within the wealth? What was he seeing in the church in Corinth? What was happening in the Greco Roman world that way, that was making it that way. And what is his, what was his advice to live
Nijay Gupta:creation? I mean, what was happening then is a lot like what's happening now. You have a few people with lots and lots and lots of money, unnecessarily, exorbitant amount of money, the equivalent of billions of dollars to the 1% this is very well documented in terms of the senatorial class, the high class, the equestrian class, you know, just just below that. And then you have this massive income gap, and then you have the 99% who are just scraping by. And so you have exploitative systems. You have exploitative systems. You have something called the patron client system, where you have these people in heavy debt who latch themselves on to a, you know, a person with money, and they basically are into kind of almost a slavery debt sort of situation, just to try to pay off a little bit of their bill. So people are desperate, I think, like they in many ways, like they are now. And in that desperation, it can often be sort of a dog eat dog world, you know, you say, Hey, I can't help you, because I'm looking out for me. And so you have a situation, for example, where you have these churches experiencing, you know, destitution due to a famine in Judea and just devastation. So you think about maybe today, like what's going on in Ukraine. You think about what's going on in Gaza, and you think people with a high level of need, and Joshua you and are looking ourselves, saying, Hey, I still got to feed my kids. But actually we have money. Because if you've ever gone the movie theater, you have money. You know, if you if you go out to dinner, you have money. And so what does Paul say this Corinthians, who are kind of up and down economically, and at some point they had some money, and they said, hey, I'll give to that fund, Paul that you're collecting for these churches. And then he comes to collect, and they say, I you know what? Maybe not this year, maybe next year. And Paul sends, you know, Second Corinthians, eight and nine. He says, Listen, listen, guys. I know what it feels like to feel the pinch. He says this in Philippians, I know. I know great need. I know being hungry, stomach growling, hungry. I know. You know sleepless nights, being in the cold. He says, Second Corinthians, you know, I've been shipwrecked, I've been in the desert, I've been hunted. But he says, Listen, he talks about something that scholars call a Goldilocks economy. Paul says, I'm not trying to rob you guys. I'm not trying to take your last penny. But listen, if, even if you have a little bit for a rainy day, give it to these guys who got nothing. Give it to them who have nothing. And guess what? Guess what? The way the world works, they're going to be they're going to be in a better position eventually, and then when you're struggling, they're going to help you out. That's not communism. What that is is sharing. It's just a basic concept of sharing. I actually start that chapter. I really had a lot of fun with that chapter. Joshua. I call I start with the chapter. The title is crazy rich Christians, and I'm playing off of Crazy Rich Asians. And I'm really talking about these pastors who want, like, an $86 million jet saying, Hey, I gotta, I gotta be able to get places to do ministry. And I'm thinking
Joshua Johnson:the private jets, the new donkey.
Nijay Gupta:Yes, there was a pastor who said he was confronted about wanting, wanting kind of luxury items, and he said, If Jesus were here today, he wouldn't be riding a donkey. And there's a great I put this in the book. I'm shocked that my publisher allowed me to do this, but I put this from The Daily Show. Ronnie Chang had this segment in the book about this pastor, and he said, Maybe Jesus would have been riding a donkey, but you went straight from donkey to $86 million jet. That's literally the entire spectrum of all transportation. You could have picked anything in the middle. And he, I think he said, like, you know, the donkey is the Toyota Corolla of the first century or something. I thought that was just hilarious. But in America, and I'm looking at myself in the mirror here. We do have a scarcity mindset with our money. And I have this, I struggle with this, probably every day. And Paul has this mindset of the man of feeding. You got to live day by day. You know, this is Jesus's Give us this day our daily bread. And he says, Not that, not that anyone would have too much. You. Certainly not an $86 million and not that anyone have too little, but just enough. And there's a there's a saying from Proverbs, actually learned from Craig Blomberg. And it's from Proverbs. I can't remember exact verse, but it's like, give me neither poverty nor wealth, and man, what a challenging prayer. And this is exactly what Paul's teaching in Second Corinthians eight and nine. And it takes a lot of faith. It takes a lot of faith to say, Lord, give me neither poverty nor wealth. And the mentality really is and I think it's true today, but it's hidden. The economics are hidden to us. The mentality is, if I'm wealthy, it's at someone else's expense. Now that that, I think that is true, but it's hidden from us often, because I see someone on the street, and I don't think I made them poor, but the reality is, in some way, I am involved in that economy. So it's a tough subject. It's a tough subject, but if you read Paul's letters, I mean, this is a guy. This is a guy who I was really challenged by digging into this. He was a pastor who could have easily said, first, Corinthians nine churches should pay me. Churches should pay me a reasonable salary for me to travel around and do work. I mean, today he could easily make a case for 150k easily. But he said, Listen, I'm going to be a day laborer. That doesn't mean he didn't make very much money. It just means he worked hard with his hands outside of ministry, and maybe he did ministry while he was working. But he was a laborer. I mean, he wasn't. He would be what we would think of as blue collar. We would use the term blue color. That's what that would be, the category of work that he was, that he that, and he could have done other things. He could have been like, I'm a philosopher that gets hired to work at parties and, you know, but he said, I'm gonna be a day laborer. Joshua. That is really challenging for me to wrap my head around, as a paid academic, this idea that I would say to myself, I'm gonna go, you know, work at Chick fil A. Actually, I would work at Chick fil A, if you're listening Chick fil A, I would be a store manager. But that, that that I think I'm a little concerned with our ministry paradigm to these big churches where pastors are making a bazillion dollars and book deals and, you know, all of that. And to look at dusty old Jesus and dusty old Paul. I love Tom Wright. Tom Wright does this often. When he's speaking. He'll show up somewhere. He'll say, it's way better than his accent, but he'll say, whenever St Paul turned up somewhere, there was a riot. Wherever I turn up, they serve tea. Have you heard him say that before?
Joshua Johnson:Yeah, it's hilarious. It's
Nijay Gupta:a great
Joshua Johnson:learning that's so good. I think we're talking about like economic, economic disparity or ethnic equality in there. I think it helps to go into the context of what was happening then. Then we could say, Okay, what is happening now? I mean, you look at the economic disparity, I think around, say maybe around 20% of the wealth was owned by the top 1% in Greco, Roman world, or so, there's a new study that in America, 31.7% of the wealth in America is owned by the top 1% it is. I mean, we have economic disparity. So as we we look at some of these things that Paul says that, hey, now we can start to live new creation, like within economics, this world can actually start to maybe look a little bit better and different and different when it comes to these things. You talk a lot about the Stoics, because the stoics were really influential in the day and age, in the Greco Roman world, stoicism now today is like making a comeback. And so I think,
Nijay Gupta:yes,
Joshua Johnson:I think it actually has, like, your talk about stoicism actually has a lot to say about today. Just give me some of the the overview, maybe where we headed with stoicism. Why? Why did you talk through the influencers of the day?
Nijay Gupta:Yeah, stoics were huge. And I think because sometimes scholars have tried to portray Paul as a Christian stoic. That is not true. They've tried to portray Jesus as sort of pseudo stoic. That's not true. However, what is true is there is some overlap. So you think about Venn diagrams, there's some overlap. So when I think about Paul getting really energetic in in sort of geeky conversations, I think sometimes he just made no progress when he's trying to have philosophical conversations about the meaning of life, about eternity, about, you know, whatever. I think whenever he ran into Stoics, I think there would be a lot to disagree with, but there would be a lot of they're asking the same. Questions, and so what is stoicism? There are different philosophies out there. There's platonic philosophies, Epicureanism, there's other things. But the stoics were really interested in the question, really, of what's the meaning of life? Why are we here on Earth? So Stoics believed in God. They didn't have super rigid beliefs about exactly how it all worked, but they believed there's the big man up in heaven, and they they control fate. They control fate. So your life is on some path that's set before you. You are not the master of what's happening in your life, but, but there's a big but there for the Stoics, you can't control how you react to all of that. And one of the things that would get in the way is too much emotionalism, getting too upset, getting too bent out of shape. You know, we say today, roll with the punches. That is a very stoic way of thinking is roll with the punches, the sense of, don't punch back, don't try to avoid the punches. But what fate throws at you, accept and try to convert into steadiness, into progress, towards acceptance, into staying even keeled. This is where we get the modern term stoic as sort of motionless. That wasn't exactly what they meant by that, but that's pretty close. And Paul has some similar sayings in in Philippians about contentment, contentment. And I've learned the secret of contentment, how to be, did it and all that. Now, the stoics thought the key to everything is learning philosophy and sort of meditation and this and that. And Paul would say, No, we got to deal with the sin problem. We got to deal with the disease. You guys are just dealing with symptoms. We got to deal with the disease. We got to follow Jesus this and that. There would have been other differences. But the reason why, I think, Okay, this is not the reason, but a popular version of stoicism today, would be Star Wars. Star Wars is sort of a mixture of Christianity and stoicism, maybe some Buddhism thrown in there for good measure. Same thing with the matrix and so stoicism, if you if you have trouble understanding what stoicism is, some of my friends who are stoic scholars are probably going to die that I'm saying this because it's probably not true. That's as true as I would like it to be, but like Yoda would be a good example of a stoic of like, feelings are the pathway to the dark side. You know, that sort of thing. Paul was all about feelings. Jesus was all about feelings. But there is a sense of restraint that is really important in the Christian tradition. So I think stoicism is making a comeback, because it's a very ancient form of processing wellness. I actually have a chapter in Hero wellness. And so I actually do think Paul and the Stoics were both very interested in what we think of as mental wellness. And I think there are some great things you can learn from the stoics that are so. So what, how I would explain this Joshua, is the difference between general revelation and special revelation. Special revelation is wisdom in the Bible that you can only get from God, that you can only get from the Bible. And general revelation would be things maybe in the Bible that you can learn from other places in life as well. So something like, you know, a gentle answer turns away wrath. Okay, that's great and true, but I could learn that also from other teachings throughout the world. That still comes from God, but it comes from common grace, rather than, you know, sort of specific prophecy from heaven. And we see lots of that in the stoics.
Joshua Johnson:You walk through justice, ethnic equality, economics, work, friendship, athletics, wellness and arts and walk through that as you were working through those issues. And what does new creation life look like in there? What one of those started to get you thinking something new and maybe challenged you to live differently.
Nijay Gupta:Oh my gosh, that's like picking my favorite children here. I'm not allowed to do that, but I will say I got really jazzed up, probably about the one on the arts. This is my chapter 11, and part this chapter is partly inspired by something that was said by a Hebrew Bible scholar. I think his name is alter. Robert Alter. Does that sound familiar to you? His last name is alter, and he did a translation of the Hebrew Bible that came out a handful of years ago, and someone asked him why he wrote that translation. And I listened to a podcast. It was really fascinating, and he said, and basically they were saying, What's wrong with the other translations? You know, the J Jewish Publication Society translation, the NASB, the NIV, all this other stuff. And here, here's what he said. He said Bible translators. So he's talking about people like NIJ Gupta, by the way, he didn't, doesn't know who I am, but he's talking about people like me. He's like Bible translators, traditional Bible translators. They're. Trained well in linguistics, Greek Hebrew, ancient world, archeology, ancient culture, theology, but there's one big thing that's missing. They're not trained in art and literature. And he said that's that's like the other half of the equation. They're able to do one half of the equation and not the other half. And I think he's right. I think he's right that it's a way that we think about the Bible. We think about the Bible as truth which is good. We think about the Bible as theology, which is good. But do we think of the Bible as art? And most evangelicals that I know, and I'm in that big, weird family, most of them, I think, have been trained not to think about it as art, because what do we do? We try to extract we try to extract it. Think about, like, what a health guru say right now. Like, instead of just squeezing juice out of an orange, eat the frickin orange, you know, like, like, eat the whole orange instead of and so what we do is we try to extract juice out of the Bible when we're supposed to be eating the whole Bible. And the Bible is 99.9% art, I'm reading, like, a 600 page commentary on Revelation. And the whole time I'm reading this commentary, I'm thinking, John, you could have done this just in a few sentences. Why all of this? Why all this numerology, why all of this symbolism, like, Why? Why? Why? Why? But then we'll go and watch, like, a four hour Lord of the Rings movie, when you know what I mean. So it's like, okay, so much of the Bible is art, and when we look at Paul. So I tried to read Paul through that lens of every artistic bit, not just hymns like Philippians, two Colossians, one First Timothy, but also little bits of liturgy To Him be the glory forever and ever sort of stuff. And then also his metaphors, metaphors of music. One of my favorite is his metaphors of building. And I had to think through like, what buildings would he see on a regular basis? How would that have inspired him? You know, these rich, rich, rich metaphors, metaphors of family, metaphors of agriculture. So he's sitting in a field and he's looking at plants, or he's walking around Corinth or Ephesus or Rome, and he's looking at the amphitheaters, and he's looking at the race track, and he's looking at, you know, the City Hall building, and he's inspired. And I think, and I think with preachers, people come up to me all the time, Joshua, and they say, nijay, you should go to such and such church, because they're an expository preaching church? And sometimes I call expository preaching suppository preaching, because I'd rather have a suppository than to listen to expository. Because sometimes expository is just a way of saying unimaginative Bible study that's kind of boring. I know that's not what everybody means by it, but often it's just sort of like, I'm gonna just read my random thoughts on random Bible verses. And when you look at Paul and how he teaches, it's filled with so much imagination, so much beauty. Look at Jesus teaching so many stories, so many beautiful stories, so many vivid stories. And so I think preaching really is at its best when it combines biblical interpretation with imagination, and then you think of artists, and you think of visual artists and how we're inspired by beautiful art or beautiful storytelling. So I had a lot of fun with that, and what it's done for me is try to be more creative in my teaching. Try to be more creative using the arts, whether it's creating a story, whether it's showing an image. I mean, this is how we how we are inspired in our lives, is through imagination, art,
Joshua Johnson:arts and humanities in universities are going away because there's no funding. Like it's really it's a dire time for this, especially in a time where we need a new imagination and a better, more creative imagination for what the world should look like and what new creation looks like and where we should be going. What are some things to help us live in like New imagination or creative imagination for the world right now,
Nijay Gupta:to me, it's not rocket science, if we if we learn to be like children again. You know, I was preaching at a church a couple months ago, and I was visiting another church, and I preached, and afterwards, you know, a young girl, maybe Middle School, came up to me and she had been drawing while I was preaching, and apparently she does this every week, and she drew like a bouquet of flowers, and it tied into the sermon, and it had wording from the sermon, and it was rudimentary, but my gosh, I was like, what if we all did this? And. Church, what if we actually told people, here's here's pen, pencil, just draw or Doodle in a really imaginative way while you listen, you know? And what images come to mind, what symbols come to mind? And man, she was inspired by doing what she did while I was preaching, and then she gave it to me, and I was inspired. I was like, gosh, this is way better than people scrolling on their phones while I'm preaching or, you know, checking out or whatever, going out to get a cup of coffee. So I think we have to actually invite people in the church to be using their imagination during the sermon or in their daily lives when they're reading the Bible, write a reflection using, you know, I don't, it takes training, doesn't it? I mean, people don't become great artists overnight, so we have to start training them. And so I think we have to, we have to be leaders in this, you know, I kind of joke about how bad Christian movies are. You know, we, every now and again, we force our kids to watch a Christian movie, and they're just so bad. But if we look back to some of the best, you know, your CS, Lewis stuff, Tolkien stuff, others, you know, Malcolm guyite with poetry. And you know, there's so many amazing musicians out there. I'm really into John Gara, just discovered him more recently. And John Guerra is amazing, the wording, the way he's interpreting the Gospels. I mean, I think he's really transformed how I read the gospels because of just turns of phrases, just powerful. And we need artists. What you know, when we have conferences, when we have conferences for pastors, do we need an EJ Gupta? Maybe you decide. But do we need an artist to come and talk about beauty? We need to lean into esthetics, you know, this is the study of beauty, right? We need to have, you know, we need seminary classes on beauty, you know. And when you train people to be able to do that, we need artists and residents at churches and at seminaries. And we think this is icing, but if we read the Bible, we need to realize it's not, it's not icing, it is essential. We have to train ourselves to be the artists. So I don't know. I don't care. I can't remember what the question was, but I get really excited about this.
Joshua Johnson:That's good. I'm excited about it too. We need this. We need more creativity. We need the arts. If it's the first gift given, the Holy Spirit, like embodied is, is actually an Arts Committee to build the tabernacle. Then I think it's important. I think we should embody the arts and creativity. If you could talk to then your readers talk to people. What's your hope for, Paul, for the world? What do you want people to get?
Nijay Gupta:I think the main thing I want them to get is, every minute you live in this world is not wasted. It's not sort of biding your time. It's not meaningless. Every minute you live has eternal significance. My son recently broke, shattered part of his collarbone. He had to have surgery. He was out of commission for, you know, it's been, it's been, you know, five, five weeks ish, it's he's not gonna play sports for another month. And I've been in situations like that. I broke my my foot fifth minute, our soul, and I wasn't out for that long, but I was out for a bit, and I sort of waved that off on my calendar as, like this, part of my life is now wasted, you know, because I can't, I couldn't walk, you know, he can't play sports. And so it's easy to write that off and be like, Okay, I'll start living again. In three months, I'll start living again. But to be able to say, like, every minute here, the main event is not then some other time, this is the main event. We're living the main event. You know, this isn't Paul, but I think Second Peter, or First Peter says, angels long to look into these things. I imagine the angels, there's a glass, you know, there's a glass ceiling of earth, and the angels are in heaven, stooping down with their faces pressing the glass, like, what's going on down there? Like we were wondering what's going up there. And they're, they're actually saying, we're watching what's going on down there. So we're the main event. What I want people to walk away with is because of Jesus, Christ, and especially because you have the Spirit of Jesus in you every every second, every minute is precious. Is precious, not just to sort of get souls into heaven, but to be these working models of new creation that I can live into this, lean into this. In every peanut butter and jelly sandwich I make for my kids, in that commute to work where I am trying to learn another language, because I don't want to waste that time, you know, I want to I want to learn and be productive so I can communicate. I tend to separate my time into sacred and secular. My sacred time is is my work because I'm doing theology, my secular time is, you know, when I'm watching sports, whatever. No, that's growth too. I'm being inspired to grow. I'm being inspired to challenge myself. I'm being inspired to see excellence in action, and how can I be more excellent? So I really want to fire people up, to get away from the escapism and to just, you know, I think of the. Remember the movie Independence Day, Independence Day, and you have Jeff Goldblum come to this realization that, you know, there's a countdown and aliens are going to invade. And so everybody is fleeing from DC or wherever they're going on this they're all moving this direction. And then there's this one car going in the other direction, which is Jeff Goldblum and his father going there. And so I'm thinking everybody's trying to get out right of this BURNING WORLD AND and we needed people on the empty highway going towards it saying, Hey, I don't know if we can fix everything, but we've actually been given all the resources to do the most good. And unfortunately, there are people like the Corinthians. Some of the Corinthians, there are Christians doing very bad things. So first of all, stop that. But then let's get on that highway going in the opposite direction as everybody else, everybody's fleeing like rats. And here we are. We're going to the smack dab center, like Bonhoeffer said, as Paul inspired and saying, roll up your sleeves. There's work to be done. If jeez, can do it, and Paul could do it. You can do it
Joshua Johnson:too. Amen, let's do it. It's good. Well, NIJ, before you go, I'd love a recommendation or two. Anything you've been reading or watching lately you could recommend.
Nijay Gupta:Yeah, oh, man, jeez, I just finished season two of paradise. I don't know if you saw paradise, but it's a dystopian show. We
Joshua Johnson:just started watching season one, first two episodes, and I'm like, it needs to get a little better.
Nijay Gupta:Yeah, okay, yeah. Does
Joshua Johnson:it get better?
Nijay Gupta:Persevere. Persevere through season one. Season one's challenging. I didn't love season one, but the middle, by the middle of season two, it's some of the best TV I've ever watched. There's a couple episodes in the middle of season two, so you got to persevere. But I like, I like that actor, Sterling, Sterling K Brown. I think I really like the actor. They have some special cameos in season two. So I would, I would stick with it. In terms of books, a big inspiration for Paul, for the world, for me, is the work of NT Wright. He has a new book. I actually have it on my shelf. I haven't read it yet, but I've thumbed through it, and I think it's called God's homecoming. Did you interview him yet? Or I
Joshua Johnson:did forgot you read it? Yeah,
Nijay Gupta:that's great. So I yeah, I think that's that's pulling in the same direction. Yes, you know, it's kind of it's this renewal theology. So I'd highly recommend that that's and then, and then Joey Dotson, I don't know if you've talked to Joey yet, but you definitely should. I think it's called Paul the rabbi philosopher. Oh my gosh, I'm botching up these titles, but I've been digging into it. He did a sub stack essay on my sub stack. So he's looking at Paul and trying to understand, is Paul Jewish? Is Paul more Greco Roman? And the answer is yes, and it's a really fantastic book. He's a great scholar, read Joey dodson's new book.
Joshua Johnson:Excellent. It's good. Well, go get Paul for the world. It's fantastic. I think I told NIJ, it might be my favorite book of his that I've read here that and because it is so it's, it's resurrectiony, it's new creation II. It's like, it's also contextual, thinking about, how do we actually read contexts in our world, now, in the world back then, in the Greco Roman world? Yeah, you've done a fantastic job here. I think it's really practical for so many people, the way that people can actually reframe and retrain the way that they think and they see the world, so that it is actually about here and now and not just about escaping. Fantastic. So go get Paul for the world. It is great. Anywhere else you'd like to point people to. How could they connect with you find what you're doing.
Nijay Gupta:Yeah. Dr, AJ suboda And I have a podcast called Slow theology. We have a book by the same title, but the podcast is ongoing. We we do Bible series stuff. We do, you know, questions from listeners, so check that out. And then I have a substack called Engaging scripture for all things Bible and biblical studies.
Joshua Johnson:Great. Well, NIJ, thank you. It's fantastic conversation. As always, love talking to you and chatting. So thanks. Appreciate
Nijay Gupta:it. Appreciate it. You.
