Nijay Gupta on Why Paul Was Not Just Preaching About the Afterlife

What did the Apostle Paul actually teach about heaven, resurrection, and the meaning of life on earth?

Dr. Nijay Gupta joins Faithful Politics to talk about Paul, heaven, resurrection, and why Christian faith is not meant to function as an escape from the world. Drawing from his new book Paul for the World, Gupta explains how Paul’s letters speak to ordinary life - friendship, work, suffering, grief, money, community, and hope. The conversation challenges the idea that the gospel is mainly about getting to heaven after death and instead presents Paul’s vision of resurrection as a call to live faithfully in the world God intends to renew.

Paul for the World: A Grounded Vision for Finding Meaning in This Life, Not Just the Next by Nijay K. Gupta
https://bakerpublishinggroup.com/products/9781540966926_paul-for-the-world


Guest Bio
Dr. Nijay K. Gupta is the Julius R. Mantey Professor of New Testament at Northern Seminary, a senior translator for the New Living Translation, and cohost of the Slow Theology podcast. He is the author of numerous books on the New Testament and early Christianity, including Tell Her Story, Strange Religion, and Paul for the World: A Grounded Vision for Finding Meaning in This Life, Not Just the Next. His work focuses on helping readers understand Scripture in its historical, theological, and practical context.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:16

Does Paul talk about really heavy theological stuff in his letters? Of course he does. But why does he write his letters? He writes his letters for very this worldly things, the healing of a broken relationship in his letter to Philemon. How to deal with death, death of loved ones, 1 Thessalonians, how to deal with suffering, Flippians. He has to take a collection for the poor saints in Jerusalem or in Judea who are dealing with a famine, 2 Corinthians 8 and 9. Problems with work and the importance of work, 2 Thessalonians. And when we think of Paul, we think of the greatest theologian that ever lived. True. But what did what did he do with a big chunk of his time? He worked. He worked with his hands. He says, 1 Thessalonians 4, aspire to live a quiet life, work with your two, you know, weathered hands, and mind your dang business. That's what he said.

SPEAKER_02 1:06

Well, hey there, folks. Welcome to another episode of Faithful Politics Podcast. I am your faithful co-host, Josh Bertram, and of course I have our political co-host, Will Wright. It's good to see you, Will. Good to be seen, Josh. Thanks. Absolutely. It's always good to be seen. And here we explore the intersection of theology, public life, and all that good stuff, and try to figure out all the crazy stuff happening in our culture. And maybe, maybe we could give you some hope today because we are joined by Dr. Nij Gupta. He is the Julius R. Manty, Professor of New Testament at Northern Seminary, senior translator of the New Living Translation. Come on, somebody, co-host of the Slow Theology Podcast, an award-winning author of books like Tell Her Story and Strange Religion, which we have talked to them about, at least Strange Religion. I thought Tell Her Story too, but either way, he's been on like, I don't know, five, six, and we're supposed to send him like a like a plaque by now or a platinum thing. I gave that to Will NJ, and I so I'm not sure if he sent that to you yet. I think he was wearing my bathrobe. We got to send the Faithful Paul. Actually, that's not a bad idea. Faithful Politics bathrobe. Who else is sending out bathrobes? I love that. But today we're actually going to talk to him about his latest book, Paul for the World: a Grounded Vision for Finding Meaning in This Life, not just the next. Dr. Goopa, Nij, my friend, our friend here. Thanks for being on. Welcome to Faithful Politics again.

SPEAKER_01 2:37

My pleasure. And actually, after I'd finished writing this book, I thought this is exactly what Josh and Will want to talk about. So I'm so excited that you're interested in talking about this book.

SPEAKER_02 2:49

I am always interested in talking to you about any book. But yes, this book in particular is so it's so keen. It's it's relevant. It's for our times. And so I'd love for you to just give a sense of what's the gist of the book for those who are listening. Kind of give them some context here, the gist and and what inspired you to write it.

SPEAKER_01 3:12

Yeah, absolutely. You know, I'll tell you something exciting. I just I just started a substack stub stack series based on this book, Paul for the World. Nice. And it's called Made for Heaven on Earth. And the first post I just put out like five minutes ago. And it actually, the post is it's a little bit of clickbait. It's called C. S. Lewis is wrong. I know, I know. I love C.S. Lewis, but let me tell you why. And are you guys C.S. Lewis people?

SPEAKER_02 3:43

I do like C.S. Lewis, but I'm not gonna say offended if you whatever.

SPEAKER_01 3:47

I'm gonna say a quote, and then uh Josh, I'm testing you, I'm gonna see if you can finish the quote. If I have in me, if I have in me a desire that this world can't satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world. That's what he says. But is that correct? But is that correct? And and and and and I go through, he has this chapter in Mere Christianity where he talks about this and he's basically trying to he's trying to talk about Christian hope. And I I I grew up with that quote, I love that quote. I think there is something meaningful in there. I think he said it wrong because the way he said it implies that we humans were created for heaven, but we got stuck on earth. Right. And how many how many Christians carry around that wrong idea every day of their lives? Well, it's pervasive because I I lived for thirty thirty years. I lived as a Christian for thirty years, assuming that quote was correct.

SPEAKER_02 4:50

Yes, same.

SPEAKER_01 4:51

But what are the I guess my book is really asking the question what are the negative impacts of thinking that life will only really start when we go to heaven? I used to do door-to-door evangelism in high school with my youth group in north central Ohio. Very Ohio thing to do. And here's how we were trained to do evangelism, how to preach the gospel. Here's how we were trained. Knock on a door, we'd we'd say the person, Hi, how are you today? Good. We're with such and such church and we're telling people about Jesus. What level of assurance do you have that you will go to heaven when you die?

SPEAKER_02 5:27

Did you have a revolver and ask them, would you be willing to play Russian?

SPEAKER_01 5:32

No, we had the sword of the spirit. And and and if they said 100%, we would say, God bless you, we'd leave. But if they said 99%, 50%, 20%, then we'd tell them about Jesus, and then we would tell them how they can get to heaven. What does that tell us about life on earth? It tells us life on earth is basically meaningless. Right. We're just biting our time, we're just sitting around waiting. That has that has a few effects. One effect is we can't actually address the hopelessness in the world. All we can say is abandon ship. Right? I grew up with the Bible as basic instructions before leaving Earth, B-I-B-L-E. And I actually talk in my book about the Heaven's Gate mass suicide. Do you guys remember this from the 90s? Where there's a group of people, I think they're in California, who who believed they had to transcend this earth, transcend their bodies. So they took they took po a poisonous cocktail of of drugs and and drink to ride the the the rare appearance of the hailbob comet into a spiritual plane. Um there is a huge disconnect between how people look at the Bible, even Christians, even C.S. Lewis, who I love. There's a it just a slight word change probably could have helped there. But there's a huge disconnect between like we've been given this huge gift of the gospel, and we failed to apply it to our life in the here and now. So my book really is trying to say, what if the gospel as Paul saw it is not just relevant for later, not just relevant for you know a buy and build relevant for here and now for every moment of our life, whether you're a teacher, engineer, food service worker, Uber driver, what if it's relevant for all the things that make up the substance of our life, like friendship, work, sports. I have a chapter on sports, which I got a huge kick out of writing. I love it. You know, every everything we do, everything we say has meaning because of the gospel. Yes, yes, that's what you called it. It is, yeah, you got that right.

SPEAKER_02 7:45

I love that. I love that. So, you know, I I was thinking about this, even as you're talking, and so I I I love history. You know, I think that's probably part of loving the Bible, right? It's hard, yeah. Like once you start getting into the Bible and starting to learn, oh, I gotta be a historian, I guess. I had to learn something about his story, history, because this is not just his story, but I had to learn about history itself and the method, the methodology of history and all that stuff. But as I was digging into this, I get to ancient Egypt, right? In ancient Egypt, from which the Israelites came, right, when they were in captivity and came out of that. And I was I've been thinking about that. In ancient Egypt, they had so much that they did to talk about the afterlife. It was it was almost they had a book of the dead, they had incantations, they had spells, they had all sorts of they they literally walked you step by step by step by step till you can get into the I don't know, maybe that's the Roman one, the alluthian fields, or whatever it is, to get to their version of heaven.

SPEAKER_01 8:48

Their paradise, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 8:49

Their paradise, right? But it was in, and then people came in, they gave you food, the pyramids were all about the afterlife. They're massive graves. So, what is this saying? Looking at that and then trying to find details about the afterlife in the Bible compared to Egypt, say it's sparse. And I think this is part of your point, but I'd love for you to kind of dig into that idea. You don't have to talk about ancient Egypt. Like, I don't want you to get out of an area you're comfortable. I mean, I'm sure you know uh more about it than I do, probably, but I don't want you to have to go there unless you want to. But it's more bringing out this idea. Man, it seems like ancient cultures actually did have some sense of the afterlife, and they talked about it in some detail, and yet Christianity and Judaism is different, or is it? Could could you help even unpack that more?

SPEAKER_01 9:41

Yeah. First of all, we we we today often think of heaven as this place really, really far away in kind of another dimension, and you sit on clouds and you eat grapes, and there's like baby angels flying around. For many ancient people, their idea of paradise is actually somewhere kind of close by, which is why they say look up to the mountains, right? When you have the transfiguration, it happens on a mountain, you know, you have Mount Sinai happen on a mountain. So they're not thinking it's in another dimension, they're thinking it's pretty close, but we just can't get there. We can't get there unless we have some Sherpa, you know, help us out. So, first of all, we kind of exoticize in many ways, and there's some reasons for that, you know, a lot of the metaphorical imagery that's really powerful in the Bible, right? But if you just look at Paul, for example, he says extremely little about what we'll actually be doing after we die. And and and so people have asked me before, why is there so much obsession in the Christian tradition? Because Josh, I think what you're saying is right. The Bible does say much less about the afterlife than we obsess over. Yes. And and and I think one of the I've been asked this question already several times, and one of the re answers I I think is true is because the church fathers started debating this in the third and fourth century. So we ended up camping out in some of these texts. Today you'll be with me in paradise. What does that mean? Or for Philippians 1, I'll depart and be with Christ. What does that mean? Or you have some of the stuff in Revelation and the sea will be no more. What does that mean? So I think what we've done is we have zoomed in on these texts and become obsessed with them because there's some big important things that happen. What's judgment all about? Will you know, will we at one point not have a body? You know, 2 Corinthians 5, some of that stuff. But what I really try to do in my book is to say we've been mistrained based on sermons, Christian teachings. We've been mistrained on how we should read Paul. When I was a teenager, when I was a young person, here's how I would read Paul. I would scan his letters looking for the important theological stuff, and I'd skip past the mundane stuff. Be as if as if that was just sort of like fast-forwarding.

SPEAKER_02 12:16

Titus, we're gonna forget about these. Yeah, what's all this?

SPEAKER_01 12:21

I had a friend who memorized the book of Romans in seminary, his name's Eric. And he got to chapter 16, and he said, NJ, should I memorize chapter 16? And we sat around and batted around and said, Ah, might as well finish it out. But now I would say actually, a lot of the really important stuff. I'm a historian, you know, Josh, you love history, I'm a historian. And actually, it's it's a gold mine. Romans 16 is a gold mine because it actually tells us how the Christians lived. We we get obsessed with how they thought. I really want to know also how did they live? And we get a lot of that stuff in in the places that we often think not to do a sermon on. I I want to hear more sermons on Romans 16 or the very end of Philippians or the very end of 2 Timothy. So one thing I realized in terms of where this book came from, Paul for the World, is I teach a class, a seminary class on Paul's theology, and I've done this for about 15 years, and students can write on any topic they want. And probably for the first 10 years of me teaching this class, students would write on the big ology eschatology, pneumatology, Christology, soteriology, all the big stuff, right? The heavy theological stuff. But just in the last five to ten years, students started to come with different questions. What does Paul think about the poor? What does Paul think about money and how money is used in society, economics? What does Paul think about racism? What does Paul one student said, What does Paul think about the neighborhood? I'm like, I've never actually thought of that before. One student said, Can I do a paper on Paul and wellness? No, there's a wellness crisis, a mental wellness crisis. I was like, geez. Um so they came to say, Well, are there resources? I'm like, ah, there's this$200 book, there's this$150 book, there's this obscure article. So I thought, gosh, what if I put this all in a book? And that led me to a kind of epiphany, and this is the pif epiphany that's at the heart of my book. Does Paul talk about really heavy theological stuff in his letters? Of course he does. But why does he write his letters? He writes his letters for very this worldly things, the healing of a broken relationship in his letter to Philemon, how to deal with death, the death of loved ones, 1 Thessalonians, how to deal with suffering, Philippians. He has to take a collection for the poor saints in Jerusalem who are in Judea who are dealing with a famine, 2 Corinthians 8 and 9. Problems with work and the importance of work, 2 Thessalonians. And when we think of Paul, we think of the greatest theologian that ever lived. True. But what did what did he do with a big chunk of his time? He worked. He worked with his hands. He says, 1 Thessalonians 4, aspire to live a quiet life, work with your two, you know, weathered hands, and mind your dang business. That's what he says.

SPEAKER_02 15:36

I love that.

SPEAKER_00 15:43

So, you know, and I and I met and I'm asking that this question kind of from a very particular point of view, because like a lot of a lot of the stuff that you include in your book, it's it's pretty dense for me. Like, I'm not a theologian, like I'm the pol political wing, right? So like if you want a play-by-play or chapter by chapter summary of the 595-page, you know, report on eradicating anti-Christian national anti-Christian national government. Like, I'm your guy. But but w one of the conversations I often hear when it comes to like Paul is like, you know, why are we even paying attention to Paul? Like he's not he's not he's not the red letter person. And and and I and I think I think it's an important question, especially for me. Like, I mean, I'm a Christian, but I I I don't know, baby Christian, probably in Trump terms. I bec I came to the faith in 2008, so you know, whatever the timeline means for that. But I'm I I just I don't even know what the importance of Paul is. You know, I know he wrote a lot of the lot of the books in the Bible. So can you just kind of help like you know, put Paul in sort of a a context only you probably could uh could could look at to kind of help us better understand?

SPEAKER_01 16:54

Yeah, great question. I don't think anyone's ever asked me that question before. I think it's a great question. So, you know, the first the first thing to say, probably in terms of the impact of Paul, is every systematic theol theology that's ever been written is primarily an expansion of the Apostle Paul. The most famous, I don't know if I have it right in front of me, probably the most famous Pauline theology written by James D.G. Dunn is actually based on Romans, the the outline of Romans. But if you think about it this way, why don't we base our whole theology on Jesus? We kind of do. However, Jesus was teaching during kind of an in-between period. He was teaching before Pentecost, before his death and resurrection. So while while what he taught what while what he taught is very important, so much of what we know about our faith in terms of how we live day to day is driven by the death, resurrection, ascension of Christ and Pentecost. So there's a little bit of a before and after thing that we have to process. Secondly, you can look at someone like Jesus and say, Oh, that's Jesus, but uh, but he's God and I'm not. And so to have a to have a hero figure, to have a teacher figure that is human, fully human and only human, I guess, is really helpful. There is an element, Will, of he wrote a lot. You know, I I wonder like if Peter is, you know, I was gonna say up in heaven, but I shouldn't say that. But if Peter is with Jesus and saying things like, if I would have written a little more, maybe I would have gotten a little more respect. I would have been the one. And apparently he is that kind of personality, you know, or James or John. And so there's something about Paul, but also, you know, in my book, in my book, Paul and the Language of Faith, I talk about some of what Paul's doing is so early in Christianity that he's actually coming up with theology as it's being built. I mean, he's you know, he's flying the plane, but he's building it also. So I talk about, for example, when he says justify by faith and not works. In some ways, it's him saying that in Galatians, I make the argument, it's like theologically, it's like splitting the atom for the first time. No one's ever done no one's ever come to this conclusion before. No Jewish person has ever come to this conclusion before. And so there's an element of like he is, you know, he's he's coming up with this stuff. What's really fascinating is when you look at the New Testament, this might blow your mind a little bit. Will don't don't be upset. We could do a counseling session later. Okay. Scholars talk about the Bible having actually different, slightly different versions of Christianity. You have Johannine, John's version of Christianity. You have Jacobian, which is James' version of Christianity. And because of Paul's importance, our churches are basically Pauline churches. Now, you know, you have Anabaptist churches that are going to lean a little bit more toward Jesus and James. You have the Eastern tradition, you know, that might have some influence from the book of Revelation or something, something like that. But by and large, especially Protestants and especially evangelicals, we are highly influenced. Our churches are Pauline churches. So it's interesting to think about brands. You know, you know, when you go to the store and you buy a computer, you know, people sometimes hate Apple. I'm an Apple person. Apple dominates, right? But then there's all these other brands or phones, iPhone versus you know, Samsung or whatever. The Pauline brand of theology dominates. And so I think a lot of that is the brilliance of the guy. A lot of that is how he's worked out all this theology in real time and and became compelling. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 20:50

I mean, I really I actually really love that. Oh, Will, go ahead. Did you want to say that?

SPEAKER_00 20:54

No, no, I was I was just saying thank you. I I didn't if if Paul was looking for a spokesperson, I would highly recommend he hire you. Hire me as a PR person.

SPEAKER_01 21:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 21:06

He said, hire you as P hire you as a PR person for sure. You know, I was thinking that even in the early church, right, Paul is pointing out, like, hey, some people say, I follow Paul, I follow Apollos, I follow Peter, I follow Christ, whatever it is. Right. And so he's even saying from the beginning, acknowledging within the New Testament itself that there is a sense of these theologies, right, that are out there, not I mean, you know, we we call them denominations today, right? I mean, we have these, like we're all Christian, but we have these theologies. I mean, I'm not saying that you that's anachronistic to put that back on the New Testament, but in its maybe infant form, right? We're seeing already just because of people, we have these kind of factional things. And I I don't want to get too much into that because that's kind of off topic in the sense, but um, you're welcome to speak to that. But what the question, though, I'm thinking of is this idea that almost like, you know, I I grew up, right, evangelical, right? Like you're saying, and I basically grew up like, hey, the world's gonna end, there's gonna be a rapture. Number one. So so basically they told me just like the book of the dead for me, are we the same age, Josh?

SPEAKER_01 22:15

We're probably the same age.

SPEAKER_02 22:16

Basically, yeah, left behind. Left behind was that was a Christian version of the Book of the Dead. Right? It's the one we should might as well get that on our coffins, dude. You just came up with that? Come on, Steve. I did. Wow. But think about that, dude. It's it's basically, hey, here's how you make it. Yeah. This is what you do. Here's what's gonna happen. Here's the timeline. Here's what you look for. Here's the words you say. That's the main event, right?

SPEAKER_01 22:41

And in their perspective, that's the main event, not what's going on right now.

SPEAKER_02 22:46

It's not the resurrection, it's not the fuse for a resurrection, although they might give some lip service to that. Right? Yeah. And that's what I really would want to get to you. Like, we're cuz because we're really talking about a different world, but the same world, right? Like if the and and and again, help me with this New Testament theology. Like Paul is saying there's going to be a resurrection. He's clear about that. But then, or is he? Let me know what you think. And then what yeah, like where why do we get so bad and wrong on this? Like, how do we get out of this? And and why do I guess really more importantly is why does it matter whether Christians believe God is gonna throw away the world? Right, right. Or he's gonna renew it. Why, what, what difference is that?

SPEAKER_01 23:33

That's the heart of my book, yeah, 100%. So there's a lot of confusion because the Bible uses a lot of symbolism, it uses it uses sort of larger than life imagery. So, on the one hand, when you have these like throne room scenes with these weird-looking angels, have you ever seen one of like this is an anatomically correct angel, and it's like got all these eyes and wings that are freaky to look at? So you got some of that kind of stuff. You got milk and honey, like I'm lactose intolerant, so what do I do with that? You know, streets of gold, why aren't they made of titanium? You know, we have all these questions. I think what's happening is it's using it's using imagery that would communicate to us beauty and greatness. But sometimes we take it over literally. Let me just say, I believe in the resurrection from the dead. I'm I'm an Apostles' Creed guy, I believe in eternal life, I believe in the Trinity, all that. But NT Wright's work has been really helpful. His book Surprised by Hope, in particular, and it was kind of one of these between him and a scholar named Richard Middleton, who you should have on the show, by the way. Between the two of them, they've really shaped how I think about God's plan for the world. Let me give you my two-minute take here, based on their work and based on other people's work. So the Lord says, you know, and this is in Isaiah, that heaven is my throne, the earth is my footstool. Right? Now we hear footstool and we think like something dirty, something gross, but what he meant by that was the earth was always meant to be an extension of where God lives or where God is present. And the problem is, Genesis 3, we made the earth uninhabitable for God. He had to evict himself because we crept up his second home. And and so that's why God travels around in a tabernacle, right? David says to the Lord, Hey, you've been hanging out in this nasty, ratty old tent. Let me build you something really, you know, really, you know. He's like, and and the Lord's like, Listen, David, yeah, you're the one with the problems. Let me help you. I'm okay. You're the one that needs help. And and that sends a signal for how we're meant to see what's going on here. We weren't made for another world. See us lose us wrong. We were made for this world. The problem is we screwed it up. We screwed it up, we made it uninhabitable for God, and and his he has a fix-it plan. So when we talk about, okay, the resurrection, dead's gonna happen, God's gonna make all things new. What's not happening is God's like, okay, we're jettisoning jettisoning the earth plan. That's not what's happening. What's happening is God has a bigger plan, a bigger, wider plan, what N.T. Wright calls life after life after death. And the bigger plan is he's gonna renew, he's gonna make a new heavens and a new earth. There's no plan B. Plan A is we live, we live on earth. We just live on earth in coexistence with heaven and with God. So I had someone message me, private message me, a friend, a former student, and she said, I don't get it though, because you have like, you know, the thief on the cross saying, Today, you know, Jesus says, Today you'll be with me in paradise. You have Philippians 1, where Paul says, I'm gonna depart and be with Christ. Now, this may sound weird, but this is how I explain this. Okay, this is some called the sometimes called the intermediate state. Imagine your house burns down. Okay, we live in wildfire territory, so this happens here. So imagine your house burns down, you have an amazing insurance plan. That is hard to imagine. You have an amazing insurance plan. And the insurance plan, you paid a lot of money for this like 20 years ago. You paid a ton of money, you forgot about it, you have a great insurance plan. So your house burns down, you call insurance plan, they said, Hey, wow, Josh, amazing. We actually can set you up in the Waldorf Astoria penthouse suite for six months. Endless room service, endless facilities, and you're like, this is amazing. So you take your family, you live it up in the Waldorf Astoria while your house is being rebuilt, and you eat shrimp cocktail, and you eat lobster and you eat filet mignon, you know, because you're in this path. But after about a week and a half, it wears off. And you're like, This is great, this is great. I'm not complaining, right? It's not the hojo, but it's not home. Like, this is amazing, and I know why people pay big money for this experience, but it's not home. So I get this from 2 Corinthians, where Paul says when this earthly tent is torn down, what I don't want to be is naked. I will be naked. Right. And when I'm naked, I'll want to have clothing. But I gotta wait. I want a body. Yeah, I want a body, and God has a building that he's making for me, a heavenly building. So I think what he's saying, so that so the idea is we m will probably be with Jesus after we die. People say, What what will I be conscious? How long will it be? That's all above our pay grade. I don't know. But we'll be in paradise because we'll be with Jesus, however that works. But the ultimate plan, the ultimate plan is we're back here. So if you especially if you read the Old Testament and it's talking about the final destination, let's put it that way. Everyone will sit under their own vine vine and fig tree, right? We'll beat we'll beat swords into plowshares. What is this communicating? It's gonna be just like it was in the beginning, but without sin. So, related to my book, we're gonna have friendships. Like, doesn't that fill you with excitement? Yeah, you're not a zombie up there just like singing songs and plucking harps, and you know, you're all friendships. You'll have work, but it'll be it'll be life-giving work. I think honestly, I think we'll learn. Why do I think that? Because that's how we were made as humans. We were made to learn. We're designed to learn. I think we'll build and create. Why? Because that's actually what it means to be human, is we build and create. I I asked my I asked this question in the book, I geeked out on some of this stuff. What language will we speak? Will it be a new language? I actually I know this is more of a guess, but I actually think we'll retain our languages. Interesting. So so if you speak Hindi, you'll speak Hindi. It's just we'll be able to understand each other. Maybe we'll all go through some training. Who knows? I don't know. You know, you got a couple hundred languages or a couple thousand. Yeah, there's a video. There's a trading video.

SPEAKER_02 30:22

I never connect with- I know a good safety guy.

SPEAKER_01 30:25

There you go. There you go. I never really connected with those paintings that exoticize heaven into this really different thing than our life on earth. Why would God create us, Adam and Eve, for earth to work and cultivate and garden, and then we're gonna do something completely different in heaven, completely unrelated to what we did here. It would seem almost schizophrenic of God to do that. What would make sense is we're gonna we're gonna set you up somewhere really nice for a while. We're gonna fix all this stuff, and we're gonna bring you back, and we're gonna make it better than ever. And you look at the book of Revelation, we're gonna rebuild the city. We're gonna rebuild everything, we're gonna make everything beautiful, we're gonna make everything clean, we're gonna make and and then we'll get back to work on the human project. We'll still do all the stuff. We'll we'll be busy. Not too busy, but we'll definitely be busy. And so what I love about that is we can be excited about heaven, we can be excited about the Waldorf, but it's but but we'll still long for home. We'll still long for our home. Right? I think we'll pick up the earth, we'll rub it in our hands, be like, it's good to be back. It's good to be back.

SPEAKER_02 31:34

You know, I I like that imagery a lot.

SPEAKER_00 31:36

Yeah, I'd love for you to like help help define the the thing that we were just talking about, because I'm I'm reading several books kind of on the topic, just trying to educate myself. And and and I think what it is you're talking about is post-millennial dispensationalism. But I think there's like a pre pre-millennial. I I don't really know the difference. And and and and I was this there's this really great book by Matt Matty Resutton called American Apocalypse, where he kind of goes into sort of glorious detail about the history of this sort of like idea. But uh, but I'd love just kind of hear from you. Like, like, is is that what we're talking about? Post millennial dispensationalism, and did I say that right? And and like what's what's sort of like the the origins of this? This is gonna take three or four hours, Will.

SPEAKER_01 32:26

It's time for you to get a seminary degree. Okay, but you you that was what you said was a hodgepodge of some some sort of right things and a lot of wrong things. So we're gonna have to start, we're gonna have to clear the deck here. So a lot of this has to do with how we read the Bible, the the kind of approach we take to reading the Bible. And I don't follow dispensationalism. I definitely I definitely don't follow classic dispensationalism, which may which is the stuff that led to left behind. The reason is it basically says, how can we create a very clear timeline of history in the future using the Bible and taking everything in the Bible pretty much literally? There are massive dangers with that because the Bible's written a whole bunch of different genres. And so, for example, Jesus' parable of the rich man in Lazarus trying to codify the material in that in terms of a timeline is just a bad idea. The book of Revelation, the first thing I thought when you're talking is a lot of people try to codify the book of Revelation into dispensations. What's a dispensation? Here's how I think about it. Think about yourself in a high school or in a hotel where there are fire doors in the corridors. So what dispensationalism is, it's saying there are these eras of history, and you'll open a door and then you'll go in the hallway, and then you'll close the door and you'll open another door, and you've sealed yourself off from the previous era. So these very well-defined eras of history where certain things happened, and in the perspective, and this is my opinion, from a dispensational perspective, those eras don't have to relate to one another in any way. So you might have one story for Israel, a whole different story for the church. But then the problem is you end up saying we have to rebuild the temple in Jerusalem. That's part of that's part of plot B storyline of the Bible. Then we have plot A to the I take more of a covenantal approach as more of the reformed approach where the whole Bible is one thing, it's telling one story, right? Agreed. Some of my dispensational friends may may send you comments that I got it wrong. But I do think that's the way I look that that's the way I look at it. So I think that thinking is hugely problematic, and and it's hugely problematic for a couple of reasons. One is I don't think it takes seriously the different genres. And so, you know, for example, when Jesus says to the thief on the cross, you'll be me in paradise, I would ask, what does today mean? What does paradise mean? Right? I'm not I'm not I might not take that as a literal today. Right? That sort of thing. Uh the book of Revelation, that's probably the biggie that comes in here. If you're interested, and you know, maybe you didn't realize you probably didn't realize this, AJ Spo Spoboda and I just kicked off a series on the book of Revelation on our podcast. And one thing we talk about is there's many different ways to interpret the book of Revelation. I'll give you just a 30-second summary. One is called historical view, meaning that the Book of Revelation is walking us through all of history, including the last 2,000 years. I think that's incorrect, because that's just not the way apocalyptic literature works. Another is called the futurist view, meaning most of it's gonna happen in a very pretty literal way, but in the future. Like a crazy future, a crazy dystopian future that we haven't experienced yet.

SPEAKER_00 36:00

Like another one's called crazy future where, like, I don't know, like a TV, you know, series star becomes the president or something like that.

unknown 36:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 36:09

Yeah. But that was Ronald Reagan, so that that happened when in the past, Will. We might get a new apprentice. We might have you been following that anyway. Okay. Another view is is called the preterist view, where most of the stuff in Revelation happened in the first century. Not all of it, but most of it. But there's a whole different track to study Revelation, which is the one that AJ and I take. And that is that Revelation is not talking about a very specific timeline, as in mark your calendars, as much as it's like a theological dream that is teaching you about the reality of evil, the reality of judgment, the reality of God's victory over the world, and ultimately what it means to be faithful in a world full of hostilities and temptations. It's not focusing on the details gets you further and further away from what Revelation is teaching. Obsessing over timelines gets you further away from what it's teaching. It's really, it's really super easy. God's gonna win, follow this guy and not the other people. That's that's the basic teaching. So when it comes to like dispensational and you know, all this stuff, millennial, I'm like, ignore all of that. That's that's not really what Revelation is trying to do. Revelation is really trying to teach you what what resilience in a world of of empire looks like and what it and what what true virtue looks like, which is a willingness to spill your own blood, just like the slaughtered lamb, to be faithful to Jesus, to be loving to others, and to resist evil.

SPEAKER_02 37:58

I think that's beautiful. You use the world the word, sorry, I'm now combining the two things I was trying to say. The word holy world, I guess phrase, holy worldliness. Okay. Yeah. This sounds like a contradiction. I hear holy worldness. And my grandmother is turning over in her grave, NJ, because I was supposed to escape the world. And holy means I am separate, right? And so I am separated from the world. I do not want, I'm gonna be like those monks. I want to go live on a frickin' whatever, like a tower or like a like a pole for years. Right. That's and there are a lot of people that are attracted to that, right? But when you say holy worldliness, you're you're drawing on Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Parton. So so help us understand that also Dietrich Bonhoeffer, man, he's people love using him kind of like they love using Jesus to weaponize and make and just to make you know, whatever they can do to take him out of context to make their point that this is what we need to be like Dietrich, whether it's liberal, you know, the liberal from Eric Mataxis or or others. Right. So all this.

SPEAKER_01 39:10

When you said liberal, you were just pointing, and on my screen, you're pointing to Will.

SPEAKER_02 39:13

Oh, I was oh, I was pointing to you on my screen. I didn't mean I meant left. All right, no, I know what you're saying.

SPEAKER_01 39:19

No, I know what you meant.

SPEAKER_02 39:20

I know you know. I'm trying, I honestly I want to get away from those. I don't know how to get away from those words because they just are so used and they're just shorthand.

SPEAKER_01 39:28

But anyway, set people off.

SPEAKER_02 39:30

Holy worldliness. What is this? Why isn't a contradiction in terms?

SPEAKER_01 39:35

Yeah, I love it. So so Bonhoeffer, one of my heroes, you know, he's part of the resistance against you know Hitler and the Nazis. So it it's helpful for people to understand. And in in Bonhoeffer's time, there was a state church. There was a government-run, you know, government-associated church called the Reich Church. Reich is just the empire, right? So the Reich Church, and and when Hitler, you know, kind of rose to power, he took over. You know, he he and his ideology took over the church. It's called the Reich Church. And so there were churches that did not agree with what Hitler was doing, did not like what Hitler's doing, and they were called the confessing church. And confessing here just means they they stand in opposition to. And Bonhoeffer was originally part of that group that was doing that. However, by the time Bonhoeffer ended up in prison, you know, being being arrested for conspiring against against the government, he became disillusioned with the confessing church because he felt like they paid lip service to rejecting imperial ideology, but they kind of hid in their churches. And he became so frustrated with this because they were abdicating their responsibilities, they were basically escaping from rolling up their sleeves and getting their hands dirty and opposing these destructive powers in the world. And so he ended up writing a lot of stuff while he was in prison. He writes about the subject of worldliness. And where he gets this from is it's in scripture, but he uses this great illustration. He says, In in ancient Greek plays, you have a protagonist who is trying to accomplish something, he runs into obstacles and he gets himself in a situation he can't get out of. And what do you normally do in these Greek plays? You dress an actor up like a god, you put a mask on them, you know, wings or whatever, and you literally pulley them down from the rafters. You know, they have a machine. You pulley them down from the rafters, and the god swoops in and quickly solves the problem, and then you pulley them back up again, out of the scene. And this became known as Deus ex machina or God out of the box. So this is the origins of that phrase, God out of the box. And the whole idea is it's a particular way of thinking or philosophy or theology that God is on the outside of our world, and he's kind of annoyed to have to swoop in and solve our problems, and he just wants to go back, you know, to finish his TV show or whatever, finish moon the lawn up in heaven. He doesn't want to deal with our problems, but he has to because we screw things up. And Bonhoeffer said the incarnation actually teaches us the opposite of that that Jesus Christ, Son of God, becomes human to live in our world, to experience our suffering, to die with us. And and in all of that, he actually affirms life in the world. He doesn't reject life in the world. He doesn't say, Hey, I came here to get you out of here. And so we often use the word worldliness in a negative way. Bonhoeffer kind of tries to turn it around and say, What we do in this world, in this life, has meaning because of the incarnation. The incarnation actually is an affirmation of life in this world. Bonhoeffer got to a point when he was in prison where he writes these letters, he doesn't know they're going to be published. Um he's writing up to a friend, and he says to his friend, I stopped reading the New Testament because it's too like cheery and like happy. He's like, I just read the Old Testament now because it's more like gritty and real. And, you know, I think we can take something away from what Bonhoeffer is talking about here. In my book, I talk about three postures, two of them wrong, one of them right. One is holy otherworldliness. That's that temptation to escape. Escape into our phones, escape into our churches. And I talked to this woman once and she's like, I just love being in the church. And so I go to as many church services as I can go to. She goes she's like, I try to go to five or six or seven or eight church services on Sunday.

SPEAKER_02 43:59

That sounds horrible.

SPEAKER_01 44:02

And and and you know, at first that might sound very pious, but that's that idea in man, it's it could be that idea of escaping. I need to escape for the problem. So I'm gonna go to church and I'm gonna have some fun. You know, it's gonna be kind of a Painkiller, so to speak. So that's holy otherworldliness. Another one, which I talk about in relation to First Corinthians, is holy is unholy worldliness. And what that is, is I'm going to plunder spiritual resources to make myself great in this world. And so we see the Corinthians doing this with speaking in tongues. And they say, Oh, God has given me this gift to speak in tongues. Now I'm going to make myself famous. I'm going to make myself more important than the other person. We see this today with greed. Pastors, you know, I have a chapter there, Crazy Rich Christians. I hope you like that one. I got a real kick out of that. But this idea that you could be a pastor trying to get your church to pay for an$86 million luxury private jet so you can travel around the world in style. LA preachers with their sneakers. All of that.

SPEAKER_02 45:10

I mean economy class needs.

SPEAKER_01 45:12

Oh, okay. Hey, if it's good enough for Bernie Sanders, it's good enough for me. Right, well Damn right. But but so then the third category is holy worldliness. Uh and what that means is on the one hand, this world is not the way it's supposed to be. Right? This world is, I say, colonized by sin and death. But worldliness means we want to take it back. Holy worldiness means we want to take it back with the power of the gospel, not with weapons of warfare, not with the quote unquote best minds of the world, not with technology, but with the gospel. With the true gospel of faith, hope, and love, of goodness, beauty, righteousness, truth. And so I want I wanted to have that contradiction, Josh, that you identified there of holy worldliness to say I actually need to be more worldly rather than less worldly. And what that means is I need to be more invested in the world because God's not willing to give it up.

SPEAKER_00 46:21

I think it's it's really fitting, at least, just your your comments on escapism, because you know, like currently we we are living in in a time where it is way easier to just not want to check the news. Oh boy, dude. Oh boy. Absolutely. It's like, I mean, I have a I have like my iPhone set to like no notifications after 6 p.m.

SPEAKER_02 46:45

Um Will and I have had to get on Prozac of starting this uh show.

SPEAKER_00 46:52

I mean, like we we live in this in this environment, this era, and and and I'm sure I'm not speaking just for myself as a Christian, like where you're like, hello God, like are you there, you know? Where where it also feels as if like, and I'm a big Marvel fan, you know, like the watcher, you know, is up there, you know, looking down on us with Nick Fury. There was a run where, anyways, so so like the watch is looking at us, right? And and and his job is to just watch, not to interact, not to interfere, you know, maybe make some cameos in Daredevil series, but like, but that's about it. Yes, you know. So, so so like well, what what would Paul have to say about sort of like, you know, or say two Christians that are that are like, okay, watcher, like feel free to come down in time.

SPEAKER_01 47:40

Great question. I just finished Daredevil season two. Phenomenal, phenomenal. What I would say that Paul would say is you cut you have the old story of the person who is lost out to sea, and they're in a lifeboat, and they're stranded, and they're praying, and they say, God, rescue me, rescue me. I'm gonna pray for a miracle that you rescue me. And then and then, you know, the Coast Guard comes, and then he says, No, no, no, I'm waiting for God to rescue me, and the Coast Guard leaves, and then a helicopter comes, no, no, I'm waiting for God to rescue me, and then the guy dies, and then God, and then he's why didn't you rescue me? He's like, I sent like five or six different, you know. So I think often in our own false assumptions, we think that God doesn't work through things in the world, right? That that he's gonna do it by some miracle. But we have to realize yes, yes, miracles did happen. They're primarily signs of the gospel, they're not primarily the way God wants to work, he designed the world to work by itself. So the first thing I'd say is the watcher is far away, right? But God is actually close to us. And the main way, so I think of the Gospel of John, I know we're gonna get back to Paul here, but the Gospel of John, you know, the disciples, you know, if you sign up to be a disciple of a teacher, the last thing you want to hear from your teacher is, I'm gonna die pretty soon. Like that's not like I just sold the business, I just left my family. I'm dead. Yeah. Like, you know, he's like, You got three years and then I'm out of here. That's not what you want to hear. But what does Jesus say in his farewell teaching, his his farewell discourse? He says, No, no, no, this is good because I'm gonna send another advocate who's actually gonna, he's gonna be able to do the work. I'm gonna be up at the control room and he's gonna be able to do the work from down here. Um, he's gonna be able to make it happen. So they're clinging on to him, saying, you know, we need this one teacher. And he's like, No, actually, you're gonna have the teacher in every single one of you. Like you're gonna have a personal assistant work with every single one of you. And so the way Paul would explain this is, you know, the transformation of the spirit within each of us. When we look at these problems, so I you know, C.S. Lewis, you know, we talked about him earlier, and I did, I did critique him a little bit, but let me give him some credit here. He wrote a book on prayer called Letters to Malcolm Chiefly on Prayer, and he talks about the Lord's Prayer, and he says, I used to think when I prayed, Thy will be done on earth as in heaven, I was kind of throwing a lifeline up to heaven. He says, Now when I read it, I think Thy will be done through me now. So he realizes I'm actually the agent. I'm actually a master agent of accomplishing the will of God on earth. I'm not trying to get an angel to get off his lunch break and get down here and rescue me. I I you know, so I think often what God is doing, like I do wonder, you know, with with tragedies, with natural disasters, God, why didn't you stop this? Why don't you step in? I think there probably is a little bit of you guys have to realize how much you've screwed things up, okay? We're like we get the message. But for human things, you know, abuse scandals, horrible, horrible abuse scandals in the church, all this stuff. I think God's like a good parent, I think God's saying, I need you guys, you knuckleheads down there, to figure this thing out. Like I could, I could do it, but I need you guys to figure this out. It's like, you know, like your kid is maybe doing a play for the first time, you know, elementary school, you're in the front row and your kid's like forgets their lines, they're like, Daddy, what's my line? What's my line? You're like, mm-mm, nope. You've got to figure this one out on your own. Like, he could, like, I could give you the line, but I'm not going to. Now that that can seem really insensitive. But I think often our theology tries to upgrade God by downgrading the church. And the outcome of that is we won't rise up to the occasion. If we're getting God to bail us out, like this is our problem. We gotta figure this out. Like, how many times, how many times, you know, you look at the resurrection scenes where Jesus is Jesus or angels or around, but they don't really explain things. Right? You know, they're really obscure, they're really cryptic. Jesus is the gardener, and then he reveals himself. There's really something to all of this to be like God's like, I've given you clues, follow the freaking clues. So I would say, Well, yes, yes, things look pretty dark, things look pretty dismal. And I don't think God is the watcher in a his hands are tied. I think he's the parent watching the children in the play, and instead of feeding the lines, he's like, You got this. You got this, you got this, right? That's interesting. And and we're sweating and we're freaking out. And he's like, You got this. You could do this. Remember your training. Remember your training. What do we do when we make a mistake, right? We keep going, skip those lines, move on, recover.

SPEAKER_02 53:26

We cry and we and we and we stomp our feet and we throw a huge fit.

SPEAKER_01 53:30

Yeah, and then we try to do better the next show. Yeah, we don't quit. We don't quit.

SPEAKER_02 53:35

No, I was just I was just playing, of course. You know, so this is my this is the last question. So the resurrection, obviously, extremely important. And there's so much more of your book, right? We like to give people a taste, so then they want to go get the rest. So we have not covered the book in its entirety by any means. There is a lot there you want to go check out. But this question of the resurrection and what in the hope that it actually brings, right? So because this is now, right? We're living now, but we're living now in light in some way, right in light of then, though the world is, you know, the the Bible's helping us live here, but there is obviously this sense of something is coming that God is gonna do. And they've used the term resurrection. And so, how does the resurrection that Paul talks about, the early church believed that's core to the Christian faith, how does that create courage, sacrifice, patience, and hope in in our world now for us?

SPEAKER_01 54:39

Yeah, I mean, where I turn to Paul is is, you know, 2 Corinthians 5 and Romans 6. And Romans 6, you have this weird debate, you know, in in in churches in the first century where they're basically like, if we have grace, can we just sin as much as we want? Because we can just kind of keep going back to the vending machine because there's no charge. And Paul says, Are you knuckleheads? Are you really gonna go down this road? He's but he says, if you've died to that life, you've been buried with Christ in baptism, you can't live like that. And he says, You walk now in the newness of life, and that these are different ways of translating this word that means you live now with resurrection life. Like you have some key aspects of that resurrection life, which means you shouldn't actually want to sin. Like you're gonna have problems, but you shouldn't want to sin. And similarly in 2 Corinthians 5, Paul's saying, everyone who died in Christ died with Christ, and those who live no longer live for themselves, but him who died and rose for the for them. And that's that idea of we actually are now, we Christians are people from another timeline. We're from the future timeline. This gets into Will's sci-fi stuff here. This is we're we we live from a future timeline. Will, have you seen the TV show Peripheral? I no, I have not. Oh, okay. I'm gonna spoil it for you. I'm gonna spoil it now for you. So there's this technology, it's sort of a near future where there's technology where you can put on the VR glasses and actually zap yourself into the future. And and and and so these people go to the future and they want help from this woman from the past, and she says, I'll help you if you help cure my mom of this disease that we don't have a cure for. And in the future, they do have a cure for it. So they actually basically send the formula back to her from the future to cure her mom, so she'll help them. And what I love about that is that's kind of how the Bible works, where we, because Jesus' resurrection, we have some access to the future world that we're gonna live in. We have the Holy Spirit, which is remaking our, you know, our spirits. We, you know, inwardly we're wasting outwardly we're wasting away, inwardly we're being renewed day by day. So we have we know we have some secrets of the future, right? Because we have these glimpses of love, joy, peace, goodness, kindness, payfulness, pay patience, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. We know what the future world is going to be. I, you know, I've I've I've probably mentioned to you before when I did discuss with you about my book, 15 Test Words of Life. Lynn Man Lynn Manuel Miranda, who is a creator of Hamilton the musical, not a Christian, but back in like 2011, he tweeted out a verse from Micah several times with no explanation. And it was the verse that you know, everyone will live under their own vine and fig tree and no one will make them afraid. This was actually one of the favorite verses of George Washington. And later on, Manuel said on Twitter, I'm not a Christian, but in a world of so much corruption and a world of so much selfishness, I'm really I'm really loving the vision cast by this verse, by this part of the Bible. And I just thought, if we Christians can lean into that, like like we know what the future holds. So our job is how do we get there? My dad, I love my my father, we're very close. He's not Christian, he's a Hindu. I'm a Christian. He reads the Bible occasionally for personal reflection. And I remember when I was, you know, in college, we were sitting down and he said, NJ, you and I both read the Bible, so what makes you a Christian and me not a Christian? And I said, Dad, it's like in our lives we're both building a huge puzzle, except I know what the puzzle looks like and you don't. That's a pretty brash thing to say to your father. But that's what the resurrection does for us, is it gives us puzzle-making sensibilities. And Jesus' own resurrection and the vision we have of the resurrection from the dead shows us what the what the actual picture of the puzzle is. Yes. And our job now, here and now, is to put that puzzle together. Now, the reality with a 10,000-piece puzzle is it's still hard, but it's much easier if you know what the puzzle looks like.

SPEAKER_02 59:16

I really, really like that. I really like that. And it makes me, you know, think when Jesus ra when he raised from the dead, the reason that they could talk about that as the first fruits, the reason that they could talk about it as the first like sibling among the family, or right, he he could talk about that is because now that we've seen like Jesus raised from the dead, we know it's a guarantee of what God's gonna do. Yeah, right, because he did. Absolutely. So it's the guarantee of what God's gonna do. And that's the assurance. And I don't know of any other, honestly, I don't know of any other religion or worldview that offers that in the sense of that kind of resurrection story that that brings a validation to that theology in that way. And I just think it's very, very beautiful. Thanks for being on the show, NJ. Where can they pick up the book? How can they get involved? When's it coming out? All that kind of stuff.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:11

Yeah, yeah. It's coming out May 12th, which you know we're recording just a few days before, so I hope it'll be out and folks can check it out wherever you like to buy books. It's on audio. I was able to record the audio. Nice. Um, I I was just getting over a cold at that time, so I you know, you'll hear a little little little little sniffles and plugs there for that. But I did record the audio for people that like that. In terms of where to follow my work, I have a podcast I co-host with AJ Swoboda called Slow Theology, Following Jesus in the mess of real life. And I have a substack where this new series I'm talking about, I'm doing it's called Made for Heaven on Earth. The substack is called Engaging Scripture. Check it out.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:53

I love it. Well, again, NJ, always a pleasure to have you on. Thanks for being here.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:58

My pleasure. Good to talk to you guys.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:00

Absolutely. To our friends, viewers, listeners, guys, thanks for joining us. Share this with someone who needs to hear it and understand these concepts. Let it sink deep into your heart. If you're curious about what is all this resurrection stuff, I'd be happy to answer questions for you. Send send me uh a message. You can look up our stuff on um online, faithfulpolitics.com. Appreciate you, NJ. Appreciate all you guys. And until next time, keep your conversations not right or left, but up.