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The Intersection of Christianity and Ancient Cultures

To hear the podcast click here.

George Kalantzis  

Hi. I am George Kalantzis, and I teach theology at Wheaton College, where I also direct the Wheaton Center for Early Christian Studies.

David Capes  

Dr George Kalantizis, welcome to The Stone Chapel Podcast. It’s a great pleasure to be with you. We are here at the Lanier Theological Library. You’re going to be teaching a class on early church history beginning tonight for our certificate program. I have to tell you, there’s been a lot of excitement around this class.

George Kalantzis  

Thank you. It’s a great opportunity to try to do 500 years in five hours!

David Capes  

That’s all we’ve given you for 500 years? I don’t know what that boils down to per decade or per century, but maybe just one hour per century. It’s going to be coming pretty fast. You’re working on some other projects as well. What are you working on now? 

George Kalantzis  

I’m finishing a book right now on seven questions that framed and shaped the Christological discussions in the first six centuries. Basically, how did the answer, any answer to Jesus’s question, “who do you say that I am”, frames and brings further questions that need further clarity. And in that process, how the church developed a grammar and a lexicon on how to understand and how to speak of the one we worship. 

The other project is on the theology of refugees. It’s not a theology for refugees, but it’s a theology of refugees. I’ve been working with the International Association for Refugees for almost a dozen years now. Refugee work in southeast and the eastern part of Africa, hearing the voices of our brothers and sisters who have been displaced. Who have been forcibly displaced, seeking refuge. How do they see God? How do they hear God? Who does God reveal himself to be to them? It’s the same God we worship. Based on our location where we are as we speak of God and expect to hear God in particular ways. They hear God differently. Their emphasis, for example, is a lot more on the Old Testament. The emphasis is on the prophets and the messages of the prophet, the emphasis on the liberation from oppression.

David Capes  

That’s what they know, that’s what they’re experiencing. 

George Kalantzis  

That’s their experience. God is a lot more, can I use the word tangible, to them than perhaps the God of the universe is to us.

David Capes  

A lot of times, people think of God in a far-off way. As in, I’m going to God one day when I die. But they have to begin to see God working in their lives, working in history.

George Kalantzis  

Yes, even in relationships.

David Capes  

Yes, which is very scary, because they have been, as you said, forcibly displaced. They’re not there in Khartoum or some other place because they want to be. They’ve been forced there by some power, some political power.

George Kalantzis  

Political, economic, health. They’re fleeing cholera. They’re fleeing famine. They’re fleeing civil war. They’re fleeing militias. Ten or twelve years ago I remember a question from Pastor Steven, a Presbyterian pastor of South Sudanese. When he spoke, he lifted his left arm, half of it was missing because he was cut off by a machete in an attack. And when we asked him, what do you expect from the next week that we’re going to be together. 

He raised his hand and said, by the end of the week, I want to be able to forget. Forget that I had to dig with my hands a shallow grave to bury my wife as we were fleeing the conflict. He never stopped being a pastor. He never stopped being a man of God, and now he’s one of the leaders of the Christian movement in refugee camps. But that relationship is a very different relationship with God and certainty of God than perhaps I have in the suburbs of Chicago.

David Capes  

Living in easy circumstances. I can’t wait to see that book. Eerdmans is publishing that. Today we’re going to turn our attention to the history of the Christian faith and discuss briefly, the first 500 year period of the early church. From the time roughly toward the end of the first century, into the fourth, and fifth centuries. What are you going to be talking about in that class?

George Kalantzis  

All stories begin with Alexander the Great.

David Capes  

You say that because you were born in Athens!

George Kalantzis  

You don’t have a middle name of “the” for nothing! We’re going to work through five movements, some of the five key developments in the story of Christianity. And it’s not just simply church history; it’s history of Christianity. In other words, more broadly as a movement than just simply ecclesial. The first one is the break with Judaism. How do the two faith traditions, by the end of the first century, beginning into the middle of the second century, start moving away from one another?

David Capes  

Yes, because they’ve been mostly one [people].

George Kalantzis  

They have been. It sometimes surprises people when I remind them, Jesus was a Jew. So, we’re all the apostles.

David Capes  

Yes, everybody that wrote the New Testament.

George Kalantzis  

That’s right. But then we have varying discussions, especially in the second century, as Christianity moves beyond the Judea centered experience into the diaspora experience. That’s where we have interactions with Hellenistic or diaspora Jews and Hellenistic Christians or pagans converted to Christianity. To whom do the scriptures belong? And by that, they mean the Hebrew Bible. What happens with the law? Do we keep the law? Who are the true people of God? That has can be seen perhaps as a bit theoretical. But the lived experience of these people is not just simply theoretical. Because being a Jew, or of the genus of the Jew, as the Romans would recognize them, the religion of the Jews carried with it legal standing. Being a Christian did not carry that.

David Capes  

It was a new thing, a new religion [as far as the Romans are concerned].

George Kalantzis  

It was a superstition. We had no legal standing. So, do Christians claim the status of the Jew? Do the Jews claim the Christians as their team? How does that work? Fundamental break with Judaism that happens both in theology, but also in legal standing and in outlook. 

The second is the movement of interacting with the world around them, because now we’re moving from a Jewish environment such as Palestinian, Judea, Samaria, Benjamine to a much broader environment that is Hellenistic, with its culture, with its philosophy. And we have a variety of Hellenistic Judaism, but also Philo in Alexandria, in Ephesus. But also we have middle Platonism. We have middle philosophical systems that are operative, about God, about ontology, about metaphysics, about morality. So how do Christians adopt, adapt, and interact with those philosophical systems? In the beginning was the logos.

David Capes  

You’ve got a pretty important Greek term there.

George Kalantzis  

That’s right. What do you want to do with that? We’re going to bring that all the way up to the second, end of the second century, beginning of the third with Tertullian of Carthage, the first great Latin theologian who gave us words and concepts like trinitas, trinity to describe what is “three in one” God. Sacraments, etc. 

So how does Christian movement interact with, adopt and adapt aspects of Greco-Roman culture and philosophy. Because not only did they take them in, but they changed them again. In the beginning was the word. That’s not a Jewish concept; that’s a Greek concept.  John continues in 1:14 and the Word became flesh. Well, his name was Jesus, right? We adopt and we adapt. 

The third would be what is this thing? We call it the church, the ecclesia. Great. How do we organize ourselves? When do we worship? To whom do we pray? How do we pray? Do we baptize? How do we baptize? What is this like? How does it function? So, church organization within that context. And what we’re going to see is that sometimes we think that the earliest church starts with a set organizational system, including worship.

David Capes  

Just like what I do every week. People think the same way as I do. They do exactly what we do every week.

George Kalantzis  

And from there, it diversifies. In actuality, it’s exactly the opposite. There is so much diversity in the earliest generations, and slowly, slowly, it takes us a few 100 years to standardize, sometimes per region, other times per language, etc, our worship and structure. The Eastern Church and the Western Church don’t have the same structure and organization. The fourth one is going to be what do we actually believe? Who is this Jesus? And if we confess with our mother church and tribe that “Hear O Israel, the Lord, your God, the Lord is one”, but now you have two or three. How do you do that? 

David Capes  

Really looking at the idea of the Trinity that has developed, that it’s already around. It’s not that it just is birthed in that century. But there’s not really been a system that puts it all together.

George Kalantzis  

We don’t have the grammar yet. Pliny, the younger, the famous governor of Bithynia in the second century, in 111 AD said “they pray to Christ as if to a God”. Already from the third generation [of Christians] in Bithynia, up in Pontus and Bithynia, Christians pray to Jesus as if to a God. In other words, praying to Jesus as God is the earliest that Christians do, from very early on. Okay, that’s great, but how do you not have two gods? So, you need to develop language to talk about it.

David Capes  

To talk about it, about the oneness of God. At the same time, have a trinity.

George Kalantzis  

So what is one? What is three? How do they relate? Does God the Father have a son, produce a son? That’s not a novel idea for the Greeks and the Romans. All their gods are born. They have mothers and fathers. So is that who he is? And if the father birthed the son, who’s the mother? Of course, here we have to talk about Mary. So that basic doctrinal definition, when we come and say, I want to be part of the community, and we say, great, this is what we believe. This is what we believe, and this is what you’re going to be baptized into. “I believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible”. What does that mean? And if all things have been created by him, by the father, then what about Jesus, or the Holy Spirit. So basic definitions, that’s going to preoccupy the bulk of our time on the second day.

The same person who came over and said, I want to be part of this community, we say this is what we believe? But we don’t stop there. We also say, and this is how we live our life, which is the fifth part. Which is what are the patterns of spiritual and moral life that Christians had in the same letter, letter 96, Pliny to the Emperor Trajan. 

Pliny says this is the total sum of their worship. Remember, this is a pagan speaking right, trying to get it right. But he’s a pagan. He has no idea who the Christians are. It’s the first time he meets Christians. He says they gather on a specific day, early in the morning, they pray antiphonally with one another, in other words, back and forth, back and forth from the Psalms, basically. Then they take an oath with one another, to not commit adultery, to not commit murder, do not commit theft, to return a deposit. Then they go away, and at the end of the day, they gather together again for a common, ordinary meal. Can you imagine if our Sunday services ended with an oath? You turn to your neighbor and you take an oath. Like, this week, this is how I’m going to live my life.

David Capes  

I’m not going to murder.

George Kalantzis  

I’m not going to commit adultery. We will be having a different kind of discussion. 

David Capes

It’d be a different kind of service.

George Kalantzis  

So how do these patterns develop? How many times a day do you pray as Christians? What days do you fast? Why do Christians fast on Wednesday and Friday? Good question. Because we’re not Jews who fast on Monday and Thursday. It’s community formative. Rituals are community formative.

David Capes  

These are the things that we do that set us apart from other people.

George Kalantzis  

A simple thing that Christians did from early on, was to cross themselves. You make the sign of the cross. We don’t do it, or at least Protestants don’t do it. But Christians did because they marked themselves in public. You cross yourself in view of others, right across yourself. Others see you.

David Capes  

It’s not something you do in private. 

George Kalantzis  

That’s right. You don’t do it in private only. You do it in public and people see you. And that has consequence in the late third century. 

So we’ll come all the way up to there and see the transformation. We’ll close with the transformation of the Roman world from a pagan world to a Christian world.

David Capes  

Where Christianity does become legal at that point.

George Kalantzis  

That’s right. It becomes tolerated. It becomes legal, and it becomes the only within the span of 120 years.

David Capes  

Which, in historical terms, is very fast. Now, persecution seems to have been an important part of the history. You’re going to be addressing throughout.

George Kalantzis  

That’s in the break with Judaism, the response to the Roman world. There are reasons for the persecution. Persecution is not “because I don’t like you”. They are accusations. Christians are accused of being seditious traitors because they don’t take an oath. They don’t pledge allegiance to the Roman state and to the Roman emperor, pure military state, like the Romans are. How do you respond to people who do not pledge allegiance to the Caesar.

David Capes  

Or do they want to serve in a military? That became a problem as well. 

George Kalantzis  

That became a problem, especially when Christians are recognized or claimed to not be Jews. Because Jews were exempted from military service for religious reasons. But that was almost 200 years before. It has a long tradition in the Roman world. But you, your group, your people, say you’re not Jews, so you’re not covered by the exemptions of the Jews.

David Capes  

History is just messy, the birth of the Christian church in Palestine in the first century, and then its growth in the next 500 years. It’s just really phenomenal to see the expansion of it but also the things that have to take place in order for it to become a religion that is tolerated and then eventually favored, in the Roman world.

George Kalantzis  

Christianity, did not grow by leaps and bounds. For the first almost 250 years, Christianity was roughly around 2% [of the population of the Roman empire].

David Capes  

Of the Roman of the Roman population. 

George Kalantzis  

Yes. And then it starts reaching into the sociologically important 10% and then by the end of the third century, it reaches roughly in the mid 20%.

David Capes  

By then, they’re formidable.

George Kalantzis  

They’re a formidable group politically. Because if a group that is 2% or less of the population, you don’t know anyone in that group. 2% of 100 people that you meet on the street.

David Capes  

Maybe 2 in 100.

George Kalantzis  

Maybe two, yes. And how do you recognize them? But at10% you think wait a minute. I know some of these people.

David Capes  

Yes, I’ve met them. I think I work with one or two of them. 

George Kalantzis  

When they reach 25%, they live in your neighborhood. So now you pay attention. So how does that work? The other accusation was that they were atheists, and that is not just simply that Zeus in your heart. For the Romans, the relationship with the gods is sacred and pragmatic. It matters if the gods are turning against you as a person, as a city, as a province, as an empire. You’re done for.

David Capes  

Calamity is coming.

George Kalantzis  

Calamity is coming. Now flip the equation. When calamity comes. Why does it come? And everybody’s thoughts turn.

David Capes  

We have 10% of the people who are Christians, and they’re really messing all of us up. 

George Kalantzis  

That’s right. So, their atheism puts all of us in danger.

David Capes  

But the word atheos doesn’t mean what we mean by it.

George Kalantzis  

It means that they don’t worship our gods. They don’t give honor to our gods. Romans don’t care if Jesus is in your heart, or Zeus is in your heart, or nobody’s in your heart. They just don’t care. What they care is that each one of us acts in public according to the rituals of Roman religion.

David Capes  

And that ensures the safety of the city and all the people. I’m really fascinated by what we’re going to be doing tonight. I appreciate you coming all this way and sharing with us a little of what, what you know.

George Kalantzis  

We’re basically doing 16 weeks in five hours.

David Capes  

Okay, let’s see how quickly you can talk and we can listen to George Kalantzis, thanks for being with us today on The Stone Chapel Podcast.

George Kalantzis  

My pleasure. Thank you.

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The Impact of Joanna on Jesus’ Ministry

To hear the podcast click here

David Capes  

Hi everybody, and welcome to The Stone Chapel Podcast. My name is David Capes. Joining me today is Dr Nancy Dawson, who has been with us before, several times to talk about remarkable women in the Bible, and she’s working on this amazing book called All the Women of the Bible. We’re going to be talking today about one of those women, and her name is Joanna. Dr Nancy Dawson, welcome back to The Stone Chapel Podcast.

Nancy Dawson

Thank you, Dr. Capes!

David Capes  

You’ve been here before to talk about the women who are mentioned in the genealogy of Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew. And you’ve also been here before to talk about your book, All the Genealogies of the Bible. You’re working on another one called All the Women of the Bible. Tell us about that project.

Nancy Dawson  

There was a theme there. It’s a very exciting project. Broadman and Holman have asked me to write that book. Of course, it covers Old Testament and New Testament women. There’s around 350 women. So it’s a comprehensive, and a little bit daunting task, But very exciting and insightful to see the roles that women have. And why are they there? Why are they mentioned? How do their stories dovetail with what else is going on in the narratives and their overall importance. When you look at a fleshed out view of the women, you see how important they are. They do counter cultural things. I see that they foreshadow many of the characteristics of Christ and also divine characteristics. Through their actions, sometimes words, but definitely through their actions, they do these remarkable things. They are noteworthy.

David Capes  

All right, so when should we be able to go to Amazon or go to our local bookstore and pick that up?

Nancy Dawson  

It’ll probably be a couple of years. I’m in the middle of the research right now, which I enjoy so much, but getting that down into words and edited takes time.

David Capes  

You like the research better or the writing better?

Nancy Dawson  

I definitely like the research better. That’s my background but I’ve always been interested in teaching the Bible and writing about men and women.

David Capes  

Well, you’re a great teacher. I’ve seen you teach here. I’ve had you come to the course I teach for Truett seminary on the gospels and the book of Acts. You’ve done a great job in those classes. You’re a good teacher as well as a good researcher, and a great writer. 

All right, Joanna, let’s talk about Joanna.  Joanna is a person that a lot of people may not know very much about. She’s mentioned in passing in some ways, but she’s mentioned in some very important times and places. Let me read one of these texts from the Gospel of Luke. And it’s Luke, chapter eight, verse one. 

Soon afterward, he (Jesus) went on through the cities and villages, proclaiming and bringing the Good News of the Kingdom of God. And the 12 were with him, and also some women who had been healed of evil spirits and infirmities. Mary called Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out, and Joanna, the wife of Chuza, Herod’s household manager. And Susanna and many others who provided for them out of their means.

Nancy Dawson  

Remarkable. Number one, you probably haven’t ever heard a sermon about her, but she’s this Galilean aristocratic woman who is healed by Jesus of evil spirits, along with Mary Magdalene and Susanna. And remarkably, she becomes a disciple or follower of Jesus. The text says that she’s the wife of a Herodian official. And of course, they’re talking about Herod Antipas, who was the successor of Herod, the Great, his father. And this is a real poignant place in the text that tells you about her background and what information she might have about that royal court. And then, she becomes this faithful follower throughout Jesus’s ministry, and she’s going to be a witness, along with other women, to the crucifixion and the empty tomb.

David Capes  

She’s gone from Galilee at that point, the Galilean ministry, down to Judea, so she’s traveled with them. Is that correct?

Nancy Dawson  

Yes. Her name means “God has given graciously”. She’s named after her father, which might be common these days. Her father’s name was John or Yohanan, and this was a common practice in the Second Temple period. There was research done by a wonderful scholar named Tal IIan, who worked on Jewish women in the Greco Roman world and about 3- 4% of the women are called Joanna. It’s a very common name. Around 46% of the women are called Mary. So, this is why you always see terms of disambiguation for the Mary figures, like Mary of Magdala or Mary mother of Jesus. 

And some scholars have speculated that she should be equated with the Junia figure of Romans 16. I don’t adhere to that, but some scholars have said this is a possibility, but they’re usually very tentative, in making that association. She’s married to Herod Antipas’ steward named Chuza. He was an appointee of Herod and had a lot of court responsibilities, overseeing his estates, possibly acting like a steward or a guardian over the ones that would be up and coming for inheritance under Herod Antipas.

David Capes  

And they lived in Tiberias you said.

Nancy Dawson  

They lived in Tiberias, which was on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee. That town was basically built by Herod Antipas around AD 18-20 but noteworthy is it was built over a cemetery, and so this is not something that goes down well.

David Capes  

That’s not really kosher! Tiberias is a thriving city today. If you go to Israel, you’ll see it on that western shore.

Nancy Dawson  

It’s part of Galilee. It’s one of the major cities. Jesus grew up in this small Nazareth hometown in the Sepphoris area and so that’s the general area. But what we see with Joanna is that she’s definitely from this elite, aristocratic background. She’s Jewish, and whether her husband was a believer or not, is not clear. 

David Capes  

You mean a believer in Jesus?

Nancy Dawson  

In Jesus. She seems to be a type of informant, both to the Herodian court and also to Jesus and his followers of what’s going on. More than once she said Herod Antipas has heard about Jesus, and he’s curious, and he wants to see him. But he wants to see him so that he’ll perform a miracle for them.

David Capes  

He wants to see a show, doesn’t he?

Nancy Dawson  

Yes, that’s exactly right. But you can see that there’s this definitely negative overlay. She’s from a wealthy background, so has the luxury of the socially elite. Also, this is a highly Romanized place. The Jews do not like the taxation. They do not appreciate any of the political domination, the economic exploitation. Heron Antipas actually had to pay people to come and live in Tiberias.

David Capes  

Like Alaska today, you have to pay people to go live up there. There’s a couple of things I found fascinating from this. She’s mentioned specifically, as well as Susanna, as providing for Jesus and his ministry out of their own means. Let’s discuss that part of it.

Nancy Dawson  

These women are following Jesus and that’s strange and counter-cultural for the day. You don’t hear about women being in the entourage of John the Baptist. This is something you hear about only with Jesus. So, this is very striking for that time. Jesus invites women and approves of them being a part of a mixed entourage. So that’s very noteworthy. 

What you see is that she is supporting Jesus out of her own personal finances. There was a great book written in 2002 by Richard Bauckham called Gospel Women, and he researched where women would have the ability to have discretionary funds that they could use, possibly separate from their husband. Because Chuza may not have been supportive of this. She has at least some disposable funds at her discretion. 

And there’s seven sources. One is that you could have inheritance from your father. Usually, this is like the prodigal son. The father is dead, and then you receive it. But there’s also property that can be acquired by a deed of a gift from your father or mother or your husband. That she could use also. There was at the time of marriage, ketubah money, the marriage contract money. That was what her husband would pay to her in case they were ever divorced or something would happen to him. 

David Capes

A prenuptial agreement in a way,

Nancy Dawson

Exactly, yes. She could have tapped into that. The dowry that was paid by her husband to her father, sometimes that is given to the daughter. 

David Capes  

This could be considerable money that you’re talking about.

Nancy Dawson  

Yes, or possibly property. Something like Barnabas, who sold his property to support the ministry. And it could be something like this that she availed, this source of funds and monies to give. And this is so consistent with her name which means “God has given graciously”. Then you see that she, in turn, gives graciously. This is a striking aspect of ministry.

David Capes  

There’s a lot of talk these days among scholars about benefactors and patrons and those kinds of things. Benefaction is a particular kind of giving, but what I hear you saying is this is not really “benefaction.”

Nancy Dawson  

Not according to that traditional female patron benefactor role where a wealthy person is giving money or provisions for a community in return for status or honor. Instead, she actually joins this itinerant band of followers of Jesus. She is not regarded in any special way. We know from the story of the widow with two mites, she gave everything that she had, and so that was what was praised. Not how much you give, but that you give willingly and graciously. And this is what she does. 

David Capes  

It’s striking to me that she leaves behind a rather a luxurious life for this itinerant life, sleeping in tents and walking lots of distance and probably doing lots of washing clothes at the river, those kinds of things.

Nancy Dawson  

Yes. We don’t really know. The text is silent on what these women actually do. But Luke is so poignant in mentioning this; that it’s women who support the ministry. It doesn’t mean that men did not support the ministry, but Luke is making a statement on what is generally true. And so, you see the mention of her in a Luke 8:3 and then we’re going to see that Luke mentions her again in Luke 24. There’s an inclusio, a literary inclusio about Joanna that I find is again, remarkable.

David Capes  

Let me read that text. We’re looking at Luke 24:9.

Now at daybreak on the first day of the week Jesus had been discovered as raised from the dead. Then they, (that is these women) who observed this returned from the tomb and announced all these things to the eleven and all the others. The women were Mary Magdalene, Joanna and Mary, the mother of James, and others who accompanied them, also told this to the apostles. But their story, (that is, the women’s story,) seemed like nonsense, so they did not believe them.

What do you learn from that?

Nancy Dawson  

The testimony of women was considered unreliable. I think it was J.D. Atkins on one of the Exegetically Speakingpodcasts that said the old lexicons say that sounded like hum-bug. It’s like just an old wives tale. We’re not going to believe that. It’s just a silly tale that women are saying. But what you see is in all the Gospel accounts, it is women who are present at the crucifixion, at his burial, at the empty tomb and at the resurrection. Now John 19:25 also mentions one of the disciples that was at the crucifixion, and that was John the Beloved Disciple, but you don’t hear any mention about men. And again, this is noteworthy. These women have a staying power, a presence, even in these difficult moments. They’re not running away. 

They’re not afraid. They’re there at the crucifixion and they’re at a distance, it says. But then at the burial, they’re taking spices to the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea; and they prepared the body, but because it was a Sabbath, it wasn’t completed. It was done in haste.

David Capes  

They had to, by the rules the Sabbath, stop what they were doing with the idea that the when the Sabbath is over, the first day of the week has arrived, which was a day of work, then they would go back finish the job.

Nancy Dawson  

And so, this is what the women do. They complete this proper burial ritual. They prepare spices and take them in. They complete that process. But when they arrive at the empty tomb, two angels are there, and they say to the women, 

“Why are you looking for the living among the dead? He is not here, but he has risen.”

And the next phrase that’s used is, 

“Remember how he spoke to you when he was still in Galilee, and He would be crucified and rise on the third day”.

And then they remembered his words.

David Capes  

In other words, the women were there when Jesus was saying all this.

Nancy Dawson  

Yes. You see that they don’t even have to touch Jesus or eat with Jesus, or remember the scriptures. They remember his words. And this is what we’re all called to do, is recall the scriptures, recall what Jesus has said. And so, they become these incredible eyewitnesses and servants. Joanna left a life of ease. She reminds me a little bit of Old Testament Abigail, who was married to Nabal, the fool. And she leaves that life of luxury and becomes a wife and follower of the Son of David, and so, there’s these interesting parallels.

David Capes  

Yes, there are interesting parallels. What’s one thing you take away from Joanna as you think about your own life here in the 21st Century?

Nancy Dawson  

What I see is that we always need to be flexible. We need to consider and be ready to leave that life, that maybe we have had, and be willing to follow a new path. And that Jesus can use you with whatever you bring. For Joanna it was possessions, but it was also a kind of fidelity, and this is what we’re called as Christians to do. And Luke probably uses Joanna as a source for information. The material that’s unique to Luke is called the L material in text criticism. She is giving these personal insights. This is what we all bring. It’s a personal insight. God can use you and remake you. And transform you.

David Capes  

I like the idea that Luke is naming his sources, throughout the gospel. He does it, I think, with Mary as well, and in an earlier passage. This is a great, great help, honestly. Maybe somebody will feel now they need to do a sermon on Joanna and encourage women and others who are there, who have the ability to give a gracious gift and be a gracious blessing. Dr Nancy Dawson, thanks for being with us today on this podcast.

Nancy Dawson  

Thank you so much. 

Description

Dr. Nancy Dawson is back on The Stone Chapel Podcast to talk with Dr. Capes about a woman in the New Testament who followed Jesus.  Few could name her or tell us anything about her. Her name is Joanna.  She came from elite circles to follow the Nazarene in a less than luxurious life. Luke tells us (Luke 8:1-3) that she supported Jesus’ work financially and was a close follower of him. 

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Staying Christian in College

Here is a transcript of my conversation with Karl Johnson. You can hear the podcast here.

This transcript has been edited for clarity and space.

Carl Johnson  

This is Carl Johnson. I’m the Executive Director of the Consortium of Christian Study Centers.

David Capes  

Dr Carl Johnson, good to see you. Welcome to The Stone Chapel Podcast.

Carl Johnson  

Thank you. It’s great to be here with you, David.

David Capes  

We are here face to face, and that’s always better. I like it when that happens. We’re going to talk about Christian study centers here in just a few minutes. But before that, let’s talk about you. For those who don’t know you, who is Carl Johnson.

Carl Johnson  

Well, a brief way to put it is, I am an accidental Christian educator. I never, never imagined I would be doing what I’m doing now. I’m from the metro New York area. I went to Cornell University, and I had a career in outdoor adventure education. So, I was teaching rock-climbing, white-water paddling, back country travel, wilderness medicine, climbing big mountains internationally. And it was great. I mean, who doesn’t enjoy that sort of thing, right? But somewhere in my 30s, I was at the university, and I got to thinking, the university can hire somebody else to do what I’m doing here. I also have this itch to start a new kind of organization that bridges the gap between the church and the Academy and brings a Christian intellectual presence to the secular university. The university is not going to hire somebody else to do that. And so ,I need to do it.

David Capes  

So you were the guy. It sounds like you sensed a call.

Carl Johnson  

Yes. I sensed a call. Pulled together a group of pastors and professors. I said, here’s what’s burning in my heart. I don’t know if it’s a crazy idea or not. What do you all think? And they said, we think we should do it. This was back in the late 90s, early 2000s.

David Capes  

There are a lot of people today who are concerned about what’s happening in higher ed. And particularly if they send their sons or daughters off to places like Cornell, will they come back with any faith intact at all, or will it be dashed on the rocks.

Carl Johnson  

Yes, this is a question that people have been asking me for about 25 years or more. There’s not an easy answer to that. There are real challenges with secular universities. I think we want to steer a middle course between not underestimating these sorts of concerns, but also not overstating them. Probably the most important thing I can say, is that right now, I think it’s actually a better time to attend secular universities for Christian students than a generation ago.

David Capes  

Really now, why do you say that?

Carl Johnson  

There’s more vibrant Christian intellectual activity on many of our campuses and more resources. And I think part of the change is this. A few generations ago, the difference that it made being a Christian on a campus where there was a greater cultural consensus around certain sorts of issues, the difference wasn’t as stark. Then you get into the post 60s. That’s when those who were in graduate school in the 60s became professors say, in the 80s. That might have been a kind of peak secular moment around that time. 

But then in the 90s, Christians start finding their voice, their scholarly voice. And there’s a whole renaissance of Christian scholarship and philosophy and history that began trickling over to other disciplines. Christian professors start having fellowships and organizations where they’re convening association of Christian economists and so forth, where they become more comfortable speaking in a Christian voice. Now you go to some campuses, and you have not just the traditional campus fellowship ministries that have been there for a long time, but you also have on at least three dozen campuses now, these Christian study centers. Which typically have a building that provides a physical hub for the Christian community on campus. And you’ve got students involved in all those fellowships, coming and going, coming and going with the door swinging thousands of times a week. Some of them even have residential facilities. 

There’s this visible hub of Christian intellectual activity on these campuses. And there’s speaker series that are coming in monthly or more. Christian professors, some from Christian colleges, some from other secular universities, Veritas Forums and other events that are just giving students plenty of reason. A generation ago, students would go to campus and they have this crisis of faith. Oh, it looks like all the smart people here, all the professors and most of the other students are not believers. And it’s just not like that anymore. Now, there’s so much visible Christian intellectual activity on many campuses, though not on every campus. So, I say it’s actually a better time than it was a generation ago.

David Capes  

That’s great to hear. When you “heard” this call was the Christian Study Center movement up and running?

Carl Johnson  

Not really. When this idea started burning in my heart there were important intellectual questions that it’s hard to get an answer for either from the church or the university. Because pastors are very busy with other sorts of things or because the university is often just so secular and the faculty members, frankly, are so very specialized that they often are not very well equipped to deal with broad questions of meaning and purpose in the good life.  

But these things were burning in me and I started talking to people. Finally, somebody said, you should take a look at what’s happening in Charlottesville, Virginia, because there’s this thing there. It’s called the Center for Christian study. And so, I wrote a letter to the director, and he wrote back, sent me some of their materials, and I saw what they were doing with this public speaker series. I thought, wow, that’s incredibly exciting. I want to do something like that. 

And at the very same time, I drove from Ithaca down to New Haven for one of the very first Veritas Forum events. And I heard this whole lineup of speakers that included people like N. T. Wright, who at that time nobody had really heard of. He was a much younger guy at that time, as we all were, and so I got this vision of Christian scholarship. I pulled together these pastors and professors, and I said, hey, let’s do something. Let’s create a new organization and bring in visiting Christian scholars. 

But at that time, we’re talking late 90s, early 2000s there was really only one very well established Christian Study Center in Charlottesville. And then there were, a few other very fledgling centers. And so, I started one at Cornell. At that time, I would say, in the early 2000s there was one big center and a handful of others. And in 2007 I invited all the folks I knew doing similar work up to Ithaca for a long weekend. We put our heads together, and we’ve resolved to form what is now the consortium of Christian Study Centers. And in our first year, we had half a dozen member centers. 

2008 was when we incorporated. The first little get together that I referred to was in 2007 and in 2009 we’ve got a full-time director, Drew Trotter. Over the years, we’ve grown from that original half dozen member centers to now three dozen, and we’ve got another dozen that are in the startup phase. 

David Capes  

The goal is to be on secular university campuses, right?

Carl Johnson  

That’s the concept, yes.

David Capes  

How does your organization exist alongside of InterVarsity and maybe the Catholic Newman Centers and those kinds of things? 

Carl Johnson  

What we’re seeking for is a very collaborative relationship with the campus ministry ecosystem. And I’ll just use a concrete illustration of what that can look like in practice. When I was on the Cornell campus working in outdoor education back in the 90s, there were probably a dozen or more campus fellowship organizations, and they would occasionally bring in a visiting speaker, and I would sometimes go to hear the speakers. They would usually have 30 or 40 students in attendance, because it was just the students in that organization that would come to hear the speaker. I started networking with the campus minister saying, hey, let’s work together. If one of us is going to bring in a speaker, let’s all co-sponsor and make it a campus wide event. We started doing that, and the attendance increased tenfold. We started getting 300-400 people showing up at events. And it wasn’t really rocket-science. All these students were already there on campus. 

David Capes  

It was just a matter of using a university facility.

Carl Johnson  

Yes. We’re on campus for these events. Part of the origin of the center that I started was, in fact, collaboration. That’s part of the DNA of the organization. And now that most of our centers have buildings, we try to let our buildings be a resource that helps all those other organizations advance their mission and their ministry. We have libraries that are available for them to use, whether it’s for Bible study prep or something else. We have meeting space for them to use, which is increasingly important, because some organizations are actually getting kicked off campus, and it’s harder to have access to space on campus for certain ministers. Providing a space, you know, is a value. We like to say, we gather, we serve and we unify the campus ministry organizations on a weekly basis.

David Capes  

What would the ministry look like on a weekend when you don’t have a big speaker? Are students coming and going and are there other meetings going on? How does that work?

Carl Johnson  

Yes, t varies a little bit from one campus and one center to another. Many of our centers now have what we call fellows programs. These are cohorts of students that commit to meeting together over the course of usually a semester or a year to go through some sort of a great books type curriculum. They are reading certain books and articles together and discussing them. So it might be every Sunday evening or every Monday evening for a semester or for the year, and some of our centers are now sufficiently built out that they’ve developed that curriculum over not just two or three years, but even four years. 

It really ends up adding up to something like a Christian liberal arts education that’s getting layered on top of whatever their major is. And many, many, many students these days are in the STEM disciplines, right? And we’re at a lot of state universities. There are big engineering schools and whatnot. My own son is at Cornell, studying engineering, and he’s involved in the center there, and he’s getting a pretty good liberal arts education layered on top of his technical training. So, the Fellows program is a key aspect of what we do, because there’s sustained, ongoing, formative impact on the students. 

But then there are other sorts of discussion groups and movie nights that might be one off sorts of things we do, a lot of public reading of Scripture events on some campuses. My successor at the Cornell center does this thing every fall where he gets some food trucks and they read an entire Gospel, say the Gospel of Mark out loud, out on the patio. And they’ll have over 100 students come and just sit just in silence while they listen to the entire book of Mark being read out loud. 

David Capes  

It’s like the way Mark wrote it, not verse by verse, but the whole thing.

Carl Johnson  

Right, exactly! It’s almost like this ancient monastic practice that’s getting reincorporated into the modern secular universities, with food trucks.

David Capes  

I love it. That’s exciting. You’re heading off to Singapore. Is this becoming an international thing, or is it mainly North America? What’s the geographic?

Carl Johnson  

Yes, I am. It’s mainly North America. I get a fair number of calls and inquiries from folks in other countries, and there are a few fledgling Christian study centers in other countries that are modeled after what they see happening here in North America. There are challenges to getting these centers established in other countries. One aspect of that is financial, and then there’s also just networking kinds of challenges. But there’s a lot of interest out there. 

I’m going to spend an entire week in Singapore, and the purpose of the visit is three-fold. There’s a lot of Christian families in a place like Singapore who are sending their children to the United States for higher education. They’re asking the same kinds of questions that you were asking earlier. What happens if I send my kids to these institutions? What are the opportunities there? How concerned should I be? I’m going over to let them know what the landscape looks like here and what the opportunities are. 

But then the other part of it is to let them know more about this model and to let them figure out what if any implications it may have for their local context. For example, in Germany, there’s now several of these small Christian study centers. And one of the reasons is precisely that the theological seminaries are not flourishing. As they shrink and die, the Christians who are there are very concerned about what is the future of Christian education in our country? And where can we provide theological training for future pastors as well as lay persons? And so the question arises, well, where are the students? And in almost every country these days, the answer is, they’re at the state funded universities. That’s where the overwhelming number of students are, and so it makes sense for Christian organizations to essentially set up camp where the students already are and to provide some education and training opportunities right there.

David Capes  

So a freshman student arrives on campus in the fall. How does he find you?

Carl Johnson  

Well, these days, if they’re looking, it’s not hard. With all the online searches, an awful lot of the students will find these centers before they arrive.

David Capes  

So they already know it exists. 

Carl Johnson  

Exactly. It’s not that hard. Many of the centers also run a 24- or 48-hour pre-orientation retreat, so that students can actually arrive a day or two early. They might be in a group with anywhere from a couple dozen or even more than 100 other students that they can get to know so they have some semblance of Christian community with other students in their class before orientation kicks in. But we can also mix in some upper-classmen Christian students to provide them with a little bit of here’s how life works at this university. We bring in a couple of Christian faculty members to give some brief talks. Yes, there are Christians here on the faculty, even though we don’t always speak in a Christian voice. So you might not know that, but yes, we’re here. We bring in a few pastors to give some short talks, to let them know about their local churches, and extend an invitation to join them for Sunday worship. And so by the time orientation begins, the incoming students have met other fellow first year students, upper class Christian students, Christian faculty members and local pastors.

David Capes  

That’s a great strategy. This is bound to cost a lot of money. I’m thinking about the buildings right next to a place like University of Virginia or Cornell. How is all this funded?

Carl Johnson  

Mostly from alumni, parents secondly, and there’s occasionally, a few foundation grants that will help with a particular project, here and there. But it’s individual donors, mostly alumni and parents. And it’s not impossible to kick things off in a very bootstrapped kind of a way. That’s certainly the way I did things, back in the day. And we would just have faculty members and parents doing talks on faith and vocation, and I would interview them, and students would come out and listen. You do what you can with the resources that you have. 

But yes, it’s true, especially once you get into buildings, it requires a lot more resources, millions of dollars, to be sure. One of the reasons, among others, that I’m enthusiastic and even bullish on this movement is precisely because there’s a business model that works pretty well. One aspect of that is that, depending on the building you have, the buildings themselves can generate revenue. The ministry that I started, we purchased two large Greek houses that each have about 20 residents, so now we have 40 residents paying rent to the ministry. And we purchased the building outright with money that was donated. And we don’t pay tax, because we’re a non-profit organization, so we’re not paying property tax. 

So all of that revenue is funding ministry staff who are ministering to the student residents. You know, it’s what I tell the donors. It’s like a double return on investment. Because if you put all that money in an endowment account, you put a million dollars in an endowment account. You might get $80,000 a year, or something like that. Now we get that much money in rent for every million dollars of equity in the house, and that rent is going directly to support the staff who are serving the students who are living in the asset. It’s really a remarkable model. And then some of the centers have commercial real estate. In Florida, there’s this very, very well built out coffee house, Pascal’s Coffee House as part of the Center at the University of Florida in Gainesville. Up in Minnesota, Anselm house, they’ve purchased a building that has 70,000 square feet, and the majority of it is rented out to commercial organizations that are paying rent supporting the ministry. So there’s all kinds of opportunities here, I think, even on the building front, for the ministries to become sustainable as a byproduct of getting into real estate.

David Capes  

That’s an exciting kind of project that you’re helping to lead right now. You estimate that there are about three dozen centers. Do you see that growing?

Carl Johnson  

Absolutely. I get more inquiries all the time. In the month of December, I think I received about 10 inquiries through our website from people saying, I would like to start a study center on such and such a campus. I received another one yesterday. I mean, these things are coming in as fast, almost faster than we can respond to them. It’s really incredible. But there are very healthy startup efforts at UCLA, in particular right now. It’s one that I’m watching. We have inquiries from some other well-known universities, and then there are some other universities that are not as well known. But that’s one of the signs of the spread of the movement, is it’s not just the campuses with 1000s of students and big resources and big recognizable names. Sometimes I get inquiries from institutions, and I have to look them up to see where they are. I’m not familiar with them, but you know, the persons inquiring have been exposed to the movement at one of the larger campuses. 

David Capes  

I think parents who hear this, grandparents who hear this, might be encouraged and not so discouraged from sending their sons and daughters, grandsons, granddaughters, off to a well-known university because they know that they can find Christian community, Christian Fellowship, Christian teaching, and maybe even almost like a liberal arts degree in Christian theology there. This is a great movement’

Carl Johnson  

I’ll say, for the record, I want it to be known. I’m a huge fan of Christian colleges. My wife, Julie, and I have five children, we sent three of them to Christian colleges and two of them to secular universities. When people ask me, what’s the better route to go, my answer is, there is no one right answer. It depends on the child, their interests and the opportunities that are before them. 

We’ve had students come to some of the universities where we have centers, and they said, well, actually, my first choice was a Christian college, but I got so much more financial aid here that I didn’t really have a choice. I had to come here. But now that I’m here, I’m happy that I’m here, because I didn’t know there were all these opportunities for Christian learning here. But the bottom line, reality is that approximately 80% of students from Christian homes and families attend secular universities. That’s just the way the numbers work, and so I think it’s important in the broadest sense of church strategy. If we want to serve the next generation, we need to be thinking about, what are we doing for the Christian students at secular universities. And of course, it’s not just the Christian students. I mean, we’re doing a lot of public events as well.

David Capes  

Some non-Christian students become Christians. I’ve talked to so many people who became Christians in college.

Carl Johnson  

Absolutely, it’s a very incredible time.

David Capes  

And a lot of that has to do with movements like the Christian Studies Center Movement.

Carl Johnson  

Yes, absolutely.

David Capes  

Carl Johnson, thanks for being with us today on The Stone Chapel Podcast. 

Carl Johnson  

Thank you, David.

Description 

TSCP 284 Staying Christian in College with Carl Johnson

Many parents (and grandparents) are concerned to send their sons and daughters off to secular colleges because they may lose their faith.  But Carl Johnson, Executive Director of the Consortium of Christian Study Centers, thinks this is a good time to send them to them to certain elite universities.  Why?  Well keep listening and you’ll find out. 

The Stone Chapel Podcast is part of the Church Leaders Podcast Network. 

For more information about the Christian Study Centers see their website: https://cscmovement.org/

The Stone Chape Podcast is created and produced by the Lanier Theological Library and Learning Center in Houston, TX. 

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The New Testament in Color (Part 1) with Esau McCaulley

David Capes  

Joining me today is Esau McCauley, Associate Professor of New Testament and Public Theology at  Wheaton College. He worked with NT Wright, our friend from the University of St Andrews.

David Capes  

Welcome. We’re so glad that you’re here. 

Esau McCaulley  

Oh, thank you. Happy to be here. I’m enjoying it, it’s a beautiful, beautiful space. 

David Capes  

Yes and you’ve had a chance to enjoy our Yarnton property.

Esau McCaulley  

Yes! How many people have done both? I’ve done double duty. 

David Capes  

You are twice blessed. 

Esau McCaulley  

I have to go back once the library is finished there, so I can see it fully operational.

David Capes  

We’re going to be talking about your commentary that you led. It’s a great project, and it’s called the New Testament in Color: A Multiethnic Bible Commentary. Tell us about this project.

Esau McCaulley  

My first book looked at the contributions of the African American church to understanding Christianity in America, and the distinctive ways in which African Americans have read the Bible and made sense of it. And so, when I wrote that book, it was supposed to be a part one of a two part series. But a lot of people bought the first book. And then wanted to talk about it, some people attacked it, so you’ve got to defend it. So it took longer to help people understand what I did and didn’t mean by African American biblical interpretation. Maybe we’ll talk about that for a second to help everyone understand New Testament in Color.

David Capes  

That was one of my questions down the way. Let’s talk a little bit about that, because you wrote a chapter on that here.

Esau McCaulley  

Yes, when we think about African American biblical interpretation, we could get this idea that skin color creates interpretations of the Bible. Like there’s something in the melanin that makes you a magical Bible interpreter. That’s not what I mean at all. What I mean is the color of your skin impacts the way that you’re treated, and when you’re treated a certain way, it raises certain kinds of questions that you then go to the Bible and answer. A good example is a lot of African Americans are told that Christianity is a white man’s religion. So, we have to show from the Bible that Christianity isn’t a white man’s religion. And I doubt that most pastors in white churches have had people come and say, Christianity is the black man’s religion, prove to me that it isn’t. So the questions that are raised in an African American context aren’t the same questions that are raised in other contexts. 

The other example that I use, is say it’s 1954 and Brown v. Board of Education has just passed. Now African Americans are thinking through the questions of how we’re going to be Christians in this new context. Now consider, it’s also 1954 but it’s a white pro-segregation congregation, and the pastor has  to stand up and make the case from the Bible. Different context produces different questions. Now you still turn into the Bible for answers. The Bible is still the authority, but the kinds of questions that you ask are influenced by your context. Then sometimes because of your context, you ask questions that lead to insights that people might not otherwise notice.

Another example that I give is say you’re getting ready to teach a youth group, and you’re looking through the Bible. You’re thinking, what’s a good message to say to 15-year-olds. And because 15-year-olds are in your head, you see exactly how this part in Paul, will speak exactly to the experiences of a 15 or 16 year olds. Those insights are there, but you didn’t notice them, because normally you think about preaching to adults. In actuality, the people who you imagine when you read the Bible influence the kinds of things that you notice, and it influences the kinds of things that you bring out of the text. So if we only have one group of people in mind when we interpret the Bible, it leads to the possibility that we don’t see things that are there. I’m not talking about distorted meanings. I’m talking about motivated readings, the things that you notice because you’re attending to them based upon your experiences. 

Maybe another example of this, not to belabor the point. Let’s say you’re a woman, and you’re told that women are intellectually inferior. You ask the question what does the Bible actually say about women. And as a woman, you might be really motivated to get this right, because this matters for who you are. Motivated readings aren’t necessarily bad, sometimes they can help us or sometimes they can hinder us. Motivated readings are a fact of reality, and African Americans in the United States have had unique experiences that have required us to answer questions that other communities haven’t. And there’s a deposit of reflections that have arisen from a community that we call the black church, that have formed habits of reading. And so that’s what we call African American biblical interpretation. Not skin color producing readings, but skin color producing experiences that we then bring to the text that influence our reading. 

If that is true of African Americans, it’s also true of people from other cultures. We thought what happens if you bring different cultures together to create a commentary that itself reflects what the church is supposed to be, people from every tribe, tongue and nation, reading the Bible together to make sense of it. The New Testament in Color is black, white, Asian and Latino scholars who are together working on a commentary on the New Testament. Not that we all did each one individually, but each person wrote a commentary on a particular book. We have Native American peoples, First Nations indigenous peoples, African Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos and white scholars. We wanted to focus on North American minorities. We saw things like the Asian Bible Commentary and others that were more Bible commentaries looking at evangelicalism, listening to the voice of the global church. And we said, it’s great to listen to the global church through the African Bible Commentary, the Asian Bible Commentary. These things are important, but what about the ethnic minorities in our midst? What we wanted to do was to create something that brought together the ethnic minorities in the United States along with the majority culture, because white is a culture, and bring them together to create a commentary.

David Capes  

There are white scholars here, as well as black scholars. Gene Green, Michael Gorman, Amy peeler is one of the editors. Janette Oak. Tell us about Janet.

Esau McCaulley  

Dr. Oak is an Asian American scholar at Fuller Seminary. She focuses on I & II Peter. She’s also working on a commentary right now on all three letters of John. She is an accomplished scholar, Associate Professor at Fuller. She’s published tons of stuff. Amy peeler is a colleague at Wheaton. We love Wheaton. Amy is a Hebrews scholar, and she also deals a lot with gender, and is helping us understand how the Bible describes women and the gifts that God has given to women and how the church needs to embrace the entire body of Christ to effective ministry. She’s a great New Testament scholar. She did a commentary on Hebrews. Her commentary on Hebrews just came out sometime recently. There’s Osvaldo Padilla. He’s a Latino scholar at Beeson Divinity School, which is in Alabama, you know, God’s country! He is working on the commentary on the Pastorals. 

All of them are accomplished scholars. We wanted three things from the people who participated. One, we wanted them to affirm that Scripture is the final authority for Christians, for faith and practice. Although we agree to disagree on a lot of stuff, we wanted to say we agree on the Bible. The second thing we said was we wanted the creeds to function as the consensus around Christian belief as well. So the Nicene Creed, the Apostles Creed. We said, there’s a bunch of denominations here and we think the creeds are a good summary of what it means to be a Christian. So If you say you’re pro-creed, and you say you like the Bible, you could be in the commentary. Beyond that, we gave people freedom. We also said we didn’t want people to speak for their entire ethnicity. I’m not speaking for black people, but I’m a black person speaking from that perspective. This is not the black view on A, B and C. It’s more of a person who’s being unapologetically themselves in the interpretive process.

David Capes  

Let’s talk a little bit about your own journey growing up in Alabama. Your own experiences. You were born in the 70’s I I take it. 

Esau McCaulley  

I like to call myself a child of the 70s. I was born in October of 1979. I’ve lived in the 70s, the 80s, the 90’s to 2000’s, the 2010’s and the 2020’s.

David Capes  

Six decades. Wow. It’s you were barely in the. 70s.

Esau McCaulley  

That month and a half in the 70s is a wild time.

David Capes  

Talk about your journey toward faith. 

Esau McCaulley  

I think that a lot of the times I talk more about decisions for Jesus rather than a decision for Jesus. I feel like a significant part of my spiritual journey is, over time, giving over more and more of my life to God. Because I was raised in a Christian home. My grandparents, on both sides of my family, were Baptist ministers. My mom was a minister. She became a minister after I did so I always say she followed me into ministry. She got ordained, a couple of years ago. We were in church every Sunday. We were kind of from a rough part of town, and so we tended towards binaries. You were either in the church or in the streets. And so I was in the church, but the levels of my piety waxed and waned over the years. And so I didn’t say it out loud to the pastor, but I’ll come to church on Sunday and if you preach a good sermon, I’m going to be a Christian that week. If you don’t, you lost me. I’ve always kept that with me, because I know what it’s like to go into church and say, if I don’t hear a word from God today I don’t know what’s going happen. 

That was most of my childhood, and I would say that for me, Christianity was in periods in my life, more of a survival mechanism. It was the way out of my neighborhood. And maybe I can say, to make a very long story short, I was a college football player, division three at the University of the South. And it was shocking to go from the poverty of my high school to college at the University of the South, where there’s so much money and so much wealth. They joked because in football we had “two a days”, where you practice twice a day. Tennessee was super hot, and I was the only person who actually ever gained weight during “two a days”. Because I never had that much food in my life. You could just go to cafeteria and eat whenever you want. I couldn’t believe it. 

But one of the things that I realized is that after I was no longer in this place where I didn’t recognize my need for God, I said, Oh, God had done what he needed to do. He got me to college, and I was in college. It was a more theologically progressive place, where I took the religion classes. They told you that none of this stuff was true, and all of the kind of stuff you hear as a stereotype of religion and higher education. It’s really good to tell a college student that God doesn’t care what you do. It wasn’t that intellectually stimulating. There were the fraternity houses down the road and the professors telling me I can do what I want. That’s a toxic mix for a college student. And I kind of drifted away from my faith for a little bit in college. Then there came this particular moment in college. 

It was Christmas break when I had a significant spiritual moment in my life. I’m home for break, and I’m back in my room, but it’s no longer mine, because when you leave our house, there’s too many people to leave an empty room. So it was my sister’s bedroom and everything’s pink now. I was listening to Etta James, like old school and Billie Holiday; this sad jazz music on this thing called Napster. If you’re a certain age, you remember when you could download illegal music before there were streaming services. I wasn’t praying or anything. I’m just listening to sad jazz music. Because I had everything that I wanted in college. I was no longer worried about what I was going to eat. I was doing well in school. I was doing well in sports. I was not praying. I was just listening to depressing jazz music because it felt like it matched my mood. 

I had this idea that I think comes from God. It was like a sentence, fully formed. What happens when you receive everything you ever wanted, but it’s not sufficient to bring you joy. And I said that has summarized my college experience. And then the answer to the question that the Spirit was, maybe you should try God and take him seriously. And so that was the spiritual transformation. But because I had been in college and I had all of the intellectual stuff taken away from me, I had to go through this process of reading myself. I had to say, I know I’ve had this experience of God, but now I had to make intellectual sense of this and that. And actually, the study to make sense of what I’d experienced spiritually led me down the road to becoming, ultimately, an academic. I began to answer those questions that I received in those courses. 

Jeannine asked me, what is it that I like doing the most? And I said, talking to students about the Bible and giving them the confidence to live their lives on the basis of each text. Because I know what it’s like to have a professor whose goal was to take that away from students. I want to give that back to students, to say we are not fools for trusting in the God who revealed these texts. And so that’s a little bit of my spiritual journey.

David Capes  

Great story. 

This is the end of part one of my interview with Esau McCaulley.  Part two is coming up next week.

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Theodicy vs. Anti-theodicy with Jahdiel Perez

This transcript has been edited for clarity and space.

Hey everybody. My name is Jahdiel Perez, and I’m an Assistant Professor of Humanities and Sciences at Villanova University in Pennsylvania.

David Capes  

Jahdiel, welcome to The Stone Chapel Podcast. Great to see you again. 

Jahdiel Perez  

Great to see you too. Thanks for having me. 

David Capes  

Oh, this is a delight. I was deeply impressed by your presentation here, and we’ll say more about that in a few minutes. But for those who don’t know Jahdiel Perez, who are you?

Jahdiel Perez  

I’m a Guatemalan and Puerto Rican pastor’s kid that grew up in Boston. I wanted nothing to do with school. I hated school with a passion. When I was about 19 years old, I had this encounter with the writings of C. S. Lewis, and it completely changed my life. I felt like God was waking me up and inviting me to play this really intriguing game with him that I later learned was called philosophy, theology, apologetics. 

And after that moment, I just wanted to spend my life wrestling with the some of the most important questions that we can ask as human beings. And then God opened the doors to study theology at Harvard and to get my doctoral degree at Oxford University. Now in this latest stage I’ve taken up a position of Humanities and Sciences at Villanova. So, it’s just a pleasure to be with you

David Capes  

Well, having watched you teach when you were at the Lanier Theological Library, I can tell your students are very fortunate to have you, because you’re very clear. You know where you want to go with a lecture. You were here for part of a conference that we did with Amy Orr Ewing entitled C.S. Lewis and the Problem of Pain. You did a lecture to a smaller group of people who were gathered here for the Lanier Certificate in Theology and Ministry. You did a talk and called it C.S. Lewis Among Contemporary Theologians. I have retitled it Theodicy versus Anti-theodicy. In a sense, you pit the two against each other. Let’s just get into the definitions. First of all, you start by defining horrendous evil. We all sort of know the idea of evil, but what do you mean by a horrendous evil?

Jahdiel Perez  

Horrendous evil is this idea that this philosopher, Marilyn McCord Adams, introduced in 1990 and the idea was that when we talk about how God relates to suffering, we’re not talking about just ordinary suffering. We’re not talking about the kind of suffering where you have a cavity or a headache. What Adams wanted to do was to distinguish those kinds of suffering where you can point them to a greater good. Like, if you go to the dentist, it’s for health, right? The pain that you feel at the gym is for health as well. There are ways you can easily think about a good reason for suffering. 

Horrendous evil is this category of evil where it’s almost impossible to try to find or imagine a good reason why somebody could suffer like that. And she defines it as life-ruining evil. It’s a kind of suffering where you question that your life could ever be meaningful again, or that anything good could compensate for that evil. So that’s basically how she defined the category. And ever since this has been the main term that philosophers and theologians have been debating over. So now we’re not talking about evil anymore. We’re talking about horrendous evil. 

David Capes  

One of the ways that that philosophers and theologians deal with that is through an idea that you find in philosophy and theology. Theodicy is the key term. When you say theodicy, what do you mean by that? 

Jahdiel Perez  

There’s a few ways to define theodicy. It comes from these two terms, Theos and Dike, which means God and justice. I’m defending the justice of God, the nature of God in the face of suffering. So there’s this obvious tension between the magnitude of suffering and the goodness of God, right? And maybe you’ve heard of the problem of evil. The idea that, if God is all good and all powerful and morally perfect, how can he allow so much suffering? So theodicy, simply put, is a response to the problem of evil. It tries to defend the nature of God in the face of suffering.

There’s two ways to think about theodicy. One is primarily in terms of truth. I’m searching for the truth about God in the midst of suffering. Another way is, I’m searching for meaning that God can give to my suffering. Those are two different ways that the discussion goes. Some philosophers will want to debate, is theodicy true? Others will want to say, is it helpful? Does it give suffering meaning that allows us to experience it and cope better with suffering?

David Capes  

I guess it’s probably the perfect answer, if you find that it is both true and it helps you discover meaning. But now there’s this movement that is called anti-theodicy. What is anti-theodicy? 

Jahdiel Perez  

This movement really picked up steam in the middle of the past century, during the world wars, from all the carnage and all the unprecedented suffering and terror that that we experienced together. There’s a book called God after Auschwitz, and it says that you can’t look at God the same way. Before we used to imagine evil as something horrendous, but now, after two world wars, after all the carnage of the 20th century, now that it means something so much more, something so much deeper. It’s almost like we share this collective trauma that makes us look at God differently. 

So anti-theodicy wants to say this, there is no meaningful relationship between God and horrendous suffering. Their main thesis is this, that horrendous suffering is inherently meaningless, and there’s no way to redeem it. There’s no way to find meaning in it, to justify it, that the most appropriate moral response as a community and as individuals, is to reject the Theodicy. That doesn’t mean we reject God. 

It just means we reject the attempt to reconcile God with suffering. They think this is not helpful. They think there are philosophical problems with it, but the big impetus behind anti-theodicy is morality. They think it’s evil to try to impose a kind of God-given meaning to suffering if the people suffering don’t accept it. We used to think this was valid, but after the 20th century, there’s no way we can keep doing this. It’s irresponsible and sometimes harmful. 

David Capes  

That’s the idea that came across very carefully in your presentation here, that theodicy they claim, harms people. That people are harmed further by attempting to find this meaning and reconcile God with that suffering. You cite a number of people and let me just include two, because I know both. I’ve met both of John Swinton and Rowan Williams, and here’s a statement by Williams, who was Archbishop of Canterbury. 

Perhaps it is time for philosophers to look away from the theodicy. Part of the task of good theology and a candid religious philosophy is, I believe, to reacquaint us with our materiality and mortality, and part of that is the knowledge of suffering as without explanation or compensation. It is more religiously imperative to be worried about evil than to put it into a satisfactory theoretical context. 

You talk about how in theodicy, what we do is take a faraway view of it. We look at it in an abstract way, but they look at it theoretically. Comment on Williams’s ideas there.

Jahdiel Perez  

I think Rowan Williams has a really intriguing perspective on what makes theology good. Up until the anti-theodicy movement, you just assumed that if you have a theology that doesn’t answer the problem of evil, it’s a bad theology. He’s flipping the script and saying, actually, theology can do its job better, it can draw you closer to God if you don’t respond to the problem of evil, if you affirm anti-theodicy. 

The important thing to note here is that anti theodicy is not just an atheist critique of religion, but actually some theologians, very good theologians like Rowan Williams and John Swinton have said, wait, there’s an insight here that can actually help us do theology and pastoral care even better. Now, personally, as I said in my lecture, I have some questions and comments and some reservations about that, but I do think that they’re hitting onto something important. They’re trying to make us aware that when we talk about God, it has consequences. If we’re not careful, we might actually do harm to people because they’re not at the correct stage of processing their loss. My position is not, oh, they’re just all false. Let’s just throw their ideas away. I think this can serve as a very important corrective to how we do theodicy.

David Capes  

Part of what you do in this paper, and a part of what you’re working on with your broader project that I hope one day will be published in a book, is to not necessarily say, okay, anti-theodicy is completely wrong. But you say it’s mostly wrong. There are some things about it that we ought to listen to, and there are some things about it that, in fact, are wrong. And part of that is the question of, does theodicy actually harm people? You’re looking at psychological studies. Tell us a little bit about that and how that research is developing for you.

Jahdiel Perez  

My research project is trying to intervene into this debate between theodicists and anti-theodicists, primarily from a psychological perspective. I can say this because I started as a philosopher. I still am a philosopher. I absolutely love philosophy, but we’re not often aware when we are making empirical claims, a claim about the physical, observable, measurable universe. Sometimes we just like to say things about human beings, but we don’t realize that this is an empirical claim, not just a philosophical speculation. 

So my first move is, let me track the empirical claims that keep going back and forth in this debate. Instead of just philosophically debating them why don’t we look at the psychological studies? What can they tell us, if anything, about the way human beings respond to suffering and trauma? So it’s very important that I shift from horrendous evil to talking specifically about trauma and PTSD. That’s the way psychologists speak about hurt, and it’s evil. I think it’s yielded very interesting insights.

I’ve found areas where anti-theodicies are correct. They’re just absolutely correct. One of their main points is called the argument from insensitivity. It’s the idea that theodicy is inherently insensitive to people who are suffering. That there’s no time, there’s no place where you can articulate a theodicy, and it will be helpful. It’s always going to be harmful. It’s always going to be insensitive. 

I think that they take that a little too far, but they’re correct that people who are suffering from PTSD, almost universally have a common symptom called hyper-arousal. It’s hypersensitivity. Somebody who’s traumatized can get triggered at the smallest cues, at the smallest remembrance. Sometimes just the tone of your voice, sometimes just your facial expression, sometimes if you just use the wrong word, it can trigger them and remind them of the imprints of their trauma. And anti-theodicists are picking up on this. Their concern about sensitivity is exactly correct that people who have suffered horrendously and have been traumatized tend to be hypersensitive. Not just our level of sensitivity, but they tend to be hyper-aroused, hyper-sensitive. So maybe we need to be very careful with how we talk about God and how we talk about theodicy. 

In my research, I have found almost the opposite, that theodicy doesn’t just help people who are suffering, but helps even caregivers that are giving medical or therapeutic care to victims of horrendous evil. If you have some kind of meaning that you can give to suffering that’s going to make it less potentially traumatic for you. One way of defining trauma is an event that you cannot make meaning of, you cannot integrate it into the overall story of your life or your overall worldview. And insofar as that event or that suffering remains that way, remains senseless, the imprints of trauma are going to continue. They’re going to affect you physically. They’re going to affect you cognitively, psychologically, spiritually. 

But if you have a framework that can try to make meaning of suffering, even horrendous suffering, you’re more likely to be able to cope with it better. What I found so far is that some of the empirical claims in the debate are not what the anti-theodicists think. If theodicy hurts individuals, it is not necessarily because theodicy is harmful, but because those individuals are in a very particular, very specific moment of processing their loss. They’re in a very specific moment of their grief. It’s very clear that your sensibilities and your needs change depending on which stage you are at. 

So, my argument is, what if the Theodicy is harmful and theodicy is offensive at the earliest stages of grief. Of course, you don’t want to hear about God when you just lost your loved one or when you just experienced trauma. Who cares about God in those moments, right? Sometimes you don’t want to hear about it. Sometimes it’s defensive. It’s hurtful. But what the anti-theodicists think is that that’s the only stage of grief, and that if you feel that way immediately, you’re bound to feel that way 10, 20, or 30 years after the event. And psychologists have shown that’s just not the case. The way we make judgments about our meaning in life changes and can change very dramatically based on many different factors. But one of them is, which stage of grief are you in?

David Capes  

Yes, that is huge. That is fascinating. One of the things that you talk about is the fact that it is important at some stage, at some point in grief, that a person actively maintain a distancing. That it’s helpful to distance yourself and to think theoretically about that, because you said that it helps to reduce stress and anxiety and negative emotions. It reduces the blood pressure, it reduces cardiovascular activity etc. And here’s a statement that you made that I thought was interesting. That “self-immersion in stressful events can lead to maladaptive reflection, more anxiety, more worry, more saying this is catastrophic, higher blood pressure, higher cardiovascular activity. That a part of what philosophers do and theologians do is to conceive of these things Theoretically, and that it’s helpful for people who are in some stage of grief to  look at it from that perspective. Would you comment on that?

Jahdiel Perez  

This relates to another major argument of anti-theodicists and it is called the “argument from detachment”. The more you abstract away from the specific, embodied suffering, the less clearly you’ll be able to see the suffering and to evaluate it correctly. So. the further you are away, the more harmful you are going to be to someone who’s suffering. If you’re suffering, you want to know you’re not alone, right? You want people to come close to you. Maybe not to talk to you, but at least to be present. So that doesn’t make some sense. 

However, what psychologists have found is that there’s two ways of looking at any specific moment in life, especially trauma. One is from a self-immersed perspective, which uses “I” statements, which means this is happening to me right now, at this very moment. I’m reliving, reenacting the trauma. Another is from a self-distance perspective, which is trying to create some sort of psychological distance between who you are now and the you that suffered the trauma. 

What psychologists have found is that trauma is overwhelming. What it does is that it keeps you trapped in the moment. It affects the way you perceive time. So even years after the event, you might think you’re still suffering. And one of the interventions that therapists like to make is precisely to create psychological self-distancing from this event. Because if you cannot distance yourself specifically from that traumatic stress, all those factors that we mentioned, anxiety, heart rate, depression, reactivity of your heart and all these biological markers tend to increase without this kind of psychological self-distancing. 

What if the theodicy provides the kind of distance that individuals need to cope better with suffering, and this is something that I think there’s enough evidence to suggest. But what if it’s not the argument per se that helps us cope better? What if it’s just the distance from the trauma and the meaning that it can give that can help us live better with suffering? 

David Capes  

It’s a fascinating study Jahdiel. Thank you for being with us today on The Stone Chapel Podcast.

Jahdiel Perez  

I appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me any time.

A Nugget of Wisdom from Jahdiel Perez  

One of my favorite sayings is that if you’re the smartest person in the room, then you’re in the wrong room. I think it’s very important to surround yourself with people that are ahead of you, that are smarter than you. I never want to be the smartest person in the room, the most spiritual person in the room. I found that every time I’ve grown in life, or anytime I’ve succeeded or have been promoted, it’s because I have mentors around me that can help me grow.