Posted on

“She’s Not Who You Think” with Jennifer Powell McNutt

This transcript has been edited for clarity and space.

Jennifer Powell NcNutt  

Hi, I’m Dr Jennifer Powell McNutt, and I’m the Franklin S Dyrness Professor of Biblical and Theological Studies at Wheaton College.

David Capes 

Dr. Jennifer McNutt, Jennifer, good to see you. Welcome to The Stone Chapel Podcast. Your first appearance. It took two years for us to be able to, do this podcast. We kept missing each other between kids, travel and work. You’re a busy lady. In a minute, we’re going to talk about your book, The Mary We Forgot, and the subtitle is fascinating. We’re going to talk about what the “apostle to the apostles”, teaches the church today. It’s fascinating. I learned a lot just by reading the book and all the things I didn’t know about Mary Magdalene and her significance and her ongoing potential significance, in the church today. 

Let’s start with you.  For those who don’t know, who is Jennifer Powell McNutt?

Jennifer Powell NcNutt  

I’ll start with my teaching. I teach at Wheaton College in the Liftin Divinity School, and I run the master’s programs in theology and history of Christianity. You and I have worked together, so that’s delightful. And my husband and I are from California. Originally I went to Westmont College and Princeton Theological Seminary and then the University of Saint Andrews. And I’m married to David McNutt. He is the senior acquisitions editor in theology at Zondervan. And we have McNuttshell Ministries. We love to work together and to do ministry together in our Presbyterian tradition, and we wrote a book together too recently.

David Capes

You’re an author along with a lot of other things. You travel and you speak all over the place. We’ll put a link in the show notes to your McNuttshell Ministries. That’s really interesting, and I’d like to learn more about that someday.

Jennifer Powell NcNutt  

Yes, we work to bridge the church and the academy. 

David Capes

That’s what we do at the Lanier Theological Library. That is our mission. And that’s a little bit of a heavy lift at times, but at other times, at least these days, it’s working hand in glove. We’ like to get you down here sometime to be one of our speakers and maybe we’ll even bring David too! Okay, we’re talking about your book, The Mary We Forgot: What the Apostle to the Apostle Teaches the Church Today. 

All I have is a promotional copy. So I’m asking you to send a signed copy my way. I’ll have the full version at that point. All right, let’s talk a little bit about the fact that you have done a lot of work in reformation studies, and now all of a sudden, you’re heading back to the early church, and that tradition. What was the impetus for you to move from a focus on later church history, back to the beginnings?

Jennifer Powell NcNutt  

For this book, it was just tracing the history of Mary Magdalene’s interpretation. And also, not only across time, but also across the different traditions and branches of the church. So, I’m looking at the Roman Catholic, the Eastern Orthodox and the Protestant. But of course, I’m writing from a Protestant perspective and experience of her. We have to go back to the beginning to see these early interpreters and how they are addressing Mary Magdalene, how they’re highlighting her role, what they’re thinking about exegetically and theologically, about her presence. 

Then I was hoping to see how that eventually gets us to the point where we are today. There were surprises along the way, and there were other things that we will be familiar with, especially this idea of her as a prostitute, which is very well known in our modern popular cultural world. I’m seeing how that happened, but then also some of the complexity behind the reading of her importance and significance and role in the Christian life. 

David Capes 

You begin with Jesus Christ Superstar, and any book that begins with Jesus Christ Superstar is going to get my attention. I was a musician back in those days and played it a few times and had fun with it. You know, it was an interesting bit of music. I didn’t understand it completely. I just thought it was about Jesus! I was into it for that. 

So, you refer to her in the subtitle as the apostle to the apostles. What do you mean by that? That’s not a phrase a lot of people have heard,

Jennifer Powell NcNutt  

It is interesting to discover that in our western tradition, we do have evidence and examples, though inconsistently, of understanding her role in Jesus’s ministry as apostolic. I had always heard that that was only part of the Eastern Orthodox tradition, and that they were very clear on Mary Magdalene, not a prostitute but as apostle to the apostles. And so it was really exciting to discover in the Western tradition how she has, importantly, also been recognized as apostle to the apostles, and some of the reasons why that happens in the history of interpretation. 

Part of it has to do with just the flourishing of medieval mysticism in the West and the attention that was put on the importance of preaching. And we see, the Mendicant orders, especially, really identifying with Mary Magdalene. Seeing her encounter with Jesus in the garden in John 20 as really the basis and foundation for sending her as apostolic witness. And that goes all the way back to Irenaeus of Leon, this reading of her role as bringing the good news to the other apostles, and therefore being the apostle to the apostles. 

So that was my first discovery. But then the second discovery was to see that even in the Protestant tradition, even among the reformers, there is recognition of her activity in the gospels as apostolic and again, inconsistently and certainly something that we have forgotten over time, but nonetheless, there and present. One of the other things that I’m doing in the book is to say that according to Scriptures own standards for apostolicity, Mary Magdalene qualifies. It’s not just in the history of our traditions, across the traditions, but also based on what the Bible sets out for us.

David Capes  

Now, one of the things that people still aren’t settled on is the idea of Magdalene itself, just the name Mary Magdalene. First of all, Mary itself is a very common name, right?

Jennifer Powell NcNutt 

That’s right. It’s the most popular name, as I understand it, in first century Palestine, for women. So, I really appreciated that as a “Jennifer” from the 80s.

David Capes  

How many Jennifers are there in the 80s? 

Jennifer Powell NcNutt  

About four in every class!

David Capes 

We go through times when names become very familiar. Even the name Jesus, Joshua, Yeshua is a very common name at the time, so he had to be designated something other than Yeshua. So, he’s designated Yeshua of Nazareth. What about Mary? What does Magdalene mean?

Jennifer Powell NcNutt  

I’m using a lot of different research and biblical studies on this topic, but the reason why the name is highlighted in part, is to distinguish her from other “Marys”. But also, we would notice that she is being connected to a location rather than to a man. Instead of to a husband or to a father or to a son. We know her by her connection to this place. But also because in Luke 8 especially, she’s Mary called the Magdalene. There is a sense that there’s another meaning to her name. In Aramaic, Migdol means tower, and so she may carry this nickname of “the tower”. This is a conversation going on in biblical studies right now. But what’s interesting is to see that this is how the church has read her name in the tradition. Not just in the early church, but also in the Reformation. She was called “the tower”, and that was intended to signify her strength of faith, that she was known as a model of faith. 

David Capes

She might also have been tall, you never know!

Jennifer Powell NcNutt  

Yes, she could have been tall!

David Capes

And when she put on those high heels, boy, was she really up there!  I’ve heard all sorts of things about that, and a lot of it is tied to Magdala, which is a location on the west shore of the Sea of Galilee. There’s been a lot of research done there in the last years, a lot of discoveries archeologically. It’s just fascinating how all these things develop. I wasn’t aware that the idea of the tower had that staying power into the tradition.

Jennifer Powell NcNutt  

It’s so interesting to discover we’re having this conversation today about how we should understand it, but we should also be aware of how the church has thought about it too, but again, inconsistently.

David Capes  

There’s this conflation of her and the idea of prostitution. First of all, where did that happen? How did that happened do you think from all of your research as a historian.

Jennifer Powell NcNutt  

I really enjoyed this part of it, the curiosity of discovering how this story fits together. What I was able to perceive was that some of the hermeneutical approaches that were happening with reading and making sense of the Gospels was to harmonize the Gospels. We can understand and appreciate that. That is a good approach. But nonetheless, what I noted was that the various stories in the Gospel about a woman anointing Jesus became one story. There are four stories and John’s Gospel is the one that names Mary of Bethany. So they are all conflated into one story, rather than interpreting that maybe the other women are different women. The person that I see this happening with is Augustine. He makes this move. And by linking these anointing women with Mary Bethany, he also links Mary Bethany then with the Luke 7 woman, who is described as a sinner woman. That, to him, shows that Mary Bethany had this other story, this other back story to her life. First she is not looked on very well, 

Then the next move that happens, that I would say, formalizes this is with Pope Gregory the Great. He then conflates Mary Bethany with Mary Magdalene. So basically, you have the conflations of the anointings, then you have the conflation of the Marys. Mary Bethany gets absorbed into the Mary Magdalene story. Mary Magdalene is known for having seven demons. Gregory then is trying to understand how that fits into the story. He will describe those as seven deadly sins and interpret the sinfulness of the woman in Luke 7 as prostitution. And actually, that is the conclusion for a lot of interpreters even into the 21st century. 

It’s only been more recently that there have been some questions about the fact that Luke could have used the Greek word for prostitute, if he’d meant that. He uses it otherwise and chooses not to use it here. So maybe her sin is not prostitution. It isn’t necessarily prostitution. That’s where we get that. From the sixth century, and on from there, she really becomes this model of a penitent prostitute who is reflecting basically the epitome of sin. It is a great example of God’s graciousness to choose her and select her to proclaim the good news of Christ’s resurrection. 

And that is not going to be questioned until the Reformation. In the Reformation, they will begin to untie the Mary Magdalene story from Mary of Bethany and from the Luke 7 woman. And this is called the controversy of the three Marys. So the Luke 7 woman isn’t a Mary.

David Capes  

She isn’t necessarily a Mary at all. Once the Pope says something, and once Augustine says something, that’s going to be like law forever [for some].

Jennifer Powell NcNutt  

For the west yes. Because it shapes then the liturgy. You think about the feast days, you think about the liturgy, which scripture passages are you reading on which days? The church is going to place the Luke 7 reading with Mary Magdalene’s feast day. And that’s not even going to be changed until the modern era.

David Capes  

If we tell the truth now about Mary and we understand better her story, that’s what your book is all about. In a summary way, what can she teach us today?

Jennifer Powell NcNutt  

Well, I think so much. I think the big takeaway, first of all is we have to recognize that in the Gospels, she is a woman who has been gripped by demons, by seven demons. That’s actually her backstory, and Jesus is healing her from this, and he is definitively delivering her from the grip of that demonic activity, however you interpret that. The Gospels don’t reveal to us her experience of that suffering, so we don’t know exactly what she experienced. We’re meant to remember her as healed. We’re also meant then when we see her in the garden with Jesus, to see what she comes to represent in the story, when she is witness to resurrection. 

And I know you’ll love this part, because I think she is revealing to us who Jesus is. And this is: Jesus is Exorcist, who is truly King. We have really lost that reading of her, and it impacts how we understand the Easter morning. It impacts how we understand why the women are there, what it means when she points us to Jesus. In the early church, when they looked at Mary Magdalene, they read her, they were less focused on her and more focused on what she tells us about Christology. What she tells us about the Trinity. And I think we want to recapture that part of it, not to the detriment of knowing her or seeing her rightly, which I think is biblically right, reading the biblical text clearly. But then also, because her whole role is really like John the Baptist, to point us to Christ in all that he means, so his identity and what he is bringing to us through salvation. That’s one part of it.

I think the other part, though, is that we have been very focused on her being this penitent prostitute, sinner, when her story is very different. And in fact, the Gospels want us to see that as soon as Jesus heals her, she is with him. She is focused on him. She is walking with him. Everything about her life becomes centered around him as we understand it again from the Gospels. Her resources, her time, where she goes. Everything is about being with him. She becomes this witness. She’s really this creedal witness for us. Because she is there in the ministry. She is there at the cross. She sees him die, sees his body put in the tomb, and the tomb sealed. She sees the empty tomb, and then sees the risen Christ, you know? And that’s not even all of it. 

There’s so much about it and the financial part is really interesting, because typically, we probably think that a woman in the New Testament is not going to give us a lot of insight into finances and how we serve faithfully with our finances. But actually, that’s also part of her story.

David Capes

So many takeaways here. I love the fact that you refer to her, and the church does as the apostle to the apostles. As the one who was this initial witness to the resurrection, who now relates this good news, who is sent to tell this good news to others, to the 12 and to others as well.

Jennifer Powell NcNutt

And we have been missing that part of it because of our reading of John 20. Some of the difficulties that we have faced for the church that have obscured that part of it. Clearing some of that away, her tears, her inability to see Jesus immediately, etc, allows us to see what it means when they interact and when he sends her. There’s many different parts to his sending of her that helps us to realize that in the true sense of the term apostle, she is messenger. She is the one who is sent. 

David Capes 

Indeed, indeed. We’re talking with Dr. Jennifer Powell McNutt about her book, The Mary, We Forgot What the Apostle to the Apostles Teaches the Church Today. It’s a great book. I would encourage you to get it. It tells us so much about church history, our beginnings, but also about Mary. She was just a remarkable woman who was completely, totally devoted to Jesus. Dr, Jennifer Powell McNutt, thanks for being with us today.

Jennifer Powell NcNutt

Thank you so much for having me. It was delightful. 

TSCP 242 She’s Not Who You Think

With Jennifer Powell McNutt

Description

TSCP 242 She’s Not Who You Think with Jennifer Power McNutt

Historian and Presbyterian church leader, Jennifer Powell McNutt, joins David Capes on The Stone Chapel Podcast to discuss her recent book, The Mary We Forgot: What the Apostle to the Apostles Teaches the Church Today (BrazosPress).  Mary Magdalene is one of the earliest followers of Jesus.  Through the twists and turns of history her backstory has been obscured.  She’s not who you think.  

For McNuttshell Ministries click here

The Stone Chapel Podcast is part of the ChurchLeaders Podcast network.  

Posted on

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.

Posted on

How Christology Begins with Stan Porter

Here is a conversation I had recently with Dr. Stan Porter on “The Stone Chapel Podcast.” That podcast is part of the ChurchLeaders Podcast Network.

Stan Porter  

I’m Stanley Porter and I’m the President and Dean and Professor of New Testament at McMaster Divinity College in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.

David Capes  

Dr. Stanley Porter, Stan. Good to see you. Welcome to The Stone Chapel Podcast.

Stan Porter  

Thanks, David. Good to see you, too.

David Capes  

It’s a pleasure to have you. I’ve been wanting to [have you on the podcast] for a while. I got your book, The Origins of New Testament Christology, the one you wrote with Bryan Dyer. And I’m very excited to be chatting with you today about it. Because you know, I love Christology. I just resonate with it. But for those who don’t know you, who is Stan Porter?

Stan Porter  

Well, that’s a good question. I have a lot of things I could talk about. One of my main interests is Greek language and linguistics. That’s how I started out my career. I’m originally from the United States, and was educated, at least in part there. And then I did my PhD in Britain, at the University of Sheffield. And I’ve taught at a lot of different places. I taught in the States, I taught in Western Canada, and I taught in the UK. Now I’m in Canada. I’ve been in Canada since 2001. I’ve been at McMaster Divinity College, probably for the biggest part of my career, and it’s been great. I’ve been President at McMaster Divinity College, and we’ve had a great time working with a lot of great students in developing a lot of different programs. And they’ve been, I think, serving the church very, very well.

David Capes  

Is there a denominational connection at McMaster?

Stan Porter  

McMaster Divinity College, we’re a Baptist seminary. We’re connected with the Convention Baptists. It’s distinctly Canadian Baptist. We’re connected to the Canadian Baptists of Ontario and Quebec. About 10% of our students are Convention Baptists, but we have a lot of other students. We have close to 40 different denominations, from a lot of different places around North America and around the globe.

David Capes  

It’s a great school. I’ve known a number of people to have gone there over the years. And it has a fantastic reputation in part because of your leadership there. And you’ve got a brilliant faculty as well. 

Stan Porter  

Thank you, David. Yeah, we’ve worked hard to develop a good faculty. 

David Capes  

That’s a big factor. And that attracts some good students, I would imagine over the years. Let’s talk about your book Origins of New Testament Christology. Here’s the subtitle, An Introduction to the Traditions and Titles Applied to Jesus. Now you wrote this, along with Bryan Dyer. How was it working with Bryan? 

Stan Porter  

Bryan’s a great guy. Bryan, I struck up a friendship and a working relationship. We edited a book on Paul and rhetoric. And I wrote this book on sacred traditions. Bryan contributed a chapter. And when we were working on that book, developing this notion of how important sacred traditions are, we got the idea of doing more, and that turned into the Christology book. It was a great experience working with Bryan. 

David Capes  

He’s a brilliant fellow. And I’m really grateful for him. Can you do a wrap it up in terms of the big focus of your book? (Now Christology means the doctrine of Christ, I guess is a simple way of putting it.) When you think about the person of Jesus, and the significance and those things, in a way you’re thinking Christologically. How does this book fit into other books about Christology? What’s the big idea of your book, Stan?

Stan Porter  

Actually, it’s a pretty complex question, because Christology is a complex issue. There are a couple of things, I think, to your question that I could address. The big idea is that we’re trying to get out how is Jesus Christ depicted in the New Testament for who he is? What are the New Testament writers doing? And what kinds of ways of depicting him do they use? How do they go about doing this? What are they saying by doing this? 

And hence, we have used a form of the titles approach. There have been important Christology books. Cullmann’s book, you know, is a well-known Christology in some ways. We patterned [our book] after that. Or at least think of it in terms of serving academia and the church in a similar kind of way. In other words, going through and not doing an exhaustive and comprehensive treatment, but a good solid treatment. Especially for students in seminary, or advanced undergraduates, of key ways that Jesus is depicted, we pattern the book then both in terms of the history of research like Cullmann and some of the others. Even at the end, in the last chapter, we position it in relationship to what some people would call the second history of religion movement, or this idea of “how Jesus became God” and try to address how it fits in there. But our primary task is to say, let’s take what the New Testament presents and show how Jesus is depicted. 

David Capes  

And that’s done, like you said, through a modified title approach. Because you don’t just do titles you do traditions and titles together. I like that. In fact, I was concerned a few years ago, when people seem to be abandoning Christological titles for other things. Those other things are good. But I didn’t feel honestly that we could divorce the titles from some of those other things, particularly narrative Christology, let’s say.

Stan Porter  

Yeah, those are really good observations. David, I think you’re absolutely right. There was a push back against the tiles approach. And in some ways, I think it was warranted, because in a lot of treatments of titles, there tends to be a focus on particular wordings. And sometimes the wordings are not particularly Christological. And you get this problem of trying to do a kind of word theology that I think goes much too far. And it’s probably not a good responsible way of dealing with lexical items. And what we’re trying to do is to say you need some kind of an organizing principle. And yes, others have used other ways of doing that book by book narratively, etc. 

But there are certain ways that Jesus is depicted or addressed by the New Testament authors. And we wanted to focus on those not trying to provide comprehensive treatments, for example, of every time a given lexeme appears in the New Testament. But when this particular set of wordings may be used, especially in these contexts that are theological, what is being meant by and that’s where the traditions part comes in. Because we found and are supporting the idea and trying to develop further, that a lot of these did not come from nowhere. But they are reflecting traditions that were found in the Jewish world and in the Greco-Roman world, and I don’t like to make a bifurcation between those two. But you know, Jesus lived within that wider thought world in which the New Testament was written. And we pick up on those particular kinds of wordings, and hence develop it along that way. That’s why it’s a bit of a modified titles approach, because the traditions help inform how this language came to be used and why it has significance in the New Testament.

David Capes  

Sometimes people look at a particular word, and say I don’t find that word, therefore, the idea is not there. I feel like that’s overreaching. Yes, that word might not be there. But still, the same idea is being expressed, let’s say in the questions being asked, or the statements being made, or the claims being made about Jesus, for example.

Stan Porter  

Yeah, absolutely. There’s that kind of thing, or just because a particular word might be used, I suppose you could say, I don’t know I’m just thinking for an example the word ‘son”. Every time “son” is used, it’s got to have some kind of theological significance to it. It’s a term that does sometimes in contexts have that theological meaning as we want to talk about that, but not do an exhaustive study of the lexeme. And all of its different uses. 

David Capes  

You and Bryan did 11 chapters on it. Let me just read the names of the chapters. And I’m going to ask in a second about the order you guys chose. Number one, Jesus the Lord. Number two, Jesus the Prophet. Number three, Jesus, the Son of Man. Number four, Jesus, the Son of God. Five, Jesus, the Suffering Servant. Six, Jesus, the Passover Lamb. Seven, Jesus the Messiah. Eight, Jesus, the Savior. Nine, Jesus, the Last Adam. Ten, Jesus, the Word and Eleven, Jesus, the High Priest. is there anything significant about that order, or was that just something you came up with as a way of getting all those titles and traditions represented,

Stan Porter  

It’d be great and clever if we said that it’s really some kind of a hidden code that spells Bryan’s middle name or something, but it’s not! That’s a good question, David. We actually debated the order. We debated whether there should be other chapters in the book. And once you open that up, you can find lots of other possibilities. You’ll notice, for example, that in dealing with “Jesus as the Word” I think we have wisdom in there. And we put those together. We maybe could have had a separate chapter or, do Moses or, there’s all sorts of things like that. But I think what we tried to do—and I’m not sure that you can ever do this in an entirely consistent way—was to have several different things going on. One starting with the broader and most well known kinds of titles. 

And so especially with “Jesus is Lord”, that’s a really important one, especially throughout the New Testament. And then we start with that one, it has a lot of implications regarding who Jesus is, as God. They move on to some of the other ones that are perhaps more specialized, but often thought of as important. Now “prophet” is interesting. Because if you say Jesus is Lord, well, then you have the prophets proclaiming the Word of the Lord. And so, you know, Jesus comes along and so “prophet” seems a natural thing. But then if you get into things like “Son of Man” and “Son of God”, “Son of Man” is pretty much a Gospel’s only kind of title. 

But when people think in terms of depicting Jesus, it seems to be the way that Jesus thought of himself often refers to that and is big in the Gospels. It needed to be probably near the top of things. “Son of God” is one of those that reaches into the Greco Roman world, in a big way. It ties in with some of the traditions concerning how especially Eastern rulers were thought of. So, there’s a long history there and we tried to tease that out. And then after that, you get into some of the perhaps even more specialized titles if you get into “Passover lamb”, there are a few places in the desert, but it’s predominantly John’s Gospel that depicts that and then you get some that are probably less overtly divine Christological titles. Some more human ones. You have the “Suffering Servant”, although that’s got some interesting things to it and “Messiah”, perhaps could have been put earlier. 

But on the other hand, there’s a lot of debate about what were the theological implications of Messianism at the time. We tend to take a more diverse view of Messianism than a lot of people are doing these days. Right now, there’s a lot of depiction in terms of the Davidic line. And the King Jesus ideas, the way of defining Messiah. But we take a little bit of a broader view, recognizing that was probably broader terminology. So, it fits then within certain other kinds of things. It will have some ties to priest, perhaps, as well. And so, you have “high priests“ there near the end, giving you a little bit of an idea of, at least how I can think of it in terms of once we settled on the order, but we did think about that.

David Capes  

Yes, some [scholars] distinguish between human titles, the human Jesus, his humanity and then the Divine. I don’t think there’s always a good clean line, sometimes between those. Let me ask you this, because I’m curious. Among the earliest Christians, they’re trying to sort out Jesus in the first century, having not had a New Testament. But what they had was the Old Testament. What they had was their culture at the time. I’m wondering what you and Bryan are thinking about the doctrine of Christ today. Is it a settled matter? Has it been settled? Or do you see things in culture or maybe in the churches that seemed to be detracting from the person and the work of Jesus these days?

Stan Porter  

It’s a live topic. It’s a hot topic. That’s part of reason we wrote the book, and you’ll see that the way we framed it we talk especially in terms of adoptionism as one of the big issues. And I mentioned earlier some of those who’ve been discussing this whole concept of the “How Jesus became God” debate that’s tied in with that whole thing. I think we frame it near the end. There’s the question of, if that’s an issue how and when. And those are big, big debates, right? Was it something that took place much later and the church bestowed? Or was it something that was there from the start? And so, in that sense, Christological issues, I think, are a very, very big issue, and are constantly being debated. 

So, some would conclude in the Jesus became God debate, it’s right from the beginning. There’s the sense in which Jesus was regarded as divine, and then the church’s language was just unfolding. Others would say, we can point to a place or a time or an event or something that occurred where some in the church people decided, that is when Jesus became regarded as divine.  We don’t get as involved in that debate, as others have, as I said, in the final chapter, we try to place our work within that larger context. 

Our primary focus is to see how the New Testament authors depict Jesus. And I think our own conclusions might be called and it’s traditionally been called a High Christology, emerges from that. From what we can see in the earliest documents, there’s a sense of Jesus being in some way divine. We want to take that seriously, and are less concerned for teasing out the rest of it. So, in that sense, we are not part of the adoption as a group, and no, we’re not. But we’re not overtly making an argument against it so much as trying to take the text as we see them. And then let others do that. 

David Capes  

I think you’re right. The other thing I’ve notice as I run into Christians who have a sense that Jesus was a prophet, he was this and that, but he wasn’t really God. That was just something that was added later. The other thing that I’m seeing, and I have noticed, it seems like there’s an abiding Gnosticism. That in the church, a sense that Jesus was never fully human. So, we get the divinity of Jesus [early], but the full humanity of Jesus was never really established. If you look up Gnostic Christianity on the Internet, there’s websites where people today are still calling themselves Gnostics. And I don’t know if that’s a thing in Canada, if that’s just a thing down here in the States or not.

Stan Porter  

I think you’ll find that in a lot of different places. But yes, you’re absolutely right. And I think some of the pushback that’s occurred in some circles, to the High Christology probably has gone too far. In emphasizing Jesus’ humanity, in an effort to make sure that we don’t forget that he’s human, I would like to think our book does address that, in some ways. All the titles probably fit into the larger picture of who Jesus is. And that overall is a High Christology, but not every one of them, is a way of naming him as God in the same way as all the others are. And so, I think we’ve tried to maintain that balance, and so that you can appreciate fully his humaneness whilst seeing how that fits within the larger picture of his divinity.

David Capes  

And the church does deal with these things and puzzles them out, in a sense over many decades, centuries. They’re trying to sort out what they find there in the earliest texts themselves. We’re talking to Dr. Stanley Porter about his book with Bryan Dyer, The Origins of New Testament Christology: An Introduction to the Traditions and Titles Applied to Jesus. It’s a brilliant book. I’m going use this as a textbook next time I teach Christology, because I think that it handles so many of the important issues. Dr. Stan Porter, thanks for being with us today on The Stone Chapel Podcast. 

A Nugget of Wisdom from Stan Porter  

One of the things that I often talk with my students about is that we work in a discipline [theology/biblical studies] that tends to emphasize the individual scholar. But I’ve had great pleasure over the years of working collaboratively with somebody else. And sometimes we wonder why is it that science seems to make so much progress. And one of the things I observe is that scientists often work collaboratively and you get the dynamic and synergy and the kind of excitement that comes from a lot of people sharing the abilities that they have. And I would like to encourage a lot of us within the field of Biblical Studies to think of working together. And I think there’s a lot of potential and a lot of good that we can do in the work that we do if we think in those terms.

Posted on

Abraham: Friend of God

Here is a transcript of a recent conversation I had with John Lennox regarding Abraham and his role as an exemplar of faith. The conversation comes from a podcast I do called “The Stone Chapel Podcast” on the ChurchLeaders Podcast Network.

John Lennox  

Hello, I’m Dr. John Lennox. I’m an Emeritus Professor of Mathematics in the University of Oxford. But I’m also passionate about scripture, teaching scripture, and Christian apologetics.

David Capes  

Dr. John Lennox, welcome back to The Stone Chapel Podcast.

John Lennox  

Thank you very much. I’m delighted to be with you again. 

David Capes  

Well, you’ve been with us and some of the most hits and downloads we’ve gotten on our podcast have come from you, because you’re such an inspiration to all. The last one we did was on AI. And it’s been a little while, but I’m glad to be back talking to you. Today we are in Oxford at St. Ebbes Church, with John Lennox. Today we’re here to talk about his book, A Friend of God: the Inspiration of Abraham in an Age of Doubt. It’s a great book. 

John Lennox  

Well, I’m glad you’ve read it. I think that’s immensely encouraging. And I have been in general, extremely encouraged by the response to it since it’s only been out a short while.

David Capes  

This is not the first biography you’ve written of important Old Testament figures. 

John Lennox  

No, I started with Daniel. I wrote a book about his entire prophecy. It’s not just a character study of him. But then I did a fairly substantial book on Joseph within the context of his family. In other words, the last major section of Genesis.

David Capes  

That’s a lot of chapters dedicated to Joseph. 

John Lennox  

That’s right. So I thought that the next logical subject to tackle would be Abraham. It was actually a friend of mine, who suggested that I give some lectures on Abraham for a conference, the ELF conference in Europe. And I did that. And immediately afterwards, people said, you must turn this into a book. Henc

David Capes  

Well, it’s a wonderful read. And it’s the kind of character study, the kind of investigation into Abraham’s life that I think helps us. We were talking earlier about my concern that we as Christians, short circuit things by not reading the Old Testament very long, or very well. I did a study years ago and about 82% of sermons (in US Protestant churches) are on the New Testament, which leaves only 18% of sermons for the Old Testament.

John Lennox  

That’s a very interesting statistic. I wasn’t aware of it. But Abraham, of all people is held forth in the New Testament as the major exemplar of a person who trusts God. He’s the man of faith. And he’s held out for us to follow that faith in God. And so that certainly catapulted me into really saying, let’s have a serious look at him. And the whole palette of Scripture information about him. In other words, the whole sequence of chapters in Genesis that deal with him without leaving anything out. 

David Capes  

Warts and all, we might say.

John Lennox  

Warts and all, because he is a complex figure. Well, we all are. And I suppose that’s a major point worth making that if God can do something with a man like Abraham then there’s hope for me.

David Capes  

Yes. Same thing with the figure of David. Maybe one day you’ll write a book about David! I have a rabbi friend in Jerusalem who says that David broke 9 of the 10 commandments. Now he never told me which one he didn’t break! But anyway, though he’s called a man after God’s own heart. A Friend of God, tell us a little bit about the title?

John Lennox  

Well, he’s one of the only people in Scripture who’s called a friend of God. And it’s a very interesting concept, that idea that God can in any way be thought of as a friend of human beings. And really, it goes back in my mind to the pinnacle of creation at the beginning of Genesis. God created the universe by his word, but the very final use of the phrase “and God said” is actually “and God said to them”. God speaks to the humans. And the way in which he interacts with human beings is of course, what the Bible is all about, and offering friendship. And of course, the Lord Jesus, who was the greatest son of Abraham, so to speak, said of his disciples, I call you friends. The information he gave to them as definition of a friend, is someone who knows what his other friend is doing. In other words, the Lord speaks to them and takes them into his confidence. And I think that is such a glorious idea that God can take us into his confidence and along the journey with Abraham. God seems to consult Abraham, which is really an incredible thing to imagine.

David Capes  

And Abraham seems to be able to persuade God of things.

John Lennox  

Even that is true. But the fact is that there is a real, what we might call friendly, discussion between them about big issues. And that’s encouraging because God encouraged us to talk to him as well.

David Capes  

Yes, we can be friends as well. 

John Lennox  

Yes, that’s right. 

David Capes  

And enter into God’s friendship. To know not only his works externally, but to know his ways.

John Lennox  

Yes indeed. And it delivers us from thinking of God as somehow remote and unapproachable. This is the exact opposite of that. And it’s speaking to us in terms we understand. We know what friendship means as human beings. And the idea of being a friend of God in one sense, is mind blowing. But in another sense, if we’re created in God’s image, you would expect something like that to be possible.

David Capes  

Exactly. If we are in God’s image, there ought to be a complementary connection. Your subtitle talks about the inspiration of Abraham. Seeing him as an inspirational figure like Saint Abraham, some traditions might do. But you say that within an age of doubt. The stories about Abraham are about faith, being a man of faith, as an exemplar of faith. But we live in this time of doubt. How do you think Abraham now can address us as a man of faith who stumbled, but he also can be an inspiration for us in our time.

John Lennox  

The first thing I would say is that as far as we can understand from scripture, Abram came from a pagan background. And that’s quite important, because our world has changed very much recently, in the West, at least, from a world strongly influenced by the Judeo-Christian tradition to one that’s largely influenced by any traditions other than Christianity. And therefore, him starting at point zero, so to speak, I think can encourage us to see that God’s revelation to him, which led him to increasingly be sure of God and His promises. And the story is very much about promises, delayed fulfillment, and do you hang on in there, and so on. And it’s very true to life. And we are in an age of uncertainty and doubt, by and large. Though there are some people who are very sure of themselves. But without a deep anchor, all of us would be unsure. And I think, the marvelous thing about this story, if we follow it along, and respond to God, as Abraham did, however imperfectly, then our confidence increases. And we no longer are influenced deeply by existential doubt, that would cause us to sadly miss the purpose that God has for us.

David Capes  

To miss our purpose and our meaning. I was amazed and I didn’t know this. I should have known this is a New Testament scholar, that Abraham is mentioned [in the New Testament] more than any of the other OT person. And he’s quoted, he’s referred to, he’s the exemplar, as you said, of faith. Let’s talk about faith itself. There’s a lot of people writing about, thinking about faith these days. What is faith? What does John Lennox say about what is faith?

John Lennox  

What I’ve tried to do is to understand what is being said here. We’re talking about trust in God. And if you start simply with etymology, the word faith in English comes from the Latin fiidem, which has more to do with trust. I mean, we get from it the word fidelity. So, the idea is one person trusting another person. And that’s in short supply today, which is why we need so many lawyers. And it’s a real problem in the economic world. People are desperate to find trust.

David Capes  

Who can you trust? I keep hearing that question, who can you trust? We’re here at the OCCA summer school. You spoke this morning. One of the first speakers was talking about that very question. Who can you trust? Because there’s so much information out there. There’s so much bad information out there. Who or what can you trust?

John Lennox  

The story of Abraham begins with this pagan man in the Middle East, the ancient Near East. And God reveals Himself to him. And it’s summed up in the New Testament, in a very short phrase: “the God of glory appeared to our father Abraham”. Now, we’re not told much about that. But I find the idea very interesting, because a similar thing happened to the major Christian Apostle Paul, when he was on the Damascus Road, persecuting Christians. Then he saw a very bright light. And the God of glory appeared to him as well. And God showed him something of how great and glorious he was. And Abraham responded and went on this incredible journey. He didn’t really know where he was going. But he knew who he was going with.

David Capes  

He had no map; he had no GPS. He knew there were roads this way. And there are people down that way.

John Lennox  

No, God spoke to him and said get going to the land that I will show you. And it’s utterly remarkable. It pays to sit and think about that. How would we feel about doing that? How would our families feel about that? That’s an amazing thing in any culture, and at any time. But the idea behind it is that God speaks, He reveals Himself. And that’s hugely important, because scripture itself claims to be a revelation from God. And God speaks to us through that revelation, to which we are invited to respond.

David Capes  

Well, I have a friend who’s written a book recently making the case that in the New Testament, at least, the word pistis, which is often translated “faith,” or sometimes trust, but also has the sense of an allegiance. And allegiance to God. We are connected. Maybe that’s the friend part. We are connected and I have allegiance to you because we are friends.

John Lennox  

Yeah, I like that idea. I think it’s hugely important, that idea that we’re following someone we trust, and to whom, therefore, we owe allegiance. I think that fills it out in a very important way. Because that’s the essence of the Christian gospel. And you asked me about the nature of faith, the Christian faith is evidence based. That is, it’s not a leap in the dark as so often people think. It’s a step, following something that you’ve experienced or seen, and Abram must have seen something very powerful when God spoke to him. It wasn’t some mere chimera of the imagination, that God revealed himself in some special way. And that’s what we’re promised in New Testament terms. Why would I want to trust Christ? Well, we’re given a lot of evidence. Now what happened to Abraham all the way along? A lot of things happen that built up the evidence that God was with him. it didn’t all happen at once.

David Capes  

He didn’t become a great nation, develop his reputation, be blessed by God, overnight. No, it was something that took a lifetime.

John Lennox  

Yes, for most of his life. He was a small nomadic tribe wandering about the Middle East.

David Capes  

At the very end of that charge, and also promise, God says, “I will make you a great nation and through you, all the families of the earth will be blessed.” How do you interpret that last phrase? Through you all the families of the earth will be blessed.

John Lennox  

Well, the interesting fact, as pointed out by many people, including the late chief rabbi of the UK, is that a huge proportion of the world population actually owe their allegiance in some way to Abraham. Jews, Muslims and Christians. But I think we begin to see the answer to that within the book of Genesis itself. Because as I said a moment ago, most of his story, he’s just a small tribe. But at the end of the book, you find that one of his descendants, Joseph, becomes something like the Minister of Agriculture of Egypt, and economically saves the world. And it seems to me that’s an indicator within the book of how this is going to happen. And the answer, the ultimate answer to it is that one of the descendants of Abraham, the greatest descendant, the most important is Christ. He offers forgiveness to everybody that trusts him, and new life, and a power to live. And in that sense, Christianity has spread around the globe, and is still spreading in spite of all the opposition.

David Capes  

[The influence of Christianity] seems to be waning in the West. But in places like Africa, and China and South America, I mean, it’s blowing the doors off.

John Lennox  

You make a very important point. The West has been very much sustained by Christian ethical dimension and the Old Testament commandments for centuries. But that has waned, as you say.  But in the majority world, Christianity is growing and very obviously growing and in a thrilling way. And so, I don’t think the evidence for that promise being fulfilled is diminishing in any way. It’s rather increasing.

David Capes  

In Paul’s language, it’s for Jew and Gentile, male and female, slave and free. 

John Lennox  

Yes, everybody on the same basis of faith in Christ, so that I can say that I am a son of Abraham, in the sense that I share his faith and trust. And that is a wonderful thing. It includes us, in the people of God, from whatever background we come.

David Capes  

There are some sons of Abraham genetically through DNA that have left Abraham behind. But we have been, as Christians, (again Paul’s language), grafted in, made part of the family. Adopted, if you want to use that language.

John Lennox  

That’s exactly right. And what has happened there, according to Paul, and those famous chapters of Romans 9 to 11, is that the burden of witness to God has shifted from the Hebrew nation to Gentiles. And it is predominantly Gentile at the moment. But there are signs that that may change according to the biblical record.

David Capes  

It could well be. I love the way the book of Revelation sums it all up when there’s a vision of 144,000. And that’s what he hears. He hears that there’s 144,000, and they’re all out of Israel. There’s 12,000 from this tribe etc. And then when he turns, he sees a multitude that cannot be numbered and it’s of every tribe, and of every language, and every people, every ethnic group.

John Lennox  

That’s right. Many words are used in that sentence. Which is very interesting, which is hammering the fact that this is a message for the whole world. And, that sense is traceable back to Abraham. I felt it was important, at least to make an effort to reverse the point that you made earlier that we pay far too little attention to the biblical roots of the Christian faith in the Old Testament.

David Capes  

[And the Old Testament] was the Bible of Jesus. The Bible of Paul and the early church, so we should be paying more attention to it. I don’t know exactly what the right percentages ought to be. But I think we should be reading and absorbing and just digesting these stories as exemplars, as you said. Right now as part of our worship, as part of our devotion.

John Lennox  

Absolutely because a lot of the New Testament depends on it. Paul uses Abraham again and again to reason his theological case, as well as the moral and spiritual implications of the gospel. And the last book of the Bible that you’ve mentioned, has an absolute huge store of allusions and citations of the Old Testament. So, it all culminates there and to remove the Old Testament from our thinking and preaching is to cut off part of the lifeblood of the Bible.

David Capes  

Well, it’s a great book, and I would recommend it. It’s called A Friend of God: The Inspiration of Abraham in An Age of Doubt by Dr. John Lennox. John, you’re a good friend to the Lanier Foundation. We thank you and I’m grateful that you could be a part of our podcast today.

John Lennox  

Well thank you very much. Delighted to be with you.

Posted on

“Jesus and the Powers” with N. T. Wright

To hear the podcast (24 min) click here.

Dr. N. T. Wright joins David Capes on “The Stone Chapel Podcast” to discuss Wright’s new book, Jesus and the Powers., co-authored with Michael Bird.