 You're listening to the Naked Bible Podcast. To support this podcast, visit nakedbiblepodcast.com and click on the support link in the upper right-hand corner. If you're new to the podcast and Dr. Heizer's approach to the Bible, click on newstarthere at nakedbiblepodcast.com. Welcome to the Naked Bible Podcast, episode 192, SBL, conference of these part three. I'm the layman, Trey Strickland, and he's the scholar, Dr. Michael Heizer. Hey, Mike. Last day. Last day. I see a tear forming in your eye. I've got my bags packed. I'm leaving on a jet plane. Yeah, well, I'm going to be here for a while because my wife and kids are coming in, and we're going to do some Boston things and then drive down to PA for Thanksgiving. So, you know, have a good trip. I'm going to be here for a while. Still doing the hotel thing. Well, in this episode, we're going to talk to Tim Mackie of the Bible Project. Again, some listeners will have heard of that. But it's really a wonderful content oriented, but again, a visual presentation of scriptural truth, biblical theology. So we wanted to talk to Tim a little bit. We have a bit of a history between us there, so we were grateful to get some of his time. We talked with Matthew Lynch, who's in the UK and has a fascinating model of delivering a high quality education for students that's sustainable and sensible. I think you're going to be really interested if you live over there, what they're actually doing and it's growing, it's taking hold. So for those of you who have wanted to, you know, learn some scripture, good content and you're in the UK, this is something you should check out. So another great set of interviews. Well, we're back at SPL and we have with us Tim Mackie, Dr. Tim Mackie, a fellow traveler at the University of Wisconsin and Madison Hebrew Department. But more significantly is that Tim has just a wonderful ministry, the Bible Project and teaches part time, but I'm going to let him introduce himself and tell us about what you do. Yeah. Thank you. I'm Tim Mackie. I live in Portland, Oregon and yeah, I'm a professor of biblical literature at Western Seminary, a part time, but my main gig is the Bible Project, which is a non-profit animation studio in Portland that makes short animated films about biblical theology. And does it really well? Yeah, it's a great team. So our main thing, we're an educational YouTube channel, that's where we fit in the ecosystem of YouTube in the non-profit education channel world, but we also have a website where we have lots of other biblical theology resources. Yeah, well, the listeners will know, I mean, right away, this is sort of the sweet spot for us because what we're trying to do is get content, good content, not like Christian Middle Earth, crazy content, to anybody who cares, you know, just the non-specialist, the pastor, and really anybody. That's the mission. Yeah. Again, just trying to do that. And what you do is just a perfect example of what we would like to see done just generally. I mean, stuff that needs to happen. You know, I'm sure you're like me, you meet people all the time that they've been Christians for 10, 20, 30 years and they just don't know a whole lot and it's not because they're not smart or good thinkers. It's just they're underexposed to content. Yeah. And at least my growing conviction is that it is about content, but it's also about a whole cultural paradigm for engaging the Bible. Yep, there you go. And it's not just like Western Protestantism, as if that's the problem with everything, but it's more that there's the symptomatic issues in Protestant culture, especially where people engage the Bible only in environments where you encounter little bits of the Bible out of context for your whole life. And so it's actually very difficult in that kind of culture to see the Bible, how it's actually designed to be read on its own terms, which is as an expansive, unified, epic narrative. I have to ask you. It's very difficult. So that's a part of what you and I both have in common of helping people see always is every particular poem or story or verse of Paul is located within that larger storyline. I'm sure you encounter people that say, well, Tim, why should we care about all that external stuff? Why should we care about the big picture? That just sounds like work. Can I just flip open my Bible and look at a few verses and understand it? Why do I need to do all this? How do you try to encourage them or even possibly rebuke them? Yeah. Well, I became a follower of Jesus when I was almost 20, and I had not read the Bible at any length, but I was really compelled by Jesus, the person of Jesus. And so the Gospels were the first parts of the Bible I ever read. And I still remember this. There was so much about Jesus that was so compelling, how he treated people, what he said and did. But there was a whole layer that I was just like, what is this guy talking about most of the time? Like the narratives about what he did with people, but how he pretty much everything he was trying to communicate made no sense to me. And then someone taught me that these cross references for when he's, quote, when why I read the NASB, that was the first Bible put in my hands, and they put the Old Testament quotes in all caps. And I remember asking my mentor, like, why is all this stuff in all caps? He's like, oh, those are quotations of Jesus from the first three quarters of the Bible. And so then I just, right from the very beginning, I just started working those notes and I was more bewildered than ever. And then I realized like, I don't, I want to follow Jesus and I want to understand him and his who he is is incomprehensible to me apart from the first three quarters of my Bible. So that was my journey, really, to be honest, was New Testament use of the old. And I just realized everything the apostles are trying to tell us about who Jesus is, what it means to follow him. They see it as part of a much larger story that takes a lifetime to immerse yourself in. And for the apostles and Jewish readers of the Bible, that's the joy of the scriptures. That's how much work it takes. 119, it's a joy, you know, so it's a, I don't know, it's a different culture. We have to learn how to, it is, but that's, that's a good, that's a good tack. You know, that's a very, I try not to, to let, you know, a person's sort of reticence about work. Yes. Yes. Determine from actually giving them the right answer. Yeah. Yeah, it is work. But yes, like most things in life, anything really worth your time or it's going to be work. Yeah. That's like a relationship. Relationships take work. Sure. But there's something about these, these texts, these precious texts from the Jewish and Christian tradition. I don't, yeah, I often feel now about the Bible is like having a friend who's eccentric and odd, who everybody misunderstands. And you'd want to help the world see how awesome your friend is. And you could call it work. I just call it time. And stepping, being able to step out of my way of seeing the world into this epic storyline, which is a, from a different culture and time and place. Yeah. And it reveals God to us, but it's from another, it's from another world, so to speak. That's a good analogy. You have to humble yourself and get on a plane and go fly to another culture, bring your phrasebook, learn like how to say your numbers and hello and goodbye. You know what I mean? It's like traveling. Absolutely. But it's that's, but it's an, it's an investment. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, there you go. It's a, yeah. I, I, I agree. I, I love what you guys are doing through all the Naked Bible resources. And it's, it's my easiest place to go to for exgenical stimulation. Well, I'm riding my bike to work. Like, I want to session Leviticus 10 this morning on my ride to work. So I know where I'm going. Okay. So 37 or whatever. Anyway, so thank you guys for what you're doing. Yeah. Well, we're, we're excited about what, what you do to, and it just, we admire the, again, the effort and the results, you know, that, that go into it. So we would encourage everybody, you know, who listens to us to check out the Bible project. You want to give the URL? Yeah. You know, the easiest thing to do is just Google the Bible project. Okay. Or if you ever in YouTube, just search the Bible project and the videos will come up pretty quickly. And our main website is just thebibleproject.com. You should know that there's a lot of scholarship, there's a lot of grunt work that goes into these videos. Again, Tim, you know, has an earned PhD, you know, he knows what he's doing and you know, we've chatted off the podcast about the work that he does. So you, you can trust that what you're getting in the videos, it's, it's not just, you know, eye candy. Okay. It, it's good stuff. It's good thinking distilled in a very comprehensible way. Yeah. Yeah. My, I cut my teeth in those early years teaching the Bible to junior high skateboarders. I came to Christ through outreach ministry to skateboarders in Portland. And so my first teaching responsibility was for the junior high Bible study, kids that have become Christians. And so this one, I first started drawing. I would draw stuff on charts for them to just try and make it comprehensible. And I had some teachers who drew a lot. And then that for me was the genesis of using heavy reliance on visuals to communicate how the Bible works. And then when I met my friend John, my co-founder of the Bible project, he had been professionally making short animated explainer videos for clients, mostly tech companies. And so he pitched the idea to me to marry my bad drawings and hopefully good content with his skillset and team. And then the Bible project happened. So it's super fun. I get to be a nerd and read and study and write. And then the art team takes over after that. Somebody else can make it beautiful. Totally. Yeah. Well, thanks for spending a few minutes with us. Yeah. Cheers. Thank you. Well, we're back at SPL and we're with Matthew Lynch. I'm going to let Matthew introduce himself and give us a little bit of a history of who you are, what your degree is in, what your focus is. But more importantly, what it is you do. Sure. Thanks, Mike. Thanks for having me on the podcast. So yeah, my name is Matt Lynch. I am Dean of Studies and lecturer in Old Testament at Westminster Theological Center, which is based in the UK. I did my doctoral studies in Hebrew Bible, Emory University in Atlanta. I had done my master's degrees at Regent College of Vancouver. And I ended up moving over to the UK four or five years ago. And so I work at Westminster Theological Center now. And the WTC is a unique college. First of all, we're unabashedly charismatic and interdenominational. And we're not an ordination track college. So a lot of colleges are specifically for people going into the Church of England or something like that. But we're looking to equip the whole people of God, no matter what area of ministry or work they're going into. The way our model works is that students study with us part-time and in a local hub, which is a place where they gather with a cohort of other students in a local community. And I can explain how that works. Yeah. Yeah. Tell us how it works and how many there are if you can. If you have those numbers off the top of your head, let us know. Yeah, I do. And it's growing. We're a growing college. And we have 11 locations around the UK, and we have a hub in Stockholm as well. And we just opened a hub in Northern Ireland this year. So those are the farthest reaches of our hubs. And if someone was going to study with us, they would pick a particular hub around the UK or up in Stockholm. And they would enroll, and the way they would do their course is that, let's say they're doing a certificate in Entheology, or they're doing a graduate diploma or a bachelor's degree. Essentially you enroll at the local hub, let's say Northeast London or Manchester or down in Bristol or out in East Anglia, or we have hubs all over the place. And you would study part-time in the local hub about 20 nights a year on Monday or Tuesday evening. But then you have two annual residentials where all of our students gather together. There are about 200 of us at the college we gather in Telford, which is a pretty central location. And those are really fantastic time. And our vision and mission really is to integrate an openness to the spirit and deep academic study and not divorcing those two things. Right. And that's important for my audience because there will be some in the audience that they hear the term charismatic and they think that's going to be incompatible with scholarship. So one of the reasons I wanted to have Matthew on is that that's not the case here. We have a credentialed scholar, stays up with his own interests, tries to do serious academic work and transmit a sense of the need to do that in his school, but yet not ignoring the other side. Yeah, exactly. And I think we find that among a lot of our students, there's a real hunger to go deep to put those sure foundations on top of an experience they've had because an experience is important. We believe God is living and active and wants to actually meet with us, but at the same time, you can't build your life simply on experience and you need foundations to sustain you when you don't have the experience or when you're doubting the experience. So I think the integration of those two things is really important. Yeah, well, we could probably all give a grocery list of the bad examples we've seen where everything is experience oriented. I want to go back to the hubs. How does a hub form and operate? Do you have to have a graduate or a scholar or a pastor? Who leads the thing? How does that work? Yeah. He has a hub director who is a facilitator of the hub, oversees the marketing side of things and is a kind of pastoral support there. They're not meant to be academic support. We handle that centrally as a college. Do you do that over the internet or Skype or how do you do that? Both ends. So first of all, if a student studies with us, you don't have a distance learning relationship with a lecture because you've already met them at the residential. Start the year in September at the residential together with a time of intensive study and worship. So that's the context out of which you form the community. But then a local hub is usually based in a church that we have a relationship with and a student will come to a hub on a hub evening, one of those 20 evenings a year if they're doing the certificate or grad diploma or VA. They would watch pre-recorded content and they would have a time of worship and discussion together but also a video conference with the lecturer who will help them unpack and ask questions about what they've seen in the content. So some refer to it as a flipped classroom model where you get the content in the recorded section and then discuss it. So if you're an instructor, you're doing 20 of these, you set a term? Yeah. Each individual instructor doesn't have that kind of load but the students will have different instructors for 20 evenings. That's really interesting. Are there fewer or more obstacles to creating a degree granting program in the UK? Do you have accreditation issues? Is that separate from granting degrees? What was the dog and pony show that you had to go through to do this? To get degree granting status in the UK, you need to be affiliated with a university. So all of our students are awarded a degree from the University of Chester which is our validating university or accrediting university. So it's a fully fledged academic degree but we have relative autonomy to develop a program how we want and that's where we can do what we do. So we have a really good relationship with Chester but there's a lot of red tape and paperwork. Did you have friends there or how did you wire that? So the relationship with Chester preceded me, the formation of that. They have a really good theology and religious studies program there that we connected with and got to know the folks in that department. I'm not sure all the reasons for the decision to go with Chester, we had been with a different university before but I think Chester also has as an openness to confessional theological colleges operating in their orbit and I'm not sure all universities are. Okay, that's probably an understatement. Yeah, so in the UK, unlike in the US where you would have an accrediting body like the ATS, it's all run through the universities. You don't have kind of freewheeling operations in quite the same way. I'd like to get your impressions on sort of the state of believing Christianity in the UK because I tend to hear the laments, okay, so what are your thoughts? Well, as you can tell from my accent, I'm American so I hesitate to make too many broad pronouncements about the state of faith in the UK but I can say that, well I'll take it from our angle. What's exciting to us is that the charismatic Pentecostal churches are growing in the UK across denominations and so for us that bodes well for our college but also it signals something exciting is happening there. I think one of the reasons those wings of the church are growing is because there's been an infusion of immigrants into those denominations and so some people suggest that in some ways revival will happen in the UK, not internal to- Right from the outside. Yeah, from the outside so to speak. The Anglican church which is the state church in the UK is broadly in decline although in the London area it's growing as that's the only major sector of the UK where the Anglican church is growing probably to do with Holy Trinity Brompton which is the major church and influencer there. I mean I keep hearing and reading things about like some ridiculous percentage of people in the UK are Jedi, like they identify with this weird sort of Neo- Oh, okay, yeah, you mean literally Jedi. Yeah, like the Jedi. Yeah, we see them walking around all over the place. Yeah, they're one out of every two breaks are Jedi. That's true. I mean I'm sure you've seen these stories about you know these percentages of people who identified as Jedi on a religious and I'm sure a lot of it has to be like sort of a you'd think it would be a little bit of a prank at some point. Well it's I mean a related story a friend of mine is he was teaching him one of the massive open online courses and he made a offhand comment when he was talking about ancient Greek gods that no one worships them anymore and then he went on to make some other point. Of course a listener wrote in and said I do in fact worship the ancient Greek pantheon and it's probably the guy that interviewed me last year. Oh, okay. I was on a pagan podcast. Yeah, I guess that's his thing. I guess you bump into these folks a little more often than I do but yeah but you know to get back to the point about the state of the church in the UK the other I guess major issues rural decline the rural decline of the church and that's been a question that people have been banging their heads against the wall over for quite some time what to do about that. Wow, well that's really an interesting program and you've got again collectively 200 which is a good number yeah I mean that would be a that'd be a sort of a good thriving seminary community you know over here you know minus the the ones that have been here forever but that I mean that's that's a really good number. Yeah and I mean we we were at about 135 in 2014 we've been growing steadily each year so it's partly to do with adding new hubs but also I think I think we're tapping into a kind of hunger for depth and people find it a very exciting environment that also fits around their work in life. Very few people can can take off from their work and go to a full-time brick-and-mortar seminary and so I think it's a really it's a really good model and allows us as well to tap into some of the best lectures around to do this. Yeah do you what how about resources I mean how do you get your students to resources does that is that a factor in where a hub is that they're near a good library or something? Yeah and and we try to to mitigate the the disparity that you would have if you're in London and you would have access to all kinds of great libraries whereas if you're out in East Sussex which is where we have another hub you have slim pickings out there and what we do is we we furnish a small library at each hub which has all the core books for the for the modules we call them modules in the UK the courses and and but they also have access to a huge database online and then through EBSCO they have about 7,000 ebooks in in biblical studies and theology so that's that gives them a pretty much better access. Does Chester give you access to that like student identification and all that? Yeah I think it was access to their databases. That's really nice. Yeah we bought the the library though the e-library to to help support students because you know I think if you have a small hub of only a thousand books or a library of only a thousand books you just can't do research and substantial studies so so that that's been really helpful. Yeah well that's really interesting so we get we get good spiritual news from the yeah I think so. We just like I said I just keep getting laments you know an email and whatnot but I wanted to have you on because we have a lot of listeners yeah that are going to be in that area and there you go you can be part of a community you know learn something of quality take advantage of it so there it is. Yeah should I share the website? Yep share the website again. WTCtheology.org.uk and you can always go on there and email me Matt Lynch if you have questions about anything and I'd be really happy to speak with you. All right thank you. Thanks Mike. Okay Mike that was good another year down 2017 right looking forward to 2018 which is in Denver I believe. Denver. Are you gonna say in Denver with everything? No I've been in Denver several times so. So it was just the Rhode Island thing. It was just the Rhode Island yes. The New England area is like another it's like the UK for me so. Maybe they'll do it in Alaska. Hence the reason why they call it New England because we were in New Jersey and asked you where's where's the old Jersey. Nobody knew so there you go. All right Mike well I've enjoyed it we appreciate everybody that came on and we'll pick up Hebrews 8 next weekend so what that is we thank everybody for listening to the Naked Bible Podcast God bless. Thanks for listening to the Naked Bible Podcast. To support this podcast visit www.nakedbibleblog.com. To learn more about Dr. Heizer's other websites and blogs go to www.ermsh.com.