 So I just wanted to spend a few minutes with you. I know it's a huge topic and really hard to boil down in such a small amount of time, but if you could just sort of give me an overview of how is history in a nutshell formed how I think about my faith and how I live it out. Wow, obviously huge questions. And actually for a British person to be talking to an American person about this is already a little tricky because quite a large swathe of American culture back in the 17th and 18th century consisted of disaffected Brits who had been fed up here, gone to the New World to say now at last we can practice our faith properly. So there's always that sort of sense of don't you Brits come over here and tell us how to do it because we got rid of you some while ago. And there was this funny thing called a war of independence. If I remember right. I've heard of it. 230 years ago whenever it was 40. And so already we have shared history which warps our sense of perceptions. And I've been aware of that once or twice when I've been in America one time when I was a visiting professor at Harvard. I had to preach in Harvard Memorial Chapel and I've been doing some homework and discovered that a great great great great uncle of mine had been the first chaplain of Harvard University which I've never known before and that he was a royalist. He was in favor of King George. And then when the glorious revolution happened he was on the boat back home finished his days as a canon of St. Paul's Cathedral. And I thought yeah this is kind of funny and here am I now. So let's just sort of name all that right off the top because nothing that I say is intended to be a criticism of one particular nation or culture. And I do want to say as well God moves in many mysterious ways and if God was waiting for us to get all the answers right before God could ever live within our lives and work through us and establish a relationship with us. God would be waiting a long time and we'd all be in a big mess. So that everything that any of us say however well-tuned and accurate and biblically shrewd et cetera is still some way down the mountain from where say the Archangel Gabriel sees things. So some of us say this to students when they say how can I ever get my head around this and I say well look here is this vast mountain. I may be a little bit further up than you simply because I'm older and have studied a few more texts but we're all climbers and let's just agree we're on a shared journey. Having said that I don't know very much about Eastern Orthodox Christianity I know a bit but most of what I know is about the Western tradition which is that after the split roughly a thousand years ago of Eastern West then what we now think of as the Roman Catholic Church became the dominant force and in Western Europe that was so until the Reformation of the 16th century and which was a hugely turbulent thing. Throughout that middle age period there were various theological streams but among the great influences on them were the great Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle and there's an awful lot of Plato in Western medieval thought which is still in Western thought to this day. Now Plato the great Greek philosopher roughly 400 years before Jesus Plato believed that though the material world wasn't exactly a bad and dark and terrible place it wasn't the reality. It was just a shadow of the reality and really we humans had souls which were something not a bodily thing but which belonged to us as it were or at least we had them on temporary loan until they then wanted to go back home where they'd come from namely to heaven and that's an idea that's deep in the Platonic tradition both in Plato himself in the middle Platonism of the 1st century in the Neo-Platonism of the 4th, 5th centuries and to this day many if not most Western Christians assume that the purpose of religion of whatever sort is quote to go to heaven when you die and indeed to challenge that rather as you said makes people think oh dear this person's a heretic it's terrible. All the alarms start going out. Yeah exactly well I know that I know that perfectly well but that's the funny thing right off the top I want to say that the great story of the Bible is about God making a world where God wants to come and live with his human creatures and he makes us in his image so that it's appropriate for him to come and share our life and that is still mind-blowing to me I've been thinking about this for a long time because it demands that we think differently about God, about who God is but that leads to the next thing along because from about the 14th century that is the, no sorry, the 15th century that's the 1400s as opposed to the Reformation period which is the 16th century, the 1500s you get a revival of the ancient philosophy of Epicureanism and for Epicurus unlike most other people in the ancient world because he wasn't the most popular philosopher by any means if the gods exist, gods plural they're a long, long way away from us they have nothing to do with us we have nothing to do with them so that instead of gods having a finger in every pie which was what ancient paganism seemed to think no, we don't need to worry about that they're a long way away nothing we can do affects them so the world just makes itself under its own steam it's all a matter of atoms bumping into each other and doing new things and so this is quite a convenient philosophy for the rich and well-to-do which it was in the ancient world and it's interesting that it becomes popular in Europe just when Europe is becoming what we now call the first world when through its exploration, through its culture, through its science and technology it as it were elevates itself or if it is an elevation above the rest of the world and guess what we become Epicurean and so we tend to favor theories about the world making itself in other words evolution is that evolutionism starts way before Charles Darwin and all Charles Darwin does is he goes on a boat and he finds some finches and tortoises and goodness knows what else to provide some sharp examples of the way in which species seem to have evolved according to their conditions and I know this is hugely controversial in America but I want to say as far as I can see biological evolution is a fact evolutionism is a philosophical theory which actually goes with the ancient Epicureanism you know this was not a new idea in the 19th century and it's all to do then with whether the being we call God if we do call a being God has any part to play in the system or not and one of the things that was going on in Epicureanism was we don't actually want God on site because we are strong now we are independent so you get this thing called the Enlightenment in the 18th century which is a way of saying we're going to kick God upstairs you can go and visit him if you want like a nice old elderly relative go and see him on Sundays he'll be glad about that but then come back to the real world and where we all live and so that goes with historical skepticism particularly in the 18th century which then affects how many in Europe and America read their Bibles oh we can't believe that sort of thing anymore can't believe that Jesus walked on water can't believe that a human being could be divine or that God would become human we now know that that's impossible which means with our newly enlightened version of Epicureanism we've ruled it out before we even start investigating so what then happens alas is that instead of saying wait a minute the Bible has a much better metaphysic than that a much better idea of how heaven and earth would go together than that many many devout Christians in the 19th century the Victorian period in Britain and America and elsewhere went back to Plato and talked in terms of the soul and actually we do have a soul that is in touch with even if but often they kept the distant God either an Epicurean God but he shouldn't really be having anything to do with this or perhaps a Daist God because Daism is like a slightly more friendly version of Epicureanism you've got a God probably just one God who is quite a way away who doesn't normally interfere but probably is looking down and checking us out and wondering if we'll ever make it and that's the model that split level model which so many Christians have to this day and they fill in the gaps with Plato that we have this soul we're gonna have them sooner or later and then you get different theories about who gets to go and why and the different theologies of salvation are really worked out within that frame of reference the Enlightenment produces what is known in the trade as modernism since then really most of the 20th century but it's only really burst on the scene in the last 40 years we've had what's called post-modernism which is a way of saying all those big stories about how great we are and how special we are and how our knowledge is pure and complete and entire that's just a power grab and instead we have a confused world where all sorts of things are going on and this too becomes a power grab actually because it's a way of saying we don't like rulers, we don't like systems we're just gonna do our own thing with all sorts of spin-offs of that that means it's been very very confusing as that has struck the mainstream cultural life I think particularly in America and an awful lot of people who were brought up with a sort of conservative modernism because if you take Plato he will help you to be a conservative within a modernist framework and so we can believe in a God and he did give us a Bible and he did send Jesus, et cetera, et cetera and then we sort of keep the heretics at bay but then post-modernity comes along and says hang on, all this stuff seems to be in the interests of the powerful in the interests of the Western world in the interests of business, whatever it is and maybe Jesus himself might have some rebuke to give us on that and so right now I think we have a lot of people in the younger generation who live in that post-modern world which says a plague on all your big dreams and they're reading the Bible and something hugely attractive about Jesus but the frameworks that they're being given are not helpful as a place to live and I think it's more or less where we are Now, how was that? The five minute version of modern European intellectuals No, you nailed it, yeah The, these are the two red flags that went off as you were talking One, how could God let that happen? You know, how could, how could as far as I understand, like pretty early on there were significant shifts in understanding of what the soul is and what happens so that's one red flag that like how, how could God let that happen? And the other red flag is are you telling me that I can't just sit here and open my Bible and read in English completely perfectly understand everything that God was saying Well, if you could, please let the rest of us know because I was quite muddled about things I'll email you So those are the two things that I find unsettling as a very individualistic American I want to just be able to open my Bible in English and understand it for all it's worth and I don't like the fact that that someone is telling me that things happened long time ago that affected, drastically affected how I live out my faith that feels uncomfortable to me Right, right Well, I mean I think it's very interesting probably only in the last two or three hundred years would people perceive this as odd because in the early centuries the early Christians were fighting so many battles and there were so many different ideas flying around and different groups of Christians would embrace some of them and what we now look back and call the early heresies like Marcionism or indeed Arianism and so on these are things which a lot of people really did believe and I think in retrospect the people who were arguing about the might have said to us that God allowed that in order to stimulate his people to a deeper grasp of the truth you know, if you hadn't had Arianism you wouldn't have had Athanasius articulating the theology which became what we now say in the great creeds the Nicene and Constantinopolitan creeds God of God, light of light very God of very God, etc. and I would say of anything like that it is perfectly possible that in the providence of God wrong ideas are allowed to come up precisely in order that people can say hang on, no we need to do some more work on that because this is one of the things I've found about the Bible throughout my life that the Bible is never a static book it's never simply oh wouldn't just go and check out this answer and then go back to sleep the Bible is always stimulating us and if it isn't then something's wrong you know, when you read the Psalms or the book of Job or Jeremiah or let alone Paul or Revelation or whatever it may be if you think that this will all just go straight in and it's all plain sailing well, I'm sorry you know, you're not taking it seriously and I think in the modern period in the Western world we've been greatly infected by a philosopher I didn't mention before called Hegel and Hegel believed in this developmental scheme that the world was actually progressing in fact, the word progress means what it means for us because of Him and I think a lot of Christians imagine as many did in the 19th century that actually in the purposes of God the world is just getting better and better and better and the Kingdom of God will arrive now the 20th century put a big explosion against that and I wanna do the same with any idea that in terms of belief that we all just believe the right stuff and that's what it should be and I don't want to say that in the way that says everything we believed is wrong because grasping onto Jesus and being grasped by Him remains constant and that's so for many people in many traditions and we are all to a lesser or greater extent muddled but Paul says again and again be transformed by the renewing of your mind and that wonderful line in the middle of 1 Corinthians 14 where he says when it comes to evil I want you just to be little babies just don't need to know about that stuff but in your thinking I want you to be grown-ups I want you to be mature and I think that's a word for Western Christianity now don't remain at Sunday school level there is such a thing as grown-up Christian thinking and it's good for you and it's part of loving God with your mind Yeah, yeah Thank you sir Thank you, bless you Thank you very much