#47 - A Biblical Response to the Prevailing Lies of our Time ft. Dr. Iain Provan

BCMB 047 - A Biblical Response to the Prevailing Lies of our Time.mp3: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

BCMB 047 - A Biblical Response to the Prevailing Lies of our Time.mp3: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

Iain Provan:
Reading the Bible well is obviously very, very important. But reading the culture well, in order to know how the Bible speaks to it, is also very important. So the loss of confidence that we're seeing in Scripture or have seen in the church doesn't really have anything to do with any deficit in Scripture itself. It really is a loss of confidence created by the groupthink in the culture at large. And if we're able to think our way through once again from first principles, why do we believe in Scripture? And if we can come up with a good answer to that, it's really going to help us, I think.

Intro:
Welcome to the BCMB podcast, Pastor to Pastor. This is a podcast by the British Columbia Conference of Mennonite Brethren Churches. We want to help equip and encourage pastors, churches, and anyone else who wants to listen in and be more effective in their ministry. This is episode 47, a biblical response to the prevailing lies of our time with Ian Provan.

Rob Thiessen:
All right, everyone, it's Rob Thiessen. I'm welcoming you here to the pastor to pastor podcast. It's been a while since we released one of these podcasts. My apologies. It's been a busy summer and fall for me, but really glad to have you with us on board and super glad today to have my guest, Dr. Iain Provan, with us. And we're here at Christ City Church in East Vancouver or South Vancouver and in the facility that interestingly, this place my parents got married and now is once again a thriving congregation of which Dr. Provan and his family are a part. So that's really awesome. And in previous episodes, Dr. Provan gave a bit of his background. I always ask people, tell us about the community that shaped you, and he's done that before. So if you're curious, you can listen to one of the earlier podcasts. But for today, I'm just leading with the question for Dr. Provan to explain the title of his new book, Cuckoos in Our Nest. And this new stage of ministry that he's involved in. Dr. Provan was the professor of Old Testament at Regent College, but he's retired from that position and starting a new venture serving the churches in Canada. So tell us about this new ministry and why this unusual title?

Iain Provan:
Well, the ministry is really premised on my conviction that we're dealing with something of a theological crisis in the church. On the question of what is a human being? This is a huge question out in the culture, very disputed question in all sorts of quite extreme ways, from transhumanism through to sexual ethics or whatever. And I've set myself up with this consultancy to offer my help to churches, individuals, organizations who would like to process with me this important question. And I've called it The Cuckoo's Consultancy for a good reason. The European cuckoo does not build its own nest or look after its own eggs. It lays an egg in another bird's nest. When the cuckoo chick hatches, it assassinates all the other chicks in the nest. The motherbird assumes this is her own chick and feeds it. It grows to enormous size usually, and takes over the entire nest, and I think this is a very good metaphor for what is happening in our churches that we have. We don't know we have, but in practice we have many foreign ideas not very biblical, only partly biblical. And they are sitting in our nest looking like birds that belong there. And we need to be able to spot them and to deal with them, otherwise they will destroy the nest. So the metaphor is designed really to communicate that big idea.

Rob Thiessen:
Yeah. And I've dabbled a little into the book. And of course you presented on this topic, so I'm eager for us to get into it. And I was thinking that today's podcast, I would sort of take maybe even a little bit the outline that you present in the book. And I think, well, why don't you tell us a little bit about how you've structured this book, how it's different from some of the other books. Some of our readers might have read or seen attempted to read some of your other books, Seriously Dangerous Religion, others, but your other books tend to be. They're pretty hefty and, you know, require a bit of diligence to read and absorb. How is this book different?

Iain Provan:
Well, this book is much shorter. The chapters are very short. They're only four pages long. It's designed for the ordinary reader, somebody who is willing and able to read four pages, get a single idea presented, and then wrestle with that, almost like a higher level daily Bible reading kind of thing, but deliberately written, I hope, at an accessible level. And so it's different in terms of its intended scope. I'm aiming for quite a wide readership, I hope here, and I'm hoping to make it very manageable for people. And hitherto I'm getting pretty good feedback about that. Actually, people like the short chapters, and they like the fact that the book is also much cheaper, because one of the problems with the university press is, of course, is they just tend to be more expensive. So with this one, I've gone with a different kind of publisher as well to try and facilitate that.

Rob Thiessen:
Yeah. Is there a study guide or anything like that with it, or is it kind of built into it?

Iain Provan:
Well, in order to keep the costs down, I've really tried to be quite minimalistic in the book itself. So there aren't very many footnotes really. And I haven't put questions in there, but there are questions on my website, so I thought that would be a good way if people want to use this, these questions for private use or for Bible study, church Bible study use, they can go to my website, ianproven.ca, and they'll find a series of guiding questions for each chapter.

Rob Thiessen:
Okay, excellent. We'll try to make sure that that link gets put into the notes of this podcast. So you laid the book also out into kind of sections. Talk to us a little bit about those sections and how they progress.

Iain Provan:
Well, the first section is about one of the central questions, I think in our culture, which is if we ask the question, what is a human being? How would we know the best or the right answer to that? That is itself a very disputed question, because we live in a culture with all kinds of ideas about where legitimate knowledge comes from. So the first part of the book is designed to put Scripture at the center of that discussion, but to explain why Scripture is at the center, and not just to assert that it ought to be as if it were an arbitrary choice, but actually to give reasons why Christians must necessarily set Scripture at the center of the how to know business.

Rob Thiessen:
It's it seems like there's a cultural a sort of readiness or like a preparedness going on like we notice even with Jordan Peterson doing lectures on the Bible and people who don't, you know, we wouldn't associate we wouldn't have them preaching at our church, per se, but they're they're just reasonably advocating and saying, no, the Bible is an important book for us to consider. So it feels like that idea is there's greater openness in society to us. And you also include how should we think about science? How should we who should we trust? You talk about all those things in the opening chapter. So it's a little bit like it feels to me like an invitation to think this is like grounding us again in critical thinking, like, this is how this is how to think rightly.

Iain Provan:
Well, yes. I mean, the thing is, we do need to ground people in critical thinking because I don't think they're being taught how to do it any longer in other parts of the culture. I don't think this is a big part of people's school experience, for example, or indeed university experience. And I think the church itself needs to resurrect critical thinking.

Rob Thiessen:
Well this is what I wanted to ask you about. What's the church's role like? Is a pastor now to be, should they be thinking about how to teach people how to think?

Iain Provan:
Well, I do believe that because this really in my opinion, this is survival skills 101. I mean, if you cannot think your way through all these alternative ideas and get to some kind of conclusion, of course you have nothing to go on then and you will probably just go with what the group things, which I think in practice is how most people do make their decisions about right and wrong or whatever, is to look around and take their lead from the group that they care most about. And so it seems to me that reading the Bible well is obviously very, very important. But reading the culture well, in order to know how the Bible speaks to it is also very important. So the loss of confidence that we're seeing in Scripture or have seen in the church doesn't really have anything to do with any deficit in Scripture itself. It really is a loss of confidence created by the the groupthink in the culture at large. And if we're able to think our way through once again from first principles, why do we believe in Scripture? And if we can come up with a good answer to that, it's really going to help us, I think.

Rob Thiessen:
Can you, this is a pretty foundational question, and I just think of my own tendencies or, you know, so there are there are people in an approach to, you know, telling people how to think or what to think that sort of has a tone like, well, other people are stupid, we're smart or like hurling, you know, our criticisms from the Tower of Christianity, as it were. What would you say to pastors about the a winsome posture? Or how do you do this without falling into those traps? Like I'm a know it all person or condescending because I know that doesn't work well, you know, people tell me that because I fall into this, that doesn't work. You know, you can't just mock people. That's not going to help gain some ground. So what would you say to pastors about this area. Who are models that they should look to and what are some things you've learned about engaging this way and thinking critically?

Iain Provan:
I do agree that mocking people is not either appropriate nor likely to get us anywhere.

Rob Thiessen:
It is tempting though.

Iain Provan:
Well, it is, particularly when there are so many foolish things being said. Of course it is a temptation. But yes, I don't think we should mock, nor should we back off, though, from subjecting bad ideas to scrutiny and explaining to ourselves and other people why they are bad ideas and what good ideas look like. So yes, I suppose it is possible that we might become arrogant in that process, which would be a bad thing. Humility is obviously one of the virtues we say we believe in. On the other hand, I think perhaps in many sections of the church the problem has not been that one. The problem has been a deep anti-intellectualism which has not served us well because after all, God has given us our minds and it seems a curious business to despise them then. And indeed, how are we supposed to discern between truth and error and right and wrong, if not in large measure by processes of the mind? Thinking about thinking about things? So I'm not sure which of these is the greatest danger. And I think we have to steer our way through the middle of that without falling into the extremes.

Rob Thiessen:
Yeah. And I think when I think about, you know, an example of the kind of it would be Keller, you know, as in his way of, you know, he would I think oftentimes like, he'll put an idea in front and then dissect it, you know, ask questions about it and give options for people. And that way, I don't know whether you call that a Socratic method or whatever, but he just took it like a philosopher and for the sake of argument, looks at all sides and then did a good job of presenting like a Christian worldview or response to things in many cases.

Iain Provan:
Yes. And that's very much the method and the posture that I'm trying to adopt here. And when we get to talking about the fourth part of the book, we'll get on to that, because that's really where I'm inviting analysis of many common ideas about what is true and how to get truth, which I think are not great ideas, even though they're very popular. I would have thought any truth seeker, Christian or not, would want to know whether ideas are strong or weak. You would think that would be bound up with seeking truth, right? So how do we do it? Of course is important that we do. It is even more important, I think.

Rob Thiessen:
Yeah. Thank you. Thanks. That's helpful. Let's talk a little bit about the Old Testament. We had a podcast talking about this a couple of years ago. We were talking about Andy Stanley's book Irresistible and Andy's Focus. They're encouraging Christians that they should focus on the New Testament and quit trying to explain the Old Testament to a society that sees the Old Testament God as violent and vengeful. And, you know, this is recovering some old ground. But maybe you could just summarize your thoughts on that, because it's germane to this book and your topic here as well. And then share with us again the concerns you had about Anabaptist tendencies on this topic, because we are a community that sort of has a long history of saying, well, Jesus at the center, we read the Bible through the lens of Jesus, but in some cases that just means all we do is read the Gospels and everything else. In the Old Testament, we sometimes even currently neo-anabaptists treat with suspicion. I don't think we used to do that. You know, Elmer Martins didn't do that, but currently that seems to be the popular approach.

Iain Provan:
Yes. I mean, obviously I agree that Jesus is the center. I mean, agreeing with that is essential to being a Christian. The thing that puzzles me about what happens next, though, is I would have thought that if Jesus is your Lord, that one of the things that means is taking seriously his reading suggestions. And as I read the Gospels, I see him all the time referring back to the Old Testament as Holy Scripture, the very Word of God. The place to go to check out what he's saying and the place he routinely goes in debating with other people. And then you see the apostles themselves doing exactly the same thing as you would expect. And you see that famous statement in 2 Timothy 3:16 about all Scripture being inspired and useful. And of course, the Apostle Paul is referring there really mainly or entirely to the Old Testament at that point, because the New Testament doesn't exist at that point. And so the thing that puzzles me is why we think we can have the Lordship of Christ without having the authority of the entire Bible, all the New Testament. So that's the question I would put back to people who have a smaller Bible, if I can put it that way. I don't see how you can justify that position.

Rob Thiessen:
And why is the Old Testament, you know, why is the Old Testament fundamental to this question of what it means to be human?

Iain Provan:
Well, of course, the Old Testament is primarily where creation theology is articulated. It's not that it doesn't appear in the New Testament, but I mean so much of what is primary in our understanding of who we are and what we're here for, what our vocation is, what we're to hope for is deeply grounded in the Old Testament and indeed, the New Testament authors and our Lord himself refer back to it precisely for these purposes. And so if we disavow the Old Testament for reasons which I've just said are surely. A questionable. We also cut ourselves off from crucially important theological resources for answering this question of our moment. The biggest cultural question of our moment, I think. What is it? What is a human being? So it's not a trivial matter. It's an extremely important matter.

Rob Thiessen:
So, you know, one of the questions we've been wrestling with is, you know, in the last decade is and before that I suppose, too, but what is a marriage? So marriage has been redefined. And again, not to pick on Andy Stanley in this, but he you know, in the last couple of months, there's been questions raised about, you know, what's Andy teaching or what's the church upholding there in terms of definition of marriage or the sanctity of marriage, the whole inclusion debate. And again, it circles back to the question of the Old Testament. And so, you know, you talk about creation and Jesus, you know, when asked about marriage and the implications, he went straight back to, to Genesis.

Iain Provan:
Yeah. I mean, it's not surprising that somebody who has dismissed the authority of the Old Testament for the church should then find himself veering ever more steadily towards cultural norms about these matters in general. So that should not surprise us. That's been seen before in the history of the church. When you depart from an orthodox understanding of Scripture, inevitably you're going to depart sooner or later from Orthodox understandings of other specific theological topics. And so if we ask ourselves the question, what is a marriage and how do we know? Well, the Christians should answer. We know fundamentally because we consult the scriptures that our Lord gave us for these purposes. And that makes it very clear that a marriage is between one man and one woman for life, till death do us part. And all of that stuff in our traditional wedding services. And it is not anything else, no matter what other people may say. So that gives us our fundamental orientation point, really, for thinking about marriage, the place of sex in human relationships, sexual intimacy, and so on.

Rob Thiessen:
In a society that thinks differently about sex, marriage and a lot of just foundational human things about what it means to be human. You know, your book is giving direction to the Christians. To stand firm is how do you think about the the role of the church then in sort of maybe concentric circles teaching the church and then what kind of a voice or posture do you see in the wider community, in society, around us and in the nation potentially? Here you remember you're talking to Anabaptists, so this is good for us to be stretched.

Iain Provan:
Well, I'm talking to fellow Christians, though, and I think we all have things in our own traditions in the church that perhaps we recognize are not equally strong, shall we say. I certainly do, I come from a Calvinist tradition, and we could talk at great length of all the things, the issues I have with aspects, aspects of my own tradition. So let's just say we're all Christians together and we're trying to follow Christ. And that's really how I want to frame this conversation. So having said that, I think the church's first job is to be the church, not something else, not the religious wing of some other organization or whatever. And so primarily, you're right, my book is for the church, and I'm trying to remind the church in the first instance of biblical fundamentals on these issues of being human, which is the second part of the book, and then some of the implications of those in the third part of the book. And so we go on from there. Now, having called people to the truth and having ensured that they are baptized into the faith and are following as disciples and raising their kids in that way, the question then comes, which is the one you're asking is, okay, so what about people beyond that discipleship boundary? And I think there are several answers to that question. I think we need to treat everyone. Outside the boundary as image bearers of God, just like us, who have not yet repented and agreed to join the discipleship community that I imagine involves treating people with respect, with dignity, all the things that all the virtues that we are exhorted to develop in relation to those people.

Iain Provan:
But it does, I think, continue to mean that they are outside that discipleship boundary. And we shouldn't get confused about that. So our posture must be respectful and all of that, but not somehow pretending that the issues that now divide us are trivial, don't matter, don't need to be acted upon. And that means that we, in the present cultural moment, we are inevitably in conflict with people who for whom things like inclusion, diversity as they define them, are almost the whole ballgame. And being a virtuous person. Now, the church has always been in this dilemma from day one, and by day one I mean day one back in Genesis or day two, perhaps. And so the people of God have always, when holding to the truth properly, have always had a different idea of the human person from the surrounding culture. To be a Hebrew was not to be an Egyptian or a Babylonian, fundamentally not the early church, of course. Likewise, to be a Christian was in many ways not to be a Roman. And the Romans knew that, which is why they tried so hard to crush the Christian movement. And we've lived with that all the way down through history as well. So it's not surprising we should find ourselves in this place of tension now. And the great mistake, I think, is to try and resolve the tension in what I would call inappropriate ways.

Rob Thiessen:
Yeah, it's. But for us too, as Christians now who have enjoyed, you know, almost a majority or a privileged position, we're sort of entering into new territory for us as Western and Canadian Christians. You know, we're watching the events in Israel and listening to some of the Jewish commentators talking about anti-Semitism and just their recognition that this has been all through history and they clearly, you know, see themselves as a people oppressed and like under under this specter of hatred. And yeah, we as Christians, like in the West in this time, don't see ourselves that way. And that's why, you know, I think personally, I, we just react in a very troubled way about all that's happening. But you're saying, well, it's actually quite normal and not uncommon through history.

Iain Provan:
No. I mean, the hatred of God's people, whether Jews or Christians, has been a recurring feature of history, both in the Bible and down through the ages since biblical times. Anti-semitism is a recurring and particularly awful example only of a general reality of racial ethnic hatred in the human heart. It is remarkable for its persistence and intensity. Perhaps, but it's not, in a sense, unique in terms of people hating each other and wanting to destroy them. And it's true that in a country like Canada in recent history, we have not been in such a position as Christians vis a vis the power of the state, for example. But I sure hope your listeners are paying attention to what's happening around about them now, because we are in many ways heading back in that direction and are already there in many respects, and we cannot at all take for granted that we're going to enjoy the protections and freedoms that we have hitherto enjoyed.

Rob Thiessen:
Yeah, well, that would almost be another podcast conversation that we could jump into. I wanted to you touched on this topic of inclusion, and it's listed in section four of your book as one of those prevailing sort of cuckoos in the nest. And that word inclusion, the idea of welcoming the phrase that, you know, Andy Stanley used saying, oh, Jesus always drew circles, the Pharisees drew lines, Jesus drew circles. So, you know, and that it captures Christians because we think, well, of course, you know, we want to be hospitable and welcoming, and Jesus welcomed the sinner. So what's the deceptive lie that's jumping into the church under this framework?

Iain Provan:
Well, I think the fundamental problem here is that once you remove Jesus in the Gospels from the Old Testament before it and the New Testament after it, you can almost make Jesus stand for anything that you like. And there's been a long history, in fact, of doing that, not least in the modern period where the liberal Jesus turns out to be a Jesus who's much like me. No matter what the search for Jesus may involve, it always turns out that Jesus is much more conveniently available to me, and not somebody who challenges me or questions my assumptions and so on. And so you get a situation here on this hospitality issue where somehow, because Jesus ate with sinners from time to time, somehow that becomes therefore the church should not have any hard boundaries with regard to the culture roundabout. And the problem is that when you look at both the Old Testament and the New Testament, the remainder of the New Testament, that's not what you find at all. And there's a good reason for that. And that is that if you're going to have a discipleship community holding to a very distinctive countercultural idea of what it means to be a human being, you're going to have to protect the sheep from the wolves who want to destroy those ideas and the community that holds them.

Iain Provan:
You're going to have to make sure that the boundaries there are actually quite hard. Not because you don't respect people, not because. You don't treat other people with dignity, but simply because you recognize that they don't believe what you believe. And if you want to protect your people, particularly your young people, from what they believe, and get them to continue to believe what you think is true, you're going to have to take steps to make sure it happens. I don't think there's a more dangerous recent idea in the church than this idea of hospitality, as it is currently being articulated. I don't think it's a biblical idea of hospitality. I think it's a postmodern philosophy from France kind of view of hospitality. And in that view of hospitality, even holding strong beliefs is held to be oppressive. Right. You can't even articulate strong beliefs. That is a form of violence in the philosophy of Derrida and the quasi Christian people who are following Derrida. But it's coming from French philosophy. It's not coming from the Bible.

Rob Thiessen:
How would you describe a more, like a biblical view of hospitality then? How would a church practice be biblically welcoming, or what would be some of the markers of that?

Iain Provan:
Well, I think communities of any kind, typically, unless they're very close communities, typically have ways of welcoming other people into their midst that don't compromise their fundamental integrity. So, for example, I wouldn't be having and I don't think the Bible permits us to have people inside the discipleship community who are not actually walking as disciples, because that undermines the whole viability of the enterprise. But does that mean that we can't invite people to church services? Does it mean that we can't invite people to lunch? Does it mean that we can't work with them? No, it doesn't mean any of those things. So having a hospitable posture in terms of friendliness and welcoming and, you know, and being a human being together, that's all fine and good and proper and all of that. But when you get confused about which level of thing you're dealing with, that's when the problems arise. And there's something of a cry now, a demand now, that the church ought to be inclusive in a way that actually in any community, if you were to adopt that same view, would destroy the very nature of the community. And, you know, it's always dangerous giving other examples, because they can sound trivial. But I think there's a certain point. So let me just take a very foolish example in a way, a silly example. If I'm a member of a golf club and I have somebody wanting to join my golf club on the basis of inclusion and diversity, who wants to play rugby on my putting greens, likely, I don't imagine there's any golf club in the world that would allow that to happen. Why? Because the person is asking for something that destroys the fundamental point of the community they're demanding to join. It's no different, really, by analogy, when people with very different views of what it means to be a human person want to become core members of our Christian discipleship community.

Rob Thiessen:
Yeah.

Rob Thiessen:
Yeah that's good. And it reminds the pastors listening of their role of protecting the flock of that that's a serious command that we're accountable for as shepherds with the church.

Iain Provan:
Well, I would say that's a primary command. I shake in my boots when I hear people being casual about this issue. There's so much about that protecting the sheep, looking after the sheep and all that. And I think that's our primary duty as church leaders. Our primary duty lies not in the direction of the culture at large. I would suggest our primary duty to make is to make sure the church remains the church, and therefore able then to preach the gospel to the culture to be salt and light. If there's nothing there in the first place to go and do those tasks, the tasks can't be done. So if we get confused about this, we not only risk destroying the church, we also risk destroying the witness of the church in the world.

Rob Thiessen:
Yeah, in your chapter on these deceptions, you have a section on worship as well. So what are some of the things that you observe that are sort of cuckoos in the worship field within churches that would help our pastors to think well about these things?

Iain Provan:
Well, I think that again, the business here is to, I hope, we all wish to be as biblical as we can possibly be, no matter what our traditions and history and all the rest of that. And I think if we look at what the Bible teaches us about worship, that worship is about offering the whole person to God across the whole range of life. And I'm thinking here of Romans 12:1 as a great guiding text here, offering our bodies as living sacrifice and all of that. So worship is not something that we do in parts of our lives. It's not something that we do only in parts of our church services. And I put it that way, because actually, the way we use language often implies that we do believe those things I just mentioned. We say things like welcome to worship. And we say this, I don't know, at 11 a.m. to the community. But of course, it raises the question, what were people doing just prior? What were they doing beforehand? Was that non-worship then? We sometimes say we're now moving into a time of worship. So what was happening in the church service just prior was all of that non-worship? What we actually mean of course is we're about to start singing some songs, which is fine. No objection to that. But it's a very impoverished idea of worship and I think our language can trip us up such that we begin to dichotomize we begin to create sacred and secular zones, we begin to put a distance between the spiritual and the unspiritual, even between the body and the soul. And these dis-incarnations. I borrowed this word from Eugene Peterson. These dis-incarnations are incompatible with the biblical idea of the human person, which is human beings are what we might call nowadays psychosomatic entities. And so even even the language we use and the way we use it can be contributing to the right thinking or wrong thinking. And we want to be careful. I think about how we speak, not just how we behave, because language does shape thinking.

Rob Thiessen:
Well, how would you? I mean, there is an aspect to entering into a time of worship, if you want to, that where people are, what they're trying to say is that we're is just a matter of degree or focus or intention saying calling people because sometimes people will have, well, everything I do is worship and and effectively by that they're saying nothing is that they're doing is actually worshipful. So how do you navigate that those extremes.

Iain Provan:
That is a danger. I'm not sure. It's the biggest danger, though, that we face just at the present time, because many of our churches have a history of putting dualism right at the heart of our idea of the Christian understanding of the person. And so, yes, of course it's true. And we're told to pray all the time. Does that mean we shouldn't have quiet time? You know, I'm not saying that. I'm just saying, though, that the Christian idea of the person is integrated. We are embodied souls in the language of Genesis 2:7. We are called in all of our lives to be worshipful and to offer everything to God as worship. And if we can't offer things in our lives to God in worship, there's a very big question mark lying over whether those are things we should be doing at all. So I think so much of what is going on in the culture at the present time is about dis incarnation, disembodiment, fracturing oppositions.

Rob Thiessen:
Give us an example of that. I know you touched on it in the book with separating. You know how I feel inside from my biology.

Iain Provan:
Well, that is one of the most obvious examples. At the larger level, you have the transhumanists who seem to be gaining quite a bit of power and voice and whatever in the world.

Rob Thiessen:
And what is that? What is that?

Iain Provan:
Well, transhumanists fundamentally the governing belief there is. So what is a human being? The answer given by transhumanists would be human beings are essentially minds currently and rather unfortunately located in bodies. There's the dualism where essentially minds and the purpose is to provoke somehow, more quickly than might otherwise happen, the next stage of human evolution, and to deal with the problem of our embodiment, setting our minds free to become, if not immortal, at least long lasting, outliving our bodies and eventually creating a new kind of being in the cosmos. Really, it's science fictionistic in a way, but it's very serious. So that's the larger bit. And then you have transgenderism, which I think is a subset of that, which applies the same thinking to what we do with our bodies right now. But it's connected more to sex and sexual identity. But the same basic idea, what is a human being? A human being is who I am deep down inside. Yeah, it may or may not have anything at all to do with my given body, my biology. My task is to look inside myself, discover who I most authentically am, and then to allow that out and to express it, and if necessary, to adjust my bodily form so that it becomes an expression of who I most deeply feel myself to be. So there's two examples of of fundamental dualism, fundamental answers to the question, what does a human being that are not biblical, not Christian, not, in fact answers that even other religious some other religious systems give, although that would vary, I suppose, because in the East, of course, you do have this idea that we are fundamentally souls trapped, time after time, in bodies until they're released. So there is that.

Rob Thiessen:
And even the use of drugs, like now, people experimenting with psychedelic drugs or whatever are trying to find an altered state of consciousness and damaging their bodies or trying to, you know, trying to free themselves essentially from the limitations that they feel.

Iain Provan:
I think there is in our culture a deep, nihilistic hatred or at least extreme discomfort with embodiment, a boredom in relation to it, a desire for things that are more exciting, more authentic in some way better. And this stuff we're talking about now is fundamentally beginning. It's beginning to shape our very society. It's definitely shaping our public and independent schools in British Columbia massively. So I'm not sure most Christians have woken up to it yet. Although there are signs now people are beginning to wake up that this is not just about stopping kids bullying each other in school, which is a great idea. Although bullying is endemic, I think to the human condition, not just something that certain kinds of people do, but who's in favor of bullying. I'm not. But the trouble is, that's not really what this is about. What's going on in our public and independent schools is actually an attempt to change, fundamentally change what people think, what young people think of as normal in this area of humanness.

Rob Thiessen:
Let me just ask you about this idea of dualism, because, you know, honestly, when you read Paul and a lot of the New Testament, there's quite a bit of it, like Romans 7 for instance. So what's the right way of thinking about the way the New Testament often describes us as body and spirit or body soul. How do we think rightly about that?

Iain Provan:
Yes, I think these are best thought of as ways of speaking from different points of view about the entire integrated person. Biblically, I don't believe it's true to say that we are collections of bits of things. In fact, Genesis makes it very clear that we're not. By refusing to say that God put souls into our bodies, it's very significant when you contrast this to something like Plato in the Greek philosophical tradition, for whom we are essentially eternal souls, unfortunately located, imprisoned in physical bodies and destined once in the future to fly away again and escape. But Genesis says that God breathed into us and thereby made us living souls. That is, we're intrinsically embodied. And it would not be true to say that therefore we are in some dualistic way, a body and a soul. But Scripture can talk and use words like spirit, soul, and indeed other words like strength. Love the Lord your God with all your heart. There's heart, for example, heart and soul and strength. I don't think that text means us to think that strength is a bit of us somewhere. It's a way of talking about every aspect of who you are being recruited to the loving of God. So I think it's better to think of these other verses that you're referring to. If we're looking at the whole story of Scripture, to think of these as different ways, of highlighting, ways of highlighting different aspects of who we are, like desire and all the rest of that and in because I know this is going to be a question or I knew this was going to be a question, I have a whole chapter where I lay out the scriptural reasons why I think this is the right way to go.

Rob Thiessen:
Yeah. It's well, I mean, we always struggle to take Romans 7 and, you know, there's a there's a head scratcher part to it, but at the same time, it resonates with our experience. We're like, oh, we can identify completely with what he's describing. But you're saying it's not he's not intending it to be a presentation of, you know, of humanness, but more of our experience of what it means.

Iain Provan:
Yeah. I mean, there's a certain way in which you and I, any human being, can, as it were, stand apart from themselves and refer to themselves and almost view themselves. But we don't claim thereby that actually we are two people. We're talking about an aspect of our integrated experience, aren't we? It's possible to think about ourselves as, mainly as embodied, as it were, from those points of view. And it's also possible to think about ourselves as those creatures who have the breath of God breathed into them. But in fact, these are not different things. I think that's the illusion. These are not different things. In the biblical tradition. There are different ways of thinking about the same thing.

Rob Thiessen:
Well, this is just, you know, sort of like seminal ideas that play out in so many aspects of our teaching. And just as we kind of wrap the conversation up, I know one of the things that you touched on in the book was the importance of hope. I think in chapter 19, you identify hope as a key aspect of Christian understanding of what it means to be human, of anthropology. And I thought that was so important for this day and time. So how do you how do we hold on to hope? How do we appropriate that hope? If that's so central? And what would you say to pastors who maybe need to be recapturing or be recaptured by the hope that should be, should be central to our humanness as God created us.

Iain Provan:
This is one of the many areas in which it's important to be on top of the question, how do we believe we know what we know? Because if we were to try to generate hope from our everyday experience or whatever, something using our senses, some normal way of knowing, I think that at the moment, as we look around the world, we would find very little reason for any kind of hope. And indeed, the culture at large, I think, is deeply nihilistic, deeply hopeless. And this creates a great problem for folks who are idealistic. For example, there are, I understand, many people in what you might call the radical green movement, with very high ideals about what we ought to and no to be doing to the planet. And they are filled with a sense of hopelessness. So the whole business of, yes, we're doing this, but of course it's a hopeless task. It becomes crushing after a while. So why do I say that we ought to be fundamentally hopeful creatures. It's not because there's anything in my own experience of the world that suggests that, very little anyway. It's really because the biblical narrative that we are commanded to locate ourselves in is a story with an inevitably happy ending. It's what Shakespeare would have called a comedy, which doesn't mean it's a bundle of laughs all the time, but that it's on the way up the whole time.

Iain Provan:
It's a you, you know, you can go down into the valley, but inevitably you're going to have a happy ending. Our story, our human story, the story of creation at large is already scripted. We already know the end. And because we already know the end, we have hope. And that then ought to not produce in us passivity. You know, waiting in the railway station for the glory train to call by. It ought to be the engine, the thing that gives us energy precisely to go and to love God with all our heart and soul and mind and strength, and to love our neighbor and even our enemy, and do all the things that we ought to be doing in the world, because however small they may feel, and most of us most of the time are doing small things that don't appear to us to make much difference. But it's a bit like the bread, the crumbs of bread left over after the feeding of the 5000. The thing is, in our story, we know that every small act done leaning into that story counts for something and will be seen in the end to count for something. So we want to be a bit careful ourselves here, because I know in my own tradition, for example, the fallenness of things when I was growing up was such a big idea that it became a kind of crushing weight.

Iain Provan:
And you almost got to the point of thinking, there's no point of getting out of bed in the morning, because I can only make the world a worse place. It was almost as bad as that. That's fundamentally wrong. The fall does not define who we are as human beings. It's a tremendous obstacle to be overcome, and we can't overcome it. But mercifully, it's been overcome. And so we don't have to worry about that. It's already been overcome. And the fall doesn't define us, nor could it in a cosmos, in a reality where there only is one true and living God. Because if the fall defined us, that would mean that somehow evil had attained the status of divinity of a rival to God. Well, there is no rival to God. And as the Apostle rightly says and logically says, who is there then to cause a problem, right? If God is for us, who can be against us? Rhetorical question. Nobody can. So hopefulness lies at the heart, I think, of the redeemed human life. I don't think we can do without it. In fact.

Rob Thiessen:
Because the God whose image in which we are created is a God of hope and purpose.

Iain Provan:
And is all the time restoring the image in us. You'll notice in New Testament how many times this notion of the image is picked up as a way of talking about our ongoing sanctification. Another reason why we can't do without Genesis before we read the New Testament, because it doesn't make sense otherwise. But once we get the whole story and we recognize that that is the story in which we live, and we're able to distinguish it from all the cuckoo stories and to get them back out of the nest, that's really, I think, the endeavor. That's what pastors and church leaders and so on have to inculcate in the people under their care. Which story are you living in? Are you sure? Can you recognize competing false stories? Do you know well enough to reject them? That is the need of the hour, because we are under such cultural pressure now to abandon our authentic Christian biblical story and adopt other people's stories as well. And some of the tactics designed to make that happen are people shouting very loudly about things like diversity and inclusion and all of that.

Rob Thiessen:
And the power of stories also to inspire hope. I know when I was on vacation, we were visiting a church. They had a discount book table and I picked up moody, the biography. And, you know, I was reading through that on holiday and I thought, this guy gives me hope and stories. Do those individual stories do inspire hope. And when they're shared in the life of the church and shared for the pastors who are listening, you know, they we really need that to carry forward. So thanks so much for this conversation. Leave it on a good note of being a people of hope in this time. And Iain, we're so delighted that you're, you know, a part of our community and offering the insights and wisdom that the Lord has given you to our community. We look forward to having you next week at EQUIP and maybe back on a podcast again in the days ahead. So for now, everyone out there listening. Thanks for spending this hour together with us, and God bless you and your work, and we'll be back again in the future on the Pastor to Pastor podcast. Bye bye for now.

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