#115 – Interfaith learning

A Baptist pastor and Yale theologian tells how he finds additional depth for his Christian faith by learning from other world religions.

Our previous two guests — Philip Yancey and Frank Schaeffer — told us how they recovered from the toxic Evangelicalism that they grew up with. The former found it possible to recover an entirely different Evangelicalism, while the other felt the best solution was to cut his losses and leave Christian faith behind.

Our guest today takes a third approach: Dr. Greg Mobley found it possible to take the Evangelical faith that was handed to him by his parents and his community, and bring that to a whole new level through music, poetry, philosophy …… and other world religions. Not just other strands of Christian faith, but deepening his theology by marinating in Judaism, Islam … even Eastern religions.

It was fascinating that he began as a Southern Baptist, had to go to Yale to become deeply familiar with Judaism, and later had to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem to fall in love with Roman Catholicism.

One of the lessons he learned was how “everyone sees their own religion as full of grace and compassion, and all other religions as harsh and demanding.”

Another important insight: “Judaism and Christianity are siblings, separated at birth. ….. That the two movements eventually separated made possible the preservation of each. …. Jews and Christians can find lost fragments of themes of their respective faiths …. by talking to each other.”

And it was great how he liberally sprinkled musical references all through his commentary … his personal love for Blue Grass, but also references to the Band, the Monkeys, Jesse Winchester, Marc Cohn, Jimmie Dale Gilmor, Ray Charles, Mumford and Sons, and even Stompin’ Tom Connors. And he wasn’t just referring to their musicality: he finds important philosophical and theological nuggets in their lyrics. “I think the three greatest Christian theologians of my lifetime are Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, and Leonard Cohen … three Jewish guys, but they could see us and the beauty of Christianity.”

We learned so much from Greg; tell us what you think …..

To find more about Dr. Gregory Mobley, see his faculty web-page.

If you enjoyed this episode, you might also like our previous conversation with Dr. Justin Barrett , who shared a Christian perspective on humans evolving a mind which was naturally tuned to search for and find the divine and to create religions.

Episode image from Pixabay.

To help grow this podcast, please like, share and post a rating/review at your favorite podcast catcher.

Subscribe here to get updates each time a new episode is posted, and find us on Twitter or Facebook.

Back to Recovering Evangelicals home-page and the podcast archive