The Two Cities

In this episode of our Apologetics series, we’re joined by Lisa Fields, the founder of the Jude 3 Project, whose mission is “to help the Christian community know what they believe and why they believe it. Distinctive in its strong emphasis in equipping those of African descent in the United States and abroad.” In our conversation, Lisa tells us a little bit of her journey, how she first got into apologetics, and why she decided to start the Jude 3 Project. As Lisa explains, part of the reason is to address the unique apologetic concerns of Black Community. Questions like whether God exists is always an important apologetic discussion, but most Black people in America do believe in God and so more germane topic need to be explored, such as whether Christianity is just “a white man’s religion.” Lisa explain that Jude 3 is also partly an attempt to ensure that Black voices are represented on all the common apologetics concerns and issues.  As the conversation progresses we touch on some additional insights that Black Apologetics provides for the broader apologetic enterprise, such as unique insights on the Problem of Evil, drawing upon a history of suffering re: slavery, racism, and systemic oppression. Team members on the episode from The Two Cities include: Dr. Amber Bowen, Rev. Daniel Parham, Dr. Chris Porter, and Dr. John Anthony Dunne. Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Carrying on our broader conversation on Apologetics, we are joined by an analytic theologian, Dr. James T. Turner, who is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Anderson University and the author of On the Resurrection of the Dead: A New Metaphysics of Afterlife for Christian Thought(published by Routledge). In this conversation we touch on the nature of apologetics as an enterprise designed to demonstrate that Christianity is not fundamentally irrational. As Dr. Turner contends, this is all apologetics really ought to be, and he goes further to explain that the idea of removing intellectual objections to the faith won’t actually lead people to bow the knee to King Jesus. Another branch of our conversation then delves into the subject matter of Dr. Turner’s book, which is the resurrection and the nature of the afterlife. Dr. Turner is a hylomorphist, which is the view that everything is comprised of matter and form. The soul, then, is the form of all living organisms (humans, plants, trees, dogs). The form thus can’t float free from the matter, and cannot be separated from it. This has huge implications for popular apologetics that point to near death experiences as an argument for God (usually implicitly given in the form of a narrative, such as books like Heaven Is For Real). Dr. Turner explains that he holds this view because he believes that the Bible places all of its hope on the bodily resurrection of human beings, as well as the physical restoration of creation, not on immaterial souls going off to Heaven after the body dies. Team members from The Two Cities on the episode include: Dr. Amber Bowen and Dr. John Anthony Dunne. Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Continuing our apologetics series, we are joined by Dr. Justin Bailey, who is Assistant Professor of Theology at Dordt University and the author of Reimagining Apologetics: The Beauty of Faith in a Secular Age(IVP Academic). In our conversation, Dr. Bailey offers his constructive proposal for what apologetics could look like that gets beyond a mere focus on the intellect. Further, he wants to distance his approach to apologetics from what he calls “capital A apologetics,” or magisterial apologetics, which promotes a “sage of the stage” who offers a kind of top-down approach full of defeater arguments. Dr. Bailey is clear that his proposal is not an attempt to get rid of the classical arguments for God’s existence, but rather he wants to open up the realm of what fits into the apologetic enterprise. This expanse needs to include the role of the imagination, which is not infantile or make believe, but rather is oriented towards reality, and specifically what possibilities stand before us, thus helping people see what possibilities are available in the life of faith to those who stand outside of it. And the other key expansive bit is the role of empathy, our ability to entertain the perspectives of others and to recognize what a person needs in that moment of encounter, which might not be a defeater argument. Team members of the episode from The Two Cities includes: Dr. Amber Bowen and Dr. John Anthony Dunne. Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On this episode in our apologetics series we address matters of evidence. What counts as “evidence,” and how do we interpret it? Moreover, what do we do when people interpret the evidence differently, or don’t find it to be relevant to the claim being made? Specifically, how should we understand religious disagreement? How should we understand religious experience? Does that count as evidence of God’s existence, God’s goodness, etc? Joining us to address these types of questions is Dr. Greta Turnbull, who is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Gonzaga University. Dr. Turnbull is an expert on evidence and disagreement, and helps us realize that evidence is messy. She calls our attention to the differences between logical apologetic questions and more existential/pastoral questions, and she points out how sometimes apologetics sticks too rigidly to logical matters when pastoral/existential issues are more pressing for people. In that light, we discuss how apologetics thus needs to expand and adapt to what is most salient for a given person, esp. since its ostensible aim is to bring people into faith, which is an inherently personal aim. Team members on the episode from The Two Cities include: Dr. Amber Bowen, Dr. John Anthony Dunne, and Dr. Grace Emmett. Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this installment of our apologetics series we ask the corresponding question to last week’s episode, Does Apologetics Help Us Read the New Testament? For this conversation we are joined by Ian Mills, who is a PhD Candidate in New Testament at Duke University and co-host with Laura Robinson of the New Testament Review podcast. Ian contends that the modern apologetics enterprise both hinders our ability to read the New Testament and makes us worse people. Over the course of our conversation we talk about both of those aspects of Ian’s indictment on the modern apologetics, looking at specific culprits and also specific examples where our reading of New Testament will be negatively impacted. Team members from The Two Cities on the episode include: Dr. Amber Bowen, Dr. John Anthony Dunne, Rev. Daniel Parham, Dr. Chris Porter, and Dr. Logan Williams. Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Continuing our conversation on Apologetics we want to take the next two episodes to ask whether apologetics helps us read Scripture. This week we want to ask that question in relation to the Old Testament specifically. We are joined by Dr. Brent Strawn, Professor of Old Testament at Duke Divinity School and Professor of Law at Duke University. He is the author of The Old Testament Is Dying: A Diagnosis and Recommended Treatment (Baker), and more recently, Lies My Preacher Told Me: An Honest Look at The Old Testament (Westminster John Knox). In our wide-ranging conversation, we talk about a number of issues pertaining to the use of the Old Testament in apologetic discussions. We pose several questions to Dr. Strawn, such as, why is it that apologetics makes it hard for us to read our Bibles, why we are perhaps less open to critical scholarship on the Old Testament than the New Testament, and what we should make of apparent contradictions if we aren’t going to feed the apologetic impulse to “tame” or “fix” the problem? Dr. Strawn contends that we need to see the big picture and put everything into perspective relative to central claims of our faith. He suggests that his approach is more compatible with a classic apologetic that is not mired in modernism and modernist constraints about what counts as facticity, historicity, etc. In the end, Dr. Strawn helpfully calls us to read with the grain of the text and to consider Augustine’s position that good interpretation ought to brings us into greater love of God and love of neighbor. Team members on the episode from The Two Cities include: Dr. John Anthony Dunne and Brandon Hurlbert. Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Kicking off our brand-new series on apologetics we begin with the end! Our first guest is Dr. Myron Bradley Penner, the author of The End of Apologetics: Christian Witness in a Postmodern Context (published by Baker), and the Rector at the Anglican Parish of Saint Paul in the Anglican Diocese of Edmonton, Alberta. Dr. Penner helpfully kick starts this series by asking what the goals of apologetics ought to be? He draws attention to many problems with the modern apologetic enterprise with their goals essentially being to win epistemic standoffs and show a force of rational domination. He highlights that many of the key figures in Christian apologetics are engaged in a project that is ironically secular, drawing as it does upon a modernist frame in order to attempt to win a battle against modernity. In our conversation, we discuss the problems that occur with reducing Christianity to propositions, as is so often done in this mode of apologetics. In our postmodern age, we are rightly skeptical of claims to “objective,” “universal,” and “neutral” knowledge, and so such an apologetic approach is also out of touch in addition to being so often less-than-Christian. Many of the questions that people are asking nowadays are also not the same ones in which classical apologetics first began. For all of these reasons, modern apologetics needs to die; and raised in its place must be something more personal, holistic, relational, and communal. Team members of the episode from The Two Cities includes: Dr. Amber Bowen, Dr. Josh Carroll, and Dr. John Anthony Dunne. Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On this episode we reflect back on our Cultural Identity series and the things that stood out to us the most. We use the analogy of the table to highlight that these conversations need to happen in an egalitarian way, where we all bring something to the table for others to enjoy. The series began with Episode 68 (May 12th) and concludes with Episode 76 (July 7th). Our series includes episodes on Latin American Theology, Asian North American preaching and biblical interpretation, race relations after George Floyd, Critical Race Theory, Masculinity, and Whiteness. What we tried to stress in this series is there is no such thing as an “un-hyphenated theology,” that we all bring our cultural identities and various intersectional backgrounds to the text with us as we attempt to read it. We hoped to stress that we all have particularities that we need to be aware of, and that we also need to learn from others who have a unique access to the text because of their distinct particularities. We also hope that this series highlights how we do not want to universalize our particularities. Team members on the episode from The Two Cities includes: Dr. John Anthony Dunne, Grace Sangalang Ng, Rev. Daniel Parham, and Dr. Chris Porter. Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Concluding our series on Cultural Identity, we are joined by Dr. Willie James Jennings, who is Associate Professor of Systematic Theology and Africana Studies at Yale Divinity School, and the author of The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (Yale University Press), and, more recently, After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging (Eerdmans). Dr. Jennings begins by explaining what Whiteness is and isn’t, and specifically how it has nothing to do with phenotype, cultural heritage, bodily characteristics, biology, etc, but rather is a particular way of seeing the world as revolving around the self and as something to be mastered. Over the course of our conversation we talk about how the church and theological education have been ensconced in Whiteness. Given that dynamic, Dr. Jennings relays to us how to call out its particularities, overcome internalized racism in the academy, and addresses what sort of “crucifixion” white evangelicalism might need to experience to be on the side of resurrection. Throughout his book, After Whiteness, Dr. Jennings interweaves anecdotes with poems that he’s written. As a special treat for us, Dr. Jennings reads one of his unpublished poems that didn’t make its way into the book. In the end, Dr. Jennings provide a beautiful vision of hope for the gathering of the multitudes together as the people of God after Whiteness. Team members on the episode from The Two Cities includes: Dr. Amber Bowen, Dr. John Anthony Dunne, Grace Sangalang Ng, Dr. Chris Porter, and Dr. Logan Williams. Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this penultimate episode in our cultural identity series we discuss the role of whiteness in New Testament scholarship with Prof. David Horrell, who is Professor of New Testament Studies and the Director of the Center for Biblical Studies at the University of Exeter (England), and the author of Solidarity and Difference: A Contemporary Reading of Paul’s Ethics (T&T Clark, 2005), and, more recently, Ethnicity and Inclusion: Religion, Race, and Whiteness in Constructions of Jewish and Christian Identities (Eerdmans, 2020). Over the course of our conversation, Prof. Horrell talks with us about his new book on the particularities that contribute to the modern state of New Testament scholarship, and specifically the particularities that have contributed to New Testament scholarship on the relationship between Judaism and nascent Christianity, that the former is particular and ethnocentric, whereas the latter is non-particular and universal. Prof. Horrell situates this within a Euro-centric perspective that lauds western liberal values, with many implications that continue to impact New Testament Studies. In our conversation Prof. Horrell also reflects on his former research under this light, particularly his studies on Paul’s ethics, and helps us consider how we can come to see the effects of whiteness on New Testament scholarship as “strange” by de-centering white western perspectives on the text. Team members on the episode from The Two Cities include Dr. John Anthony Dunne, Dr. Grace Emmett, Dr. Chris Porter, and Dr. Logan Williams. Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.