1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:03,680 Hello and welcome to Oak Hill College's Deep Roots podcast, 2 00:00:04,380 --> 00:00:06,380 conversations about theology and ministry. 3 00:00:06,620 --> 00:00:10,160 My name is Tim Ward and I'm one of the lecturers here at Oak Hill. 4 00:00:10,160 --> 00:00:12,840 And if you're wondering why at least a couple of us are in shorts, 5 00:00:12,960 --> 00:00:17,120 that's because we're down in the basement of Oak Hill Towers here, but up and out there 6 00:00:17,320 --> 00:00:25,000 it's just hit 40 degrees, a UK record. So yeah, those of you watching this in August, maybe when it's like five degrees and raining, 7 00:00:25,760 --> 00:00:27,760 we are recording on that day. 8 00:00:27,760 --> 00:00:33,760 So this may be the shortest podcast we ever have. Who knows? My name is Eric. 9 00:00:33,760 --> 00:00:38,800 I'm also one of the faculty members here and we are joined today by our friend and colleague, Chris Stead. 10 00:00:39,100 --> 00:00:39,420 Hi. 11 00:00:39,540 --> 00:00:41,220 Chris, can you tell us a little bit about yourself? 12 00:00:41,260 --> 00:00:52,580 Sure. So I am the Mike Ovi fellow here at Oak Hill, and that's meant teaching a lot of systematic theology and or doctrine, 13 00:00:52,620 --> 00:00:54,460 depending on what kind of language you like. 14 00:00:54,460 --> 00:01:00,500 So I've been doing that for years, full time here, but I did a bit of teaching while I was a curate before then. 15 00:01:00,840 --> 00:01:09,460 And we'll be talking about some of the some of the theological areas that I've enjoyed teaching as we go through the format of today. 16 00:01:09,960 --> 00:01:14,580 A particular student, I think, asked you for some Chris Stead's top book recommendations. 17 00:01:14,580 --> 00:01:18,260 We heard of that and thought, here's the next podcast, Chris Stead's Book Club. 18 00:01:18,420 --> 00:01:19,180 Yes. Yeah, yeah. 19 00:01:19,720 --> 00:01:20,920 Just tell us how that came about. 20 00:01:20,920 --> 00:01:28,280 Yes. So one of the students in my fellowship group, well, I'll name him, Dan Halpin of Canterbury, well, very soon to be of Canterbury, 21 00:01:28,780 --> 00:01:36,780 asked for a list of books that have really had an impact upon me that I've really enjoyed, that have shaped me in particular ways. 22 00:01:36,780 --> 00:01:39,200 And I thought, well, why not? 23 00:01:39,200 --> 00:01:47,320 And so I spent a bit of time coming up with two lists just because as anyone who's been taught by me knows, I tend to have a lot of a lot to say. 24 00:01:47,320 --> 00:01:54,200 And so I came up with two lists. One of them was top 20 reads from the 20th century onwards. 25 00:01:54,660 --> 00:01:58,080 And there's more than 20 on there, but it's around about 20. 26 00:01:58,440 --> 00:02:02,660 And then the second list is top 20 must haves from the first 20 centuries of the church. 27 00:02:03,280 --> 00:02:10,620 So two lists and both of them idiosyncratic, very much my own personal choice. 28 00:02:10,620 --> 00:02:16,120 The second list, the sort of must haves are slightly more objective, as they refer to works that everyone recognises. 29 00:02:16,120 --> 00:02:18,080 These are just standards. 30 00:02:18,080 --> 00:02:23,160 But particularly the must reads, which is where I think we're going to be chatting most of our time today around. 31 00:02:24,280 --> 00:02:34,680 Yeah, that's just books that have shaped me as a Christian, as a Christian student here at Oak Hill, as a pastor, and then latterly as a theological educator. 32 00:02:34,880 --> 00:02:43,400 So there's a there's a range of books on there, but they're all very much in my favourite warehouse. 33 00:02:43,400 --> 00:02:48,400 That's wonderful. But you have not brought 40 books with you today. 34 00:02:48,400 --> 00:02:50,400 So are we going to get our top five from each list? 35 00:02:50,400 --> 00:03:01,400 Yeah, well, I mean, I'll give you maybe some snippets in addition to the it's mainly going to be five from the top 20 must reads, but I brought some Augustine with me as well as well. 36 00:03:01,400 --> 00:03:06,400 But yeah, it's I'll give you some of the snippets and some of the highlights on the list and then do a bit of a deeper dive. 37 00:03:06,400 --> 00:03:08,400 Where would you like to start? 38 00:03:08,400 --> 00:03:14,400 Okay, great. Well, why don't I start with a few that I haven't brought with me just to say what's on the list. 39 00:03:14,400 --> 00:03:23,400 And I couldn't do this. And I realized that I haven't warned either of them on what I'm about to do now, which is, Eric, I'm afraid I don't have a book of yours on the list. 40 00:03:23,400 --> 00:03:28,400 I'm very, very sorry. I do have a book of Tim's on the list there, which is the awkwardness in the room. 41 00:03:28,400 --> 00:03:30,400 You have very good taste. 42 00:03:31,400 --> 00:03:34,400 I was taking your list incredibly seriously till I saw one. 43 00:03:34,400 --> 00:03:44,400 No, no, no. So, so starting off Tim's book, Words of Life, I remember in my first year here, I'd come to Oak Hill. 44 00:03:44,400 --> 00:03:50,400 I'd read a fair bit of theology before coming with young, punky and arrogance. 45 00:03:50,400 --> 00:03:54,400 And now I'm just slightly less young, but still a bit too punky and arrogant. 46 00:03:54,400 --> 00:03:58,400 Maybe I don't know. And thinking I want to do some serious theological reading. 47 00:03:58,400 --> 00:04:01,400 And I wanted to find a good book on scripture and this little IVP number. 48 00:04:01,400 --> 00:04:04,400 And I thought this would be a really helpful introduction, I'm sure. 49 00:04:04,400 --> 00:04:07,400 Sort of maybe a few a few good points in here that are really going to help me. 50 00:04:07,400 --> 00:04:10,400 But, you know, I'm a theological student. I want something more serious than this. 51 00:04:10,400 --> 00:04:18,400 And then I opened up this book and there was Barvink and Warfield and Calvin and some rich theology on the doctrine of scripture. 52 00:04:18,400 --> 00:04:20,400 And it really blew me away. 53 00:04:20,400 --> 00:04:28,400 And so now Tim's book, Words of Life, I think is the book to point people to for an accessible and yet very rich introduction to scripture. 54 00:04:28,400 --> 00:04:29,400 So there we go. 55 00:04:29,400 --> 00:04:31,400 Thank you. That's wonderful. 56 00:04:31,400 --> 00:04:33,400 That's very kind of you to say. 57 00:04:33,400 --> 00:04:38,400 Just occasionally I get an email from someone I've never heard of saying your book really helped me. 58 00:04:38,400 --> 00:04:40,400 And I don't know about you, actually we all feel this. 59 00:04:40,400 --> 00:04:45,400 If any, you put time and effort in and it costs other people's money and it's just you're working your way. 60 00:04:45,400 --> 00:04:49,400 And if anybody says, you know, what you did was worthwhile. 61 00:04:49,400 --> 00:04:53,400 I'm the kind of British person who just wants to go, oh, no, it was nothing. 62 00:04:53,400 --> 00:04:55,400 But thank you. 63 00:04:55,400 --> 00:04:57,400 My pleasure. That was great. 64 00:04:57,400 --> 00:05:00,400 And what I throw in is I haven't yet read this. 65 00:05:00,400 --> 00:05:02,400 I'm hoping to get to it quite soon. 66 00:05:02,400 --> 00:05:14,400 Mark Thompson from More College has just produced a sort of a shortish accessible 200 page book on the doctrine of scripture, which I'm really excited to get to. 67 00:05:14,400 --> 00:05:17,400 Great. I think this could be could be a new go to. 68 00:05:17,400 --> 00:05:33,400 He he's building in some more recent theology that I just didn't know of and take account of at all when I was reading people like John Webster building into a really orthodox doctrine of scripture. 69 00:05:33,400 --> 00:05:34,400 I'm confident that's going to be great. 70 00:05:34,400 --> 00:05:35,400 Looking forward to getting to it. 71 00:05:35,400 --> 00:05:37,400 Excellent. Excellent. Good. 72 00:05:37,400 --> 00:05:38,400 So that was that was one on the list. 73 00:05:38,400 --> 00:05:43,400 Any others on the list that I'm not going to spend time and say Sinclair Ferguson, the Holy Spirit. 74 00:05:43,400 --> 00:05:46,400 I think that's a fantastic book on the Holy Spirit. 75 00:05:46,400 --> 00:05:48,400 I've got quite a lot of Michael Horton on here. 76 00:05:48,400 --> 00:05:51,400 So he counts as one entry, but I've got a fair few things by him. 77 00:05:51,400 --> 00:06:01,400 Probably the in terms of living reformed authors, he's probably had more of an impact on me and my sort of thinking I've had than anyone else. 78 00:06:01,400 --> 00:06:03,400 Is that his four volume theology? 79 00:06:03,400 --> 00:06:05,400 It's a variety of ones on here. 80 00:06:05,400 --> 00:06:09,400 I've got the Christian faith, which is the one volume kind of distillation of that four parts. 81 00:06:09,400 --> 00:06:10,400 He did. 82 00:06:10,400 --> 00:06:12,400 Christless Christianity is on there. 83 00:06:12,400 --> 00:06:13,400 That's the first one of his I read. 84 00:06:13,400 --> 00:06:24,400 And that was basically his he uses the reformed distinction between law and gospel to argue that lots of modern evangelical is actually law light. 85 00:06:24,400 --> 00:06:28,400 And he's thinking particularly in American perspective, it was written a while ago now. 86 00:06:28,400 --> 00:06:35,400 Maybe things have changed, but there's a phrase that sociologists called Christian Smith use called moralistic, therapeutic dayism. 87 00:06:35,400 --> 00:06:39,400 I first came across it in that book by Michael Horton, Christless Christianity, 88 00:06:39,400 --> 00:06:48,400 and basically completely reduces the sense of weightiness that historically attributed to the so-called first use of the law. 89 00:06:48,400 --> 00:06:53,400 The idea that the law shows you that you cannot save yourself and that you need Christ. 90 00:06:53,400 --> 00:07:00,400 And once you reduce that, then you actually make Christianity something perhaps that is about rule keeping and doing good. 91 00:07:00,400 --> 00:07:06,400 And that book shows that actually that's led American evangelicalism, at least to a very dark place. 92 00:07:06,400 --> 00:07:12,400 And what you need is a weighty sense of the law so that you can really hear the good news of the gospel. 93 00:07:12,400 --> 00:07:18,400 And so that's why it's Christless Christianity, because it's Christianity that doesn't need a savior. 94 00:07:18,400 --> 00:07:20,400 So, yeah, that was a really influential book for me. 95 00:07:20,400 --> 00:07:23,400 Wonderful. This is so Michael Horton, H-O-R-T-O-N. 96 00:07:23,400 --> 00:07:24,400 Yeah. 97 00:07:24,400 --> 00:07:32,400 And if someone's listening in hasn't particularly heard of him or maybe heard of him not reading before, Christless Christianity would be a good way in, do you think? 98 00:07:32,400 --> 00:07:33,400 It would be a good way in. 99 00:07:33,400 --> 00:07:36,400 I think so. I mean, that was my way in and it was a really helpful way in. 100 00:07:36,400 --> 00:07:38,400 He's got lots of books on the list. 101 00:07:38,400 --> 00:07:44,400 His The Christian Faith is his one volume systematic theology and I think that's a really good one to have on the shelf. 102 00:07:44,400 --> 00:07:52,400 I think if a pastor is looking for a contemporary systematic theology, my choice would be Horton's. 103 00:07:52,400 --> 00:07:53,400 Wow. 104 00:07:53,400 --> 00:07:57,400 There's lots of other good ones out there, but for me Horton is a good one. 105 00:07:57,400 --> 00:08:02,400 And the big one, if I remember rightly, he did an abbreviated thing, is it called Pilgrim Theology? 106 00:08:02,400 --> 00:08:03,400 Pilgrim Theology, yeah. 107 00:08:03,400 --> 00:08:09,400 And if a pastor is thinking, that, well that, what would your recommendation be? 108 00:08:09,400 --> 00:08:11,400 Depends what they're wanting it for. 109 00:08:11,400 --> 00:08:12,400 Okay. 110 00:08:12,400 --> 00:08:21,400 If they're wanting a book to teach doctrines to their congregation and to work through Pilgrim Theology would be a good one to go with. 111 00:08:21,400 --> 00:08:34,400 If they want a truly systematic theology in the sense that it really does hold together with particularly the use of covenant and redemptive history as a real theme that drives the book forward, 112 00:08:34,400 --> 00:08:38,400 then The Christian Faith I think is a really good one for a pastor to hold on their shelf. 113 00:08:38,400 --> 00:08:39,400 Great. 114 00:08:39,400 --> 00:08:42,400 Yeah. So, deeper dive then. 115 00:08:42,400 --> 00:08:45,400 So the five I've brought with me, this is the first one. 116 00:08:45,400 --> 00:08:50,400 I think I'm going in sort of chronological order in terms of when I read them and then the impact they had on me. 117 00:08:50,400 --> 00:08:52,400 And so the first one is this one. 118 00:08:52,400 --> 00:08:54,400 The good news we almost forgot. 119 00:08:54,400 --> 00:09:02,400 Rediscovering the gospel in a 16th century catechism, which is a rubbish book title I have to say, no offence to Kevin D. Young. 120 00:09:02,400 --> 00:09:11,400 I don't, particularly the subtitle, it doesn't sound very exciting, but this is on my top 20 absolute must reads from the 20th century. 121 00:09:11,400 --> 00:09:18,400 And I read this, a friend of mine who's a reformed pastor in America who used to live in the UK gave it to me because I just, 122 00:09:18,400 --> 00:09:22,400 I wanted to figure out how do you go deeper into Christianity? 123 00:09:22,400 --> 00:09:24,400 Where are the resources to really help you go? 124 00:09:24,400 --> 00:09:30,400 This was right at the start of my sort of older Christian life way back when. 125 00:09:30,400 --> 00:09:43,400 And he introduced me to the idea of confessional Christianity in the sense of looking to particularly the reformed confessions and catechisms of the 16th and 17th centuries as teaching tools, 126 00:09:43,400 --> 00:09:55,400 as points of doctrinal unity, but also as ways of getting the gospel into your bloodstream so that when you come to any part of scripture, 127 00:09:55,400 --> 00:10:04,400 you have a sense of the big story, the big shapes of the Christian faith so that you understand how this part of the Bible fits into the bigger whole. 128 00:10:04,400 --> 00:10:09,400 And he gave me this book and I read it and it was absolutely superb. 129 00:10:09,400 --> 00:10:12,400 I think Kevin D. Young's written a lot of very good books. 130 00:10:12,400 --> 00:10:21,400 For me, this is my favourite by a long way because what it is, it's 52 chapters and it's a very short commentary on the Heidelberg Catechism. 131 00:10:21,400 --> 00:10:33,400 Heidelberg Catechism was produced in 1564 as a way of uniting these newly emerging reformed churches around what they thought was the rediscovery of the gospel, 132 00:10:33,400 --> 00:10:43,400 that it had been lost or at least very heavily covered. And so in rediscovering the gospel, they wanted, well, a particular prince in a particular region 133 00:10:43,400 --> 00:10:52,400 wanted something to bring people together, to be able to teach children the faith, teach adults the faith and be a point of unity with these new reformed churches. 134 00:10:52,400 --> 00:11:03,400 And so he got a variety of people together, but Zacharias Ersinus is the sort of lead writer to write a series of questions and answers about the Christian faith, to teach it, 135 00:11:03,400 --> 00:11:08,400 to write a point of unity. And the Heidelberg Catechism was what came out of that. 136 00:11:08,400 --> 00:11:13,400 And Catechizing has been around since the very early days of the church. 137 00:11:13,400 --> 00:11:18,400 People sometimes hear Catechism and think, oh, that's what Roman Catholics do, I didn't realise Protestants do it. 138 00:11:18,400 --> 00:11:25,400 Well, actually Roman Catholics, so I've heard, heard what Protestants were doing, things like the Heidelberg Catechism, and thought, well, that seems like a good idea. 139 00:11:25,400 --> 00:11:37,400 Let's get in on that action. And the Heidelberg Catechism was one of the earlier Catechisms, and it treats the Apostles' Creed, the Lord's Prayer and the Ten Commandments. 140 00:11:37,400 --> 00:11:50,400 And it moves in sort of three stages of guilt, grace, gratitude. So the state of humanity's misery under sin, the grace that is available in the gospel, 141 00:11:50,400 --> 00:11:56,400 and then how to live your life in gratitude, in worship and obedience. 142 00:11:56,400 --> 00:12:03,400 And the Catechism takes you through all of that in 52 chunks, but there are several questions within each chunk. 143 00:12:03,400 --> 00:12:10,400 The idea is you teach, you go through one chunk every week. So there are 52 Lord's Days, the Heidelberg Catechism. 144 00:12:10,400 --> 00:12:15,400 And your motive for all of this was growing in Christ, growing as a Christian. 145 00:12:15,400 --> 00:12:16,400 Yeah, yeah, absolutely. 146 00:12:16,400 --> 00:12:18,400 That was the larger motive. And did that happen as you worked through the book? 147 00:12:18,400 --> 00:12:21,400 And that's why I love the book, because it really helped me do that. 148 00:12:21,400 --> 00:12:29,400 And it's, yeah, Kevin DeYoung said, he says it in his introduction, he set aside a year to blog his way through the Heidelberg Catechism. 149 00:12:29,400 --> 00:12:34,400 It must be nice when you set aside a year, blog your way through, and then someone goes, can we publish that, please? 150 00:12:34,400 --> 00:12:39,400 Which, well, it works for him in various ways, I think. But certainly in this book, that's what they did. 151 00:12:39,400 --> 00:12:47,400 And it was fantastic, really accessible, straightforward language, just saying, look, this question gets at this. 152 00:12:47,400 --> 00:12:54,400 So you may, if you've never heard of the Heidelberg Catechism, you may have heard of the first question, which goes like this. 153 00:12:54,400 --> 00:13:05,400 What is your only comfort in life and in death? Answer, that I am not my own, but belong body and soul in life and in death to my faithful Saviour Jesus Christ, and so on and so on. 154 00:13:05,400 --> 00:13:11,400 It's such a wonderful reformational pastoral instinct, isn't it? Question one, what is your comfort? 155 00:13:11,400 --> 00:13:12,400 Yes, absolutely. 156 00:13:12,400 --> 00:13:13,400 What is your comfort? 157 00:13:13,400 --> 00:13:14,400 Yeah. 158 00:13:14,400 --> 00:13:25,400 For some folks who maybe have not been brought up in traditions that have been strong on Catechesis, Heidelberg may have heard of it, there can be, as I've heard this too, 159 00:13:25,400 --> 00:13:39,400 there can be reasons for this being a legitimate worry, a worry that getting really excited about things like Heidelberg Catechism is in the end going to produce people who are just excited about micro points of doctrine, 160 00:13:39,400 --> 00:13:47,400 arguing about the proverbial angels on pinheads and not really getting on with gospel ministry or not really a heart of warmth toward Christ. 161 00:13:47,400 --> 00:13:48,400 Yeah, yeah. 162 00:13:48,400 --> 00:13:53,400 Clearly this was not the impact that that book had on you. 163 00:13:53,400 --> 00:14:03,400 No, and on lots of other people as well. I mean, the Heidelberg Catechism so claims introduction, and I've seen this verified elsewhere. 164 00:14:03,400 --> 00:14:09,400 Behind the Bible, the Pilgrim's Progress and Imitation of Christ, the Heidelberg Catechism is the most circulated book in the world. 165 00:14:09,400 --> 00:14:21,400 And within, I think, a century after its publication had been translated into languages covering most continents of the world because it was used as a missional tool to go and reach people with the gospel, 166 00:14:21,400 --> 00:14:25,400 as well as build those who had received and believed the gospel. 167 00:14:25,400 --> 00:14:33,400 So historically that doesn't pan out and certainly in lots of people's experience, that's not the case. 168 00:14:33,400 --> 00:14:40,400 Then anything can produce formulaic hardness of heart, I guess, to things of God. 169 00:14:40,400 --> 00:14:46,400 So yeah, that Catechisms may have done that in the past doesn't mean that they're to blame, as it were. 170 00:14:46,400 --> 00:14:54,400 I think one of the things in terms of ministry then that I really found with this is you kind of do something like a Christianity explored course at your church. 171 00:14:54,400 --> 00:14:59,400 Which is a really helpful course and lots of people become Christians through it. 172 00:14:59,400 --> 00:15:03,400 What do you do next? Well, I know there's discipleship explored, a few weeks of extra stuff. 173 00:15:03,400 --> 00:15:08,400 But then you want to give people the big shapes of the gospel and the Christian life. 174 00:15:08,400 --> 00:15:15,400 What do you do to achieve that? Well, attending church regularly, maybe in small group things. 175 00:15:15,400 --> 00:15:23,400 But something like the Heidelberg Catechism, which is designed to be gone through in a year, is a fantastic way to introduce people to the Creed. 176 00:15:23,400 --> 00:15:27,400 So the big doctrines of the faith, the Ten Commandments. 177 00:15:27,400 --> 00:15:33,400 What does it look like to follow Christ and the Lord's Prayer? What does it look like to worship and pray? 178 00:15:33,400 --> 00:15:40,400 And if you've gone through that with a guide as trustee as Kevin DeYoung, then you've got some pretty good stuff under your belt in a year then. 179 00:15:40,400 --> 00:15:47,400 So as a discipleship tool, something that's proved its worth over the centuries, pretty good place to start. 180 00:15:47,400 --> 00:15:52,400 So again, this is Chris Stead's list, not the absolute must have list for everyone. 181 00:15:52,400 --> 00:15:55,400 And so I think this is a really great tool. 182 00:15:55,400 --> 00:15:58,400 And I think Kevin DeYoung's Cometron is a good place to start. 183 00:15:58,400 --> 00:16:02,400 Tremendous, tremendous. Shall we move on? Yes, sure. 184 00:16:02,400 --> 00:16:06,400 I'm reading upside down the author of the next book. 185 00:16:06,400 --> 00:16:10,400 I'm quite excited about this book. Yes. Okay. Yes. Is this with it? 186 00:16:10,400 --> 00:16:13,400 And I read this book on your recommendation and enjoyed it a great deal. 187 00:16:13,400 --> 00:16:18,400 Oh, did you? Okay. What's the big point? 188 00:16:18,400 --> 00:16:25,400 There are a number of big points that I really enjoyed. The big point, the way I would say it in a simple way is that. 189 00:16:25,400 --> 00:16:29,400 Should you say what the book is first? That's probably best. Say that first. 190 00:16:29,400 --> 00:16:33,400 This is your book club, but I'll summarize it if you want. Does God Suffer by Thomas Wynandee. 191 00:16:33,400 --> 00:16:43,400 So, Eric, does God suffer? I took him to be saying that God is not the kind of being who is ever overwhelmed with emotional turmoil. 192 00:16:43,400 --> 00:16:52,400 And he never has any emotional needs that he has to attend to first before he gives to you, comforts you, loves you and receives you. 193 00:16:52,400 --> 00:16:58,400 So these sorts of doctrines can very easily make God sound cold or ghostly or distant. 194 00:16:58,400 --> 00:17:12,400 They are not intended to do that. But just that God is always able to be perfectly loving, kind, sympathetic, tender hearted to you out of his own fullness and out of his own unruffled fullness, if I can put it that way. 195 00:17:12,400 --> 00:17:16,400 Yes. Is that fair? That's a very good introduction, I think, to the book. 196 00:17:16,400 --> 00:17:25,400 So it touches on the doctrine of divine impassibility and from the Latin pacio meaning to suffer or to undergo some sort of change. 197 00:17:25,400 --> 00:17:31,400 And so therefore the question does God suffer? The short answer is no. 198 00:17:31,400 --> 00:17:38,400 But the reason why no is such good news is what Thomas Wynandee spends this book setting out. 199 00:17:38,400 --> 00:17:44,400 And I read this in my first... Because it can sound like bad news, can't it? It can sound like God is now... 200 00:17:44,400 --> 00:18:00,400 It's quite easy in a kind of loose pastoral way to make God feel more relevant to my life and closer if he experiences what I do in the troubles of this life. 201 00:18:00,400 --> 00:18:02,400 Yes. So in a sense it's counterintuitive, isn't it? 202 00:18:02,400 --> 00:18:13,400 Yes. And Thomas Wynandee is very alive to that. And in fact, he even says in his introduction, you know, the thing that frightens me most about writing this book is Auschwitz. 203 00:18:13,400 --> 00:18:25,400 How do I write a book saying God does not suffer when the weight of 20th century theology has said, look, the only way we can offer a God who answers the protests of so-called protest atheism, 204 00:18:25,400 --> 00:18:36,400 which is I don't care about rational arguments for the existence of God, but look at how wretched the world is. I'm going to disagree and disbelieve in God just out of protest. 205 00:18:36,400 --> 00:18:47,400 And he says, I recognize that is hugely weighty and hugely significant. And yet he presses on and says, no, no, the answer that the Christian tradition has always set about impossibility. 206 00:18:47,400 --> 00:19:00,400 And Anglican from the early 20th century called Eric Maskell said basically theology has very few doctrines as stable and well attested as divine impossibility. 207 00:19:00,400 --> 00:19:10,400 It's there in the Chalcedonian settlement. The assumption is, of course, God can't suffer. So how do we make sense of the incarnation? 208 00:19:10,400 --> 00:19:14,400 But everyone at Chalcedon said, but we know God doesn't suffer and it's there, it's captured. 209 00:19:14,400 --> 00:19:15,400 That was not in question. 210 00:19:15,400 --> 00:19:22,400 That was not in question. And so it even has in that sense, creedal weight, divine impossibility. 211 00:19:22,400 --> 00:19:30,400 But the way, one of the reasons that, so I read this book in my first year of Oak Hill and it had a huge impact on me for a number of reasons. 212 00:19:30,400 --> 00:19:38,400 One of them is the way that Thomas Wynandy goes about reading the Bible, which is to say that I'm going to take the Bible so seriously, 213 00:19:38,400 --> 00:19:43,400 I have to read the whole thing and let the whole thing weigh upon my interpretation of the whole thing. 214 00:19:43,400 --> 00:19:54,400 And one of the big issues in thinking about the doctrine of God is the apparent tension between those texts which present God as beyond this world, 215 00:19:54,400 --> 00:20:02,400 as the big sovereignty type texts, sometimes called the texts that speak of God's transcendence, to transcend, to go beyond. 216 00:20:02,400 --> 00:20:08,400 God isn't part of the world order. God isn't affected by the world order because he made it all, bigger than it all. 217 00:20:08,400 --> 00:20:17,400 You've got those texts. You then got texts, the so-called immanent texts, the kind of present to texts where God is really intimately involved in the life of his people. 218 00:20:17,400 --> 00:20:23,400 And sometimes those are set off against each other as they're parallel modes of God's existence or their intention with one another. 219 00:20:23,400 --> 00:20:29,400 Thomas Wynandy does this, has a whole beautiful chapter on Yahweh the Holy Other where he says, 220 00:20:29,400 --> 00:20:39,400 you read the whole picture carefully and what you have is a God who is so intimately involved in the lives of his people that no created being, 221 00:20:39,400 --> 00:20:43,400 nothing in the universe could be that intimately involved. 222 00:20:43,400 --> 00:20:49,400 And in fact, the very texts which speak of God's immanence reveal God's transcendence. 223 00:20:49,400 --> 00:20:56,400 Only a God who is outside the limitations of the created order could be the kind of God that Israel enjoys, for instance, in the book of Isaiah. 224 00:20:56,400 --> 00:20:58,400 They depend on each other. 225 00:20:58,400 --> 00:21:08,400 Exactly. So what kind of God could be the God of Psalm 139, who is closer than my inward thoughts, who knows every word even before I speak it? 226 00:21:08,400 --> 00:21:18,400 What kind of God could be that God apart from the transcendent, sovereign, majestic creator who is not in any way limited by any part of creation? 227 00:21:18,400 --> 00:21:25,400 Only that God. So the immanence texts Wynandy says reveal the very transcendence of God. 228 00:21:25,400 --> 00:21:30,400 For me that really then made sense of the whole. 229 00:21:30,400 --> 00:21:42,400 This is immanence, isn't it? When we say immanence, it's not immanence as in happening any moment, immanence remaining with, present to. 230 00:21:42,400 --> 00:22:00,400 So he has a whole chapter on that. He moves through a variety of different arguments to show that actually the impassibility of God is not that God is, in the words of some people, a metaphysical iceberg, that he's frozen static and that that's why he doesn't suffer. 231 00:22:00,400 --> 00:22:16,400 It's because he is so alive with his own life in the word. He's a Roman Catholic, so he uses the language of Thomas Aquinas a lot. God is so fully actual that there isn't any passive part of him that's just sort of lying there waiting to come to life. 232 00:22:16,400 --> 00:22:21,400 Every part of him is alive all at once and particularly in the life of the Trinity. 233 00:22:21,400 --> 00:22:27,400 Each person of the Trinity is fully alive. The being of God is fully alive in the relation to the Trinity. 234 00:22:27,400 --> 00:22:39,400 So it's not that God doesn't suffer because he's static, he's like a rock, it's that he is so alive and so full of love and life that he can't be moved to anything else other than who he is. 235 00:22:39,400 --> 00:22:43,400 Can I ask you this? You've got very young children. 236 00:22:43,400 --> 00:22:44,400 Yeah. 237 00:22:44,400 --> 00:22:52,400 If you wanted to explain to your oldest child, your oldest child is seven, explain it to her, how would you do it? 238 00:22:52,400 --> 00:22:53,400 And why it's good news. 239 00:22:53,400 --> 00:23:11,400 Why it's good news? Wow. Well, I'm not saying these are the words I'd use, but some of the things that I'd want to touch upon are to show that we often think that God should be just like us, that we want God to be like us but just bigger. 240 00:23:11,400 --> 00:23:25,400 And yet, we all know that we don't love perfectly, that because of who we are as creatures, who we are as sinful people as well, that our love is imperfect. 241 00:23:25,400 --> 00:23:36,400 It is often broken and frail. Pete Sandlin in his book Simply God talks about this, that we want for some reason God's love to be as feeble and frail as ours. 242 00:23:36,400 --> 00:23:37,400 Unchangeable. 243 00:23:37,400 --> 00:23:49,400 Unchangeable, exactly. And actually the good news of God's love is that in the words of 1 John 3 verse 1, it is from another place, literally see what kind of love the Father has lavished on us. 244 00:23:49,400 --> 00:24:02,400 And the word that John uses is from what place? From what place is this love? God's love is not like the love that we know. It's not even just a better kind of love, it's a different kind of love, it's an alien kind of love. 245 00:24:02,400 --> 00:24:18,400 Two things that have really helped me with this are that impassibility does not mean God has no emotions. It means that his emotional life is one proper to a divine being who is perfect and never changes, unlike a creature like me. 246 00:24:18,400 --> 00:24:27,400 And this is getting a little bit off topic, but secondly I'm praying to a Father who never changes, who is never, his emotions are never chaotic and overwhelming within him. 247 00:24:27,400 --> 00:24:34,400 But I'm praying to him through Jesus Christ, who is two natures joined together, one man who has a passable, suffering human nature. 248 00:24:34,400 --> 00:24:44,400 I find it so moving in John 11 where Jesus sees his friend in the grave and it always gets under translated. The Greek is something like, it's like to make a noise like a horse makes. 249 00:24:44,400 --> 00:24:52,400 It doesn't mean Jesus is going, like Jesus has a breakdown, which you know what, which God can't have. 250 00:24:52,400 --> 00:25:04,400 And yet I'm praying to an unchangingly loving Father through Jesus Christ who never changes and who utterly understands what emotional turmoil is like. 251 00:25:04,400 --> 00:25:12,400 Getting a little bit off topic when we say this, but it's comforting to me to think I can't change God's heart toward me. He has no other emotional needs to deal with. 252 00:25:12,400 --> 00:25:15,400 But in his Son he knows exactly what that's like. 253 00:25:15,400 --> 00:25:23,400 Yes, yeah, absolutely. I mean the question of God's emotional life is precisely that for a start when we have emotions, we have embodied emotions. 254 00:25:23,400 --> 00:25:32,400 And God doesn't have a body. Yes, the second person of the Trinity has a body because he is incarnate, but God as God has no body. 255 00:25:32,400 --> 00:25:38,400 So straight away whatever you want to say about God's emotional life is going to be radically different to what we say about ours. 256 00:25:38,400 --> 00:25:53,400 And that's one of the things I really like about this book is when Andy is very happy to then bring hugely rich and mature biblical reading into conversation with things like simplicity or actuality, 257 00:25:53,400 --> 00:25:58,400 which are technical terms which come to the doctrine of God at Oak Hill and you'll find out what they mean. 258 00:25:58,400 --> 00:26:05,400 But some philosophical notions that Thomas Aquinas drew on quite heavily that the church had drawn on long before Thomas Aquinas 259 00:26:05,400 --> 00:26:16,400 to try and capture exactly what the Bible says, which is God's life is fully alive and there aren't parts to God which are less alive or parts to God which are less essential to God, 260 00:26:16,400 --> 00:26:27,400 but that all of God is fully alive all at once and that precisely because that life is untouchable, he is free to be close to us, intimate, loving, saving. 261 00:26:27,400 --> 00:26:33,400 He doesn't save out of any need. He didn't create out of any need. Thomas Aquinas brings all of that together. 262 00:26:33,400 --> 00:26:37,400 This is one of my favorites, theological books of all time, I think. 263 00:26:37,400 --> 00:26:39,400 Fantastic. It's wonderful. 264 00:26:39,400 --> 00:26:46,400 And it's wonderful how you are building on the work of others. I mean, you mentioned the doctrine of God module, which is kind of a capstone in our 30s, 265 00:26:46,400 --> 00:26:52,400 but it's wonderful how you and others have really put that front and centre of the kinds of things we're trying to do here, because it is the case, isn't it? 266 00:26:52,400 --> 00:27:04,400 Just as you said, impossibility, just unquestioned across the board of Orthodox faith until roughly around about 1900 when, 267 00:27:04,400 --> 00:27:13,400 and then evangelicals in various places can either deny it or forget it or ignore it or even not know about it. 268 00:27:13,400 --> 00:27:22,400 And so to bring these vital historic doctrines back onto the table. And you've already pointed out how pastorally that's crucial. 269 00:27:22,400 --> 00:27:28,400 Just in terms of if someone wanted to read around this a little bit, how accessible is that book? 270 00:27:28,400 --> 00:27:34,400 What level of theological education is someone to have had for that really to be useful? 271 00:27:34,400 --> 00:27:53,400 Some, I think. So some familiarity with certain Christian doctrines like the Incarnation and the Trinity in order to really understand why it is you can speak about Jesus suffering as a man without that needing to compromise his divinity, things like that. 272 00:27:53,400 --> 00:27:59,400 So there does need to be, I think, some foundation there in order to be able to make sense of it. 273 00:27:59,400 --> 00:28:10,400 There are a number of books out there that are deliberately written for people who might not pick up Thomas Wanandi. So Gary Williams, Love Endures Forever. 274 00:28:10,400 --> 00:28:14,400 That's a really lovely book on the attributes of God. That's fantastic. 275 00:28:14,400 --> 00:28:16,400 It ends with a prayer each time, doesn't it? 276 00:28:16,400 --> 00:28:23,400 Oh, it's brilliant. Yeah, yeah. Every chapter is very devotional and meant to lead you to reflect and meditate. 277 00:28:23,400 --> 00:28:31,400 And similarly, Pete Sandlin's Simply God does the same sort of thing, which is to move towards that devotional side of things. 278 00:28:31,400 --> 00:28:36,400 Matthew Barrett's None Greater does something similar as well. 279 00:28:36,400 --> 00:28:48,400 I don't think it finishes each chapter in the same devotional key, but again, doing this thing called looking at the attributes of God, which historically was quite a thing that people did. 280 00:28:48,400 --> 00:28:56,400 I think that's a bit of a fall in their side of favor. If you want something that's a bit chunkier and breaks down particularly divine impossibility more, 281 00:28:56,400 --> 00:29:04,400 there's a book written by some Reformed Baptists called God Without Passions, I think. 282 00:29:04,400 --> 00:29:10,400 Something like that. It's a sort of book of essays by a variety of people on a variety of topics, 283 00:29:10,400 --> 00:29:19,400 trying to argue for divine impossibility from biblical, historical, pastoral, theological. So that's a good one there. 284 00:29:19,400 --> 00:29:25,400 Wonderful. Now, I'm very excited about the next book you have here because it's not nonfiction. 285 00:29:25,400 --> 00:29:35,400 No, it is not nonfiction. It is Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. So this is... 286 00:29:35,400 --> 00:29:39,400 You've read this, haven't you? I have. Have you? No, I haven't. I'm interested to hear about it. 287 00:29:39,400 --> 00:29:47,400 So Marilynne Robinson is, for a start, a fantastic user of the English language. 288 00:29:47,400 --> 00:29:58,400 I've read lots of things that she's written and her ability to articulate ideas is just wonderful. Her novels are beautifully written. 289 00:29:58,400 --> 00:30:05,400 Gilead, I don't know the publication series. I think this might be the first, but I might be wrong. 290 00:30:05,400 --> 00:30:12,400 It is one of a series of novels relating to a particular family in rural America. 291 00:30:12,400 --> 00:30:16,400 This was the first one I've read. I've read the others. This was my favourite. 292 00:30:16,400 --> 00:30:22,400 It's a series of letters written by an aging father to his young son. 293 00:30:22,400 --> 00:30:28,400 An aging father is a pastor of, I think, an Episcopal church. It's never quite clear to me, quite the domination. 294 00:30:28,400 --> 00:30:36,400 It's a series of letters written by this father to his son, just reflecting on his life, telling the story, 295 00:30:36,400 --> 00:30:40,400 this very slow-paced story of just a couple of characters in his own life. 296 00:30:40,400 --> 00:30:52,400 But the reason why I love it and why I've included it in this explicitly Christian literature is that he reflects very deeply on the nature of the past or task, 297 00:30:52,400 --> 00:31:10,400 on the things of God, on the Gospel, forgiveness and sin and redemption, on heaven and hell and everything that is within the range of Christian things that you might think about is reflected upon in this book. 298 00:31:10,400 --> 00:31:24,400 But one of the things that I really loved in reading this book is the way in which it shows that people are far more complex and rich and interesting than I think we can often assume in quite a reductionistic way of, 299 00:31:24,400 --> 00:31:30,400 well, there's sin, there's need for salvation, people are sinners, let's just hit them with that and move on. 300 00:31:30,400 --> 00:31:47,400 That people are far more complex and as I said, far more interesting than that. And so the pastoral ministry is a practice in patience and in slow burn, just seeing people grow, getting alongside them, 301 00:31:47,400 --> 00:31:56,400 not being quick to correct what they think just because you know what the right thing to think is, but being there and loving people and doing that kind of thing. 302 00:31:56,400 --> 00:32:02,400 And so I loved it for that alone as well as the incredibly profound theological reflections. 303 00:32:02,400 --> 00:32:08,400 I adored that book. I would so love to read it again. I found it so moving. I found it hard to put down. 304 00:32:08,400 --> 00:32:14,400 It's not a thrill a minute kind of book, but I would get reading it and it was difficult to put down. 305 00:32:14,400 --> 00:32:24,400 Part of the reason I found it so moving was all the things you're talking about, just the ordinariness of their lives and like the church roof being leaky and needing to repaint it. 306 00:32:24,400 --> 00:32:31,400 And these really profound meditations on scripture and this man's son and his wife and other things going on. 307 00:32:31,400 --> 00:32:41,400 And he's a very realistic character and there are a couple points in the novel where he's worried about sin in someone's life and it's like he doesn't need, it pains him even to say. 308 00:32:41,400 --> 00:32:50,400 And it's like he doesn't want to think the worst about someone. And toward the end of one letter, he's starting to get worried and he stops and he says, I need to get a hold of myself right now because I'm not trying. 309 00:32:50,400 --> 00:32:58,400 In fact, I think at one point in the letter he says, I have two choices. I can continue to worry or trust God. Yes, exactly. Those are my choices. 310 00:32:58,400 --> 00:33:05,400 Put in fleshing that in a very believable character. Yeah. Made it doubly moving. 311 00:33:05,400 --> 00:33:15,400 It still would have been so valuable if Marilyn Robinson had said all these things in a nonfiction book directly to me. Yes. But having creating this character and having them say it. 312 00:33:15,400 --> 00:33:28,400 Yes. I mean, I just don't know how novelists work generally, but novelists of this caliber to create this character and draw and bring out the kind of reflections that she does. 313 00:33:28,400 --> 00:33:37,400 So, yeah, that's on the list. I think it's a really good one for pastors to read for the very reason that it's a pastor thinking very deeply. 314 00:33:37,400 --> 00:33:59,400 He's very well theologically educated. And one of the themes of the book is the desire to make sure that the quick theological answers aren't just thrown out carelessly, but that there's a lot of paying attention to who it is, the audience and speaking appropriately. 315 00:33:59,400 --> 00:34:11,400 Chris, before you go on, could I slightly sidetrack and say, well, what if someone were to say, I'm just not really a reader, or I don't like reading fiction, and you're saying Gilead is so wonderful to read. 316 00:34:11,400 --> 00:34:18,400 Well, what would you say to someone who said, I just don't enjoy reading or I don't like reading fiction. I never do it. 317 00:34:18,400 --> 00:34:35,400 Or even, I like reading fiction, but I'm a pastor and my time for reading is really limited. And I'm frankly, I'm going to get more bang for my buck of time reading Wynandie or the young wading through pages of description in fiction. 318 00:34:35,400 --> 00:34:50,400 Yeah, I mean, all legitimate points and I don't want to. And again, this is this is Chris Stead's book club, and I like reading and say that's, you know, if you don't like reading, then I have absolutely no problem with someone saying I'd never read any of those. 319 00:34:50,400 --> 00:35:02,400 That's fine. I'm not going to lose any sleep over that and I don't think you're a worse person for it. But I guess what if someone was saying convince me that I should do more. 320 00:35:02,400 --> 00:35:25,400 I think for some of the reasons we've just been saying in that what Marilynne Robinson does is to translate some of the technical theological, not jargons the wrong word, technical theological concepts and frameworks and put them in a concrete lived out life in real relationships. 321 00:35:25,400 --> 00:35:41,400 Real, you know what I mean in interpersonal relationships and pastoral situations that everyone will encounter. And the way he can move from talking about the leaky roof to the incomprehensibility of God and his reflections. 322 00:35:41,400 --> 00:35:58,400 So, so I guess in reading different genres of books, you, you can start then seeing how you might make those moves and connections and saying well actually yeah what does that really helpful commentary that I read on that passage in Ephesians, how might I start working 323 00:35:58,400 --> 00:36:12,400 that into the conversation over cleaning up after a coffee morning on a Tuesday, and just seeing, seeing it in examples like this I think is a really helpful way. So there is value in doing that. 324 00:36:12,400 --> 00:36:20,400 Plus, I just think it's good to mix it up and not, not have one diet of books at the time. 325 00:36:20,400 --> 00:36:31,400 Great. Gilead. Gilead. Tremendous. If we keep going we can squeeze two more in. Okay, great. Well I have two more to squeeze in. So look at that. 326 00:36:31,400 --> 00:36:46,400 So my next one. My wife, Abby and I have been, been a few difficult times in our life and marriage and we've read a lot of books on suffering, and people always say what's the best book on suffering you've read. 327 00:36:46,400 --> 00:37:00,400 My name is Eric Ortlund, suffering wisely and well in his work on Job. Certainly some of the, some of the stuff you've said about Job I've found tremendously helpful. And so I have no doubt that that book will be a real blessing to many. 328 00:37:00,400 --> 00:37:02,400 Podcast number one. 329 00:37:02,400 --> 00:37:16,400 Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. And just, in fact, just pausing there, something you said in there that really struck me that I've been, always tried to teach in doctrine of God and never found a way to say it the way you said it. And I might be putting words in your mouth here. 330 00:37:16,400 --> 00:37:31,400 But just the way in which God's complaint against Job's comforters was that they, I mean I'm again paraphrasing what you're saying, but basically they didn't believe that God had big enough shoulders for Job to say shocking things about him. 331 00:37:31,400 --> 00:37:44,400 And the view of God was small enough, or so small, that they had to correct people's, correct Job's, you're saying something shocking about God, stop it. And it's almost like they couldn't handle that. So they were speaking wrongly of God by assuming God couldn't handle it. 332 00:37:44,400 --> 00:38:02,400 And as Job is, and I think your phrase was, we need to allow people to say shocking things about God. Because in their pain and their suffering, they, sometimes that's all they've got and if we clamp down and don't let people be honest, then actually, we could do some damage. 333 00:38:02,400 --> 00:38:22,400 And Job's big enough to deal with it. And I think that's really valuable to say, well actually, the aseity of God, the from-himselfness, the way in which God ultimately is not affected in any kind of negative way by the world means that his children can mouth off and he doesn't stop loving them. 334 00:38:22,400 --> 00:38:34,400 And the huge difference there is that Job wants to reconnect with God. That's what generates the, where are you? And this is not fair. And that's what's crucial there. 335 00:38:34,400 --> 00:38:40,400 Yes, absolutely. And it's that, actually, if you really care about this, you will be angry and have some real feeling about it. 336 00:38:40,400 --> 00:38:44,400 If Job didn't really love God, he would not have said the terrible things about God that he did. 337 00:38:44,400 --> 00:38:46,400 Yeah, yeah. And I think that's the, there you go. 338 00:38:46,400 --> 00:38:56,400 And if you can discern in a friend who's suffering, there's a heart of love for God here. That's what's generating the agony. Then you don't correct them theologically because they said something crazy and they're in agony. 339 00:38:56,400 --> 00:39:10,400 And in the same way that, I guess, a parent knows when their child is, you know, shouting at them, I hate you, I can't stand this, but you're a parent and you go, look, I know they love me, I can handle this. I'm well able to take this. 340 00:39:10,400 --> 00:39:22,400 Yeah. And that's how I think that's the picture you get of God. Obviously, it's much more complex than that. But anyway, I found that helpful. But it's not about you, Eric. It's about my books. 341 00:39:22,400 --> 00:39:34,400 The book that I recommend, the best book that I've read on suffering is this one, Rejoicing in Lament, Wrestling with Incurable Cancer and Life in Christ by J. Todd Billings. 342 00:39:34,400 --> 00:39:45,400 And I think one of the reasons why I really like this is Todd Billings is a theology professor who thinks and writes very deeply about complex theological things. 343 00:39:45,400 --> 00:40:02,400 He got diagnosed with a form of myeloma, which I think is a form of leukemia, kind of blood related cancer. He went through some pretty agonizing treatment and obviously very difficult news about prognosis and length of life and things like that with two young children. 344 00:40:02,400 --> 00:40:22,400 And he in this book shows that incredibly complex, deep, extended theological thought doesn't go against you when it comes to suffering well, but when employed and deployed well is a hugely helpful resource. 345 00:40:22,400 --> 00:40:41,400 And so he brings his thinking about union with Christ and the Psalms and Job and divine impassibility to bear on how do I deal with incurable cancer as a father and a husband and someone who is now facing probably a much shorter life. 346 00:40:41,400 --> 00:40:59,400 And I think that's just so helpful. But also the way he does it is to use the Psalms particularly to say the Psalms give us language to lament, to trust, as well as to think about our union with Christ and the nature of the God that we're trusting in. 347 00:40:59,400 --> 00:41:12,400 So I think he also weaves together questions about providence, how does a good God allow evil without getting sidetracked into any of the sort of pat theological discussions or philosophical debates. 348 00:41:12,400 --> 00:41:15,400 He just weaves it all in there really nicely. 349 00:41:15,400 --> 00:41:20,400 Fantastic. I love everything I've read by Todd Billings. I haven't read that one. 350 00:41:20,400 --> 00:41:38,400 But you're, you're making it sound like it does a great deal. If someone was thinking, I would love my past during of others in their suffering or even as it were frankly my past during of myself in my own suffering to be deeper and richer theologically, but 351 00:41:38,400 --> 00:41:50,400 without sitting at someone's bedside giving them a lecture on divine impassibility in ways that are well grounded and expressed in simple terms. Is he helping someone towards that? 352 00:41:50,400 --> 00:41:57,400 Yes, yeah, I think so. I mean, again, would this be the book I'd put in everyone's hands? He's going through a hard time. Probably not. 353 00:41:57,400 --> 00:42:17,400 But for you, for me, it was it was ideal. And I would encourage again encourage pastors to read this and think, actually, there's, there are a lot of resources available in, in Christian theology to think about suffering, and that go beyond. 354 00:42:17,400 --> 00:42:24,400 Well, think of the resurrection or hear it here a few verses on sovereignty. All things work out for good or something. 355 00:42:24,400 --> 00:42:29,400 Yeah, that sort of thing. So, so yeah, I think I think it's really, really helpful for that. 356 00:42:29,400 --> 00:42:32,400 Wonderful. Thank you, Chris. 357 00:42:32,400 --> 00:42:33,400 Final book. One more. 358 00:42:33,400 --> 00:42:53,400 Final book. So, I'm a big fan of the late John Webster, British theologian who died in 2016. He's written some very complicated and complex theological essays which have been brought together in a variety of books, sort of compilations of his work. 359 00:42:53,400 --> 00:43:11,400 The book I've chosen, however, isn't one of those, the book I've chosen is a transcription of a lot of his sermons. So while he was in Oxford, he preached a lot at, I want to say Christ Church Cathedral or something, somewhere in Oxford, an old building, a big church. 360 00:43:11,400 --> 00:43:20,400 These are a series of sermons, some taken from his time there, some from elsewhere. Various students of his have produced a couple of books of his sermons. 361 00:43:20,400 --> 00:43:36,400 And I love these one because they're short because they're homilies in a relatively broad church setting and so they tend to be about five to seven minutes long. So that means about six or seven pages. 362 00:43:36,400 --> 00:44:00,400 And again, what I love about these particular is, you can use them devotionally in that sense, he deals well with the text that is before him, but he shows again how, a bit like Todd Billings in his book on suffering, how a rich and well thought through theology is a help, not a hindrance to the past or task. 363 00:44:00,400 --> 00:44:20,400 So for Todd Billings, I think, generally in suffering, for John Webster in preaching and in handling the Bible in the context of teaching it and declaring it from the pulpit, his phenomenal theological grasp of most things, everything, is brought to bear. 364 00:44:20,400 --> 00:44:33,400 He deploys it really well and it means he picks things out very much there in the text and sort of picks it out and looks at it and examines it and seals it and sends it. It's just, it's wonderful. 365 00:44:33,400 --> 00:44:50,400 He also had a great, like Marilyn Robinson, great grasp of the English language and is able to express himself well. Because they're sermons, they're not the sometimes quite dense, slightly difficult prose of his essays, but much more accessible. 366 00:44:50,400 --> 00:44:56,400 Let's be honest. If you've not done postgraduate theology, Webster is a stretch to read. 367 00:44:56,400 --> 00:44:57,400 He is, he is. 368 00:44:57,400 --> 00:44:58,400 He really is, yeah, yeah. 369 00:44:58,400 --> 00:45:08,400 I once heard that he's kind of increasingly a big news and he is a massive influence on a lot of terrific mainstream reform theology increasingly. 370 00:45:08,400 --> 00:45:09,400 And a very good influence. 371 00:45:09,400 --> 00:45:14,400 Oh yeah, absolutely. All to the good. 372 00:45:14,400 --> 00:45:18,400 Would that be a good way in? So what's all the Webster who are about? 373 00:45:18,400 --> 00:45:29,400 Definitely. So this one is confronted by Grace, Meditations of a Theologian. On the back, it's endorsed by Michael Horton and Graham Goldsworthy from Sydney. 374 00:45:29,400 --> 00:45:32,400 They think this is a fantastic book. This is the first one. There's another one. 375 00:45:32,400 --> 00:45:35,400 I wonder how many books those two have both connected. 376 00:45:35,400 --> 00:45:38,400 They go together on the same back. 377 00:45:38,400 --> 00:45:42,400 There's another one, I can't remember it, it has Christ in the title, but another book of sermons. 378 00:45:42,400 --> 00:45:50,400 And that one, interestingly, that in the introduction, the person who edited the book went to sit with the late John Webster to say, you know, how do you go about the sermon writing process? 379 00:45:50,400 --> 00:45:59,400 And he said, well, I read the passage quite a lot and then see if John Owens written anything on it, then pray, and then I write the sermon. 380 00:45:59,400 --> 00:46:02,400 And yeah, so which I think is a nice approach. 381 00:46:02,400 --> 00:46:04,400 Is the order important there? 382 00:46:04,400 --> 00:46:09,400 Well, I presume he prays before he reads it as well, but that's how he spoke about that. 383 00:46:09,400 --> 00:46:12,400 I mean, yeah, John Webster. 384 00:46:12,400 --> 00:46:15,400 I would shorten my preaching courses here if we just did that. 385 00:46:15,400 --> 00:46:17,400 Check John Owen. 386 00:46:17,400 --> 00:46:20,400 Don't tell the authorities here. 387 00:46:20,400 --> 00:46:23,400 Yeah. And anyway, it is a good way. 388 00:46:23,400 --> 00:46:36,400 If you want to see how really rich theology makes a huge difference in the pulpits and to get a sense of how John Webster approached Christian life, it's a good place to start. 389 00:46:36,400 --> 00:46:41,400 I mean, for you, as the person who teaches preaching, I've got to ask this question. 390 00:46:41,400 --> 00:46:50,400 Is it in any in terms of form and language and style, do you think there's any way in which it's sort of exemplary for quote, ministry? 391 00:46:50,400 --> 00:46:58,400 Or is there just a sense that this is a professor in a cathedral and it's just and that's going to be different from ordinary pastor? 392 00:46:58,400 --> 00:47:00,400 I'd say it's somewhere between the two. 393 00:47:00,400 --> 00:47:04,400 There are times you are aware he's a professor of theology in an Oxbridge Cathedral. 394 00:47:04,400 --> 00:47:09,400 And so there's that comes with certain requirements and expectations. 395 00:47:09,400 --> 00:47:25,400 And yet even even then, even in those sermons, there's still a sense that this is this is a man who wants to tell you about Jesus and to to help people know how to to live the Christian life in a fuller and contented way. 396 00:47:25,400 --> 00:47:28,400 So, yeah, so somewhere between the two. 397 00:47:28,400 --> 00:47:37,400 But I think I think any pastor who is thinking about preaching on a regular basis will be benefited by this book. 398 00:47:37,400 --> 00:47:39,400 Wonderful. Wonderful. 399 00:47:39,400 --> 00:47:42,400 Chris, thank you. Thank you very much for being with us, Chris. 400 00:47:42,400 --> 00:47:59,400 I do have Augustine here, but bye Augustine.