094 Strange Religion and the First Believers (with Nijay Gupta)

The first Christians were weird. Just how weird is often lost on us today. The first Christians believed unusual things, worshiped God in strange ways, and lived a unique lifestyle. Many in the ancient world saw it as bizarre, even dangerous, but some found this new religion attractive and compelling

Today we are interviewing Dr. Nijay K. Gupta. He is the Julius R. Mantey Professor of New Testament at Northern Seminary. He is cohost of the Slow Theology podcast, and has written numerous books, including Tell Her Story: How Women Led, Taught, and Ministered in the Early Church, and recently, Strange Religion How the First Christians Were Weird, Dangerous, and Compelling.

Chapters: 
00:53 Meet Nijay Gupta: Author and Scholar
01:31 Origins of 'Strange Religion'
05:19 The Concept of Believers
06:56 Roman Society and the Christian Challenge
16:39 Household of Faith: Early Christian Practices
24:35 The Radical Message of God's Love
31:55 Conclusion and Upcoming Works

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Transcript

[00:00:14] Geoff Holsclaw: The first Christians were weird, but just how weird is often lost today. The first Christians believed unusual things. They worshiped God in strange ways and lived in a unique lifestyle compared to all those around them. Many in the ancient world saw them as bizarre, even dangerous. But some found the new religion attractive and compelling.

We could even say that the way they attach to God slowly changed the world. This is the attaching to God podcast with Geoff and Cyd Holsclaw. This is an interview. So Cyd's not with us today, but we seek to explore neuroscience and form spiritual formation. And today we're going to be more in the spiritual formation end of the pool.

But I'm so glad to have Nijay Gupta, the Julius. Our Manti professor of New Testament at Northern Seminary. That's a mouthful. Uh, he is also the co host of the slow theology podcast. That's also why his sound is so silky smooth today. He has written numerous, uh, books, including tell her story, how women led, taught and ministered in the early church.

And recently what we're going to be talking about today is his book called strange religion, how the first Christians were weird, dangerous, and compelling. Thanks for being on the show with us today.

[00:01:25] Nijay Gupta: Thanks, Geoff. Wow, what an intro. I feel great now.

[00:01:28] Geoff Holsclaw: Got to pump you up. That's right. 

Well, let's dive right into the book. Cause, uh, you talk about, uh, where the book came from on the early pages. Uh, someone just asked you, why, why are Christians called believers in the first place? And you were like, I don't know. And then a whole book came out of it. See, this is like, when you get curious, you just start tracking things down.

So could you tell us more, just a little bit about the roots there of the book?

[00:01:51] Nijay Gupta: Yeah. There's an academic Cyde and there's a more kind of, uh, uh, church Cyde. So the academic Cyde is, is just what you said. 

You know, I was giving a lecture on faith language in the Bible and someone asked, you know, Hey, these Christians call themselves believers. What other groups call themselves believers?

And I, that started me down this kind of research, um, you know, hole where I just got lost in, okay, Christians were weird in this way. And it made me wonder, were they weird in other ways? How, and when I use the word weird, I'm not saying like their hairstyles or their music taste. I'm using a social scientific term as in cultural deviance.

cultural, religious, social, uh, and in some ways, moral deviants. Um, and so it just opened up Pandora's box for me of all the ways. So Geoff, the way I like to explain it is let's say I came to you and I had an idea for new restaurant. I'm like, I'm going to, I'm going to create a totally new restaurant.

There's going to be no tables, chairs. food, utensils, and you're like, okay, but, but how is it still a restaurant?

[00:02:54] Geoff Holsclaw: That's a food truck, by the way.

[00:02:57] Nijay Gupta: well, yeah, that's true, but no food,

[00:02:59] Geoff Holsclaw: Oh, there's no food.

[00:03:00] Nijay Gupta: There's no

[00:03:01] Geoff Holsclaw: Oh no.

[00:03:02] Nijay Gupta: come along and religion as normal was sacrifices, temples, priests, cult statues.

By 75 AD, Christians had none of those things. And, um, and, and, and they were, they were doing something completely different. We would call it weird. Or we would even call it dangerous if it seemed like they were defying the status quo in really harmful ways. And so I'm just fascinated by the academic Cyde of that.

I double majored in my undergraduate in classics and public relations, which is funny because they seem kind of opposites, but I've used both of them in my career. And then the church Cyde, and you kind of got this from that first chapter was Living in an age, you know, AJ and I do this podcast, we just sense we live in an age of disenchantment, where, you know, Christians, we feel like we're losing, we're losing the American, you know, culture wars, we're losing, you know, evangelism, we're losing spreading Christendom, you know, all these things we're losing, losing, losing, and there's that sense of like, At what point do we just throw in the towel?

At what point? And, and, and then you also have the problem. I live in Portland, Oregon, one of the most unchurched, perhaps even anti Christian parts of the United States. Um, I love it here. I don't demonize it. There's a lot of great things. We've got great coffee, uh, great nature, but it's true that there's a real negative attitude towards Christianity here.

And if I asked my neighbors, what do you think about Christianity? Um, they would say Christians. reflect and amplify the worst of American culture. Greed, narcissism, racism, sexism, classism, you name it. And you know what, Geoff? I've lived in five or six states. Uh, I can see where they're coming from. And so I really want to do in the book is re enchant Christians today, inspire them with the story of the early Christians.

The early Christians weren't perfect, but they caught the fire of Jesus and the power of the spirit and were willing to be deviants. In all the best ways for the good of the world.

[00:05:08] Geoff Holsclaw: I love that willing to be weird, willing to be deviant. And that word deviant kind of has like negative connotations actually. Well, back to that first thing. What was it then? Why were they called believers? What did you, what'd you find out? What, what? So

[00:05:25] Nijay Gupta: it, it would be as weird as if you were on a subway, you know, in New York city or something like that. And someone just leaned over you and just said, I'm a thinker. Your natural question is thinking about what, like you would expect the verb belief to have an object. And so perhaps it started as believers in Jesus, believers in Christ, but the fact that Christianity spread to the Gentile world, they're not automatically going to know what you're believing.

And when you say I'm a believer. Belief in the Messiah, they wouldn't get there. I think one of the reasons they were called believers is they believed things. that seemed impossible to believe at that time. And so I think one of the reasons they were called believers is they believed, they had to really rely on belief because there was no conceptual infrastructure in society for the weird things that they believed, that God was invisible.

Uh, that God is ushering in a new world order that's going to overturn the world, that God has invested all of his greatness in this criminal named Jesus, who is a nobody Jew from nowheresville who died on a cross, the most heinous, despicable sort of death. So Christians believe such opposite things as most people in the world.

That they could just call themselves believers because it took impossible belief to believe the crazy things that they believed.

[00:06:48] Geoff Holsclaw: let's make a, let's make Christianity crazy again. Or something like that.

[00:06:54] Nijay Gupta: weird again. Yeah.

[00:06:56] Geoff Holsclaw: Well, well, could you tell us then, um, to set up the contrast, like what was the social religious and there's kind of a dash right, right in there, or it should be social, religious, economic kind of world order, political.

Yeah. It was all kind of one. What was that world, uh, in the early kind of Roman Empire or late at that point, I guess, comparatively, but

[00:07:18] Nijay Gupta: Yeah, what I talk about in my book is Roman society operated according to what I call a pyramid of power. And that pyramid has the fewest people with the most power at the top and the greatest number of people with the least power at the bottom. At the very top you had the great Olympians, Jupiter, Mars, Venus, all of that.

Going down the kind of spiritual scale, you have demigods. If you watch Percy Jackson, you know all about this. You got demigods, you got divinized heroes. Those at the line

[00:07:44] Geoff Holsclaw: new series is Netflix is chaos. That's the, with Geoff Goldblum. It's actually pretty interesting.

[00:07:52] Nijay Gupta: I need to check that out. I mean, I haven't

[00:07:54] Geoff Holsclaw: It gets, it gets the petty.

[00:07:55] Nijay Gupta: watch Percy Jackson

[00:07:56] Geoff Holsclaw: It gets, yeah, your kids are younger, so I no longer have to want, you know, but the, uh, we listened to all those Percy Jackson are pretty great fantasy, but the chaos actually gets at the pyramid scheme quite, quite much.

Uh,

[00:08:09] Nijay Gupta: love that. I love that and and and Percy Jackson does too But I I did read I did see the preview chaos and I think you're right about that So then at the cusp of heaven and earth you have the Emperor he was called the Pontiff's Maximus the great bridge builder So he was this The gateway, the bridge between heaven and earth, the gatekeeper below that, you had elites, senatorial class, equestrian class, uh, to carrying class.

And then there was no middle class. You got to go all the way to the bottom, the 99 percent or the 60 percent cause you'd have commoners and below that. You'd have slaves, foreigners, disabled, uh, immigrants, and so forth. And every, Rome was highly motivated to keep the system intact. So the idea was you clawed and scraped to try to go up just a tiny bit in your class.

And, and you tried to reinforce the system. So you kiss up to the elites, you mock the people at the bottom of the scale, that sort of thing. So everything was geared towards Roman ness. So even gods. You know, Rome's out there conquering people. So even new, new peoples and new gods, they actually allowed them to come in as long as they Romanized.

They have to find their rightful place in that system. That system was built on ego, competitive glory, wealth, class. You know, some of it has actually inspired the American dream in many ways. We have Roman foundations as well as Judeo Christian foundations. And so, um, and so Christianity comes along and, Really tries to turn this thing upCyde down by appealing to people at the very bottom and saying you can have equal and powerful access to Opportunity to friendship to relationship to God the one God I mean all of this was going to seem very strange and very dangerous to Romanized people

[00:09:59] Geoff Holsclaw: So they were, and I want to get back to the, kind of the offer of the gospel to the everyday person, but what were Christian's responses to this pantheon of gods? Like, cause usually in the, you know, in the Roman milieu, you know, everybody had their, you know, regional gods and family gods and then you had, you know, and you kind of just, you kind of went along with it, but Christian and Jews before that, but Christians kind Didn't go along with it.

[00:10:24] Nijay Gupta: Well, you know, you got, you know, take the book of Acts for existence. You got two things happening at once. You have the apostles getting into all kinds of hijinks, right? They're getting thrown in prison. They're getting thrown before magistrates are getting beaten up by mobs. There's get, they're getting flogged by, uh, soldiers and whatnot.

So there's that sense of deviance there. You know, they're saying there's no name under heaven by which. mortals can be saved. I mean, one of the titles for Jupiter, which is Zeus, is Jupiter best and greatest. And here you have Christians saying Jesus is Kurios, Lord, which means he is best and greatest. Um, they weren't directly challenging the Roman gods that probably would have got them killed pretty fast.

They were, they were indirectly challenging the Roman gods by saying Jesus is supreme. There's one God. One Lord, you know, first Corinthians eight. Um, and that got this one God and Lord is going to judge the whole world. So that's going on in the book of Acts. At the same time, the apostles are always being let off the hook. Stephen, not so much, but everybody else is being let off the hook because they can say we're actually good for the world. Test us, we're innocent, we're lawful, we're not bombing places, uh, we're not preventing people from carrying on, um, good citizenship, uh, so, you know, you have all these trial scenes in the book of Acts.

Why so many trial scenes? Why does Paul rehearse his conversion so many times? They're saying, this Christianity thing has come in, it's different, it seems dangerous, but it's actually going to be good for the world.

[00:12:02] Geoff Holsclaw: So it's a deviant, but good for the world.

[00:12:05] Nijay Gupta: I think so. Yeah,

[00:12:07] Geoff Holsclaw: so, so then going to, um, you know, cause sometimes it's claimed and I'd love to hear your response to this, that, you know, Christianity introduced, this is kind of the negative take Christianity introduced an exclusivist and intolerant religion where you had to worship the one God rather than the more tolerant view of God.

the Greeks and the Romans, uh, and other kind of polytheistic where it's like everybody can just follow and worship their own gods. And so, uh, is there something to this claim that Christians are the intolerant ones or is it more kind of nuanced than that?

[00:12:42] Nijay Gupta: it's definitely more nuanced than that. And, and

[00:12:46] Geoff Holsclaw: What? I asked you a leading question. Impossible.

[00:12:50] Nijay Gupta: and, and someone, I point to people, I point listeners to someone like Tom Holland, not Spider Man, but the historian Tom Holland, who wrote a book called dominion, where he lays out those early centuries. And how the values that we, um, assume today of equality, uh, inherent sanctity of the individual, uh, trace back to Christianity, not to Rome, not to Greece, so forth.

So that, that view that you're talking about is wrong on both accounts. Uh, it's wrong on the tolerance of polytheism and it's wrong on the intolerance of Christianity. So let's talk about tolerance and polytheism. Um, polytheism is probably the wrong, uh, is misleading in some ways, because even though Rome accepted other religions, they actually had to fit within a hierarchy.

And you couldn't just do, or whatever you want, or worship whatever you want. You had to prove certain things about religion. How ancient is it? Do you have rules and laws? Do you have priests and gatekeepers? And if you didn't, I mean, you know, you could be killed. You could be enslaved. There's all kinds of stuff.

They didn't take everything. They took what they felt like they could accommodate to the Roman way. You look also at ancient civilizations. And even though they're polytheistic, it wasn't anything goes look at Israel against, uh, against the prophets of Baal. They weren't shaking hands saying let's combine gods.

They were saying Baal is better than Yahweh. Uh, and Baal was the worshippers Baal weren't saying let's just add Yahweh in. They were saying, uh, bail is, is victorious. Nations went to war against each other over whose gods were better. Um, so this idea of, you know, hippie love, let's just, you know, hug it out.

Was not happening in the blood bloody world of the ancient world. Um, now Rome was shrewd for sure. And they would say, okay, your God is super powerful in this area. Let's add that God, but that God's going to be a servant to Jupiter. or companion to Jupiter are not going to be sort of anything goes. Um, on the other Cyde, the Christian Cyde, it was actually Jews who would have been in the first century, more well known as monotheists and exclusionists.

Um, and they actually had to find ways of accommodating. So they would say, Hey, listen, Rome, we're not going to offer a sacrifice of an ox to Caesar, but we will offer an ox to Yahweh and pray for Caesar.

[00:15:18] Geoff Holsclaw: hmm.

[00:15:20] Nijay Gupta: Um, so they found ways to negotiate, uh, in terms of kind of this tolerance sort of thing. I mean, if Galatians is one of the very first texts written, uh, in early Christianity, uh, then one of the very first things we read in Christianity is Christians do not judge each other on the basis of, uh, sexual status, male or female, on the basis of social status, slave or free, on the basis of ethnic status.

Um, did they say, Hey, it's, it's my religion or, or no religion? Yes. But, uh, they wanted to do it in the most winsome way possible. They weren't putting swords to people's necks like they were several centuries later.

[00:16:06] Geoff Holsclaw: Yeah. So the, so I, I pulled this other book, uh, pagans and Christians in the city, um, where he really talks about how, like, there's kind of a veneer of a. Religious toleration, but there's a, really a, a high political intolerance, which is there's the hierarchy and you will follow it and you will support Rome.

Um, and it's really, uh, where Christians were thought to be dangerous. Cause they were kind of attacking both those things. Cause the social order was being kind of, uh, Upended. So let's talk about that. 

So you, you have a chapter about the household of faith and the family practices of early Christians.

How is it that they're this household language or family practices? Like, how is that weird or if not deviant, uh, in the early church world?

[00:16:55] Nijay Gupta: it was so weird, and this is where you really have to understand the religious cultural context to get just how weird, because we think, oh, a church meeting in a house is quaint, have some coffee, that sort of thing, but you have to understand, in the Roman world, religion was meant to be public, meaning, when you think of a Roman temple, don't think of an enclosed building with walls and a roof.

Most ancient Roman temples were open air, they had Pillars, uh, and they had maybe kind of a, a roof kind of like structure, but you could see from the front to the back, uh, outCyde, you could see, uh, into the temple front to back. And when people came into a temple, they, you know, they're, the sacrifices were actually made outCyde the temple and inCyde was statues, almost like a gallery.

You might have like a enclosed room that was like a safe to keep. Um, valuable objects, uh, but, but temples were open air and festivals, which were the very, very popular religious ceremonies were in public, uh, often kind of like parades, that sort of thing. Now, Christians were meeting in houses. I used to think, Oh, they're meeting in houses because that was the only place they could meet.

And that is kind of true, but there are some, there are two or three key reasons why meeting in houses was part of their DNA and was seen as Suspicious by Romans. Uh, number one, um, Christians change the paradigm of religion away from politics, the gods as masters and overlords, to family, God as Father. So, this is interesting.

Most people don't think about this. Even though God has a name in the Old Testament, Yahweh, God the Father does not ever have a name in the New Testament. He's only known by a title, God the Father. He's not God the Sovereign, God the King, God the Ruler. Those can be titles used of God. He's primarily God the Pater, the Father.

And Jesus is Huya, Son. And Christians, one of the first terminology that Christians use for each other is Adelphoi, brothers and sisters. So Christians wanted to send the signal, we're like family members. Now Rome, Rome I would not have understood this because there were strong lines of distinction between ethnic groups.

You're Jew, or you're Greek, or you're Roman. Uh, people that refused to be Romanized were called Barbarians. And here, Paul's saying Jew, Gentile, Barbarian, whatever, were all part of the same family. And he didn't mean that in some quaint, uh, Uh, sort of generic metaphor. He meant we're actually family,

[00:19:36] Geoff Holsclaw: wasn't like when we all die and go to heaven, we'll all be there. Right. He meant right now we're hanging out and doing the things that a family does.

[00:19:46] Nijay Gupta: Yeah. Your family has been deconstituted and reconstituted around Jesus Christ. And uh, that would have been powerful because people like the apostle Paul, we don't know anything about his family. We'll get the sense that his family would have rejected him because of, of his, um, Attachment to Christ that sort of thing a second thing about the family is the emphasis on the meal now This is where when you do research you start to learn new things what I learned about the Roman world was The Roman religion with Jupiter and all that was public religion.

There was a separate religion for inCyde your house. And you had these two spirits that you worshipped in your house, the Lares and the Panates. The Lares is the family spirit. The Panates is like your storehouse, your food, that sort of thing. And Christians said, we only have one cult. We only have one religion.

It's a religion of Christ. It's the same in our family as if out our family. And it really centers around a meal. Now, this is one of my biggest frustrations with church today, Geoff. And I know you, uh, you have ministry experience background. Um, so I hope I'm not putting you on the spot here, but the little, you know, the little wafer, the little cup, um, I think that is such a horrible, uh, perversion of, of what the early Christians were doing. Um, because I think we've kind of, uh, this, we can get to an argument over this, but I think it turns it into missed in something mystical, which I don't think it actually was for the early Christians. I think the mystical part was having the spirit in you. Uh, but, but the little, the meal part was. We need to practice being a family with Jesus Christ.

And the way you do that in the ancient world is with a meal. And you know what? The way we do that is with a meal too. When I want to hang out with a good friend, they come into town. What do we say? Let's grab lunch. We don't say, let's have a little tidy cup of grape juice and let's have a little horrible wafer that has been sitting around for who knows how many years.

Um, and so they got around in a meal in someone's family room. They call it the triclinium. Part of the reason they call it the triclinium is they're actually laying down. The clin part means lying down. So in ancient meals, you lay down on the ground with kind of on a cushion with your face towards the table and your feet away from the table because your feet are usually dirty.

And so you're laying right next to people. And so you tend to only eat with people of your status. Uh, that are maybe part of your biological family, people of your social class, people of your wealth class, all of that. And you would organize people further away at a big meal who were less important. And what we learn from first Corinthians, what we learn from James chapter two is, uh, Orthodox or good Christians should observe what John Barclay calls status destabilization at the table. Meaning you're no longer a slave when you're at that table. You're no longer separated by ethnicity. You're no longer separated by social class at that or wealth at that table. So they practice a dangerous meal. I'll say one more thing. I know we're running out of time, but one of my favorite parts of strange religion is talking about a letter that plenty, plenty of the elder wrote to a new governor.

Tiro of Bithynia. He gave some advice to Tiro. He says, you're going to want to cozy up to your inferiors to basically be their buddy. He said, don't do that. That's a common rookie mistake. He said, famously, the most unequal thing is the appearance of equality where it doesn't exist. What he was basically saying is, You can be equals with people in your social class, but when we start to be equal with people above and below us in the pyramid, it leads to chaos, and the whole empire will topple.

So he says, don't pretend there's equality when there's no equality. And here you have these Christians gathering at a table, saying to a slave, would you like some more? Saying to a child, would you like some more? Saying to a foreigner, would you like some more? Saying to someone that can't speak Latin.

Would you like some more that would have been seen as dangerous to some, but

[00:24:02] Geoff Holsclaw: Well, and Paul really called out the Corinthians because he's like, Hey, all you rich people, you already ate. And then all the people who are just getting off the night shift who showing up late because they're, you know, they're working hard for their life. Uh, that is not church. That is not. Celebrating the meal that Jesus gave us.

You're doing it wrong. You need, you need to slow down and wait for them before you get started for church. So, which is probably a word for, you know, all of us like more Anglo oriented people who are like, it's time to start church. It's time to start church. And everyone else is like, Hey, you know, we're.

It's still, still arriving little time consciousness. 

Um, well, as we finish off though, uh, we haven't really, you know, talked about this theme because you know, like Tom Holland and other not Spider Man, uh, you know, it becomes so familiar to us that it's not weird, but this idea of the father, father, God. So you talked about that already, but actually in a sense, loving us and the us means anyone, um, was also pretty weird.

Could you kind of talk about how that like. Developed or that landed or how people kind of wrestled with that.

[00:25:05] Nijay Gupta: Yeah. You know, if you, if you could get a time machine, go back to the Roman world and you ask your average Roman, do you love God, um, with familial love? I mean, that, that would be an absurd question. That would be like asking, uh, do you love the chief of police? Of your town with familial love you like I respect him or her.

I, I, I, you know, I don't want to get in trouble. So I'm going to salute. Um, I'm going to bring a gift. Uh, you know, I'm going to compliment, you know, the police officer when I get pulled over, but you don't love. I mean, it's absurd, right? I

[00:25:40] Geoff Holsclaw: Like, do you love your CEO of your business that lives, you know, 20 states away and makes 20 million? It's like, uh, no, no.

[00:25:48] Nijay Gupta: yeah. You're just like, I just, you know, I just want to like put my head down, do my work. Like I have this feeling when I crossed the border into Canada, I got really paranoid about crossing the border, you know? And so I just get so nervous when they're, you know, when they're coming by and asking you questions.

They're so nice. They're Canadians. They're so nice. My wife just gets really weirded out that I'm so stressed out about talking to this person. Like they're going to immediately arrest me for whatever. So you're polite. That's, but here you have, uh, The early Christians and their message is. Don't think of God like a scary overlord who's just looking for a reason to burst out with lightning against you.

We have, you know, when I give presentations on this, I actually show images of ancient art where gods are striking out with lightning. The statue is striking out with lightning against a worshiper who said the wrong thing or done the wrong thing. And, you know, you approach these statues with fear and

[00:26:46] Geoff Holsclaw: Well you even mentioned that people would say the name of the God, but if they were worried if they mispronounced it, they'd add something like, or whatever name you prefer to be called.

[00:26:55] Nijay Gupta: Yeah, whatever you want to be called, they would have kind of a catch all to say, like, please don't strike me in lightning. I'm trying really hard, that sort of

[00:27:02] Geoff Holsclaw: I'm doing my

[00:27:03] Nijay Gupta: Um, and, and here you have Jesus when he's teaching about prayer saying, don't go on and on babbling with words. I think the idea was you got to get God's attention, the God's attention because they are busy.

They don't care about you and you need to do what you can to ingratiate them. And what I love about the new Testament is because of Jesus Christ. God is always at a good mood when he sees you. Like that's amazing. You think about Hebrews, let us approach the throne of.

[00:27:33] Geoff Holsclaw: Grace.

[00:27:33] Nijay Gupta: horror, terror, anger, vengeance, justice, wrath, grace.

Okay, how should we approach the grace? How should we approach the throne with meekness, shrinking, worried? No, with confidence or parousia, boldness. Knowing that we will receive mercy and receive grace. It's as if we show up to God in prayer and he says, what can I give you today? How can I spoil you today?

You know, like my kid, you know, my, my kids, they're, you know, 13 and 15. I pick them up from school or pick them up from sports. They're always asking, can we stop at Starbucks? Can we stop at Starbucks? Can we stop at Starbucks? And you know, I'm like, Oh, you got to do your homework. We got this thing to do.

God's always like, what do you want? You want a Frappuccino? We'll hook you up with a Frappuccino. What do you want? Because we're his kids,

[00:28:18] Geoff Holsclaw: With the whipped cream and the chocolate drizzle, let's get the

[00:28:20] Nijay Gupta: Yeah, all the, you know, the, the, the caramel crumble crunch thing, all the things that, I mean, this word grace, I mean, it is powerful and the Romans had no conception of this because grace you show to people there that are going that You're gonna get something back from later on. It was a patronage reciprocity system. You're gonna get what you give You're gonna get back. So you're gonna give To the right kinds of people, uh, read John Barclay's work on Paul and gift upon the power of grace and the Christians, which God's gonna rain on the good and bad, and he's just gonna give as much love and grace as he can.

Now that doesn't mean there's not justice. That doesn't mean there's not repentance, but this was a new message for people to hear in that time.

[00:29:03] Geoff Holsclaw: Yeah. And I think, uh, that's why I wanted to have you on to talk about these things, especially as just that strange message. Cause it seems so, um, like the, the book that Cyd and I wrote, um, does God really liked me is for a while as pastors, we stopped telling people. That God loves you because it kind of like, it doesn't do anything.

Like it just bounces off. Like everybody, yeah, I know, I know, I know. Right. But that message was so weird. Um, in the early tree, like it was just dumbfounding. Like, what do you mean? God loves me. Like, you know, God even knows me, you know, would be like, it is just dumbfounding. So I think we need to kind of get back to that, um, that God, you know.

So love the world that, you know, we love God because God first loved us as John says, you know, and that's why, you know, we call this the attaching to God podcast, not because we first attached to God, but because like you said, he's delighting, he's welcoming. We boldly can approach the throne of grace.

Well, is there any, Oh, go ahead.

[00:30:04] Nijay Gupta: I'll say one more thing. This past summer I was at a, a Christian camp with my family and the speakers were, uh, converse to Christianity from Budd, from Buddhism in Thailand. And I, I don't know that much about Buddhism and I, I, I just was learning from their talks they're talking about in, in the Buddhist system that they had.

You never heard that God loved you. You had to go through these kind of ascetic echelons of spiritual achievement to get close enough to God, to really know God and to be known by God. And it was so difficult, so exclusionistic, so challenging, at least from the way they expressed it, to hear someone say, God is with you now at the bottom and God loves you.

And you don't have to do stuff to get closer to God. He came close to you. I mean, to hear these, uh, this man and woman, this couple talk about the good news of God's love, like you said, we take it for granted, but that God should come to us in the incarnation, um, for the purpose of love, uh, is, is a transformative gift just to add on to that briefly, um, You know, I have teenagers, you know, I'm volunteering in our church youth group. These kids live in such an anxious generation. So much fear about the world, is the world going to make it through climate change, through a nuclear holocaust, you know, whatever. The division, the political division, the economic issues, and they're just wondering, is there any hope for this world?

[00:31:36] Geoff Holsclaw: hmm. Mm hmm.

[00:31:37] Nijay Gupta: And, um, we, we as Christians can be the hope bringers.

We can say, as long as God's still in charge, which he is, and as God is still loving, which he is, there's always going to be hope. We just have to, to, to, to be ready to jump in and participate when we're called upon.

[00:31:53] Geoff Holsclaw: Yeah. Amen. 

Well, thank you so much. And, uh, you and I have been going back about your next new book, which I'm super excited about, which will be right in line with more of the neuroscience and emotion theories. You have a book coming out in a couple of months called the affections of Christ Jesus. The love at the heart of Paul's theology.

So we'll have you on again to talk more about that and how love and affections and emotions and how all that is cultivated. Uh, so we'll get much more in the, in the nitty gritty, but where can people follow you or keep track of the work that you're up to

[00:32:24] Nijay Gupta: Yeah. Thanks. Um, so I teach Northern Seminary. I'd love anyone interested in seminary. Check that out. Um, I have a sub stack called engaging scripture. I do lots of nerdy Bible stuff, book reviews, little essays, that sort of thing, interviews. Um, and then, uh, as you mentioned, A. J. Swoboda and I have had, uh, have been running a podcast the last several years called Slow Theology.

Uh, how to follow Jesus, the mess of real life. We want to get real and we want to talk about the messy stuff. So join us on Slow Theology.

[00:32:55] Geoff Holsclaw: excellence? Well, thank you so much. And again, uh, his current book is strange religion. Please check it out. It's just full of aha moments. And I didn't know that. And just a little, and it's very readable. So thank you so much for all the hard work you put into that.

[00:33:10] Nijay Gupta: My pleasure. Great talking to you. 

Um,