How to Talk About Jesus in a Post-Christian Age (with Glen Scrivener)

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0:00:00 – (Glen Scrivener): I’m desperate to blend in. And so I’m going to not talk about Jesus, because the moment I talk about Jesus, I’m injecting an awkward kind of difference into the relationship. Whereas I think in the New Testament, it’s the other way around. In the New Testament, my life is meant to be so weird, so inexplicable outside of Christ, that my friend is like, okay, you are really, really weird. Say something.

0:00:29 – (Glen Scrivener): Relieve the tension. For why is it that you do the things that you do? And at that point, my Christian witness actually relieves the tension rather than introduces the tension.

0:00:47 – (Matt Smethurst): Welcome back, friends, to the Everyday Pastor, a podcast from the Gospel Coalition on the nuts and bolts of ministry. I’m Matt Smethurst.

0:00:54 – (Ligon Duncan): And I’m Lig Duncan.

0:00:56 – (Matt Smethurst): And we’re joined today by our friend, Glenn Scrivener. Glenn is an evangelist from Australia who lives in the. He’s the director and evangelist at Speak Life, an organization that exists to revive Christians, resource the church, and reach the world with the good news of Jesus. He’s also the author of several books, including the Air We How We All Came to Believe in Freedom, Kindness, Progress, and Equality, published by the Good Book Company in 2022. And I blurbed that book a few years ago, and I think I said something like it was one of the most important books I had read in years.

0:01:34 – (Matt Smethurst): And a few years later now I can still say that remains true. I’m so grateful for Glenn and his writing ministry and his speaking ministry over the years. And on my very short list of YouTube channels that I follow faithfully is his ministry, Speak Life. So before we dive in, Glenn, first of all, welcome. Thanks for joining us.

0:01:55 – (Glen Scrivener): Thank you for having me.

0:01:57 – (Matt Smethurst): Tell us a brief bit about yourself for pastors who are listening who may not be familiar with you or your ministry.

0:02:03 – (Glen Scrivener): So I am Emma’s husband. I’m Ruby and JJ’s dad. I’m ordained, an ordained minister. But my day job is to work for speak life to. Yeah. Write and podcast and YouTube and speak about Jesus in lots of different ways. So that’s me.

0:02:17 – (Matt Smethurst): And tell us a bit about 3, 2, 1. What is that?

0:02:20 – (Glen Scrivener): So 3, 21 was a way of explaining the gospel in a blog post back in sort of 2011, I think. And I remember it was Kevin DeYoung actually came out with a blog post on TGC. It was something like, if I was teaching worldview, I would teach 1, 2, 3, 4. And 1 was there is a God, 2, there’s the creator creature distinction. 3 was the Trinity. And 4 was. I forget what 4 was, but I remember sort of listening to that and thinking, what would it look like to begin with the triune God? Well, I guess you’d have to start with three and then you’d have to go backwards. So what would two be?

0:02:57 – (Glen Scrivener): And I started to think about the two Adams because I was doing a lot of work in kind of Irenaeus and Athanasius and Christ as the second Adam was really gripping me at that time. So yeah, the world is shaped by two representatives, Adam and Jesus. And then what would one be? Well, beautifully one gets to be oneness with Jesus. You’re born one with Adam. The gospel is be born again, be one with Christ and then you get his father is your father and his spirit is your spirit and his future is your future.

0:03:24 – (Glen Scrivener): So that’s kind of a framework I’ve been using to teach the gospel, I guess ever since then. So 15 years old now and there’s a course that people can do online. There’s about 40,000 people doing it online at 321course.com. It’s completely free. People can go and do that for themselves. And there are a about a thousand churches, mainly in the uk, but also around the world and quite a few in the States that are running as a four week course where people can be introduced to Jesus and then Jesus vision for God, the world and you. God’s threeness, the world’s twoness and your oneness.

0:03:56 – (Matt Smethurst): Yeah, I love that. I read your book 321 many years ago and then have since kind of dabbled in the course and recommended it to folks in my own church. So thanks for mentioning that. You said it’s 321 course.

0:04:10 – (Glen Scrivener): Come, come. That’s right, yeah.

0:04:11 – (Matt Smethurst): Okay, wonderful. And that’s a ministry of Speak life in terms of helping pastors who are listening to this, ordinary pastors, Glenn. This is called the everyday pastor understanding. Help them understand the cultural moment. I’m just curious, given your context, an Australian ministering in secular Britain through, you know, church media, public evangelism, how what is that vantage point taught you about how cultures really change and maybe how pastors can misread the moment they’re in?

0:04:48 – (Glen Scrivener): Well, I guess being an Australian in the UK is an interesting vantage point because I’m not a UK citizen, but I kind of breathe the same air. And so was that a book plug just then? You’ve got the book plugs covered for me.

0:05:05 – (Ligon Duncan): Very stealthy.

0:05:06 – (Glen Scrivener): You don’t need to. But I mean I actually do say in the book the air we Breathe. I mean, it’s interesting that when I fly back into Australia, I do smell the difference of the air because you’ve got the eucalyptus trees, the gum trees are just mentholating the air the whole time. It’s like you’ve got a cough syrup carried upon the breeze. It smells so sweet to go back into Sydney, but you don’t recognize the atmosphere of Sydney when you live in London and vice versa.

0:05:32 – (Glen Scrivener): And there is something about living in a different culture that means you always feel a little bit away from home. But I guess as Christians, we know what that is. You know, when Paul writes to the Colossians, they are in Christ and they’re in Colossae. And I guess wherever you are, there is your zip code and you are in Christ, you are in the city in which you live and you are in Christ at the same time. And I guess being cross cultural means that you are constantly thinking about differences and people are constantly striking you as strange, and you are constantly striking them as strange. You’re a stranger in a strange land.

0:06:12 – (Glen Scrivener): Um, and so I, I, I think that’s actually helpful to, to whatever degree you can. As you’re scrolling through your feed, I. Are you able to experience the world as though you were a foreigner? Because you are in fact a foreigner. And, and are you able to sit as loose as you can sit to the fact that you live in Colossi or the fact that you live in London? Can you sit as loose as you can to that and, and try events or whatever through the lens of Jesus?

0:06:48 – (Glen Scrivener): I think we’re kind of called to do that really, in order to be all things to all people, that some might be saved. So yeah, being cross cultural is a particular thing that I do, but I think it’s actually universal experience of all Christians.

0:07:02 – (Ligon Duncan): Right.

0:07:03 – (Matt Smethurst): And in terms of the book we’ve mentioned, the Air We Breathe, talk a bit about your burden in that project and how you’re trying to help everyday secular people in your context see that they’re already breathing Christian ish air.

0:07:22 – (Glen Scrivener): Yeah, Christian ish air. Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, we’re living in a post Christian culture, but I think it’s post Christian in the same way that post industrialization is a thing. You only get to a post industrialized culture by going through industrialization, and that industrialization has marked that culture forever. And I think Christianity has marked us. If you’re in the Anglosphere, a particular brand of Western Protestant Christianity has marked you in a certain way, even if you’ve never shown up in church and so my big burden is with my secular friends, who I remember a friend who I went to college with, she once said to me, glenn, I could never be a believer.

0:08:08 – (Glen Scrivener): And I think she kind of. She looks at me as somebody who is a faith head. And at times she is jealous and she thinks I’ve hit the jackpot. At times she looks at me and she thinks that she’s dodged a bullet and she doesn’t want the sort of. The sort of, the thing that afflicts me. That’s called faith. But sometimes she’s jealous of it. But she thinks of herself as a neutral. She thinks of herself as somebody who just navigates the world via reason and evidence.

0:08:38 – (Glen Scrivener): And one of my burdens in the Air We Breathe is just to show her that if she believes in equality, compassion, consent, enlightenment, science, freedom, progress, if she believes in human dignity, if she believes in human rights, she is leaning into truths that cannot be demonstrated logically or proved in a laboratory. She is a believer. And not only is she a believer, she happens to believe in some things that have been marked by the Jesus revolution in some very profound ways. If she believes in human rights, for instance, she believes in some quite Christian ish things.

0:09:15 – (Glen Scrivener): But all the while she tells me that she’s godless and that this is a godless universe. And really with the air we breathe. I’m trying to sort of create some cognitive dissonance in my friends so that they recognize that the humanist ideals, that they might have fit a lot better in the Jesus story then they fit in the atheistic story that they say they believe. And then by the end of the book, I’m asking them to choose.

0:09:46 – (Ligon Duncan): You know, this is something that Tom Holland has been arguing for a long time. Even recently, Bart Ehrman is admitting at least part of the Christian story in this way. Let me turn the question around a little bit. You’re talking about secular folks and helping them realize that what. What do you think believers ministering to or seeking to reach out to people in this secular environment need to be aware of themselves. And I’m sure you’ve thought about this from the standpoint of Australia and Britain. I lived in Britain 35, 40 years ago. Things have really changed in that 35 or 40 years ago, even as they had changed significantly 20 years before I got there.

0:10:31 – (Ligon Duncan): What are the things that we need to be aware of about ourselves, et cetera, as we seek to talk to secular folks around us?

0:10:40 – (Glen Scrivener): Well, Romans 1:16. You know, I’m not ashamed of the gospel, says Paul when he goes to, well, when, when he’s writing to a bedraggled mob of, of Christians who are in the great empire. They are in the eternal city of Rome surrounded by, you know, the greatest civilization that has ever visited the ear. Paul’s like, I’m not ashamed of this message. And the only reason why he would say that is because, well, of course you’re tempted to be ashamed of being a Christian. Of course you’re tempted to be ashamed of Team Jesus.

0:11:17 – (Glen Scrivener): And I think one of the reasons I wrote yeah, We Breathe is just to tell Christians, you do not have to be ashamed. You do not have to be embarrassed by Team Jesus. Oh, my goodness. You are on a team that has been the greatest source of blessing for this world, like the greatest source of, of flourishing for humanity. If you’re interested in progressive ideals, well, the institution that has abolished the slave trade, the institution that has abolished pederasty, the institution that has abolished infanticide and has established schooling. The way we think of schooling. And universities. The way we think of universities. Charities. The way we think of charities. Orphan care. The way we think of orphan care. Human rights. The way we think of human rights. Just war. The way we think of just war. Parliaments, universities, the modern science, scientific method. You are on Team Jesus. Like, rejoice.

0:12:13 – (Glen Scrivener): We should not be ashamed of Jesus. We should not be ashamed of his gospel message. And that’s just so important. I think in a post Christian, post enlightenment world that is intent on casting Christianity as the bad guys, it is just so important, I think, for Christians to say, hang on, can we just do a little reality check here? And I think one of the big responses that people have made to the book Christians have been to come up and say, actually, I was embarrassed to be a Christian before I read the Air We Breathe, and I’m no longer embarrassed. And I think that will help our evangelism.

0:13:00 – (Matt Smethurst): Yeah. And for pastors who are listening, Glenn, and they love Jesus. That’s why they got into ministry in the first place. They want to reach lost people. But the way they were trained in evangelism was a pretty straightforward assumption of belief in God. The reality that the person they’re talking to is probably already mentally furnished with the architecture of what no needs to be understood in terms of the Bible as a respected book, the afterlife, heaven, hell, as likely destinations for humanity.

0:13:35 – (Matt Smethurst): We are in a very different context today in the post Christian West. How would you help pastors just even bring them into this conversation about cultural narratives? Because this may seem a bit esoteric to some pastors. Philosophical. How does this actually. How does thinking about cultural narratives and cultural apologetics actually help them reach people for Jesus today?

0:13:59 – (Glen Scrivener): Well, if part of the proclamation of the Gospel is to unmask idols, then I think you probably better be acquainted with the sort of the idols that you are unmasking. And if the Apostle Paul goes to Athens and tours around their objects of worship and is provoked deeply and grieved in his spirit at the sorts of things that Athenian culture was lording and orbiting around, around and giving themselves to and worshiping, we are foolish if we don’t think that the modern secular west is not at least as religious as the Athenian, you know, classical civilization.

0:14:37 – (Glen Scrivener): Of course we are orbiting around sacred values. Of course we are burning incense to and giving ourselves to any number of different ideals. And I guess in. In the book the Air We Breathe, I’m. I’m trying to name these values, these. These highest ideals as things that kind of set off the t fork in our souls, whether we’re Christians or not. And things like equality and compassion and freedom and progress, these things just have a religious character to them, such that to go against any of these things feels like a blasphemy. And if somebody does blaspheme against these highest ideals, they get excommunicated or in other words, canceled.

0:15:23 – (Glen Scrivener): And so I guess I’m just trying to name the religious nature of the secular West. And the secular west obviously doesn’t like being called religious. Sorry, humanity is irreducibly religious. And when a Gospel comes into a situation, whether it’s Elijah preaching on Mount Carmel, whether it’s Paul in Athens or whether it’s Glen Scrivener in London, we are. We are equally addressing the word of the Lord to people who.

0:16:00 – (Glen Scrivener): To. Who give their lives to baal or they give their lives to Artemis, or that they give their lives to human rights or, you know, like. Like what? Or progress or whatever. Whatever. Whatever. Whatever highest ideal there is. And so it’s. It’s just. I think it’s incumbent on us to know what these idols are so that we can expose them and show how much more profoundly Jesus answers the questions that those idols simply can’t.

0:16:26 – (Matt Smethurst): Let’s talk about some of those idols, particularly in the form of stories that shape us stories, we inhabit cultural narratives. What are some of the main cultural stories that pastors ought to be aware of?

0:16:45 – (Glen Scrivener): Well, I think progress, or you might say progress is a kind of a narrative.

0:16:51 – (Matt Smethurst): See, that was a great example of contextualization, which is really important for this conversation.

0:16:57 – (Glen Scrivener): Sienna. I’m not just transatlantic. I’m trans. Trans Indian Ocean as well. So, yeah, progress. As this story of things are getting better, we are the ones we. We’ve been waiting for. That, that idea that tomorrow would be. Will be better than today, but not without, you know, reforming the evils of yesterday. I think that just goes very, very

0:17:21 – (Matt Smethurst): deeply and thank God or thank ourselves that we’re not like those benighted people from the past.

0:17:28 – (Glen Scrivener): So when you say we are the ones that we’ve been waiting for, you’re basically saying we are the Messiah. Right. So there have been many different presidents who have had messianic complexes. Okay, Right. There are many different ways of having a messianic complex in which you cast yourself as. Yeah, the one that history has been waiting for or that we are the ones that history has been waiting for.

0:17:54 – (Glen Scrivener): And, you know, there is a genealogy of ideas behind this. It’s obviously a very scriptural idea, you know, from page one of the Bible. And there was evening and there was morning. The first day. Right. And even within the first chapter of the Bible, you go from simple things to very grand things. As the weak develops, you move, you know, in the whole narrative of Scripture from a garden to a garden city, but not without, you know, passing through a deep valley of shadow.

0:18:25 – (Glen Scrivener): And the Lord Jesus himself enters into that dark valley through the cross and then to the resurrection. And so it is a profoundly biblical notion that tomorrow will be better than today. It’s a profoundly hopeful scriptural idea that history is heading somewhere, that it is not a circle as so many, you know, Eastern religions might. Might characterize it as. It’s not simply an arrow down, a descent from a golden age. And now we’re sort of much worse off than we were. The idea of onwards and upwards is a profoundly Christian idea.

0:19:04 – (Glen Scrivener): And this is. This is just so baked into our secular friends that not only are things getting better in a. In a secularization direction, but also that the church have always been the bad guys. They’ve always been, like, holding us back. And so I think unmasking this particular idol is really valuable.

0:19:26 – (Ligon Duncan): How are some of the ways that you would counsel Christians, pastors, seminarians, professors, to have that kind of conversation about the issue of progress?

0:19:37 – (Glen Scrivener): I guess if the subject comes up, you can press into it and just sort of ask questions like, do you think your moral fiber is greater than the moral fiber of someone from the 13th century or from the 5th century B.C. what is it about your heart? Are you a more virtuous person than someone who sailed on the Mayflower. Are you really? Are you. I’m sure if you went into a time machine and went back to the 17th century, you could probably impress people with your iPhone.

0:20:08 – (Glen Scrivener): I’m not sure you would necessarily impress them with your moral character. And just unearthing that sense of chronological snobbery that is really baked into us in the west is quite important, I think, at that stage.

0:20:25 – (Ligon Duncan): Do you think inclusivity is that which we view ourselves primarily morally superior in. In relation to our forebears?

0:20:38 – (Glen Scrivener): So that the value of inclusion is the kind of value that makes us think of the benighted past when they. They actually had. Yeah, they had thick black lines and you were either in or out of things. And nowadays we have no lines whatsoever and everybody’s in. And that’s better. And you’re like, yeah, okay, how’s that working out for a second? Yeah, I mean, on the value, on the inclusion thing. So there’s another narrative, I think, that intersects quite interestingly with the progress one.

0:21:09 – (Glen Scrivener): And the analogy I’m always using for that is, look, if you want to come to the scrivener household for Christmas, you’re going to get largely a scrivener kind of a Christmas. And you might have a tradition from a Smethurst Christmas. That’s fine. You can maybe bring one. One Smethurst tradition is all you get. But you’re going to be happy to sit down around our table doing our kind of Christmas. And it’s great to learn from the different traditions around the table, but somebody is hosting this meal.

0:21:42 – (Glen Scrivener): This day has a certain shape to it. It has certain traditions around it. There is a meaning to it that is already given, that you’re so welcome. I want to welcome you around this table. And that’s why I think the word welcome is a much more biblical word than inclusion. Welcome is come over to our Christmas, okay. And you can have Christmas the way that we have Christmas. And you are so welcome to pull up a chair the same as everybody else around our table.

0:22:11 – (Glen Scrivener): Inclusion is a little bit like you show up on Christmas morning and instead of coming into the dining room and having lunch with us all, like, you go up to your own room with a TV dinner and you just watch your iPad with your headphones on. Done. And you do you. But we’re all under the same roof. So I guess that’s inclusion. Is it like. No, no. I think welcome into a thing that is already heading in a direction that you’re so welcome to. I think that’s the more Christian ideal that’s Good.

0:22:41 – (Matt Smethurst): Well, in an age of identity politics with the fracturing and just balkanization of even people who used to be on the same team, I’m not just talking about within the church, just in the broader secular society. I do think that this is an opportunity for us as Christians to show a more excellent way because that welcome has fallen on really hard times in an age of outrage and division. And so we have the opportunity, without softening the borders of the gospel message or the hard demands of Jesus Christ, of showing that actually following him in the context of his people is actually the path to the very life you most want.

0:23:26 – (Glen Scrivener): Right? Yeah.

0:23:28 – (Matt Smethurst): Glenn, you are one of the contributors to a new curriculum from TGC called Making Sense of Exploring Six Stories that Shape How We Live. And this is for small groups, this is for Sunday school classes, this is for just ordinary believers and discipling relationships. Pastors, you could lead your elders through this, your staff through this. Essentially there are sessions on various stories that we live by self happiness, science, justice, liberty.

0:24:05 – (Matt Smethurst): And as Glenn was just talking about progress. And there’s a 10 to 15 minute video segment followed by opportunities for small group discussion. So that’s something just to be aware of, pastors maybe take a look at and, and put to use in your church. Glenn, is there anything else you want to say about this curriculum given that you were a part of creating it?

0:24:27 – (Glen Scrivener): Yeah, I think the, the videos were really, really well done and I hope that they are well used in, in churches and you can get these things. I, I see it as a little bit in the areopagus and touring around the objects of worship and just getting, getting a real sense for. Yeah, what, what it is, what it is they’re actually believing at the moment.

0:24:50 – (Matt Smethurst): I’ve also heard you, Glenn, talk about how, rather than trying to figure out how we as Christians can avoid seeming strange, that actually there is evangelistic power in leaning into some of our strangeness. Talk about what you mean by that.

0:25:12 – (Glen Scrivener): I’ve been meditating a lot on Matthew Chapter five recently as, as kind of the heartbeat of evangelism, really. If we are the salt of the earth, we’re the light of the world. We’re a city on a hill that cannot be hidden. All three of those pictures are pictures of distinctiveness. If the salt is not salty, it’s the most worthless. Can you imagine salt that’s not salty? It’s like, like chalk dust. Like who.

0:25:40 – (Glen Scrivener): Who could be bothered with salt that is not salty? What would it even mean to be light that doesn’t shine? That’s so ridiculous. It’s so ridiculous, says Jesus. It would be like buying a lamp and then putting an upturned bucket over the top of it. Like, who does that? What moron does that? And in a sense Jesus is saying, that’s you. That is right. Oh, oh, ashamed Christian. The sort of Christian that which is my kind of Christian. Unfortunately, I am constantly tempted to mute my distinctiveness and to be like the sort of person who just puts an upturned bucket on a lamp. How ridiculous. Or to be a city on a hill that’s all self conscious and doesn’t want to be on a hill. It’s like, let’s just be who you are.

0:26:31 – (Glen Scrivener): And Matthew 5 is fascinating because Jesus doesn’t say, try and burn brighter. He says, you are light. You’re probably actively doing foolish things to mute your distinctiveness, to hide your light under a bushel. And it’s imbecilic and it’s against your nature. And you’re spending your time trying not to be weird. And that’s the trouble. And I think one of the huge issues for evangelism in the west is that most of the time my life looks indistinguishable from my non Christian friend’s life.

0:27:11 – (Glen Scrivener): It’s almost identical. Maybe in the calendar, my Sunday mornings look different to his Sunday morning. Otherwise, how different am I from my neighbor? And one of the reasons why we get nervous about evangelism is because when we start to speak about Jesus, that’s the first time that that difference is injected into the relationship. And all of a sudden I start to. Because I feel wrongly that not being weird is the goal and blending in is the goal.

0:27:45 – (Glen Scrivener): And so I’m desperate to blend in. And so I’m going to not talk about Jesus because the moment I talk about Jesus, I’m injecting an awkward kind of difference into the relationship. Whereas I think in the New Testament it’s the other way around. In the New Testament, my life is meant to be so weird, so inexplicable outside of Christ, that my friend is like, okay, you are really, really weird. Say something, relieve the tension for me.

0:28:18 – (Glen Scrivener): Why is it that you do the things that you do? And at that point my Christian witness actually relieves the tension rather than introduces the tension. And I think you get that in 1st Peter 3:15, like in your heart set apart, Christ the Lord is holy, always being prepared to give an answer to anyone who asks you for the reason, for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect. And who is Initiating this evangelistic encounter, it’s the non Christian, because they’re seeing my weirdness.

0:28:48 – (Glen Scrivener): And my real danger in evangelism is not that I don’t have an answer in that point. My real danger is that I haven’t lived such a life that prompts such a question.

0:28:57 – (Matt Smethurst): And the question is not whether you’ve set something apart in your heart as holy. It’s what everyone has, a Lord that they have set apart as holy. Even believers functionally can be living with something else reigning supreme in their affections, their attention, their allegiance. But it’s only when we’ve set apart the Lord Jesus Christ as holy that people are going to ask us to give a reason and for the hope we have.

0:29:24 – (Ligon Duncan): We’re watching this with Ben Sasse right now. It’s just a Christian dying well, and people are wanting to ask him questions. And he’s having wonderful opportunities to share the gospel in that context because people have seen a trust, a comfort, a belief in God’s love and care for him and for his family as he’s dying of cancer. And it’s opened up opportunities to share. Speaking of the weirdness, Glenn, one of the weirdnesses is just some of our truth claims.

0:30:00 – (Ligon Duncan): I can see a lot of people saying, well, I want your progress, I want the good things that Christianity has given to me, but I don’t want some of your crazy supernaturalism and some of your truth claims and especially some of your ethics. So how do we in that, let’s say somebody has seen, you know, a way of life in us, a manner of dealing with other people that has prompted this kind of a conversation. But you’ve got to talk about some of the things that they don’t like in Christianity.

0:30:31 – (Ligon Duncan): What counsel do you have to us as we have that conversation?

0:30:35 – (Glen Scrivener): First, be assured in your own heart that the way of Jesus is good. It’s not like any of those ethical positions that Christians take is the, the nasty price that we’ve got to pay in order to be in the Christian club. It’s, it’s far more like this. This is the glorious but strange to the non Christian, but the glorious way of Christ that is a counterculture to the madness of the world. And, and so what you are like, defending in that moment, you might feel like you are very much on the defensive.

0:31:15 – (Glen Scrivener): I think in your heart, you need to be very assured yourself that the way of Jesus is beautiful. It’s bonkers, but it’s beautiful. The way of sex and sexuality as laid out in scripture is genuinely good news. For the world, the way we treat the unborn, the sanctity of life issues at the beginning of life and at the end of life, that that is the actually compassionate view, no matter how the world wants to characterize it.

0:31:46 – (Glen Scrivener): So in your own heart, set apart Christ, the Lord is holy, set apart the goodness of Jesus. And that some of these ethical positions are not arbitrary and they’re not just the price you have to pay to be in the Christian club. They are things that my non Christian friend won’t, won’t understand at the moment. And I guess one of the first moves you need to then make with your non Christian friend is to say, look, I don’t think you’ll get this right away, but can I go to 30,000ft and give you, can I give you two minutes on how the Bible is a romance between man and woman and maybe then our conversation about marriage might make sense?

0:32:31 – (Glen Scrivener): Or can I go to 30,000ft and just give you my doctrine of humanity and the fact that every single member of the human family has worth and dignity in God’s eyes and then we can dive down into whether this embryo has dignity and worth. You know, you have to beg their indulgence at that point. And I’m not saying that’s easily done, but those are the first moves that need to be made, I think, and

0:32:58 – (Matt Smethurst): we’ve already touched on this a bit in the conversation about inclusion and welcome. But I also think one of the ways you can turn this kind of back to your friend, your questioning, skeptical friend, is by looking at the topic of forgiveness. It’s been said we live in an age in which everything is permitted but nothing is forgiven. And we live in an age of, as you were saying earlier, Glenn, essentially a secular orthodoxy with a priesthood, with excommunication.

0:33:34 – (Matt Smethurst): And anyone could be canceled today for falling out of step, even in a minor way, with the reigning orthodoxy of their little ever narrowing tribe. And so what a big glorious welcome is offered only in the Gospel of Jesus Christ where forgiveness is found.

0:33:57 – (Glen Scrivener): Yeah, and notice it’s welcoming rather than the inclusion language. Like the inclusion is like everybody is on the bus and there’s, you know, and anybody could be in charge of the steering wheel at any one point of view, but also anyone could get kicked off quite, quite without process. That, that’s kind of the inclusion bus, I think. I think the, yeah, the welcome is a, is a welcome into a family that has a structure, that has a direction, that has a meaning, that has, you know, rituals and all the, and all the rest of it, but, but, but I think that that sense of thick community is, is far more what, what people are made for than the, the nice sounding, you know, inclusion language which masks, as you say, a cancel culture, which is the, the.

0:34:50 – (Matt Smethurst): How do you talk about repentance with unbelievers? In a way, because that is part of that hard message of Jesus that in order to receive his welcome, you have to do a U turn. How do you talk about what repentance isn’t and what it is and why it’s actually good news for a person?

0:35:10 – (Glen Scrivener): That’s why I like in 3, 2, 1. You finish with 1, you finish with be one with Jesus, which is an all embracing, all of life marital union. Right? And you know, perhaps the chief biblical metaphor for union with Christ is a marital one. And you know, I did not pick up Emma, my wife, as a hobby in the year 2003, which I’ve been keeping up this side hustle called marriage since 2008. No, I have been been one with Emma for the last, whatever it is, 23 years.

0:35:46 – (Glen Scrivener): And it is an all of life, all embracing reorientation of my very self. And so what we’re offering to the non Christian, you can do premarital counseling. It’s very important to do premarital counseling. And the equivalent of that in evangelism is to say, hey, Jesus is offered to you completely for free. He is a completely free Lord. Do you want to be one with this completely free Lord who has already offered himself to you with body and soul, bled his own heart’s blood for you? He’s raised up again. He says, will you be one with me? But it’s an all embracing kind of a oneness.

0:36:29 – (Glen Scrivener): And hey, if you say I do to Jesus, it will involve all sorts of things. And you can lay out in your premarital counseling, as it were, what oneness with Jesus will look like. And it is not just a checklist of new moral behaviors. It’s an entirely new orientation. And so repentance is a gift. Like we know that, right? Repentance is given to people. Repentance is a gift because Jesus is given to people not as a get out of hell free card, not as a blank check for your sinning. He’s given to you for free as a Lord that you are to be one with. And praise God, you have a new life now, right? Praise God.

0:37:15 – (Glen Scrivener): Praise God you can be different. In fact, in Jesus you are different. And praise God, you can actually be new. And actually I do think the world is looking for ways to be new. I think non Christian, like you look at any magazine and the front covers are just splashed with six ways to get ABS before Easter or whatever it is. It’s like, like you are told constantly, be new, be new, be new, be new. And there’s a sense in which the human heart actually does long for becoming a new creation. Like obviously the flesh hates the idea of change and hates the idea of not being the boss, all of that.

0:37:56 – (Glen Scrivener): But there is a part of people that really wants to be new. And so when Jesus comes and says the time has come, repent, believe the good news, there’s a glorious, attractive, compelling proclamation that comes along when you have an all embracing sense of repentance. If it’s just tidy up your act, then nobody would get that excited about repentance. But I think go deeper into what repentance truly is and I think you can offer it to people in a compelling way.

0:38:30 – (Ligon Duncan): Glenn, you’ve ministered in Australia and Britain. Any word for us in the United States or in the larger North American context, things that you would want us to be on the lookout for as pastors that you’ve observed because you’re ministering in an environment where secularization has progressed to a certain stage. We see it in parts of the US maybe not everywhere. There is still a nominal Bible belt in the the United States in the ways, I guess in Britain you’d have to kind of go to Northern Ireland to find that.

0:39:06 – (Ligon Duncan): But just talk to us about things that we might need to think about that you’ve seen because of where you’ve been situated in your ministry.

0:39:14 – (Matt Smethurst): Speak to us from the future, Glenn.

0:39:19 – (Glen Scrivener): The church of Jesus Christ is doing just fine in the future. The church of Jesus Christ is doing just fine. No matter what the secular authorities say. Jesus is still Lord. No matter who is in the Oval Office or in Westminster or in Canberra, in Australia, I think there is no sense really. Certainly in Australia there’s no sense of saying to the culture anymore, you know, they want to go in this very post, very non Christian direction and you know, know.

0:39:59 – (Glen Scrivener): And it makes sense for the church that has shaped the morals of a nation to say, no, don’t do it, don’t go in this, you know, in this cultural direction, please don’t go. And it totally makes sense at, at various stages of cultural development of secularization for the church to say, hey, we gave you marriage, honestly. And even like gay marriage, you’ve been tweaking with and completely redefining a Christian thing and you’re still dealing with so you still want two people, right? And you still want to give some kind of notion of permanence and for life and that kind of thing.

0:40:48 – (Glen Scrivener): And so it totally makes sense for Christians to say, guys, what are you even doing? Come to Matthew 19. This is what marriage is. It totally makes sense to do that. But in a country’s history, there comes a point where the church, if the culture keeps on going that way, there comes a point where the church just stops kind of throwing itself in front of the stampede and saying, no, wait, no. And there comes a point where you sort of do the Abraham option.

0:41:20 – (Glen Scrivener): And I think I’m riffing on the Benedict option, but the Abraham option from Genesis 14 is Abraham sets up by the trees of Mamre. And there are all sorts of wars that are going on. There’s the Northern Kings, and then there’s the Sodom and Gomorrah and all those five kings down there. And they go through all sorts of back and forwards, and it’s a very unstable time. And Abraham builds the household of faith, and he can still mix it with the best of them. There’s 312 men in his household that can still go. And they do enter into the fray, and they enter into the battle to get lot.

0:41:58 – (Glen Scrivener): And at some stage, for the sake of the household of faith, faith. Abraham will enter into the wars of his day, but then he will never allow the king of Sodom to enrich him in any way, shape or form. And he will instead lead those people towards the great Melchizedek figure, the high priest who comes with bread and wine. And then he will go back to building the household of faith. And I do think that that is the church’s calling to build the household of faith. And I think it’s. In some senses, it can be easier in Australia when we’ve stopped trying to stop the stampede, and we’ve basically come off to one side and we’ve sort of said, okay, you have gone in that direction. We will be over here.

0:42:45 – (Glen Scrivener): We will be a place of refuge for you when you’re ready to be a refugee from the sexual revolution or whatever other stampede that you’re in. In. Involved in right now. So I think the church is more off to one side in both Australia and the uk and it’s okay. It’s okay to be where we are, and we’re seeing fruit there, so don’t fear that if that’s where you end up.

0:43:15 – (Matt Smethurst): I’m happy you brought it there, Glenn, because the church is the hope of the world. And this is a podcast for pastors, so it’s a welcome reminder to us that the dear sheep for whom Jesus prayed and bled and died that have been entrusted to our care for a time, that the local church is God’s ultimate evangelism strategy and preaching through the Book of Acts. And have noticed, just right after the dramatic story of Pentecost 3000 being saved in a day, you immediately have that first snapshot of the compelling life of believers living together, taking responsibility for one another, worshiping.

0:44:02 – (Matt Smethurst): And that remains the most compelling witness to a watching world.

0:44:09 – (Glen Scrivener): Right. The newspapers would have covered all the wars in Genesis 14. The newspapers would have been all covering the five kings versus the four kings. And history is being made in those tents with Abraham and his seed.

0:44:22 – (Ligon Duncan): And if you look at the content of what happens in the next few chapters, it’s especially God teaching Abram about himself. And it just reminds me that one of the ways that pastors can prepare their people to do good cultural apologetics is teach Bible doctrine, but explain to people what it’s for and then show them how it is good and beautiful. As you do that, you’ll actually be helping them have conversations with their neighbors and conversations that are not antagonistic, but conversations that are.

0:44:56 – (Ligon Duncan): We want you to be welcomed to all of these benefits. Let me explain why I believe what I believe.

0:45:04 – (Glen Scrivener): Yeah, I love that.

0:45:06 – (Matt Smethurst): Well, here’s how I’d like to end the interview. I didn’t give Glenn advance warning on this. I didn’t even mention it to Lig, but it just, just it occurs to me we had a lot of fun with Wes Huff when he was on with us doing a bit of a lightning round where we posed some common objections to Christianity and asked him, and, you know, how would he at least begin an answer to a good faith skeptic questioner?

0:45:34 – (Matt Smethurst): And so I’d love to, Glenn, for you to just help pastors think on their feet. So, Glenn, are you game to answer a few quick questions?

0:45:44 – (Glen Scrivener): Yep. Let’s see. Let’s give it a go.

0:45:47 – (Matt Smethurst): Well, we’ve mentioned a couple times just the Bible, we’ve just referenced it, but what would you say to someone. Again, we’re talking about good faith questioners, someone who’s just convinced that the Bible is an outdated book of moral lessons that frankly has some stuff in there that. That we really should embarrass us. It’s not a book to be taken seriously. What would you say?

0:46:12 – (Glen Scrivener): I would say, have you read it? I would say, have you read. And a simple way in is, have you Read a gospel since becoming an adult, have you read one of the four biographies of Jesus? Because I think when you actually have contact with the actual Bible, rather than the idea of the Bible as a poisonous religious document, you’re talking about night and day difference. So I would first of all say, you know, have you read it? And if they do say, ah, no, I have a problem with the Bible precisely because I’ve read it, I think I would then say, well, the way Jesus told us to read the Bible in Matthew chapter 19 as a story that culminates in him.

0:46:52 – (Glen Scrivener): And he said, you know, in the beginning there was a kind of a perfection, there was a fall into hardness of heart in the Old Testament. And Moses gave non ideal laws to the Israelites as part of a story of creation. And then full. And then Jesus said, he has come to be this jubilee, to be this fulfillment of all the strands that the Old Testament was, was weaving together. And so are you reading the Bible as a story that has a sweep to it, that has a shape to it, that is fulfilled in Jesus himself?

0:47:27 – (Glen Scrivener): Because I think that’s the way that Christians view the Bible. And the reason why we love the Bible is not simply because we like ancient texts. It’s because we love Jesus. And question number one, have you read the Bible? But question number two is, and what do you make of him? What do you make of Christ himself?

0:47:44 – (Matt Smethurst): That’s great. And it’s the only story in which the central character loves us back.

0:47:51 – (Glen Scrivener): Okay, I’m stealing that. Thank you, Matt

0:47:56 – (Matt Smethurst): Lig.

0:47:58 – (Ligon Duncan): Let’s say you’re talking with someone and they say, I don’t understand why you need to believe that Jesus is divine. Can’t we just think of him as a good man who showed us what God wants us to be like? Why do you Christians insist on thinking of him as divine? That seems implausible to me. What do you say?

0:48:24 – (Glen Scrivener): Well, I guess the symbol of Christianity is not a ladder, it’s a cross. And if Jesus was a godly man showing us the way to heaven, then I guess the symbol of Christianity would be a ladder. And that sounds attractive in one sense. Don’t we all want 12 rules for life and 12 more rules for life? Don’t we all want to ascend up into the heavenlies through our own behavior? And it sounds good, but it’s a heck of a lot of pressure and I’m not sure I can do that.

0:48:56 – (Glen Scrivener): The symbol at the heart of Christianity is a cross, which is basically a rescue rope coming down from heaven. Here comes here’s the Christian story. God comes to earth to do what we can’t because we’re in the gutter. And that’s a radically different message to self help manuals. It’s also a radically different message to other religions in the world. I think there’s a lot of good advice in other religions around the world. But the problem with those other religions is not that they give bad advice, it’s that all it is is advice.

0:49:26 – (Glen Scrivener): It’s like a voice from heaven say, try, saying try harder. Whereas I know for myself what I need is God coming down to my level to live my life and die my death and rise up again. And so that’s why Christians insist on Jesus being divine. And also it’s kind of the, you get to, when you read about Jesus, have you read a gospel since becoming an adult? I know that when I read through the Gospels, I was expecting to meet a good teacher trying to show me the way.

0:49:55 – (Glen Scrivener): And instead I was meeting this laughing, shouting, crying, bleeding human sacrifice who is also claiming to be God. And on every page of the Gospels he seems to make these kinds of divine claims. And it’s the sort of thing that forces you to reconsider who, who God is as well as who Jesus is. And I think it’s the most wonderful kind of reconfiguration you can have. That’s, that’s what Christians mean by repentance, to kind of to rethink everything and go, that’s what God looks like. It looks like this one with arms outstretched to the world. And at that point I’m like, well, if that’s what God’s like, I’m in.

0:50:31 – (Ligon Duncan): Yeah, I think that’s exactly the way to go on that. And I, I do think that our, our 19th century liberal friends that wanted to make Jesus a less than divine being were actually trying to make Christianity like every other world religion. And they had no idea what they were undoing there. That the uniqueness of Christianity is that God himself has to save us. And I do think you pick it up in the most remarkable ways in the Gospel because this man moves so comfortably amongst sinners and yet, yet they instinctively recognize that though he loves them, he is not like them.

0:51:14 – (Ligon Duncan): And for three centuries, really, really, until you get to the time of Arius, almost no one will question his divinity. They’ll question his humanity in early Christianity, but they won’t question his divinity for three centuries. And I think it just jumps off the pages of the Gospels.

0:51:35 – (Glen Scrivener): And just on that, I love that there’s a place In Contra Arianus, where Athanasius kind of addresses Arius and, you know, Arius is saying that Jesus is a divine figure, but not one being with the Father. And Athanasius says to Arius, my dear Arius, some words to this effect. You do not understand the grace of God. And I just think that’s really interesting. The questions are around the. The divinity of Christ are actually questions about the grace of God and. And vice versa.

0:52:06 – (Ligon Duncan): Amen.

0:52:06 – (Matt Smethurst): And would you say the same for the skeptic who’s saying, okay, well, I respect Jesus too. I. I hear a lot about what you’re saying. But. But why do you Christians have to insist that he’s the only way to God?

0:52:20 – (Glen Scrivener): You can answer that question and make it sound like Jesus is a really tiny little gateway into this much larger thing called God. God, Right. And it can sound arbitrary and narrow and a bigoted fundamentalism to say Jesus is the only way to God when what you’re communicating is little Jesus is the way to this much more expansive thing called God, which is precisely what Arius and Athanasius were fighting over. And Athanasius rightly wins the day by saying, it’s not little Jesus, like the true light who enlightens everyone, was coming into the world, says John 1:9.

0:53:08 – (Glen Scrivener): He is the Logos who is in the bosom of the Father. He is God from God, light from light, very God from very God. He is the one through whom all things were made. To talk about the exclusivity of Christ is another way of talking about the supremacy of Christ. We’re talking about our Maker. When we’re talking about Jesus, we’re not just talking about a tiny little goblet called Jesus. That was Arius’s problem.

0:53:34 – (Glen Scrivener): And I’m afraid sometimes when Christians answer this question, they can give the impression that the exclusivity of Christ is, oh, it is a bit narrow and nasty, but we’ve got to lump it. It’s the cost of being a Christian. It’s the cost of joining the Jesus club. And I know it doesn’t really make sense, whereas I think scripturally, how does John begin? In the beginning was the Word. The Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him, all things were made. Without him, nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind, like the life that John describes in John’s Gospel.

0:54:08 – (Glen Scrivener): Again, we detach the meaning of that word from Jesus, and we imagine it just means Willy Wonka’s. Golden ticket. We imagine that life just means bliss in the ninth dimension. The life that John is talking about is the eternal life of God. It’s the eternal life of God. And so obviously the one who has been participating in eternal life filled with the spirit God from God in the bosom of the Father, the one who has been enjoying that eternal life, he fully God, comes to give it to little old Matt and little old Lig and little old Glen and little old Lisner.

0:54:46 – (Glen Scrivener): And now we are in on the eternal life life of God because Jesus himself is eternal life. So it’s not that Jesus is this weird, arbitrary minor detour that gets us to this other thing called God or eternal life or heaven. It’s Jesus is heaven. Jesus is eternal life. Jesus is God. And that still doesn’t solve the problem. Oh, that seems, you know, I haven’t seen things like that. But then at that point you just say, well, you need to meet Jesus.

0:55:18 – (Glen Scrivener): Because I don’t see if you’re reading through Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, I don’t see how you can’t see this guy walking on water. You don’t think he’s God, this guy healing like this and speaking like that, you don’t think he’s eternal man. If he’s not God, I don’t know who God is. You know, that’s the way to approach that.

0:55:37 – (Ligon Duncan): I think that’s good. And that means that when we meet the objection. How can you say that he’s the only way? What they’re really saying is I want to be able to go to the God of my own imagination. And it’s not that, oh well, we all want to go to the true God. Why do we have to go through Jesus? Well, no, you’re really saying, no, I want to go to a different God.

0:56:02 – (Glen Scrivener): And you are in fact saying if you don’t want to go to Jesus, you want to go to the true God. That’s not Jesus. What are you saying about Jesus? There he is. He’s there in front of you. Don’t you want him?

0:56:12 – (Ligon Duncan): It’s good.

0:56:12 – (Matt Smethurst): God’s perfect man. Man’s perfect God. I think Augustine said. I have read in Plato and Cicero many sayings, wise and beautiful, but never in either. Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Last question, Glenn. You mentioned bigoted fundamentalism. How is the Christian, the biblical sexual ethic, not bigoted and harmful?

0:56:40 – (Glen Scrivener): Sex is powerful, and therefore the. The Bible insists on it being stewarded carefully and wisely. It’s powerful, it’s holy, it’s dangerous. It’s like fire. And there is one place in my house where you can light a fire safely in the fireplace. If you light a fire anywhere else but in the fireplace, you will burn down my house. And the Bible is just wise enough to say something that’s very different from what culture is saying.

0:57:18 – (Glen Scrivener): Culture is saying sex is a leisure activity. And the Bible is like, no, no, it’s holy fire. It’s holy fire. And there is a place for it and it is a very exclusive place. And that might not jive with the cultural narrative that we have around, around inclusion, but I think our culture is speaking out both sides of its mouth when it talks about sex. I think our culture, the, the part that has really inherited from the Christian sexual ethic says that, yeah, consent is our highest ideal when it comes to comes to sex.

0:58:00 – (Glen Scrivener): And that non consensual sex is the worst thing that can ever happen to a person. And Christians agree with that. But then at the same time, the cultural narrative is, but our bodies are like playgrounds and sex is a leisure activity. And the Christian is trying to heal the cognitive dissonance of the non Christian at that point and say, well, pick one. I either your body is like a temple and sex is very significant, or your body is like a playground and sex is a leisure activity.

0:58:32 – (Glen Scrivener): But when sex goes wrong, you know that it is not a leisure activity. Like if leisure activities go wrong, you give it one star on TripAdvisor. If sex goes wrong in some of these ways, people go to prison, and rightfully so. Sex is significant. Bodies, temples, gender is important. And I think the world is re waking up to that fact. And once you reweave together just those truths that my gendered embodied life is significant and my wife’s gendered embodied life is significant, that sex is significant, that bodies are like temples, you reweave those things together. And when you put the needs of children ahead of the desires, attractions of parents, when you weave those things together, you get something like the Christian sexual ethic. And it has been for the utter blessing of the world.

0:59:30 – (Glen Scrivener): And I question whether the sexual revolution of the 1960s has done anything like as much for the world as the Jesus sexual revolution of the first century.

0:59:40 – (Matt Smethurst): Yeah, Amen. And not just true, but beautiful and good. Glenn, I’ve long been an admirer of your work and have benefited so much. I don’t mean to embarrass you, but listeners should know that Wes Huff has publicly said that Glenn is one of the if not currently, the best living evangelists he knows of. So I really want to encourage pastors to to look into Glenn’s work. Get a copy of the air we breathe three two one.

1:00:14 – (Matt Smethurst): Check out the three two one course on 321course.com and subscribe to the Speak Life YouTube channel. And while you’re at it, pick up a copy of the new TGC video curriculum. Making Sense of Us. Glenn, thanks so much for joining us and serving pastors today.

1:00:32 – (Glen Scrivener): Thank you for embarrassing me, Matt,

1:00:36 – (Matt Smethurst): all the way across the pond.

1:00:37 – (Ligon Duncan): And thanks L too great to be with you, Glenn.

1:00:41 – (Matt Smethurst): Thank you all for joining in to this episode of the Everyday Pastor. We hope it’s been useful to you. Please recommend it to a friend so that we can all understand the culture we inhabit and know how best to reach it with the good news of Jesus Christ. Thanks for listening.

1:01:00 – (Glen Scrivener): Sa.