Confronting Christianity

Please note that due to the software used, not everything recorded in this transcript will be accurate

Rebecca McLaughlin:
And when people say, oh, you know, I think the Bible condemns same sex relationships. One of the things I, I wanna be quick to say is actually I don’t think so. I think the Bible commands same sex relationships for Christians. I. That are not sexual, but actually incredibly important and powerful. Um, Paul, who, who wrote many of the texts, uh, in the New Testament, he talked about Christians as being one body with each other as being knit together in love. He’s all this incredibly intimate language about how Christians should relate to each other. There’s a beauty around. The Biblical boundaries on sex because it actually creates space for different kinds of relationships that give us different angles on what it means for Jesus to love us.

Studio – John Dickson:

That’s Rebecca McLaughlin, and just a taste of the learned, feisty intellectual character you’re gonna meet in this episode. You can read her full bio on her website, but among other things, she has a PhD in English Literature from Cambridge University, a degree in theology from Oak Hill College, and a list of international writing credits as long as your arm. She was also the vice president of content. For the Veritas Forum in the US where she basically identified and equipped Christian professors in mainstream universities to speak about their faith in connection with their work. She’s also the author of 2020s Christian Book of the Year, confronting Christianity 12 Hard Questions for the world’s largest religion. It’s frankly brilliant. Rebecca basically asks, is Christianity a viable worldview or is there just too much going against it? I caught up with her in Boston or Cambridge, Massachusetts to be precise and she is rather precise and I fired at her. My top questions confronting Christianity and then I shut up and let her talk. And I think you’ll be happier about that. And I think you’ll be surprised at some of her Undeceptions. I am John Dickson, and this is Undeceptions.

Undeceptions theme

Director Mark:

It is often said that Britain’s church congregations are shrinking, but that doesn’t come close to expressing the scale of the disaster now facing Christianity in this country. Between 2001 and 2011, the number of Christians born in Britain fell by 5.3 million, about 10,000 a week. If that rate of decline continues, the mission of Saint Augustine to the English will come to an end. In 2067, that is the year in which the Christians who have inherited the faith that their British ancestors will become statistically invisible. Damien Thompson, the Spectator.

Studio – John Dickson:

Christianity in decline seems to be a favorite media trope. The narrative that fewer and fewer people believe in God and go to church and all that stuff, and so it’s gonna go away any moment. Now, is there any point defending Christianity? It might not even be around in a few generations. That’s where Rebecca and I begin.

John Dickson:
Uh, Rebecca, just about everything we see in the media tells us that religion is on the way out. That sec secularism is just the great march. Uh, you’re not so sure.

Rebecca McLaughlin:
I’m actually quite sure that it’s not, and that’s not my opinion. I. 40 odd years ago, pretty much every sociologist of religion worth their salt thought exactly what you just articulated, that religion was on its way out. That as, as the world became more modern, more scientific, more educated, that religious belief would naturally decline. But that prophecy has actually failed. And not only are we not seeing a less religious world now, but as sociologists now look out over the next 40 years to 2060, they’re anticipating an increasingly religious world.

John Dickson:
Is this just because, you know, the ignorant masses outside our educated environment are religious and they’re just, you know, bigger populations than us.

Rebecca McLaughlin:
Well, so the irony is that part of the, the foundational thought behind what was called the secularization hypothesis, this idea that the world as it became more modern would become more secular. Was that this is what had happened in Western Europe and there was this idea that where Western Europe led, obviously the rest of the world would follow. And that turns out to have been pretty much a kind of white, Western centric arrogance that we’re only just now realizing. And there’s an irony in the sort of upper echelons of the educated world in the West right now, which is that this idea of global secularization is still very much, um, preeminent. But it’s actually been proven false by empirical evidence. So there’s an interesting guy named, um, Fang Yang, who’s a leading expert of sociology of religion in China. And he anticipates that the university in the west is gonna have to go through a paradigm shift, much like a scientific revolution. He puts it when the failure of the hypothesis that the world is becoming less, less religious, comes home to roost. Now there there is the reality that religious people have more kids. So that’s absolutely at play, but the idea that education necessarily produces atheism or agnosticism is actually pretty weak. As a hy hypothesis,

Studio – John Dickson:

Western commentators seem to have overstepped the mark. To paraphrase Mark Twain reports of Christianity’s death have been greatly exaggerated, but there’s plenty more I want to throw at Rebecca.

Media – Christopher Hitchens

Studio – John Dickson:

That’s the late great Christopher Hitchens, a champion of world atheism. I’ve often thought of him as God’s favorite atheist because he was just so charming and witty. Anyway, that’s him railing against one of the many evils that Christianity imposes on the world. He puts our next question bluntly. Why embrace something that’s obviously bad for us?

John Dickson:
You confront the claim that religion is. Bad for us. Mm. By declaring the opposite, it’s good for us in multiple ways. Are you just being a contrarian?

Rebecca McLaughlin:
No, I mean, again, I’m literally just following very well documented evidence coming out of places like Harvard. So there’s a guy named Tyler Vanderville, who’s one of the leading experts of, uh, the, um, physical and mental benefits of religion. He’s at Harvard School of Public Health down the, down the road here, and he argues from a, a wealth of empirical data. That regular religious participation, so for example, going to church once a week or more is good for our health and for our happiness and for our pro-social behavior. It’s even to the extent that, for example, you probably know that smoking is bad for you and that if you quit smoking, then you have a sort of bump in your, um, health outcomes. It turns out that going to church once a week or more is an equivalent health benefit to quitting smoking. Also equivalent to eating more fruits and vegetables, which all of our mothers have told us to do at various points in our lives. So you could take up smoking and keep going to church, and you’d be on a par with your, your secular friends.

Media – CNN clip

Studio – John Dickson:

That’s CNN reporting on President Donald Trump receiving the support of a coalition of American Evangelical Christian leaders, which in this case was represented by a group of largely white aging men. Not that there’s anything wrong with white aging men, but it does reinforce a stereotype that Christianity has a limited demographic. Isn’t Christianity white and male, and therefore the enemy of diversity?

Rebecca McLaughlin:
Gosh, again, this is one of the deep ironies of the secularization hypothesis because right now, despite this perception that atheism, or at least secular humanism is the worldview of diversity and progress, it’s actually the worldview of white western men and communist regimes. So if you look in America, the proportion of of, um, people who identify as atheist is much higher among white men than it is among the average population. And the most typical Christian, both in America and globally, is a woman of color.

Studio – John Dickson:

According to the Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in the us, a pretty prestigious place actually. The Christian faith far from shrinking is growing at 0.07% faster than the world’s population is growing. And it’s anything but white Christianity is barely growing in Europe and only doing slightly better in North America, but it is growing in Oceania and Latin America and it’s exploding in Asia and Africa. To many Christianity appears, um, absolutist. How could there possibly what be one grand faith one way in spiritual matters?

Rebecca McLaughlin:
I think there’s a, a, an important insight at the heart of why people think that. And that is a sense that we humans naturally tend toward arrogance and we tend toward wanting to prove that we’re, we are right and other people are wrong. Uh, we tend to want to feel morally superior to others. So I think that there is a. A good core insight that drives people to say, actually, maybe it’s arrogant to say there’s only one true faith. However, I think if we look at that more closely, I. We’ll find out that it turns out to not be a humble posture at all, but actually quite an arrogant posture because in order to say that all religions are equally true, you actually can’t take the belief system of any religion seriously. And you are, you are ultimately saying none of these belief systems have any real claim on objective truth. And when it comes to Christianity in particular, one of the awkward things about Christianity is that. It makes a very specific, historically grounded truth claims. Most importantly, the claim that Jesus was raised from the dead, and this is not some sort of peripheral belief of Christianity. It’s right at the heart of the Gospel for Christians and Christians claim that this first century Jewish man named Jesus of Nazareth, died on a cross and three days later was physically raised from the dead. Now if we look even at the two other great monotheistic religions, so the ones closest to Christianity in many ways, Islam and Judaism, we find that they make different claims about this historical event. So, um, Jews and for that matter, budhist and Hindus and atheists and agnostics would say that Jesus died, but he was not raised. Muslims say that he didn’t die, but just seemed to. So when it comes to a very specific concrete historical claim. The three great monotheistic religions take different views and only one of them can be right. And I think people sometimes find this hard to grasp because they think, well, you know, 2000 years is a long time ago. It’s hard to prove exactly what happened that long ago. Fine. But it is still the case that either Jesus was raised from the dead or he wasn’t. It’s not a kind of both end scenario.

Media – Franz Deval

Studio – John Dickson:

That’s Franz Deval, professor of primate behavior in the Department of Psychology at Emory University on Big think.com. He’s suggesting that religion is a late comer to the morality party, that it was sort of tacked onto morality to bolster the moral authority and impulse. The historian in me wants to ask what he makes of the fact that most of the oldest religions didn’t have. Moral systems, but he does raise an interesting area of inquiry whether religion is necessary for morality.

John Dickson:
How do you respond to secularist thinkers like Stephen Pinker, who famously has said, really, it’s secularism that has promoted the moral good in the west, and religion generally hinders the growth of morality.

Rebecca McLaughlin: I’m reading a really interesting book right now by a British atheist historian called Tom Holland. Uh, it’s called Dominion. I think the subtitle, it’s different in the UK and the us, but it’s something like Dominion, um, how the Christian movement changed the world and in it, Holland, who is not a Christian, is looking at the history of ideas and he’s pointing out to us that things that we today see as moral norms. Regardless of your religious perspective. So for example, the idea that all human beings are equally morally valuable, that, um, humans should be given human rights, that men and women are equally valuable, that racial diversity is a moral good, and that people, you know, starving in the slums in Calcutta can make moral demands on us sitting in Cambridge, Massachusetts here. Now, all of these seem to us be self-evident claims. But actually, if you look at the history of ideas, there are claims that have been brought to us by Christianity.

Studio – John Dickson:

Hey, excuse me for interrupting, Rebecca, but actually, if you want more on this particular topic. Uh, last season, episode four, Moral Classics. We interviewed, uh, Theresa Morgan, uh, one of the professors of classics at Oxford University, and it was astonishing the way she described that Christianity brought into the classical world this notion that not only does. God love human beings. As a result, human beings are to love one another. And she says that was the single greatest contribution of Christianity to the classical world. Anyway, back to Rebecca.

Rebecca McLaughlin:
And so if you, if you take a his historical view, you’ll find that even the moral standards against which atheist and agnostic leaders like Stephen Pinker are evaluating are actually Christian moral values. Like, why do we care about the poor and the marginalized? If you look back at the Greco-Roman world, you wouldn’t have that expectation. You wouldn’t have the expectation that that women were equally morally valuable to men. You wouldn’t, um, have the expectation that, that the poor and the oppressed and the marginalized and the sick deserved the attention and help of the powerful and the strong and the rich.

Studio – John Dickson: 

Atheism wants to have its cake and eat it. Rebecca is saying it wants an ultimately meaningless universe, and yet to borrow some of the Bible’s best lines, humility, care for the unknown, vulnerable, and so on. The obvious next question, confronting Christianity is its history of violence, of denying the good. I put that to Rebecca after the break. 

Break

The obvious next question confronting Christianity is its history of violence. For years I’ve been fascinated by this particular challenge confronting Christianity. Monty Python’s holy grail puts it humorously, King Arthur about to smite someone for not believing he’s God’s chosen one. But it’s a serious question.

Media – Monty Python clip

Studio – John Dickson:

It’s a playful way of putting it, but there’s no hiding from the harsh realities of church history.

John Dickson:
But surely the history of Christian violence from the crusades to the European wars and so on, uh, suggests that Christianity is incapable of promoting peace and may in fact be a trigger for violence.

Rebecca McLaughlin:
Again, this is a very widely believed view and so one that it’s important for us to grapple with. And the first thing I wanna say is that a core insight of Christianity is that we, human beings are utterly morally. Depraved out of our hearts, Jesus says, comes all sorts of horrible things, including murder and including adultery and including, you know, the, the cruel things that we see in the world from a Christian perspective are what one would expect from human beings. Given our understanding of, of what human beings are, and particularly in order to become a Christian, you need to acknowledge that you’re a total moral failure. And that you could only ever stand before a holy, just and righteous God on the basis of Jesus’s goodness and not your own. So that’s the, the, the first thing that’s important to acknowledge Christians are moral failures, not moral successes. As we look back over the last 2000 years, we see many examples of Christian moral failure. As we look around the world today, and as we look frankly inside our own hearts, we see many examples of Christian moral failure. However, as I was just noting, Christianity has defined goodness for us to the extent that we, we only see some moral acts in the last 2000 years as horrific because of the moral standards that Jesus has given us. So in the ancient world, the idea of conquering another, um, another army or another nation and basically, you know, raping the women and killing all the men. That was just like a good deal. No, nobody had moral qualms about that, that that was like the, the sort of victory march that, that you would do because of Christianity. We’re like, wait a minute. Jesus told us to love even our enemies. Uh, he didn’t endorse this, this kind of behavior. And so we are, we rightly looked back at times when Christians have acted in violent ways, you know, on massed toward others with, with horror. That’s not because of Christian ethics. It’s in spite of Christian ethics. And if we compare the fruit of Christianity in terms of violence and, and what we now see as immoral behavior, if we compare the fruit of Christianity to the fruit of other competing worldview, we actually find Christianity comes out very well. So, for example, I mean, horrifically uh, communism, um, in the last a hundred years has. Been responsible for untold amounts of, of violence and, and murder and genocide and communism at, at first blush. Sounds like a great idea, but I think what communism doesn’t take into account that Christianity does is the fact that we humans are fundamentally. Morally flawed. And so I think if you make a fair comparison between Christianity and Islam, between Christianity and Communism, between Christianity and fascism, between Christianity and the other sort of big belief systems that have been going around in the last century, even just in the last century, Christianity comes out extremely well.

Studio – John Dickson:

The Bible isn’t just one book, it’s a library of authors who write in a rich and diverse set of styles. So it’s kind of cool that Rebecca has a PhD in English literature ’cause she actually loves the way the Bible can be very prosaic at points and then classically poetic and everything in between. Take the book of Proverbs where wisdom, uh, walks onto the stage as a noble woman.

READING:

To you, o people, I call out, I raise my voice to all mankind. You who are simple, gain prudence. You who are foolish. Set your hearts on it. Listen for I have trustworthy things to say. I open my lips to speak What is right? My mouth speaks. What is true for my lips? Detest wickedness. All the words of my mouth are just, none of them is crooked or perverse to the discerning. All of them are right. They are upright to those who have found knowledge. Choose my instruction instead of silver knowledge rather than choice Gold. Full wisdom is more precious than rubies and nothing you desire can compare with her.

John Dickson:
You seem keen to observe the Bible’s literary and metaphorical forms, but critics might reply that when Christians don’t take the Bible literally, it’s often because they’re trying to avoid looking like idiots in the light of modern evidence. So is your, uh, love for metaphor and so on, just a relic of your, um, doctorate in English literature? Uh, or, or is it something more substantial? It.

Rebecca McLaughlin:
It’s certainly partly a relic because I do love, love a good metaphor, but so do Jesus. And this is the funny thing. I dunno. Some of your listeners may have come across these red letter Bibles, which are bibles, where only the direct reported speech of Jesus is picked out and read. And there are some people who would even describe themselves as red letter Christians, where they say, I wanna follow what Jesus says, just those red letters. And I’m kind of, uh, not so sure about the, the rest of the Bible. There are all sorts of theological problems with that. But let’s just approach this from the question of metaphor. Jesus uses more metaphors than basically anybody else. Now you see metaphors throughout the scriptures, very importantly, and Jesus often taps into those metaphors. But when Jesus calls himself the true vine. We don’t just lack faith to believe that he’s really a plant. We, we recognize that he’s tapping into this beautiful Old Testament metaphor, uh, in which Israel was, was a vine, and that Jesus now is the, the true vine. Or when Jesus says, uh, that he is the light of the world, again, we are not thinking well, Jesus was in fact just a collection of photons. Give that a sort of scientific analysis. We see that Jesus is saying something profound about the, the reality that without him there is nothing but darkness. Or when, um, Jesus says that he is the, um, the good shepherd, we don’t think, oh, well, clearly he spent a lot of his time with little fairy animals. We think, oh, no, he’s, he’s tapping into this, this Old Testament idea that God’s people were like sheep and God himself was like the shepherd. So the idea that you either take the Bible literally or you don’t, that it’s sort of an on off switch to use a metaphor, it is, is thoroughly misleading because even if you only really want to take the words of Jesus seriously, which I don’t advocate, um, making that distinction at all, but even there, you, you are forced to recognize that God often expresses profound and important truths through metaphor.

John Dickson:

Let’s press pause. I’ve got a five-minute Jesus for you. One of Jesus’ hardest teachings was delivered in metaphor hell, I’m sometimes asked if I believe in hell. I think I must give off the vibe sometimes that I’m a soft theologian who doesn’t go with all those archaic hard bits in Christianity. Uh, I actually do. I am not sure. I believe in the hell people usually think of when they say the word, but I do believe in the hell Jesus talked about and he talked about it more than anyone else in the Bible. Fire brimstone and all the rest of it. But Jesus used picture language that’s really clear just as the Bible speaks of heaven having pearly gates. Jesus spoke of hell as darkness one minute and fire the next. So in Matthew eight, we hear Jesus say. They will be thrown outside into the darkness where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. But in Matthew 25, he speaks of it this way. Depart from me, you who are cursed into the eternal fire, prepared for the devil and his angels. So this is clearly metaphor on the part of Jesus. You can’t have darkness and fire in the same place at the same time. But what does the scary image mean? It isn’t a theological scare tactic good or you’ll burn in hell. Uh, it’s basically about justice. It’s God’s pledge to bring his justice to bear on every evil act. I mean, who wants human traffickers, for example, to get away with their crimes forever? Not me. Hell tells me they won’t get away with it, even if they seem to get away with it in this life. And one of Jesus’ scariest parables makes this point about justice powerfully. And metaphorically, he speaks of a king separating sheep from goats to the sheep. On his right, he says, take your inheritance. The kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink. I was a stranger, and you invited me in. It goes on. It’s all about how we treat the vulnerable. Those who know the love of God are meant to. Treat others with that love. But then he says to those on his left, the goats depart from me, you who are cursed into the eternal fire for I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat. I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, and so on. He’s talking about those who neglected the poor, and by doing so, we’re neglecting Jesus himself. The other interesting thing Jesus says about hell is that it’s not the same experience for everyone. Some will receive greater judgment than others, and again, he puts this teaching in a metaphor. His Luke 12, the servant who knows the will and does not get ready or does not do what the master wants, will be beaten with many blows. But the one who does not know and does things deserving punishment will be beaten with few blows. So there’s a difference in judgment in this parable. Jesus taught what you might call proportional judgment if it makes sense for the human trafficker to experience some level of judgment. It also makes sense to me that the rest of us would experience a degree of judgment proportional to our own participation in evil. The metaphor corresponds to reality and the most striking thing Jesus said about all this judgment stuff. He also put in a metaphor. He said that his death would take the judgment of hell for any who wanted at his final meal. This is the way he put it. I’m quoting from Matthew 26. He, he took the cup and when he’d given thanks, he gave it to them, saying, drink from it, all of you. This is my blood of the covenant. Which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins. So here’s the most controversial thing about all this judgment stuff. I mean, way more controversial than the thought that God might judge us, is the promise. That he would forgive us anyone, even the human trafficker who wants forgiveness. The fact that Jesus put all this stuff in images and metaphors doesn’t for me take away from the reality. It makes it somehow more confronting. These things are so profound, so significant. Our normal ways of speaking just become inadequate. Only metaphor can bear the burden of such grave and beautiful realities. You can press play now.

Media – Richard Dawkins clip

John Dickson:

That’s Richard Dawkins on ABC’s Q and A program making possibly the most uncomfortable criticism of Christianity. It’s assertion that there is a hell to which people who reject God are heading.

John Dickson:
You say that every other question pales in comparison to the problem of a loving God sending people to hell. Is this where Christianity just has to admit it has some views that are mean-spirited scaremongering?

Rebecca McLaughlin:
I don’t think it’s mean-spirited scaremongering. I, I do think it’s offensive. I think many of, many Christian beliefs are, are offensive and in some ways I think we’re better to kind of acknowledge that upfront and start those, those conversations there. I think that the question of whether, um, talking about hell is mean, spirit and scare maning depends on whether there is such a reality to be talked about. We’re, we’re sitting in a building together right now, and if, if this building caught fire, um, and I didn’t tell you that’d be extremely unkind and unloving to you. If it wasn’t on fire and I told you that it was on fire and got you, you know, terrified and wanting to jump outta the window because it, you thought the building was on fire, that would be cruel. So the question is whether this reality of hell. It is a reality or whether it’s a fiction. And people, sometimes even atheists, will sometimes say, well, we kind of like Jesus. We just don’t like the rest of Christianity or the rest of the Bible in the Old Testament, and all those sort of other awkward things. But you know, we, we’ll keep Jesus. Jesus talks about God’s judgment more than any Old Testament prophet. If we only listen to his exact words, we need to take the reality of hell very seriously. And I think it is cruel and unloving and mean-spirited to not warn people about something so incredibly important.

John Dickson:
That makes perfect sense from your perspective as someone who believes in hell. But I, I guess the question is why would God who who presents as loving us then end up condemning us in some awful, eternal situation? It’s the God perspective that is most problematic.

Rebecca McLaughlin:
Yeah. Again, I would actually go back to the things that Jesus says about himself. If Jesus is in his own words, the light of the world, then let’s imagine we reject Jesus. Where, where does that leave us? Leave us in utter darkness if Jesus is the, the bread of life as he claims. And, and he was claiming that in a culture where bread was very much a staple diet, if we reject the bread of life, where does that leave us? It leaves us starving. If Jesus is the way and the truth and the life as he claims, and we reject the way and the truth of the, and the life, then we are lost. We are, we’re just stumbling around in, in darkness and death. So there is a fundamental logic. To how the Bible describes hell, which is contingent on how the Bible describes Jesus. When we reject Jesus, we might think it’s no big deal because we don’t realize how much goodness from God we have right now.

John Dickson:
You seem pretty comfortable with the progress of science. You don’t seem like one of these anxious Christians worried that science is gonna discover something that causes the faith to collapse.

Rebecca McLaughlin:
Indeed, one of my favorite discoveries of the last five years is a, a wonderful man called Hans Halverson, who’s a professor at Princeton, uh, in philosophy, and particularly in philosophy of science. And Hans is one of the top four philosophers of science in the world. And I had some sense when reading other sources that Christians had literally invented what we now understand to be science. Uh, the idea of having a hypothesis and testing it empirically, et cetera, et cetera. And, and, and that’s absolutely true, but Hans points out that it’s not just a kind of historical accident that Christians happened to invent the modern scientific method, ’cause, you know, right place at the right time, but that actually it was because of their beliefs about God. So we sometimes see science as an alternative hypothesis to a creator God. Bhan says No. The first scientists believed two things about God. Well, many things, but two particularly relevant things. First, that God was rational, and second, that God was free. And because God was rational, which they picked up from the Bible, the fact that God seems to create with order and that he seems to be interested in, in giving consistent moral laws that apply across the, the world, rather than just being very specific to, to particular places, they thought, Hmm, maybe this created, God created the universe according to rational principles or underlying. Laws that we as creatures made in God’s image as the Book of Genesis at the beginning of the Bible claims could figure out. But they also believe that God was free. And because God is free, he can create the universe any way he likes. So the only way to find out what those underlying principles are is to go and look. And that was the, the philosophical basis for the modern scientific method. And Hans Halon, again, one of the top four philoso of science in the world. He says that even today, Christianity and Theism provides a better philosophical foundation for science than atheism does. In fact, he says atheism doesn’t give you a philosophical foundation for science at all.

John Dickson:
I think some listeners will be, uh, going to purchase that book and argue with it.

Studio – John Dickson:

Also, on the list of arguments confronting Christianity is the church’s long established opposition to homosexuality.

Media – news clip

John Dickson:
The Bible’s alleged homophobia is one of the most difficult, uh, questions today. How do you thread that needle? Especially when this question isn’t just theoretical for you.

Rebecca McLaughlin:
I, I think as, as Christians, we have noticed the boundaries that the Bible gives us around sex, which is, is not only prohibiting same sex, sexual behavior, but actually prohibiting any kind of sexual behavior outside the very specific, once in a lifetime commitment of marriage. And we’ve thought that’s all the Bible has to say. But in fact, if you look at the Bible, and we’re gonna go back to to metaphor here. You, you’ll realize that the whole point of male and female, from a Christian perspective, the whole point of romance and sexuality and marriage is actually not about us. It’s it’s about Jesus. And we see in, in Ephesians chapter five, uh, a letter that Paul, uh, wrote to the early church in Ephesus. He describes human marriage as like a little scale model of Jesus’ love for his church. And Jesus’ love for his church is, is unique in some particular ways. It’s, it’s a love across difference, which is pictured for us actually in, in the fact that Christian marriage is male female. It’s a love built on sacrifice. And it’s a, it’s a never ending life, creating flesh, uniting, exclusive kind of love. So I think before we can have any kind of conversation about what does the Bible say about, about sexuality, we need to understand the basic point that the Bible’s trying to make to us through the fact that God created male and female in the first place. Now I, uh, for as long as I can remember, um, I was always romantically attracted to women. So this is a question that’s been, you know, very personal and, and important for me. And one where, you know, people sometimes say, oh, well, you know, you, you’ve looked at the Bible through a kind of lens of homophobia wanting it to say that, um, sex outside of heterosexual marriage is, is okay, and that that gay marriage is, is okay for Christians.

Um, and so you’ve come to that conclusion. Actually, I’ve kind of done the reverse. There probably times in my life, I, I would’ve been quite pleased to look at the Bible and conclude that actually gay marriage was, was fine for Christians, but I, I don’t think it is. And I think, I think the Bible’s very clear about that. But I think the other piece that’s been really missing from the conversation is that the Bible doesn’t affirm. The kind of mantra love is love in the sense that, um, we use that, that language today. It, it affirms that God is love, but it actually gives us different kinds of relationships through which to glimpse God’s love. Marriage is one of them. Parenting is one of them actually, because a God, um, is described as a father and also compared to a mother in the scriptures interestingly. So he glimpse a little bit of God’s love through the best possible parent-child relationships, but also through friendship. Jesus famously said that greater love has no one than this, that he laid down his life for his friends. And when people say, oh, well, you know, I think the Bible condemns same sex relationships. One of the things I, I wanna be quick to say is actually I don’t think so. I think the Bible commands same sex relationships for Christians that are not sexual, but actually incredibly important and powerful. Um, Paul who, who wrote many of the texts, uh, in the New Testament, that that prohibit or sort of clarify that the Old Testament prohibitions on, um, on gay relationships that kind of continue in, in the new covenant, he called his friend. His very heart. Um, he said he was among the thessalonian Christians like a nursing mother with our children. He talked about Christians as being one body with each other, as being knit together in love. He’s all this incredibly intimate language about how Christians should relate to each other and, and in particular, I think that is a, a way in which Christians are the same. Sex should relate to each other. So there is, um, a, a beauty in my mind, and this is something, you know, over many years that a conclusion that I’ve come to, there’s, there’s a beauty around the biblical boundaries on sex because it actually creates space for different kinds of relationships that give us us different angles on what it means for Jesus to love us.

John Dickson:
How did you come to believe all this? What, what are the most important. Factors that drew you to this place?

Rebecca McLaughlin:
I came from a very sort of religiously complicated family of a sort of Catholic family mother and a Anglican father and, you know, sort of mixed, um, uh, church setups. Uh, and from an early age I was kind of the odd one out at the rather academic schools that I was going to because I was very serious about believing in Jesus. Um, and years of conversations with. People who were, um, either hostile to Christianity or skeptical of Christianity or just sort of confused by Christianity, uh, have had the effect for me, not of disturbing or diminishing my faith, but actually making me more sure because I’ve tried to be quite deliberate and I continued to try to be quite deliberate about spending time with really clever people who fundamentally disagree with me and hearing their best arguments and ideas. Their best claims on truth, they’re their best hopes for the world, and I’m actually increasingly sure that Christianity is true. After those conversations with those very intelligent people.

Undeceptions theme

Studio John Dickson:

I hope you enjoyed listening to Rebecca’s spirited defense of all this stuff. There’s much more, of course, in her wonderful book, confronting Christianity. There’s a link in the show notes for this episode. I’m not exaggerating when I say I think it’s the best defense of the Christian faith to appear in a decade even better than Tim Keller’s Reason for God. I hope that’s not a heresy. One challenge in particular we left out of this episode is that Christianity has no place for women, and Rebecca will be returning in an upcoming episode to Undeceptions on that one. Stay tuned.