ACC - Key Persons

Job Titles:

• Primary Teacher

From a young age Alison practised teaching her brother and anyone else who happened to be near. At the age of 15 she was the coord...

Job Titles:

• Principal
• It Must'Ve Been Flattering. Was It

Good morning everybody, and welcome to another episode of The Inspiration Project podcast, that conversation where we get to meet people who are of devout Christian faith and who have been able to explore the heights of academic and professional excellence. I say it is a personal honour and privilege today to be speaking to Dr. Vishal Mangalwadi. Dr. Mangalwadi was born in 1949, in one of the provinces of India. He graduated from the University of Allahabad in 1969. He obtained a Master's of Philosophy at the University of Indore in 1973, then in 1974 was the co-founder of the Theological Research and Communication Institute. After an extensive career involved in charities, in political science, and in further academic studies, he was awarded a doctorate in 2003 by William Carey International University. In 2009, he started to develop his thesis on the truth and transformation, encouraging local churches around the world to become centres of learning and service. He's most well-known in terms of the global community for two very significant treaties that he has prepared. In 2011, the publication of The Book That Made Your World: How the Bible Created the Soul of Western Civilization. And much more recently, This Book Changed Everything: The Bible's Amazing Impact on Our World. Dr. Mangalwadi, it's an absolute pleasure to have some time to talk with you. Thank you for the generosity of being available. Hello everybody, welcome to another episode of The Inspiration Project podcast, where we get a chance to talk with Christians of significance who have been able to find the expression of their faith through their career and their vocation. This morning we're having a conversation with Dr. Owen Strachan. Dr. Strachan is provost and research professor of theology at Grace Bible Theological Seminary. He's previously stayed at other programs at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, where he gained his PhD. He studied at the Evangelical Divinity School where he obtained his master of divinity, and at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine in the northeast of America. He's written several books, including Reenchanting Humanity: A Theology of Mankind. The Pastor as Public Theologian: Reclaiming a Lost Vision. And more recently his latest book, The War on Men: Why Society Hates Them and Why We Need Them. Dr. Strachan, it's very nice to meet you. Thank you for giving us your time. You must be a very busy academic with so much to do. And the notion that you're just describing the nativity, the preciousness of the incarnation, but the council also not to restrict God's activity in the world to that event and that period. But that he remains intimately connected, intimately involved with the functions of our world, our lives, and our society. That's part of your theology of mankind? Yeah, I get that. It comes back to our… Well, I think for me it reconnects with the idea of reenchanting, the notion that there's a bigger thing going on, and there are forces of good and there are forces of evil, and there is light and there is dark. And we as a society and as individuals need to find where we can leave the dark and enter the light, where we can let go of the era and embrace the truth. And to deny that as a fundamental part of the creation is one of the things that's leading us astray. G. K. Chesterton writes about the well-intentionedness of the modern world. He makes a description to say the world is not evil. The world is in some ways too good, in that it pursues particular virtues disconnected from reality, disconnected from truth. And I wonder whether that's some degree of what's happening here, that equality, or tolerance, or acceptance becomes the benchmark, becomes the pinnacle of virtue, disconnected from other equally important significant aspects of truthfulness or a virtue. Yeah. That's wonderful Dr. Strachan. Thank you so much for those concluding remarks. I guess one final thought from me before I come back to the notion of individual response to this, is the characterising of identity simply with the notion of your genderedness rather than your creativity is one of the problems. If there is a type of masculinity that is excessive or exploitive, then let's call that out and not dismiss the whole category of masculine. Let's find what is the creativeness of a godly expression of the things that he's put in place. This comes back to that notion I said to you earlier, that the society at large, the ideologies and the politics that young people, in fact all of us are now wallowing our way through, which denies the notion of being active, and being assertive, and being purposeful. I'm conscious that at least to some degree, there may be something similar that is spoken about in Christian circles, that it is not good to be ambitious, that it is not good to have goals for yourself, to work hard, and the right thing is just to sit back and let God work it out. That doesn't necessarily seem to be your story. I wonder whether you could reflect a little bit on that for any of our listeners who might be, "I'm just going to leave it to God and come what may." Hello everybody. Welcome to another episode of The Inspiration Project podcast where we get a chance to meet Christians who are living out their faith with a life of success and flourishing. Today, we're speaking with Professor Nigel Biggar. Professor Biggar is professor emeritus of the Moral and Pastoral Theology at Oxford. He was the former director of the McDonald Centre for Theology, Ethics & Public Life. He is an ordained British Anglican priest renowned theologian and world-renowned ethicist. He first obtained a bachelor of arts in modern history at Oxford, added a master of arts in religious studies from the University of Chicago, studied at Regent College in British Columbia, and completed a Ph.D. in Christian theology at the University of Chicago. Professor Biggar, delighted to have you join us. Thank you for fitting this into what must be a very busy schedule. Yes. So beware of the oversimplification either way to completely exonerate the past or to completely repudiate the past. Nigel Biggar Absolutely, absolutely. Let's have the whole story, warts, but also the good bits. Brendan Corr Yeah, agree. Nigel Biggar In the case of the British Empire, by all means, let's remind ourselves of slavery between 1650 and 1800. Let's also remind ourselves of the 150 years of imperial penance in stamping out slavery from Brazil to Malaysia. Brendan Corr Very good. I'm thoughtful as we draw our conversation to a close, Professor, of the teaching of Christ himself talked about logs and moats and the will to point fault at the cultures of the past and be completely ignorant to the massive problems that we might be facing in our own culture. Can I thank you for the work that you've done in helping point out some of those logs and moats? May you continue to do that as we reflect on where we've come from and the story that has brought us to this place so that we can learn from it and allow the light of the Lord to illuminate our way forward. Nigel Biggar Thanks, Brendan. Thanks very much for this conversation. These are really important matters and it's great to have a chance to have an honest and open conversation about them. Brendan Corr Thank you. God bless. Nigel Biggar You, too. Well, hello everybody. Welcome to another episode of The Inspiration Project podcast where we get a chance to talk to Christians who are living lives of significance and being true to their faith and their calling in the midst of finding a way to contribute to the broad society. I'm personally delighted to be having a conversation today with Mike Baird. Mike will be well-known to many of you. His name and his family name are well-known, but primarily through service as the 44th Premier of New South Wales. Mike actually completed his secondary schooling at The Kings School before going on to study at Sydney University, completing a Bachelor of Arts and Economics and government. He's also studied at Regent College in Vancouver, Canada. He undertook a career as an investment banker before moving into politics as a member of Manly in 2007 in the New South Wales Parliament. Having served in various roles in that organisation, including shadow treasurer, treasurer, minister for Western Sydney, and Minister for Infrastructure, he became Premier in 2014. Rather unexpectedly, he announced his resignation from that position and stepped down in February 2017. And Mike now serves as CEO of HammondCare, an organisation that is committed to providing health and welfare for students and aged people in need. Mike, it's a personal privilege to talk with you. I have long admired the extent and the quality of your public service, and I'm personally thrilled to get a chance to talk a bit about that. Welcome to the podcast. Indeed. We'll visit some of those aspects of faith and how it happens in your own life. But he was known for that beautiful copperplate script, wasn't it? That became characteristic. And the standpoint of that. Mike, you made a reference in the quote about Reverend Hammond and the start of HammondCare that he saw something and decided to do something about it. And it struck me as you used that phrase to describe that servant of the Lord, that it's a bit of a theme for what I hope we might talk about this afternoon, the way in which your own expression of commitment to seeing need and doing something about it in the way that you are able to. Did you always have that sense of public service? Mike, you've demonstrated clearly the commitment in several different areas of your service. In fact, your family has demonstrated through your dad and through your siblings. Was that something that you learned at your father's knee? Was it something that came through faith, your schooling? Good morning, everybody and welcome to another episode of The Inspiration Project podcast. This morning I'm having a conversation with Dr Georgia Purdom. Dr Purdom is vice president of Educational Content for the Answers in Genesis organisation. Dr Purdom holds a PhD in molecular genetics from the Ohio State University. She's published numerous scientific peer-reviewed papers in the Journal of Neuroscience, the Journal of Bone and Mineral Research, and the Journal of Leukocyte Biology. She's a member of the Creation Research Society and Creation Biology Society. She brings expertise in the specific topic of natural selection and how that plays out in terms of some of our theories and our thinking and has experience in making scientific concepts understandable to the general public and a wide variety of people. She also expresses a passion to help females, ladies, and women understand the importance of the Genesis story for them and their context. Dr Purdom, welcome to The Inspiration Project podcast. It's so delightful to have you here. You're resident in the US. Is that right? And it comes back to where we started about the notion you described: why do I believe what I believe? And doing the work to understand how you conceive of God in your life and the way He works and the sovereign decisions that He makes. That's a lovely personal story. Thank you for sharing that. Georgia, I wonder, again, without being a caricature of the Midwest, the notion of that conservative Bible belt might suggest that science was not necessarily something that was encouraged. The pursuit of a science career may not have been something that was the normal path for people in your community. Did you find that there was encouragement from the people around you? Discouragement? Freedom? Yeah. That's great. I agree with you that if it is done well, it can reveal the glory of God in his creation and help us fulfil our role as stewards of that creation. Let me ask you, Georgia, the counterpoint. You've done a great job of describing the role of science and the value that it has, but there'd be some Christians who would say, "Look, I know Jesus. I know he saved me. He died and I've got this good thing going with God right now. Does it really matter that I don't understand the beginnings and I don't fully get my head around the creation account? Can you share what you believe is, why is it important that we wrestle with that idea and those concepts? Yeah, I hear what you're saying in that space that it's a package deal and the revelation of understanding that the Bible is God's revelation of himself to humanity. And it wasn't something that humanity created independently of God moving through those writers to document, "This is who I am, and therefore it's important to understand who you're relating to and what your relative position is to the God of the creator of the universe." That's well said. I'd be interested to explore a little bit more your area of specialty in terms of genetic biology, and most people who go through high school science will remember that the father of modern genetics, Mendel was a practising priest, that it was in his Christian faith that he started to investigate the inheritability of characteristics. All those testing come down to the discovery of DNA and the code that captures all the specifications for the manufacturer of proteins that form our DNA. The appearance would be that it makes some valid sense that our DNA is so similar to the DNA shared by all of the other creatures of the world. As a Christian coming to that view and investigating the specifics of genetics, what's been your understanding of how separate we are, how unique we are, how in the image of God we are when there is so much of that genetic code that seems to be borrowed from the natural world? Thank you so much for all the work that you are doing. May God strengthen you and continue to give you all that you need to do his work in the way that he's called you to. God bless you. Well, hello, everybody. Welcome to another episode of The Inspiration Project podcast. The podcast is where we get to hear from successful people who have navigated a life of success and thriving based on their faith. Today, we're talking to Eric Agyeman. Eric is a youth mentor and motivational speaker who has quite an interesting background starting out as the only African student in his school. He had quite a diverse range of experiences that weren't always following the exemplary model path of a young child at school. He's ended up though, coming out the other end of some very challenging circumstances. He's been the author of three bestselling books and is committed to sharing what he has learned through his passion about helping young people find their future. Some of those experiences have allowed him to become a wide-ranging speaker to young people all over the country. Eric, it's very much my pleasure to have this opportunity to speak with you. Let me just get a little unpack, what's on your calendar for the next little while? What's coming up in terms of your commitments? Yeah. What a great story. Was your family a family of faith before you went to Ghana? At what age did you head back to Ghana? How old were you? You started school, you'd been off in high school? So, that one-way ticket, that's pretty dramatic. Was that sort of your dad doing an intervention? Is it a case of, "I love my boy. I could see he's in trouble. I got to break this?" I want to wind back, Eric, if you can, because that's a wonderful story of coming into the light or coming into the truth after, obviously, part of your life where you were living with misconceptions of yourself, misconceptions about the people around you, probably a misconception of God at that point in your life. And as I was reading your story, I was thinking about how the alienation that you must have felt in your young schooling, where you were the only one and you were the one who was teased and picked on and ostracised and made it very clear you didn't belong in whatever was going on in whatever culture was. And how did you find yourself from that being a loner at school, being on the out? How did you find yourself in those youth gangs of your early teen years? So your dad sees this, realises that you've lost interest in school, more suspensions, I think, in two years, and realises something needs to change, sends you to Ghana. What was the purpose? You said a three-week holiday. He must have had a notion that what did you do for school? Back to school in Ghana? The prayer thing that you went on, that camp that changed your whole perspective of yourself and of life. At what stage did that happen in your Ghana experience? Was that early on? Sort of towards the end of school? Without wanting to pry too much, the six weeks before you're going on this prayer camp, you're at the bottom, you're at the lowest point you could possibly get to. So, going to Ghana wasn't a solution in itself. It wasn't the miraculous transition to something, it was still tough and it was still dark and the load was still heavy up to that point. Did you have other people to talk with in Ghana during those years, or was it still a sense of, "I'm doing this alone?" And now, you're so far away from your family, from your mom, from your dad, and no hope. Amen.That's very confronting to hear that, and to try and imagine what it must have been like for you, Eric, in that context to be so far from home. Anybody who really knew you, anybody who really saw you and your situation became so desperate. I ask you again, this is with all measure of respect in that space. The notion of things that happened around you, things that happened to you, and the response that you have, is there a measure of balance about what you own as decisions that you made, things that you chose to believe versus the circumstances you found yourself in? Have you wrestled with some of that tension? I want to come back and explore what it is that you're doing, and how you're spending your life now helping other people. But the change that you are describing, Eric, is just such an incredibly dramatic 180 from somebody who felt betrayed, alone, and hopeless for the perspective that you are describing that is now. And again, I don't know whether you can put this into words or something, but it feels there must have been something more that happened than just you changed your mind and then you just picked yourself up by the bootstraps and got on with things. What happened to change that Eric who was lost and broken to this Eric that could look back with such clarity and such confidence? Can you explain that? I can see that transformation, Eric. There is the evidence, overflowing the Scripture talks of how living water will flow up out of your innermost being without trying to be presumptuous. I sense that. I sense that there has been a spring created in you of this new life, this new supernatural life that washed over everything in your life, washed over everything in your mind, and is flowing out to the people that you want to speak to. So let me ask you this. You find yourself having this incredible experience over in Ghana. You're at this prayer camp, a supernatural transformation for you as to who you are and how you see the world, how you understand everything. Did you, at that stage, imagine that you were going to be a motivational speaker and an author and march around the country inspiring and helping other young kids? So, you mentioned the ministry that you're involved in a little bit earlier. I can't remember the name of what you just described but unpack for us a little bit about what you're involved in. Brendan Corr Yeah, that does sound like you got a lot on and it's going to keep you busy. So, let me ask you another associated question. One of the themes that have been running through our conversation, Eric, has been the idea of finding a sense of belonging, finding who you are in that sense. And we've talked about you coming to New Zealand, not fitting in at school, seeking inclusion in some negative social settings, gangs, etc., feeling alone back in Ghana, and coming into this incredible relationship with Jesus in this very special way. And now, your job is to go around and to visit communities of people you don't know, you don't have a lot of understanding. Where do you find belonging in your current sense? That's good. Not confidence. God-fidence. That's good. I like that. So, what I think I'm hearing, Eric, is this idea of you now have an identity that doesn't depend on your social connections or your social setting, your identity, who you are, where you gain your sense of meaning and purpose comes from an unbroken connection with God, and you carry that sense of belonging wherever he is, you belong, wherever he takes you, that's your place at that moment. Is that sort of a paraphrase of- Yeah, it's a great place to be. Can I ask you this, and that may be a complicated question? Does it mean that all your problems have disappeared? You mentioned earlier, you referenced Romans 8:28 a little while back, "All things work together for good." And the extension of that, the passage of the verses around it talks about, "For nothing shall separate us from the love of God." And it goes on a list of some pretty horrible things that can happen to you. Some genuine opposition and some genuine tragedy can come into your life. And it doesn't invalidate the assumption earlier, right? Even these things will work together for good. When you are sealed, taken, sold out to God. I know there's a lot that you, obviously, lead people through when you give a presentation and you talk about how an individual might be able to make sense of the circumstances they're in. But if there was one bit of advice that you wanted to leave with a young person who was trying to figure out, "Who am I, where do I belong, what is my next step," what would be the thing you'd want them to remember or to think about at that moment? That is beautiful. When you are sharing some of your early stories, Eric, the little childish rhyme, sticks, and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me came to my mind as being such a false assertion that that is not true. Words do have power, they do have an impact. And what I'm thinking, as we come to the end of our conversation, and you reflected earlier about how the words spoken by broken, damaged, selfish peers, eight, nine, 10, 11 years of age, and how those words spoken over you exercise some power, how much better it is for the word, the eternal word to speak over you, speak about who you are, not being defined by your peers or your culture or your school or your gang, who does Christ declare you to be and to let that word form who you are, your identity. You'd agree with that sort of summary? Eric, I'm so glad that God spoke over your life. I'm so glad that in that prayer camp over in Ghana, the word of the eternal word spoken to your heart gave you a new identity and a new commission and set you on a path of a destiny that was reflecting who He's called you to be. And I'm so glad that you're continuing to do that, that you're speaking words of hope and life and inspiration over young people. Thank you for sharing your words with us today, and know that we'll be praying for your ministry wherever it is. I know those kids at Australian Christian College - Moreton in Caboolture will have a really blessed experience. Thank you for your time today, Eric. Hello, everybody, and welcome to another episode of The Inspiration Project podcast. I have a personal delight today of speaking with Dr. Chris Watkin. Dr. Watkin is an associate professor in French studies at Monash University and his research is attempting to help people understand how they make sense of the world around them. He is the writer of a number of very prominent books, including Phenomenology or Deconstruction?, Difficult Atheism, and his most recent publication, Biblical Critical Theory. The current way in which Dr. Watkin is working is to explore the different ways the modern West has made sense of the ideas of freedom and liberation. Dr. Watkin, thank you so much for your time. It's a personal delight to have the chance to speak with you. I've enjoyed reading some of your work and it's very deep, very provocative. Yeah, and that's a beautiful circle back to the experience you had as a teenager where you encountered the profundities of eternity, but you experienced a community that was committed to one another and were making life in the here and now something quintessentially better in their love with one another. Those two parts of Christianity, that full of grace, full of truth, that we're called to live out, the full measure of the stature of Christ. Dr. Watkin, it's been an absolute joy to spend some time with you. I thoroughly appreciate the way God has used you to shine some of his light into the areas of the world that we occupy sociologically, and we'll continue to pray that he strengthens you for that. I look forward to hearing a bit more about emancipation and freedom for freedom's sake, he made us free, and it'd be great to hear some of your thoughts on that. But for today, thank you for your gracious presence. Originally a Secondary Science Teacher, Brendan is a graduate of UTS, Deakin and Regent College, Canada. While Deputy Principal at Pacific Hills for 12 years, Brendan also led the NSW Christian Schools Australia registration system. Brendan's faith is grounded in a personal relationship with Jesus Christ and a deep knowledge of God's Word. Married for over 30 years, Brendan and Kim have 4 adult children. On the weekends, Brendan enjoys cycling (but he enjoys coffee with his mates afterwards slightly more).

Job Titles:

• Principal

Job Titles:

• Primary Coordinator Distance Education

After working in education in both the public and independent sectors, including TAFE, Carol, together with her husband and family...

Job Titles:

• Secondary Teacher

Dale completed a Bachelor of Teaching (Health, P.E and Mathematics) and a Bachelor of Exercise Science at ACU Melbourne. He had th...

Job Titles:

• Principal

David grew up in Sydney and moved to Albany to begin a new adventure. He and his wife moved across the country and have loved the ...

Job Titles:

• Chairman
• Episode Description
• Molecular Genetics Professor

On this episode of The Inspiration Project, Brendan Corr talks to Dr Georgia Purdom, a Molecular Genetics professor who works for Answers in Genesis. They discuss the idea of Conservative vs Liberal ways of thinking about the world, what led Georgia to earn her PhD in Science, how she came to faith, how Molecular Biology and Science prove the Creation story to be true, the danger of scientism, what role sciences play in our world, understanding how unique we all are and how genetic code reveals how we are created in the image of God. I grew up in a Christian home and my parents loved the Lord and we went to church pretty much every time the doors were open and had a very rich heritage of that. Actually, almost everyone in my family is a born-again Christian. And so I'm thankful for that heritage. But I don't have anyone in my family that is a scientist. My parents didn't even attend college, so I didn't really have a lot of that high level of education in my family. But I knew from the time I was very young that I really loved science and I was really something that I think God gifted me with the ability to do well and to think about well. So from a very young age, I wanted to be a medical doctor. That was what I was going to do and pursue. And when I got into college and I first started learning about what are the other professions that are out there, you don't just have to become a medical doctor. And I started to learn about research and things that people had done, and one professor, in particular, was being hired by the school when he gave his presentation on some of the immunology work that he had done studying the immune system, I was just completely fascinated by that. That was the end of my sophomore year of college and I was like, "This is what I want to do. This is so amazing. This is so neat." So at the time though, molecular biology, I mean there were programs in it and stuff, but my college didn't have a lot in that area. So I had one genetics class and I had one molecular biology class, but I really enjoyed them. And even one of the summers between my junior and senior years I had pursued research through a research program, so I kind of did it firsthand and worked at a university doing that. And so then once I finished college, I actually took a year to work at a university and do research just as a research assistant just to get more of a feel for it and see if I really liked it. And I did. I loved it. And so then I applied to graduate school and got accepted there. But the Lord really during that year used that time. While I really liked research, I really started to think about a teaching career and teaching other people what I loved so much and what I love to learn about because I always loved school. I'm one of those weird kids that loved school and loved. I'm a science nerd at heart, and so I just love learning. I wanted to help other people do that too. So really during that year I really started to think, "Okay, I want to get a Ph.D. so I can teach." I liked the research, but I wanted to really pursue teaching. Teaching college was what I really wanted to do because I really enjoyed my college experience. I saw the impact my professors had on me, so I wanted to have that same impact on students. So that's what really led me into it. After I finished my PhD I actually did some teaching while I was at Ohio State and got a taste for it and really liked it. And so then I went straight from there to teaching college and did that for six years before I came to Answers in Genesis. I was saved when I was eight at a church camp, and I fully understood what I was doing and knew and understood the gospel really well at that point. But at the same time, I think making it my own, I wouldn't say that happened while I was probably about 14. I was at a Christian youth rally actually and I just really listened to everything. I'd say that's where my faith really gained its maturity where I really started on that path to spiritual maturity and growing and reading my Bible and praying, and really understanding what all that meant I think was really at that point, and really seeking what God would have me to do, where to go to college, what to major in, what he wanted for my life. One of the things I always tell students is you're on this path and you think, "Okay, this is what I'm going to do. I'm a planner, so I like to plan." And God likes to say, "I actually want you to go this way." And so I tell students to really take it step by step. You can plan and planning is good, but don't be surprised if God sometimes leads you a different way. And that's okay. I thought I was going to be a medical doctor. I got a PhD. I thought I was going to go into research, I went into teaching. And lots of other areas of my life where the Lord's really led me on a different path than the one I thought I was going to go on. And just like working for an apologetics ministry and using my degree in genetics, in ministry, that was something that I had never really thought about. I mean, every job has an aspect of ministry to it, whether I'm in a research lab or what, we're Christians, we're doing it for the glory of God and to understand his world better in this case. But it's neat to see how the Lord led me to really have a passion for defending my faith and wanting to help other people be able to do that well too. I still teach. I still get to teach people things. It's just in a different capacity. I distinctly remember sitting in a chair having my morning devotions when I was in my first year of teaching college and just the Lord really impressing me. I was reading 1 Peter 3:15. It was part of my devotion that day and that is basically always be ready to give a defence or an answer for the hope that you have. And the Lord just really, really impressed on my heart - I need to know what I believe and why I believe it. I mean, I know what I believe, but why do I believe it? How can I defend that effectively? And through other things that have been happening, questions people have been asking me, things I had been challenged with even in graduate school, and it kind of all culminated and I was like, "I need to make a decision on this and figure these things out." So that was one thing. I know for example just from a personal perspective, so my husband and I tried to have children and we really felt that this was God's will for our life to have children, and we didn't expect to have any problems with that. But the Lord closed the door on that. We're not able to get pregnant. But the Lord opened the door for adoption and we were able to adopt our daughter. Sometimes it's the Lord impressing, sometimes it's him just closing those doors, but opening up a different door. I never was discouraged. I don't remember anyone ever discouraging me from going into science ever. My parents were always extremely encouraging of me to follow what I felt was God's goal for my life. I don't remember anyone saying, "Oh, because you're a Christian, or science might… Because you're going to learn about evolution." I was in the public school system, so I was hearing this stuff. It wasn't like it was new to me, but I never really. I didn't necessarily have any role models in the sense of other scientists or people that had become scientists. I never had any of that. I just knew that I really liked it and I wanted to pursue it. So I have heard of that happening to people where I've had students sometimes say, "I don't know if I should go into the sciences because there's going to be a lot of evolution, a lot of things that challenge my faith and I don't know if I'm going to be able to. How am I going to be able to handle that?" I personally never experienced that, but I do encourage students to, "Look, don't be afraid of these things. You are going to be challenged by a lot of things in the world, not just in this area, but in a lot of ways." So you just have to ground yourself in God's word. That is really important. Know what God's word says and you're going to be able to deal with these things as they come up. We've got so many great resources now. Answers in Genesis didn't exist until I was a senior in college. So we've got all these great resources that when you have these questions, don't be afraid to talk to people. Talk to other adults or teachers, or parents about some of the questions that you have and seek out those answers. That's what we're supposed to be doing as Christians. So those answers are out there. You just have to want to seek them and just continue to be grounded in that faith knowing that God's word is true and nothing can contradict that or go against that. I think one of the big things for me, so I never really believed in biological evolution just because, well, because I knew what God's word said about creation, but also because I was studying genetics and it's extremely complex. So there's no way this just happened by random chance over aeons of time. I wasn't buying that. But the age of the Earth was something that actually really challenged me because I didn't have a lot of geology background. And so I was like, "Well, if they're saying it's millions of years and maybe it is, and so maybe I should accept that and somehow figure out how to make that work with what the Bible says." So the more I started to study that though, I started to study what people were saying in the area of geology. I started to realise that things like radiometric dating and all that, they're all based on assumptions. Everybody starts with a worldview. Everybody starts with certain assumptions. So even radiometric dating starts with certain assumptions. The radioactive decay rate has always been constant, which studies show it hasn't been. And there are things like. Well, without getting too technical, like, "Oh, you start with all this parent material and all the daughter material has to come from that." Well, how do you know there wasn't any daughter material to start with? So I didn't realise there were those assumptions going into that. And so once I started to really understand that, I was like, "Oh, okay." And then I think for me, the biggest thing was really a theological thing, understanding that you can't have death before sin. So sin didn't come about until Genesis chapter 3. And 1 and 2 are the creation of everything, all animals, and Adam and Eve. So the fossil record or the rock layers are supposedly millions of years of death, disease, suffering, and bloodshed. That's how evolution works. So I hadn't thought, "Oh, if I have that, then how does that work with what God's word says?" I mean, God's word makes it clear that death came about as a result of sin. So the Bible can't have that contradiction. And so if that's true, then these layers were a result of the flood. They're not a result of millions of years of evolution and really understanding that the Word is true. We can add the years up and there's only about 6,000 years total if we add up to today. Sometimes we just don't understand the science well enough. We haven't really delved into that and see how we can use God's word and understand that and how the state of that doesn't actually contradicts it, it goes along with it. I think that's a great danger. We call that scientism. Everything has to be looked at and understood scientifically. And it's just all material. There's no immaterial and it's what we observe, and that's all there is. So I think there is a great danger in that, and I think it's important to understand too, that there's a difference between what we would consider observational science, which is what we do in the lab every day. It uses the scientific method. So you have a hypothesis, and you do experiments. Does it support or not support your original hypothesis? I call that here-and-now science because this is what we do in the lab, but that's very different from historical science, which deals with things that have happened in the past. So evolution and creation both fall into that category because they're not testable, they're not repeatable, and they're not observable because they're past events. They're history in that sense. And so what we believe about those things is very much based on our worldview. Who are we trusting to tell us the truth about the past? Do we trust God's word or do we trust man's ideas about what they think happened? So that's very different. That's very worldview based, whereas I think science that we do in the here and now, people that do good science and use the scientific method are doing that, then it's not as worldview based or it doesn't have to be. Because, again, you can observe it, and see whether or not support the original ideas that you had. If people are honest about it, the problem is there can be a lot of dishonesty. And I've seen it. I've seen scientists that are so hooked on their idea of what they think is true that they won't accept anything else, even things that go to the contrary. And that's not good science if a scientist is doing that. But if they're being true to it, then we can observe things and see things. But they're two very different types of science. Oh, that's a good question. I think it's important. From my Christian perspective, I would say that it's important to discover what God has created all of these things. I mean, as much as we know, I think when we sequence the human genome, we're like, "Oh, this is awesome. We've done it." That's just the tip of the iceberg because now you have to figure out what it all means? What does it actually do? How does it actually work? How does it function? So just knowing the letters or knowing the basis doesn't tell us that. And so we have to still investigate that. So I think that's really good to do, and I think it's good to do from the perspective of we do live in a fallen world and we're trying to mitigate the effects of the curse on people. So it's good to study and understand these things to help people, and that can be through a variety of things. Even improving crops, animals, all of these things. We have dominion. We're given dominion over God's word. That doesn't mean we rule harshly over it, but we take care of it and we should be stewards of what God has created. So I think just a natural curiosity and finding out what God has created and understanding it, but also how can it help people and how can it help us better take care of the world that he's created? I think there are a couple of reasons. One, I think that God has revealed these things to us in his word. And so we are supposed to know God's word, what it says, and understand it. Just because it's hard or difficult, or we may not see the relevance. It may just be that we haven't delved deep enough into it to really look at it and understand it. He gave us all these words in the Bible for a reason. So including Genesis, Revelation, and including all of it in between. Even when you get to passages like a lot of genealogies and numbers and things, and you think, but it's important. That's part of his word. And so we need to understand those things and think about those things. So I would argue that we're to study his word and know his words, and that's part of it. I actually heard this the other day. It was interesting. Somebody was talking about what are some things where Christians can agree to disagree on, and what are some things that they can't basically. And they would say, "Well, you have to agree that Jesus was a virgin born. You have to agree that Jesus resurrected." And I would agree. Every Christian needs to agree on those things. Now they said, "Well, but creation, that's a secondary issue. That's not as important." I would not agree with that because I think we really need to think about how foundational Genesis is and what is given there to a lot of the issues that we're dealing with in our world today. Things like, for example, sexuality. Things like the sanctity of life when it comes to the abortion issue. Things like marriage and how it's defined. You think about all those issues. Well, where does all that start? It starts in Genesis, and that's where it's defined that we're made in the image of God, that we're made male and female, and that marriage is one man and one woman. So I think by ignoring those things and not realising the foundational importance of Genesis, we're missing out. And two, I mean, I've been in this field for over 17 years and I have watched sadly many people who are professing Christ, they're professing Christians. Now, I don't know their heart. I can't see that, but that's what they're professing. And I've watched them say, "Well, it's okay that the earth is millions of years old. Well, it's okay that evolution is true. Well, it's okay that Adam and Eve evolved from some sort of apelike creature. Well, it's okay that maybe Genesis is really just an analogy, or an allegory or something. It's a myth." Well, there wasn't really the fall and maybe Jesus just came to show us how to be a good person. I mean, I've seen that. And these people, they're professors at Christian colleges and they're saying this and it's problematic. And that's why I say they're professing Christians because if you believe Jesus just came to show you how to be a good person, you're not a Christian. I mean, that's not the gospel. So that's a false gospel. So it's just that slippery slope that once part of God's word isn't true, it's easier to say that more of it isn't true. And then possibly deny it altogether. I mean, the way I look at it definitely is that we all do have. I mean all organisms have a lot of similarities in their DNA. That's because we're all designed by God and we all have to. And just like you Van Gogh, paintings all have a similarity to them that you can detect when you look at them. So it just makes sense. That's how designers work. They have a certain style and a certain way that they do things. And two, if you're talking about mammals, for example, which humans fall under that category, our bodies have to do a lot of similar things. So it makes sense that God's going to have the same, why do it differently in the different organisms. If it works, then it makes sense that it would be in multiple organisms. So I think just like car parts, I mean, there are certain car parts that are going to be basically the same regardless of the type of car that it is because it's a design that works. So I think we see that common designer, those ideas throughout a lot of different organisms. But I will say that a lot of times I hear this spout all the time still that, "Oh, chimps in humans are like 98% the same." But it's not a factually true problem. So if you look at how those comparisons are done. For example, if you look at one of the original papers that declared that, they say. And again, this is where you have to look at why you have to. It's important to not just take whatever the media says. Sometimes you got to look at that scientific paper or at least people that are scientists that are evaluating it maybe from a different perspective, but in looking at it. But it says that in order to get that 98% number, they had to exclude basically one-third of the genome. Okay. So right there tells you that you're not looking at the whole thing. We've got, what, 3 billion bases, and they're not looking at all that. They're looking at a much smaller portion. They're looking at a smaller amount. So right there, that's a lot of differences. And also they're only typically counting one type of difference. So they're not counting what we would call gaps or indels when they do this. They're not counting duplications. There are certain things that they don't do in the overall count. They don't count basically as differences. Now, they would say, and actually, I've watched a video on this and it was kind of entertaining. It was made by evolutionists. It was made by people that are geneticists that know what they're talking about. But it was interesting because they said the basic idea was, "Well, we did it this way where we just looked at if you have a sequence in the human and you have a sequence in the chimp and you just look at the letters that are different so when they match up, these letters match, but then this letter doesn't match." So they only counted those letters that don't match. That's all they counted. If there was a gap where there was maybe human DNA, but not chimp DNA, they didn't count that. So they said, "Well because it was hard." And I was like, "Well, scientists need to do hard things." So I'm like, "Okay, I get that it's hard." It's hard to make those comparisons when there are things, but you have to figure out a way to say, "That is a difference. There is something missing there and not there." And you need to figure out how to count it. So Dr. Jeffrey Tompkins, who's a geneticist, actually a genomicist, so he works at Clemson University for 10 years as the head of their genomics lab there. He's done a lot of research on this comparing human and chimp DNA, and he said in papers that he's published, it looks like it's more around 70% similarity when he tries to count all of the differences. So that's significant. When you're talking millions of bases that are different, which cannot be accounted for in any evolutionary time frame, you could get millions of differences even over millions of years. No evolutionary geneticist would believe that. And so it really is problematic for them, and it really shows that we are very unique and different from the chimps and thus from any other living thing as well. When we talk about the image of God, I don't believe that to be something genetic. That's something that God endows us with as humans that he's given us distinctly and uniquely, that we are created in his image. So I don't think that has anything to do with genetics necessarily. I would not buy that. I think it's very, very challenging to make that assertion and that connection. And one of my main problems with that is because we're still at a very rudimentary level of understanding the genome and how it works, and how you even determine that this gene makes this behaviour so to speak. Is that true in every individual that has that version of the gene that has that behaviour? You would have to have a lot. I just don't think the studies out there have enough to be able to show those kinds of things. Certainly, we do know that there can be some disorders like schizophrenia and personality disorder, psychological disorders. There have been some suggestions of some mutations that may predispose a person to that or may have a role in that. And certainly, I'm open to that idea, but I don't really think that we have a lot of good solid studies out there that are linking behaviour to genetics. And you got to understand too, the reason that people want to do that is because they're materialist and they don't believe there's anything else. So it has to be explained that way. In an evolutionary materialistic worldview, every aspect of you has to be explained by your genetics. It cannot be explained outside of that because you have no spirit or soul according to that. There's nothing immaterial about you. Everything is material. So they're looking for that because they believe that's what's true, and so that must exist. But I worry about things like that because usually the scientists that are doing this, usually it's the media that takes that information and makes it into something it isn't. The scientists themselves are usually a lot more reserved in saying what the connection is between those two things. And scientists can get caught up in this too. They're sinners just as much as anyone else. And so they tend to get big egos and they tend to want money and notoriety, popularity for discovering something. So sometimes they jump the gun on things, I think in talking to the media about it. I think it's hard. I always thought there should be more people that are knowledgeable about science in the media that truly know the science behind these things and can write about it intelligently. I was reading an article the other day. It was on the CNN website, and I'm like, "Why did they use that word there? What does that mean in relation to DNA? That doesn't make any sense." I think that is a major issue and I think we need more of that. I think it's because I can't write well. I would have a problem writing well about geology because I don't know geology that well, so it would be great. I don't know how to resolve that. I don't know how to do that because they want the headlines and they want to beat everyone to it. But just really taking that information and having people that are scientists review it and make sure it's accurate and right. But it's just hard. It's hard in a very media-driven world. I think there are definitely aspects of things that you can make understandable to people. So I've worked very hard at that for a long time. I have a whole talk talking about the differences between human and chimp DNA. And so that was challenging because when people don't understand the basics of DNA and getting people to understand that so that I can talk about it at a certain level. And I've had people say to me after that presentation, they're like, "Wow, I actually understood that. That made a lot of sense." I'm like, "That's the best compliment I could get." So I think you can do it. Are there some things that are always going to be harder to understand if you don't have the background? Absolutely. There are going to be some things that are just. I can't talk about it at a certain level because I don't have a way to simplify that. You have to have so much basic knowledge, even just this foundational knowledge, and if you don't have that, I don't have anything to build on to get up to this level. And most people, I'm just trying to explain the basics with, and I don't have time a lot of times to get up to that higher level because of that. And so you have to spend so much time getting the basics down that you can't get to that level. So I think there always are going to be. When you talk about that, I think about epigenetics, which is like how the genome is controlled by different things. And I have been able to explain that at a certain level, but to go into it deeper would be harder because people just don't have the genetics background to really appreciate that. I've had to really learn that over the years because there's so much stuff you'd like people to understand, but you realise that. But to me, it's not good for me to know the science and not be able to articulate it to people. So if I can't get to these other things, it's okay. I have to just live with that and say, "These are the basics that they need to know. What do they really need to know?" I mean, I like knowing all this other stuff, but they don't really need to know that. What did they need to know to defend their faith well and be able to overall just understand this well? And so you have to just be able to discern that. So when I started with the ministry, I definitely never saw myself talking about this to women or specifically trying to train women in apologetics and teaching them about these things. But the more that I started to look at different women's conferences and what was out there for women understanding their faith and understanding the scriptures, I realised we call it fluff and stuff. And so it's very surface, very superficial, I believe. A lot of the material that's produced for women, doesn't really encourage them to get into the word and understand the word. It is a very superficial understanding of it. And that saddens me. I mean, I'd love to learn, and that includes God's word, obviously. I don't understand why women are being looked at or thought of differently. We don't need to know these things. So I really got burdened by that, and I said, "We need to do something about this." So I was the first female speaker that Answers in Genesis had hired. And so I was like, "Well, I have a unique opportunity then to be able to maybe go to women's conferences and speak." And then, "Well, 12 years ago, we actually started our own women's conference at Answers in Genesis called Answers for Women. So we're in our 11th year because of COVID, even though it was 12 years ago. But we sold out this last conference, and that's almost 2,000 women. So it's really neat to see the hunger that women have for really delving into God's word because that is one thing that I really want to do is understand it. And in the society that we live in, that's very gender and sexually confused, boy, Genesis speaks to that. I mean, Genesis is really vital for that. And understanding our roles that men and women are of equal value before God. We're both made in God's image. We're both needed to project and help people understand that image. It's not just man alone. It's man and woman that we're not the same. What I see a lot of is almost wanting that sameness like, "Well, women and men are identical." They're exactly the same. I'm like, "No, they're not. I don't want that." God created diversity. It's not good that man should be alone. It's not that he was lonely, it's just that it's not good that he should be alone. He needed a helpmate comparable to him is what the scripture says. And so equal in value, but different in role, different in sexuality, different in gender, different in physical appearance. I mean, we have different aspects, I think of God's image. I mean, we're fully made in the image of God, but for example, women tend to be more nurturing. We read in scripture, God has a lot of nurturing aspects to him. And so women are able to fulfil that more than men. And that's a good thing. Men can do other things that women can't in leading and doing some of those things. Not that women can't lead, but I mean they sometimes are more like the leader and the protector. And we see very much that in the scripture of God as well. So I think it's really neat to see. I want women to really embrace that, embrace who God has made them, and not want to be the same as men, just to embrace their womanhood and how God has created them to be. All of that begins in Genesis. And so it's important for them to understand that. I just want them to be grounded in their faith because they are a lot of times the ones teaching children. I mean, a lot of educators are women. A lot of women, they're educating their children in the home. They're doing it in churches. They're responsible for training the next generation to a large extent. And so they need to know it well. They can't give what they don't have, so they need to know it well so they can pass it on well. There are so many ways that we do that. So one of the ways is we have an amazing website, answersingenesis.org that has a tonne of free resources on it, videos, articles, and books. I mean, just lots of amazing things there. We produce a lot of books and DVDs, curriculum, and homeschool curriculum. We're currently working on a Christian school curriculum right now. Just really trying to reach into all of those aspects that people might need resources for teens, for children, for adults. We offer conferences every year. So we do that not just at our facilities, but also we go to places. So I'm coming to Australia in June to teach over there, and I'm super excited about that. So we go all over the world. I was just in Sweden last year. We get to have these amazing opportunities to do that. We also then have our two main attractions, the Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter in Kentucky. And so those are great places where we can have people come on-site and be able to learn about God's word and learn about the flood. We have a life-sized ark that we've built in Kentucky. And so that's great for people to be able to really appreciate the size of what the ark really was. We also do a lot of educational programming, both at the Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter. We have a K through 12 schools, Answers Academy now. Trying to put that, in a nutshell, is hard because we have a lot of ways. I just encourage people to get on our website and have a look around because there's lots of things there that can really help you and assist you. Dr Georgia Purdom received a PhD in molecular genetics from Ohio State University in 2000. Dr Purdom said that "the creation and evolution issue is so important because it is foundational to biblical authority, a Christian worldview and to the whole of Christianity. Therefore, it is necessary to have a solid understanding of the issue of origins." Dr Purdom became a Christian when she attended a youth camp when she was eight years old. Six years later at a Christian youth conference, she dedicated her life to serving the Lord. Dr Purdom's professional accomplishments include the winning of a variety of honours, research presentations at national conferences and the completion of five years of teaching at Mt Vernon Nazarene University (Ohio). She has published papers in the Journal of Neuroscience, the Journal of Bone and Mineral Research and the Journal of Leukocyte Biology. She is also a member of the Creation Research Society, American Society for Microbiology, and American Society for Cell Biology and a peer reviewer for Creation Research Science Quarterly. Dr Purdom's main area of specialty is cell and molecular biology. Her graduate work focused on genetic regulation of factors important for bone remodelling. Her particular interest is in the role of mutations and horizontal gene transfer in microbial populations (and other organisms) in natural selection.

Job Titles:

• Founder - President of BOMI / Revelation Movement
• Founder and President of Revelation Movement

On this episode of The Inspiration Project, Brendan Corr talks to Dr Vishal Mangalwadi founder and president of Revelation Movement about why the Indian Government tried to kill Vishal and his wife, why they had to flee their home in India, whether the bible is under threat in today's culture, the arrival of Christianity in India, how Christianity shaped Indian society and the rest of the world, the current crisis of gender identity as being a type of new sexual revolution, and much more. Well, thank you for honouring me. It is wonderful. I'm looking forward to being in Australia next month. Well, they were actually trying to kill us. The government was trying to kill us, the chief of the police. He personally told me that he would kill me if I did not stop my service to the poor, but thankfully, the local press at that time was supporting me. So they did not actually kill me, but just threw me in prison, which gave me the opportunity to start writing the book, which became Truth and Transformation. It has been published in many parts of the world, not in Australia as yet, but how do you transform oppressive societies? So that book actually concluded with an appendix proposing how America can be reformed again, through Christian education, and church-based education. So that project has grown. It's become a global movement called the Third Education Revolution, which is a big book now, a 751-page book and a global movement. But it did begin with when I was thrown in prison. The community was burned down later, and so we've been homeless, wandering around the world, but the Lord has kept it that way so that I'm in fact available to many, many nations. Well, things are much worse in India right now than they were 30 years ago because a militant Hindu party has been ruling and so its roots are very explicitly in the Italian and German fascist movement. So that idea of fascism and Aryans as the most evolved people and they must govern. So that is explicitly the political belief of the central government and in many states. So in one of the states, for example, Manipur, northeast, hundreds of churches have been burned down, almost 30, almost 40,000 or so, Christians are living in camps because their houses have been burned down. They can't go back to their houses. But leaving what's happening in India to one side, when the specific trigger, this was not a full study, but the trigger which began this conflict was a hailstorm had destroyed the crops in about a hundred villages, and I was organising relief for them. The government banned that relief. So I said, "Okay, we'll not give any relief. We will pray for the victims, with the victims, in a public prayer meeting in a Gandhi Ashram, not in a church, not a Christian prayer meeting, but we will invite all religions to come and seek God. Perhaps if you're not allowed to do any relief, maybe as an answer to our prayer, the government itself will offer relief to the victims of this hailstorm." So the specific order was to cancel that prayer meeting. The police told me that if you don't cancel it, I will personally kill you. I won't arrest you. I won't prosecute you before a magistrate. I'll just take you from your home to the jungle, shoot you, throw your body, hyenas will eat it. In the end, they didn't kill me, but they just threw me in jail. That raised the question, how do you build a society where human rights are respected? Where my freedom to pray, my freedom to serve the victims of a national calamity, is there, where the state exists to defend my rights, including my right to life, not to take it away. So that journey of how do you create justice in a free and a progressive society, resulted in some of the study. I wrote four books on the history of modern India, that it was in fact biblical Christianity that created modern India. And then I went on to see what else has this book, the Bible, done to the world? And that led to the two books that you mentioned, The Book That Made Your World and This Book Changed Everything. So that's sort of the passion, but now that the Bible is no longer the soul of India, Australia, or Europe, and as European society is disintegrating once again and people are losing their freedom in countries such as Canada and America, the question, is how do we rebuild the foundations of freedom and justice? That's been part of the passion that how was the modern world created, and if the Bible created it, can that world be sustained? Can those freedoms be sustained? Is part of the question behind these books. Well, I would say both because the question is do I have the freedom to serve the poor? Do I have the freedom to organise a public prayer meeting in a neutral ground where Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, and Christians, are all invited to come and seek God, for the victims? Because in a hundred villages, there are people of all religions who have been devastated by this hailstorm. Does the state exist to promote, preserve, and protect my freedom, or is my freedom a gift from the government that it can take away? Do I have an inalienable or fundamental right to life? Where does it come from? Does it come from The United Nations Charter of Human Rights, or is it a fundamental right because it is given to me by God himself? If God says, "You shall not kill," is that a command binding on the government, that the government cannot kill me? So Ahab and Jezebel may be king and queen of Israel, but they cannot kill a farmer, Naboth, because the king wants his vineyard. So the queen organises his murder through false witnesses, takes his property, and gives it to her husband because he wants it badly. Elijah has to face this: does my right to life come to me from the state, or does it come from God and the state is bound to exist to protect my life and my property and my family, etc? So these are philosophical issues, but the freedoms that the world has enjoyed, much of the world, including Australia, have actually come from the Bible. But the universities have been deceiving. The university has been deceived that these freedoms and rights come from Greece or the Enlightenment, not from the Bible. Therefore, the source of justice, freedom and prosperity has been undermined by the universities. The West, including Australia, is not yet experiencing the damage that the universities and the intellectual deception, the deception of the ideas has… It does not yet have practical implications in many societies, but it did in Germany. So as the Germans, the birthplace of Protestant Christianity, rejected the Bible, and accepted the human mind as the ultimate authority and rationalism, it led to totalitarianism and the two world wars. And of course, after the World Wars, communism continued, with the communist ideas that man can be the Messiah, should be the Messiah, the party. So in this, yes, it is certain doctrines, teachings of the Bible, certain ideas, and it may be different ideas at different times. So it could be as simple a question as, is it really God's word that you shall not kill? Is my fundamental right to life, is the practical application of that command you shall not steal? Is my right to property, my responsibility to work and my freedom to create wealth, does it come from God's word, or is it the state's gift to me? Who gives the state the authority? So these are issues on which the modern world was built. Now in India, we are still struggling with more basic issues, such as, in most Hindu temples untouchables are not allowed to enter the temple. Even the president of India right now is a tribal woman. She's not of high caste, therefore, she can enter a temple, but she cannot go into the holiest of holy. And this was true of our previous president of India. They have to be kept out. They cannot do this. But for most low-caste Hindus, right now in my home district, a Dalit, an untouchable, Scheduled Caste man was beaten up because he dared to drive in front of the palace. The palace is a little thing of a little former ruling family. He was beaten up, his wife was beaten up, and that one-year-old baby was thrown on the street. The whole nation right now, social media is seized with an incident that a high-caste political activist urinated in public on the face of a low-caste tribal young man. The young man was sitting on the roadside, this man was urinating on him. Video is made, the video is viral, much of the social media is discussing it, the issue that this is showing… And the Brahman community, the president of the Brahman Society is actually defending this humiliation, and beastliness, by saying that there is no law that one cannot urinate another person. So this man has not broken any law, though he's publicly humiliated that you are dirt, you are filth. That's the message he has sent. So in India, can this man, upon whom a high caste Brahman is urinating in public, make a video, and send it to the people so that the whole people groups are humiliated, can this man actually become a priest? The victim, can he become the priest? Can he become the ruler? This is the gospel in Revelation 5:9-10, the Lamb of God is worshipped in heaven because, with his blood, he purchases slaves of Satan to make them sons of God, and they will serve God as his priests and king. So this is a social revolution, an intellectual revolution, that a person who was not allowed to enter the temple, in fact, his body becomes the temple of the living God, and he becomes a child of God, serving his father, managing his father's kingdom. So you're priest and king. So in India right now, these aspects of Christian doctrine, whether the lower caste can in fact be exalted to the highest position of being priests and kings. Now, this is not important in the West at this moment, these ideas, but in fact, Martin Luther's concept that every child should be educated was exactly built on the concept of priesthood and kingship of all believers. School systems did not exist in Europe, 500 years ago. No country had a school system, but universities had been created by the Roman Catholic Church. Universities existed, but universities were institutions of the church for the church, by the church. They were training the ministers of the church. Very few secular students will be there. They would be sons and daughters of the kings, royalty, and high bureaucrats, as noble families. If their children went on to be on diplomatic posts, they would be admitted to the church institutions because the state had no universities of its own. All the universities grew out of the monasteries and cathedral schools. But when Martin Luther understood that every believer is a priest and king, he said that every child must be educated because you cannot serve God if you don't know God. You cannot do God's will on earth if you don't know what his will is, and therefore you have to be taught to read and write, that's why the Bible should be available in German, English, Finnish, Spanish, etc. So the linguistic revolution of translating the Bible into vernacular dialects, and transforming dialects into literary languages, was the foundation of the intellectual revolution, which was a social revolution of bringing equality that every child of God is a priest and king. This is the revolution which the gospel is now bringing into India, and which is the fundamental challenge to what Hinduism had done to India of making the vast majority of Indians second class, third class, fourth class, outcast people, who are not allowed to enter into the holiest place in the temple or to become ministers, priests. So yes, these are ideas, but they are ideas rooted in the Bible, therefore, the Bible itself has to be… Starting next week, I'm publishing a series of books. All of them have been written, they're now being prepared for the press. The first of these is called The Father of Modern India, William Carey. You have Carey Grammar School in Sydney where our daughter, when she was in 10th Grade, came for six months as an exchange student, and that's honouring William Carey. He was the first Baptist missionary to India, who also initiated the modern Protestant missions from English-speaking countries to the rest of the world. The Modern Missionary Movement, as an organised force, begins with him. He is the father of modern India. So this is our first book, different versions had been published of it earlier, but now it's called The Father of Modern India. So this should go to press next week. The second one is called Missionary Conspiracy. This goes beyond William Carey, to study 150 years of what exactly the missionary movement did, and what was achieved in India. The Third book is called India: The Grand Experiment, which says that modern, free, democratic India, educated India was a vision of Victorian evangelicals, people like Wilberforce and his team, Charles Grant and many others who dreamt of India as a nation and exerted tremendous self-sacrificing labour to create modern India. Then we have a whole series of books, perhaps three volumes. The content of the two volumes is ready. This is called How the Bible Created Modern India. So we are looking at everything from how modern agriculture came to India, the rule of law came to India, the ideas of human equality came, the emancipation of women, health, nursing, but also constitutionalism, etc. So about 30 of us have been working on it for something like 110 weeks to produce these chapters, which we will start publishing now. So there will be, over the next six months, perhaps six volumes revisiting the history of how the Bible created most of India. And this actually begins, the first book goes to press next week. So, some of these books had already been published, and there has been no serious disagreement. It is shocking, but since no one else has been saying it, 25 years ago, I was alone in arguing this. But now there are at least 50 scholars who have researched different facets of the creation of modern India and whose research we will be publishing. Unfortunately, you are absolutely right. Right now, Sweden is allowing the Swedes to burn Bibles in public. In fact, the book I mentioned, The Father of Modern India, by William Carey, was published… My wife and I self-published it in 1992 as a much smaller book, William Carey: A Tribute by an Indian Woman. Then, there was a second edition, William Carey and the Regeneration of India. There was a third British edition called Carey, Christ, and Cultural Transformation. In 1999, there was a US edition called The Legacy of William Carey: A Model for the Transforming Culture. That book has also been translated into Korean, German, and Chinese. But leaving all of that behind, once the US edition, The Legacy of William Carey, was published, there is a lady who helped establish, with her husband, the L'Abri in the USA. She was speaking at Harvard University. She lives within an hour or so of Harvard University. She was speaking and during her speech, she held up our book saying what the gospel, and particularly William Carey had done in abolishing suttee, widow burning, in India. The widows used to be burned and the tradition was banned in 1829, and William Carey was a pivotal figure in arguing that widows should not be burned. They should be educated, they should remarry and begin a new life. But a white woman who was doing a PhD at Harvard, she stood up and shouted at the speaker who authorised this white colonial English man to say that the tradition of widow burning is wrong. He should be respecting local traditions. These are auspicious, sacred traditions, and we should respect their culture. So this is how stupid Harvard University has become, that a white woman doing a PhD, her mind has been so twisted and corrupted that she's saying… She has no basis for critiquing the evil of widow burning. All that she can do is critique a missionary who says that young widows should not be burned, but should be educated and remarried because a woman does not live for her husband. Ultimately, each of us lives for God. The meaning of our lives comes from our relationship with God, not from our culture. So the blindness of Western universities has in fact created the problem that you are expressing. Now, you are absolutely right, there are public intellectuals, including Jordan Peterson, and Tom Holland in England, who are saying that no, the best of the Western civilization came from the Bible. The Bible is the soul of the West, and neither of them are Christians who are saying this. But I have a debate, I don't know if you've had the opportunity to watch it, with Tom Holland. Tom Holland, in one of his discussions, said that modern freedoms came from Greece, and I debated that point with him, that modern freedoms came from the Bible, not from Greece. And during the course of our discussion, he admitted three times that he had not actually studied the history of freedom. He is a professional historian, and I'm not so he is a much better historian than me. I'm not a historian, but he admitted that he had not studied. I pointed out to him that the only political philosophy that Greece ever exported was imperialism. All of European imperialism came from Alexander the Great. Before that, that was imperialism in the Middle East. The Persian empire was invading a democratic free Athens and Greek city-states. But the Greek city-states had become evil, as Plato says, that Greek democracy was the worst of all political systems. So Plato proposed the concept of a philosopher king, which his disciple, Aristotle, tried to implement. Aristotle was the mentor to Alexander the Great. Before he became great, and he was in Macedonia as a young prince, Alexander was his tutor. Alexander implied the concept of a philosopher king and began conquering the world, starting with Persia and going all the way to India. And when he was returning from India, he died in Babylon. So Greece exported imperialism, which Rome then, after the Greek empire fell apart, Rome then started the Roman Empire, which inspired the Spanish, the Portuguese, the French, the Swedish, the Russian, the Austro-Hungarian, British. So the British Empire finally became the biggest. But this imperialism came from Greece. This is the only political philosophy Greece ever exported. But it was in 1910 that Columbia University in New York began to… There were two professors who began to propose the myth. They constructed the myth that modern freedoms came from Greece because Athens at one point had democracy and some of those people praised democracy. It was Will Durant, a lapsed Roman Catholic, who used to lecture on Monday nights in a Presbyterian church across the street from the gate entrance to New York University. Will Durant popularised the myth that modern democracy came from Greece, and that is what the universities have been teaching. And it was amazing that a historian, of the stature of Tom Holland, accepted that myth uncritically because there was no one in England who had been saying that no, British democracy, British freedom did not come from Greece. It came from the Bible, from Scotland, and it came into Scotland from Huguenots and from Geneva. Geneva was the source of republicanism and freedom. So yes, there is a lot of myth that Western universities have been promoting, and as a result, the West is losing freedom. I was in Canada two months ago, and Canada is becoming a nation of slaves, where university professors are not free to publicly present a thesis which they have carefully studied and actually believe in. They may be tenured professors, but they don't have any intellectual liberty to stand for truth or communicate truth. The movement is intended to equip every local church around the world, to take education back from. The university has become the source of darkness because the church, abandoned… Church invented the university, all of the early, in America, USA where I'm sitting right now, 116 of the first 118 colleges and universities were established by the church. In India, the concept of university, college education and universal education came with the church with the missionary movement. It was hard for the Protestant Reformation that if we were a royal priesthood, if every child is a priest and a king, then every child has to be educated because God's will cannot be done on earth unless people know what God's will is. That was the driving force. But after Napoleon, because after the French Revolution and Enlightenment, beginning in 1832, the European church, including the Protestant church, began to surrender education to the state. No state in history had ever run an educational programme. Education was a ministry of the church. So Oxford, and Cambridge, began as Augustinian monasteries. Harvard, and Yale, were Puritan institutions either established by Congregationalists or Presbyterians, or even Anglicans and Methodists and others, later. So education was a ministry of the church, but let's just focus on the USA. It was after 1848 that Horace Mann. He was the first person who began to argue that the church should not educate, the state should. Why? If the church educates, the church will teach divisive doctrines such as the Trinity. A child doesn't need to learn about Trinity. The child needs to learn that he should honour his father and his mother, and he should not covet his friend's pencil, paper, book, or food. So the Bible should be taught for ethics and morality, not for doctrine and truth. Horace Mann then went on to win a seat in the House of Representatives. He became a congressman and that gave him a national platform. He was a good writer, and good speaker, arguing that the church should not educate, and the state should educate. His core argument was that teaching truths, such as the Trinity, is divisive because he was a Unitarian. So as a Unitarian, he does not want the churches that believe in the Trinity to teach Trinity. Now, there is a long story, on which I can't go. John Dewey in Chicago, etc, played a very important role, The World War played an important role, in the American church abandoning education and education becoming a secular enterprise funded by the government and the private sector, not by the church. The result of that is that the Supreme Court can no longer define what a woman is. The last nominee in the USA to the Supreme Court bench is a woman, and she was asked during her confirmation hearing, "What is a woman?" And she could not define it. Why can't they define what a woman is? You can't define a woman, except in contrast to a man. Are men and women different? If they're different, how can they be the same one? Now, Islam has no problem with the question, what is a woman? Because Islam doesn't believe men and women are equal. That's why one man can have four wives, but a woman cannot have four husbands. Hinduism doesn't believe men and women are equal because Hinduism says that a soul is incarnated as a female if her karma in a previous life had been bad. So being a female is a cosmic punishment upon a soul, that you are born in a lower category of a female. Now, Western civilization had no problem in affirming that men and women are different, therefore, they can be defined, and each can be defined. They're different, but they're the same, and they are one, because the Bible's Trinitarian point of view is that in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The Spirit of God was hovering over the waters and the word of God began to create. This Triune God, the Creator, the Spirit, the Word said, "Let's make man in our image." So he made man in his image, male and female, for the two of them to become one flesh so that they actually become three, and have a baby. So that they might reproduce, fill the earth, establish dominion over the earth, which means that the child has to be nurtured by the parents' generation so that he or she learns everything that the parents, and uncles, and aunts, and grandparents know, so that this process of education allows the future generations to increasingly establish their dominion, their stewardship, their managerial ability over the earth. So the Trinitarian worldview had allowed Western civilization to say, "Men and women are different, but they're the same because Father, Son and the Holy Spirit are distinct. But there's one God, they're the same, substance, etc." So Trinity, which affirms unity and diversity, was the base of a unique Western outlook that men and women are different, but they are the same. But now you give up the Bible, you give up that the ultimate reality of the universe is unity and diversity. You condemn the whole intellectual culture to the foolishness of which you cannot even define… So a teacher is teaching a child for two, three, four, five years, she can't say whether this is a girl or a boy. How have Western intellectuals become so blind, so dark? Why is darkness ruling the Western education system? It is because it has been uprooted from its philosophical worldview foundation in the truth, when Jesus says to his disciples, "Go into all the world, disciple all nations," baptising them in the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit, you're immersing them in truth. And this is the source of the West's amazing progress that every girl should study because she is as good as a man, yet she is a woman. Because God has made us male and female. So I'm working on a three-part lecture series and I was hoping that I would be able to give some of it in Australia next month. The lecture series is called Three Sexual Revolutions, about how has the West become intellectually so blind that it has become incapable of defining what is a woman. This is the third sexual revolution. But before coming to that, let me answer your main question, what is the third education revolution? So the third education revolution is an attempt to equip the church to take education back. So 130 Korean missions are partnering with us to establish a million microschools. I'm hoping that 10% of them will become a million micro universities. That means the students will enrol in an accredited university, but go to the local church to attend classes. A church may have only 15 students, but 1,500 professors will come to church every day online, and students can learn from the best teachers from around the world. 10 to 15 students will be overseen by an academic pastor. An academic pastor is a homeschooling mother, or a home college mother, who is helping students to do all the courses, to learn what is. They cannot learn from the internet or they cannot learn from libraries. They cannot learn from books. Learn from each other or have Zoom events with experts that live seminars. So an economist or a chemist goes to the church to have a live seminar with students who are studying daily. So enabling every church to become the centre of education, where education is studying both truths and shaping character because the state education simply cannot shape character. And it can teach students how to make very good robots, but it cannot teach students how to be good husbands, how to be faithful wives, and how to be good children. So character shaping and worldview shaping, which is the study of truth and virtue, has to be reintegrated into education and therefore the church needs a new education revolution to take education back from the state, back from the devil, and restore it to the church, as a ministry of the church, to disciple the future of every nation. Thank you. I'm honoured and I'm grateful. Thank you. Vishal Mangalwadi, founder-president of BOMI/Revelation Movement, is an Indian philosopher and social reformer. Vishal has lectured in more than 40 countries, published 17 books, and contributed chapters to many more. From November 2013, Vishal has also served as the Honorary Professor of Applied Theology in the Gospel and Plough Faculty of Theology at the Sam Higginbottom Institute of Agriculture, Technology, and Sciences.

On this episode of The Inspiration Project, Brendan Corr talks to Dr Chris Watkin about his latest book Biblical Critical Theory. They also discuss why Dr Watkin studies medieval languages in French and German, how Dr Watkin became a Christian after growing up a "happy Atheist", The intellectual critique about Christianity being just about blind faith, choosing to see meaning in the face of anguish instead of nihilisim, whether Dr Watkin believes tackling big ideas and concepts is God's chosen commission for his life and how critical theory is appropriately applied to the Bible. It's very kind of you to say that, Brendan. It's lovely to be with you here today. I'm really looking forward to it. I have no idea why, Brendan. I don't know why everybody doesn't want to do this. Look, I've always loved big ideas and all the big questions, life, the universe, and everything, and so I've always had a real soft spot, I guess, for philosophy because philosophers ask those questions, and I think originally that was probably what drew me, part of what drew me to Christianity as well, that Christians also don't shirk those big questions, don't entertain ourselves to death but we face life and certainly the Bible faces life with all its difficult and profound questions. And so I've always seen an affinity, I guess, between philosophers and Christians as two of the very few groups in society that are asking those big questions today, and I saw this degree as an opportunity to pursue those big questions. Both the French and German traditions have a huge wealth of thinking about all the big, deep questions of life and huge literary traditions. It was just a joy if I'm honest with you. It was an absolute joy to spend four years of my life just reading what people from the 18th century and the 19th century thought about life, what they thought its meaning was, what they tried to do with their lives, and the more you do that, I suppose, the more you realise that the way that you see the life, you see life, whoever you are, is not obvious. Not everybody has always looked at the world the way that I do. People have seen things very, very differently and it really helps you to reflect on your own position and to question yourself, I suppose. I don't think I put it as strongly as being hardwired. Life is complicated, isn't it? How we get to where we end up I think is always much more complex than simply I always wanted to do this and I ended up doing it, but I have always been drawn to big questions, the deepest ways of thinking about life. What is the meaning of life, I suppose, is the deepest you get. So yeah, I've always enjoyed thinking about that sort of thing. That's a really interesting question. I've never thought about that. Do you know, I don't know, Brendan? There's no one sort of moment where the universe opened up to me and I sort of looked into the abyss and thought… And it's nothing like that. No, I think I may have to disappoint you by saying I've just always been interested in it, but there's no sort of one-trigger moment that suddenly sent everything off. Absolutely. Yeah, no, I was fortunate to be able to choose what I did. So in England where I did my education, you choose three subjects to focus on for A-level when you're 16, and I could have chosen sciences. I loved science, I was fascinated by the physical world, but you sort of had to focus one way or another and so I did French, German, and English literature. Yeah, as I say, I could have gone a different way and I think I'd have really enjoyed going a different way. I love physics, maths, and chemistry, but I chose languages, and I'm glad that by God's grace, I've been able to serve and help people by going that way. I've been really fortunate, Brendan, I think, in that I haven't faced any huge challenges. My parents were incredibly supportive all the way through school and university, and I was able to go through university without needing to work to earn money which I recognise is a huge privilege and something that most people are just physically not able to do. So I consider myself to have been very fortunate in the way that I've been able to pursue the degree that I did without having to fight against anyone or anything. Safe to say no. I had a bit of an inoculation against faith as a child, so I grew up as a happy atheist. No God-shaped hole, no existential sort of angst, no desire for transcendence, nothing of that, just really happy, to be honest, with the life that I had. Didn't have a space for God, didn't really feel the need for God. I did go to Sunday school once when I was a child and it was one of the most traumatic experiences of my life. I was quite a shy child and I was just thrown into this room with all these people who knew what they were doing, and we were colouring in pictures of something I didn't understand and we were told a story I didn't understand. Oh, I hated it. It was so stressful, and then the next week I wouldn't even go back into the room. I got my mum to take back the library book that I borrowed. So that was my experience of church as a child. And then I came back to God when I was about 15. So we went with school on a trip to the battlefield of the First World War, and it's very hard to visit those battlefields with rows and rows and rows of little white crosses as far as the eye can see without thinking about death and where all those people are now and whether their sacrifice had any meaning and whether indeed you can use words like sacrifice or whether it's just nature taking its course. Is there anything beyond stuff happening in something like a world war? And so I got thinking and a friend who was on the trip invited me to come to church with her. I went mainly because she was a friend and you're young and you try different things out. So there wasn't any particular attraction to Christianity at that point, but I went along. I think about a year later, it may have been two years, I don't remember, I got to the point where I couldn't walk away from Christianity but I didn't believe it yet. I think the reason I couldn't walk away was that I saw the way that the Christians loved each other. I don't think I'd have used that word at the time, the way they related to each other in the church, which was just extraordinary. I'd never seen anything like it outside of a family setting. They really loved each other, and yet they had, a lot of them, very little in common with each other. There was just an intoxicating quality of the relationship between them. And then again, the Jesus that they kept talking about from the Bible was just perplexing in the sense that he would say some very profoundly wise and sensible things, and then on the next page he suddenly claimed to be God, and there were wise people. There were people who claimed to be God. They're not the same people. The people who claim to be God are in institutions and the people who are wise enough to know not to claim to be God. And so I couldn't put him in a box. I couldn't work him out. And then a little while later, I think, I realised on the first Christian summer camp that I went on that I was a Christian. I heard the Bible taught and I thought, "Yeah, this is the way things are and it is a very exciting way for things to be and I'm very excited by it." So I don't know the moment that I became a Christian, but I know the first time that I realised that I certainly was. Look, I'm sure that there are flavours of Christianity where that's the case. I'm just, again, I suppose the word is fortunate never to have been brought up in that sort of Christianity. So the first Christianity I had contact with when I was still asking questions and not sure where I stood was a Christianity that was asking questions at a much deeper level than anything else that I'd ever encountered in life and much deeper than my friends, and that was sort of opening the Bible and reading it very carefully and taking it seriously and trying to work through how the Bible could be brought to bear on those questions. So there was always, I suppose, a high bar from that point of view. Then when I went up to university, the church that I went to was influenced by figures like John Stott and C.S. Lewis who thought extremely profoundly about the modern world from a position of trying to take the Bible seriously and bring it to bear on the world, and so that's always the Christian air I breathed, I suppose. Yeah, I'm aware, because people have asked the question that you've just asked me before, that there are types of Christianity that try to shut down thinking, but it seems to me that that's neither very helpful nor is it really what the Bible does. You don't see Jesus or Paul telling people to stop thinking. Jesus tells provocative parables precisely with the purpose of making people think and making people slightly unsure of where they stand so that they ask deeper questions. And I think, yes, I completely agree, Brendan, and I think that the same phrase, I am the way, the truth, and the life also primes you to think that the response that Christianity gives you is not going to be a simple one. It's not these three points are the way, the truth, and the life. This simple sentence is the way the truth and the life. There's nothing more complex than people. If Jesus says, "I am the way, the truth, and the life," in a sense there's a beautiful simplicity to that because all God's promises are, yes, in him, everything goes through him. There's a simplicity, but it's not simplistic because the richness of the response that Christ gives to these deep questions of life I think is more complex and more multidimensional than you could ever get with any sort of abstract philosophical answer to them, simply because people are more rich and diverse and sort of multilevel than any abstract idea. And I think it's a balm as well, isn't it? There are very few people in society today who don't want to care for people and the weakest and most vulnerable among us, the people the Bible would call the widows and the orphans, and there are very few people who don't want to say that people have dignity. All people have dignity regardless of how much money they earn or regardless of how well they play sports or whatever. The idea that the deepest reality in the universe is not a force or an impersonal equation or whatever but is actually personal is just one of the biblical foundations. There are others for say that regardless of what I think, people actually do have dignity. So if everybody in the world said people are worthless, on Christianity they would still have dignity, doesn't matter what we think. There's something outside us that ascribes dignity to people. That's so precious. It's interesting, isn't it? I wonder if those two reactions are quite as opposite as we might think though. In order to feel the weight of the nihilism, there's got to be a sense that nihilism's not just normal. It's like Pascal's point that you can only be wretched if you ought to be something more than you are. I think his example is a rat is not wretched when it scrapes around in the rubbish looking for something to eat, and I think again Pascal's example is but a queen would be wretched if she was scraping around in the rubbish looking for something to eat because a queen ought to be grander than that. And so I don't think you can be hit by nihilism without a latent sense that there should be something better or bigger or more meaningful than this. And so I think almost you could say being confronted with the nihilism of the universe, you're already halfway to grasping onto some greater meaning. I think it's the person who would look at the crosses of the First World War and see the millions of people who died and think, "Yeah, whatever. Just more stuff." That's a lot further away from faith than someone who would just be struck by the meaninglessness of it all. Yes, they have. I think you need to be careful about that. So the people like Tom Holland in Dominion and Glen Scrivener in The Air We Breathe have made this argument that the values that we recognise as universal human values today, human dignity, equality, and freedom, actually sunk their roots in a particular cultural compost, if you like, which was the cultural compost that was full of the Bible of Jewish and Christian thought, and I think just historically speaking, it's very hard to refute that. It is de facto the case that those societies that have valued human dignity and the intrinsic value of human life the most, and equality and freedom and so forth happen to have been those cultures where Christianity has helped to shape those cultures. But I think what you don't want to do is suggest that you can't value human life without that Christian influence because I think the Bible itself would say, for example, that verse in Ecclesiastes, God has put eternity in people's hearts. God has given us a sense. As Romans 1 says, it's not a sense that's beautifully pristine and shining in us, but nevertheless, we do have a sense of how God has made the world, as Romans 1 says, his eternal power and divine nature, and so you wouldn't want to suggest that there's no inkling as to the value of human life without specific explicit teaching of Christianity. And so I think what I'm saying is don't push that argument too far. That's right. It's the idea, the theological idea that I think does reflect something that the Bible is talking about, although the Bible doesn't use this language of common grace. God gives grace to everybody. None of us are quite as evil as we would be if we were just left to our own devices, regardless of whether we're Christians or not. That is because God is kind to us and holds back our destructive impulses, and I think we need to let common grace have its say in those debates about values. I don't think I'd use that language. So I enjoy it. It seems that when I do it, people get helped and served and so that's fantastic, but I think it's always dangerous to second guess God's plans. So for example, if my wife were to be injured in a horrific car crash today and to need my full-time care, that would become my vocation. That's me. From that point on, I'm all in. And so if I hold onto an idea of the one thing that I know that God has called me to is to write these books, and then something happens like my wife becomes in need of full-time care, where does that leave me? And I think I've presumed upon knowing more about God's will than I actually do in a case like that. So I enjoy it. It appears that what I do is useful, and I will keep on doing it as long as God puts me in a place where I'm able to do it, and if he changes that then we'll reassess. That's part of the problem. It's become so politicised and so polarised, this debate around critical theory that it's very hard to sort of see the wood for the trees anymore. Look, my argument in the book is really that both historically and logically, Christian faith provides the best basis for doing what we call critical theory. Let me just walk through why I think that's the case because that might sound strange to people who've only come across critical theory as this sort of thing on the news that pops up and people either love or hate and then it sounds quite provocative to say that that is fundamentally Christian. So I owe your listeners an explanation of that. So first of all, historically, just look back to the different ancient civilizations and think about which of them entertained a critique of power within society. So ancient Babylon, and ancient Assyria, you don't find the emperors and kings willingly entertaining people who say, "You're making bad choices." Those people were killed in Babylon and Assyria. And yet in the Hebrew nation, we find this very particular institution which is the institution of the prophet. Now they're not officially sanctioned. There's no school of prophets. You don't have to go to Prophet University to become a prophet. Some prophets are shepherds. Some seem to work in the royal courts. Everybody in society seems to be eligible to be a prophet, and there's only one instance of it being passed on in a line of succession from Elijah to Elisha, I think. So it is really anarchic, this institution of prophecy, and one of the things that the prophet does is they pronounce God's judgement upon the political leadership of the nation. So the other nations are judged absolutely, but a lot of the invective goes towards the kings of Israel and Judah, and yet there's a place in Hebrew society for this institution. Now prophets aren't always liked. Once in a while, they're killed, but nevertheless, they're recognised as, if you like, a legit part of society in ancient Israel, and that's just odd. That critique of that sort should be tolerated is not usual in the ancient world. And then you go into the New Testament period and you see just more of it. The volume gets turned up. Jesus rips into the Pharisees, the leaders, the authority, religious authority figures of his day like he rips into nobody else. And so there's this tradition of critique within the Bible. And then you get into the early centuries of the Christian tradition and you see it carrying on. So I'm thinking particularly of Augustine's amazing book, the City of God. Charles Mathewes is an Augustine scholar. I think he's based at the University of Virginia, a very respected, sort of world authority on Augustine, and one thing that he said in one of his books really struck me. He said that the city of God is the first example that he's aware of in the Western tradition of taking a whole culture, which Augustine does with Rome, not just a little bit of it but the whole of a culture, and subjecting it to a systematic critique from a position outside of it, which of course for Augustine is a biblical standpoint, and to the extent that that is true, the city of God is the origin of the enterprise of systematic cultural critique in the West. So historically speaking, when we talk about critiquing society, we're drawing necessarily upon a heritage that is Christian. But I think there's also a stronger argument to make which is that Christianity provides you with the sort of basis you need to make cultural critique meaningful in the sense that in order to say the way things are in society at the moment is not right, things need change. And everybody says that, don't they? Nobody sort of goes on Twitter and says, "It was good actually. Let's just carry on." Everybody thinks things about any changing one way or another. In order to do that, you've got to have somewhere to stand outside the status quo from which to judge the status quo. If what there is is all there is, why is it not okay? It's just everything. It's just it is what it is. How could you judge it on the basis of anything other than itself because there is nothing else? Christianity, of course, provides you with that place to stand because we know that the way things are now is neither the way that they were originally intended to be, Genesis 1 is not Genesis 3, something catastrophic happened after the original creation to stuff things up basically, and we know that how things are now is not how they're going to be. Colossians 2, I think it is, Ephesians 1, God will gather everything under Christ. Everything will be reconciled to him. Right at the end of Revelation, of course, there's the Final Judgement when nobody will get away with anything that they thought they'd got away with during this life. And so that the Christian can say the way things are now is not how they should be, and that's not just my feeling, it's not just that it makes me feel bad, not just that it sets off certain chemicals in my brain, but objectively, regardless of what I feel that the way things are now is not as they should be. That gives you a very powerful foundation for cultural critique because it's not just I don't like this, and then someone else comes along and says, "Well, actually I quite like it." And then where do you go from there? The only thing you can do there is who can shout the loudest put the most money behind their position and eventually produce the most firepower in order to silence the opposition. That's not a very healthy society. And so there's a sense that pops up in secular cultural theory once in a while that you do need this sort of place to stand, and one of the clearest places that it pops up is towards the end of a book called Minima Moralia by the Frankfurt School critical theorist, a guy called Theodor Adorno, and he's talking about the enterprise of cultural critique towards the end of that book. He says, "Look, what we need is a standpoint of redemption." Now he's not a Christian. He holds no brief for Christianity whatsoever, and he's not using that argument, to be fair to him, to say we all need to become Christians. He has a way of thinking you can get that standpoint of redemption without becoming a theist or a Christian. But nevertheless, the fact that that's the language he reaches for to say, "This is what we need to legitimate the enterprise of cultural critique," I just think is really interesting. It shows you that logically if you don't have somewhere to stand that's different from the status quo, when push comes to shove, all you can really do is say, "I don't like this," and hope that enough people agree with you. I think that's absolutely right. Look, if you don't have a positive vision to offer, then just take your place alongside all the other armchair critics who are pointing their finger at things in society. But the deliciousness of the Bible is that it doesn't just sit there and wag its finger. It does, I suppose iconically in the Book of Revelation paints this, just this beautiful, this meltingly beautiful picture of the new Jerusalem that's a different way that society can be done with God at its centre. Just the picture of beauty and flourishing and joy and harmony that there is there I think is as important in terms of cultural engagement as being able to say the way things are now is not the way that they should be because if that's all you can say, then where do you go from there. So what, what are we going to do about that? We're just going to sort of fold our arms and curl our lips and sneer? Well, that's hardly going to help anyone. So you've got to have a positive vision. I think so. I think certainly that's how Augustine sees things in The City of God. When you get to big views of the world that encompass everything, you can't just say… There's no objective place to stand to say this one's right and that one's wrong because they all explain everything. So what are you going to do? One way of trying to grapple with that is to look at the stories they have to explain to each other. And so there are lots of secular stories out there that will try to explain Christianity better than Christians can explain it themselves is the claim. So psychoanalysis will say, "Yes, well, you think there's a God, but let me tell you what's really going on. Actually, you're projecting a father figure." It is more complex than that, but essentially you need some sort of transcendent idea of the father and so you've invented this idea called God. The philosophy of Darwinism would have its own explanation for Christianity, how it's evolutionarily advantageous, and so forth. And so they all try to explain Christianity as part of their own story. They try to out-narrate Christianity, but of course, Christianity does that as well. It doesn't just sort of sit there in the corner waiting to be animated. It explains why people would be desperate for there to be no God and would go to great lengths to invent stories that paint God out of the picture and so forth. And so you'd look at these stories alongside each other and look at how they explain each other and look at the, I guess, the explanatory power that they have in relation to the way that we see the world. And so a lot of these stories will either go hard on humans being basically nice and benevolent, and we just got to get education right, and then people will be free to be themselves, and if only we can mix the formula correctly in society then everything will be wonderful. Other stories go really hard on human depravity and evil and say, "You're never going to get people to be nice to each other. You've just got to scare them into submission. Unless there's enough fear in society, you're going to get anarchy." And there's a historical genealogy for each of those positions. You can see how they sort of develop. But the wonderful thing about the Bible is that it's sort of more pessimistic than the deepest pessimist and also more wild-eyedly optimistic than the greatest idealist. The pessimists or the cynics will say, "People are fundamentally flawed," and the Bible will come along and say, "You've got no idea how bad we are. We are unable to change our hearts. Our hearts deceive us. We are powerless before our own depravity." There aren't many people painting such a bleak picture, even among the Hobsians who say that there's a war of all against all unless we're too scared to do what we really want to do. And then the Bible comes along and sort of has a look at these idealists who are saying, "We just got to get education right, and then society's going to be wonderful," and the Bible says, "That's a very small vision. Let me show you a reality where we get new hearts, where there's no longer any mourning or crying or pain because the old order of things has passed away. Let me show you a perfect society that's not just pie in the sky but is actually on its way." It makes the greatest secular idealism look like a quick sketch on the back of a napkin. The amazing thing about the Bible is it does both of these and they're not in conflict with each other. It's not that you've got half cynicism or pessimism and half idealism, that Genesis 1 and Genesis 3, both of them unload both battles, Christian view of the world. And so when people do terribly wicked things, the Christian grieves and weeps but she's not shocked, but that doesn't challenge our view of the world, and when people do the most gloriously wonderful self-sacrificial things that the Christian rejoices and is happy, but again, that doesn't rock our world because that's right there in the Bible. And so the Christian can play this whole keyboard of the human experience in a way that I think it's really hard for secular philosophies to wrap their head around because they either go mainly on the people are fundamentally good line or mainly on the people are fundamentally stuffed up line. Yeah, and I think that's what we see on the news, isn't it? People are pretty crummy a lot of the time, and people can torture babies. That happens. People can kill each other. If our view of the world can't cope with that, then we've got a problem. And yet people can go into war zones to rescue people and lose their lives when these people, they're not their family, they're not the same ethnic group, there's no… People are capable of the most wonderful acts as well, and so it just resonates. It just fits with what we see around us, what we read in the paper, and what we see online. I think it's a really complex question, and I'm just trying to think through it in terms of Augustine in The City of God. Look, there are different building blocks that I think you need to get in place to have an adequate answer to that question. Let's just try and throw a few of them in the wall. I think first of all, none of us come to the Bible as a blank slate. So we've all been categorised into a particular cultural view of the world and that catechesis has been constant and often very aggressive. So everything that we are taught as babies and then children is bringing us into a particular view of the world that our parents largely hold. Everything that we see online, all the adverts that we see as we walk around the city, wherever we live, all the interactions that we have with other people are all shaping and forming us, and for those of us who live in Australia and similar countries, they're shaping us into a really quite particular, and in many ways peculiar, Western view of the world and teaching us to value particular things that not all cultures have always valued and to shun and decry other things that not all cultures have shunned and decried, and so we all start from somewhere. None of us come to the Bible completely clean culturally, and so we're necessarily going to read some of our cultural assumptions into the way that we interpret the Bible. Now the question is not do we start from there, the question is what do we do with that, and I think there are particular ways in relation to reading the Bible that that needn't mean that you end up with some sort of wishy-washy relativism where the Bible just means nothing in itself and everybody just brings their own ideas to it and nobody ever takes anything away from it. I think first of all, that's not the way we read any other book. You wouldn't say that about Shakespeare. You'd say that your cultural lenses filter your view of Shakespeare to a certain extent, but I don't think anyone would say the text itself means nothing at all and it's only what you bring to it that you take away from it. So the sort of entry-level to this, you just treat the Bible like you would treat any other text and don't deny to the Bible the courtesy that you would give to any other text or to any other person speaking to you. As I'm speaking to you now, you're not saying, "Well, your words could mean anything at all." That's not very nice to me and I'm not assuming the same of you either, and so you're just to extend the Bible that same courtesy. I think what the Bible has going for it though in contradistinction to other books is two things. First of all, it is itself multicultural, if you like, that it's written over a period of centuries in different languages within two different cultures. So there's the culture of a nation being slaves in Egypt, moving out of slavery to a self-governing setup in the Promised Land, and then later on in exile, a very different cultural context, and then under Roman occupation in the New Testament. And so the Bible is not monocultural, and if you believe that the problem is being locked into a particular cultural outlook, well, then the Bible doesn't have that problem, almost uniquely among books because it wasn't written within one generation and one cultural context. The other factor I think that gives us great hope in reading the Bible that we're not just looking at a mirror and seeing our own ideas reflected back to us is the promise of God's Holy Spirit to help believers interpret the scriptures. Now, this is not a get-out-of-jail-free card. It's not, well, I'm a believer, therefore everything I think about the Bible is necessarily going to be true because I've got the Holy Spirit. I don't think that's the way the New Testament conditions us to think about reading the Bible, but nevertheless, the ministry of the Holy Spirit does guide the first apostles into all truth and they're able to set it down. And then when we read, if we read seeking to obey Christ and seeking to follow him, we do have the Holy Spirit. And so I think for those two main reasons, almost the Bible more than any other book gives us hope that we're not just in an echo chamber of our own ideas when we read it. I guess it goes back to the answer from a little while ago which is that the Bible expects human beings to be capable of great good and great evil, and it expects human beings not to be comfortable with the idea of there being a personal God who makes demands of us and makes promises that he wants us to trust. If that is the case, as the Bible suggests that it is, then it would be no surprise if we take biblical truths and try and wriggle out of them or twist them against the Bible and try and draw out of them arguments that seem to defeat the faith. It would be odd if that didn't happen if we are as the Bible says that we are. And so the trajectory that Trueman charts in that book, and there are other possible ways of telling that story as well, it's sort of, well, yeah, that's the sort of people that we are, isn't it? If the Bible is correct, that's sort of the way you'd expect it to play out. Let's just say a quick word about the nostalgia first. I think that the nostalgia reflex is more complex than we often give it credit for. So I don't think people actually want to go back. We selectively understand certain parts of the past through the lens of the present and project onto the past I think a weight that the actual past is not able to bear. And so I think there's a lot more to nostalgia than simply wanting to turn the clock back. It's a bit of a simplistic idea that all that we need to do is go back to a previous point. There was no golden age, and I think again, the Bible predisposes us to expect that. This side of Genesis 3, there's no high point that if we just get back to there then it's all going to be great. That's not the shape of the people who called the story. So is there hope? Well, yes, there's a Christian sort of hope which is neither the armchair cynicism of all politicians are corrupt, and if you're on the left, capitalism is just draining society of all its morality, or if you're on the right, whatever it is these days, the woke agenda is destroying. So there's not that cynicism, but neither is the sort of wing and a prayer, Hail Mary sort of hope that you sometimes get, if we could all just love each other and these sort of John Lennon Imagine type hope. It sort of sounds okay, but how on earth… That's not what people are like. That's never been what people are like, so why do we expect that people are suddenly going to fundamentally change and society's going to be wonderful? But the sort of hope that you get in Christianity is a hope that can look the bleakness of reality in the face. It can look those rows of white crosses in the First World War in the face, and it doesn't have to pretend they're not there and it can weep at that, and yet in the midst of that, it can hold out a concrete, visceral hope for the fundamental change, the inbreaking of which we see already. When Christianity is working along a biblical pattern, I think we see something of the hope being manifest. So for example, during the Great Awakening in the UK, back in the day when under Whitefield and Wesley crime rates dropped, alcoholism dropped, and I'm not suggesting that Christianity is always an unmitigatedly beneficial force in society. Christians in the name of Christ have also done a lot of evil. John Dickson's book, Bullies and Saints, I think is really, really helpful in facing that and coming to terms with that as Christians. So don't anybody hear me saying Christians are always wonderful and they always do wonderful things, isn't it great? Nevertheless, there is historical evidence to show that Christianity can benefit, does benefit society, and that from a Christian point of view is just the first fruit. It's just the shadows, the incoming, to switch the metaphor from the shadow to the little rays of light before the glorious sunrise. There's a hope that's a here-and-now hope. It's not just pie in the sky when you die. Christianity done properly benefits society, and we can look at the past as an example of that, if people love each other and build community and help each other and use their money and their time to support each other, that's good for society. And yet, that's not the only hope. It's not just a let's try and make things a tiny bit better type of hope, which the more you think about it and the more you dwell with that sort of hope is actually sort of a council of despair. Is that all we can do? But it is an unstoppable juggernaut of hope also coming when we will get new hearts and every tear will be wiped away from our eyes and so forth. It's the combination I think of those two that's the distinctive of the Christian hope. It's not just let's sit tight and wait for the apocalypse, but it's not let's just do a tiny bit now because that's all we're ever going to achieve either. Christopher Watkin (PhD, University of Cambridge) is senior lecturer in French studies at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. He is a scholar with an international reputation in the area of modern and contemporary European thought, atheism, and the relationship between the Bible and philosophy. His published work runs the spectrum from academic monographs on contemporary philosophy to books written for general readers, both Christian and secular, and include Difficult Atheism, From Plato to Postmodernism, Great Thinkers: Jacques Derrida, and others.

Job Titles:

• Provost

On this episode of The Inspiration Project, Brendan Corr talks to Dr. Owen Strachan about the current war on men. They discuss what led Dr. Strachan into ministry, how he became a Christian, what it means to be a biblical man, why men are under attack in today's culture, why Toxic masculinity is actually a toxic idea, where and how the war on men began, what it would take to fix this issue in society today, how Dr. Strachan would answer a modern feminist who disagrees there is a war on men, and What does Dr. Strachan mean by the notion of re enchanting the world. Okay. Yeah, well it translates then. Yeah, so I had no idea I would be born on the coast of Maine in New England, and then go to Washington DC and Louisville, Kentucky, and Chicago, and then Louisville again, and then Kansas City, and now in Arkansas. But yes, I have been able to have the blessing of seeing a lot of America and even living and working in a lot of America. And it just really owes to God's providence, and it's taught me that as much as you can teach about the providence or the sovereignty of God in a kind of textbook way, this is the definition. In terms of actually living out God's plan for your life, it's not dull, it's not boring, and God will surprise you in some different ways. But he seems to take joy in doing so. So I'm along for the ride. That's a great question. I wanted to be in Christian ministry when I got to college, and especially during my sophomore year. But I had no, again, plan by which that was going to happen. And that's been a theme of my life. My father was not in ministry. He's a Christian man, but he wasn't a pastor. A lot of my peers in Christian ministry were trained in a pastoral context, missionary home, or academic home. That's not what is true of my background. So I'm in college, and my roommate in college goes to DC and hears about a pastoral internship and tells me about it. Long story short, I applied and ended up being accepted, and so then I went to Washington DC. And then while I'm there, I'm told about Southern Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky where Al Mohler is the president, and I end up going there. And then when I'm at Southern, I end up hearing about a job at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. And so I go there and do further study. And it's just been like that throughout my life. Everyone has their own God-written story. That's mine. But yeah, it's not been dull, and it's caused me some amount of vocational confusion at different points. But I suppose God has used all of that back and forth to teach me to trust him and rely on him, even when I don't know what's up ahead because I surely don't. I grew up in a Christian home. And from a young age, I knew that I needed the grace of God. I knew that I was not sufficiently holy to be accepted by God as I stood. And so growing up in that context, you hear the gospel message from the scriptures, and the gospel message is very simply that Jesus Christ died on the cross to save sinners, and rose again from the grave to give those same sinners eternal life. And we lay hold of that forgiveness and even eternal life itself when we repent of our sin, which means turning from our sin, rejecting our sin, breaking up with it if you will. And then we follow Christ, we set our face to follow Christ. And all of that does not occur by some virtuous motion of our own heart. All of that occurs ultimately as God works in us, and God gives us a zeal for the things of God and takes away the zeal we formerly had for fallen things, for sinful things. And so that's true in my own story. When you become a Christian, of course, it doesn't mean that you get zapped with a magic wand and you never sin again. You never have to battle thinking the wrong things, desiring the wrong things, saying the wrong things, and acting in the wrong ways. But it does mean that you are given what the Bible calls a new heart, a new nature. And now you want to please God. You want to please your heavenly father, and you're given the spirit's power to do that. And now you see it as a joyful thing that God is in control of your life. And it's not scary. It's not as scary as it is when you're not a Christian that God is in control. Now it's the most comforting truth there is. That's a great question. I have three kids, 15, 12, and nine, and they ask me sometimes because I'll go and speak at an event. And they'll say, "Dad, are you famous?" Because there are people who will know who I am at a Christian Church sometimes. And I will say, "When we go to the airport child, there will not be a single person who will know who I am. So no, I am not famous." They have not yet hounded me when I go to the supermarket. But I appreciate your kind words. I would say that yes, I was driven from an early age, and I think a lot of young men want to make their mark in the world. They want to be strong from birth. They don't want to be weak, they want to be heroic, and they want their life to count. And that was true of me. That instinct has been wired out of boys, or at least folks have tried to take it out of boys, but it's wired into boys by God himself I believe. And I see that in my background. I didn't have a strong notion of earning a lot of money. I've never been that concerned with earning a lot of money. I'm thankful for what God gives. I wanted to be a basketball coach from the time I was young, in particular, because I enjoy young people, and I love sports. I love the drama, the intensity, the struggle, and the approximation of the hero's quest that you find in a small form in sports today. It's one of the last heroic theatres we have in the modern world. So that's what I aspired to. But no, I've had all the normal battles with pride, vanity, desire for fame, and affluence that anyone has or many people have. And I've had to die to those sins. And even today in Christian ministry, you have to watch your heart, because it's a very dangerous thing to be in ministry but then have worldly desires for fame, money, or prominence creep into that. And so I'm not here to present myself as one who has navigated those struggles perfectly, because I haven't. But I can tell you that by the grace of God, I want to pass the test and I pray that I will. No, it's not. We're fundamentally in an age that values safety more than risk. And it's seen as toxic, for example, to be a risk-taker if you're a boy or a young man. I can scarcely think of a worse framing than that for adulthood, manhood, and Christian maturity guy or girl alike, than that. We all want to be safe. You can see walls behind me. I'm not broadcasting from a forest glade open to nature and animals to invade the broadcast. So there's a right form of safety that we all very much need to seek and pursue. You train your kids as a father or a mother in all sorts of rudiments of living wisely, to use a better word than safety. Wisdom is the greater category than safety. But safety has been allowed in our time to usurp wisdom and dethrone it. And so now, what we train our kids to be is safe, not wise. And again, to reuse this word once more, that's a tragedy. Because what is going to happen if you train children to want to be safe above all, is that they are not going to have an appropriate instinct to take risks. And life in a fallen world necessitates that you must often act with the wind in your face and you must often venture into unsafe territory if you are going to make a difference in any number of areas. So one of the absolute worst things you can do is platform safety as the highest virtue or the greatest good. It is no such thing. And that's had tremendous effects in all sorts of directions. But yes, one of them is to extract the very nature of boyhood from boys, such that if they show any boyishness at all, it's a terrible thing. It's a crime against humanity. When of course boys need shepherding, training, and formation. But a lot of that is supposed to come not in a punitive way or a medicinal way through pills. It's supposed to come through a father's arm around the shoulder, speaking calmly and lovingly, and sometimes just a bit sternly into his son's ear, such that his son is shaped and helped and guided. But here again, we've lost many fathers from our world as well. In the 1970s, the political philosopher Irving Kristol wrote a marvellous essay on this very theme. I cite it in this book, The War on Men, which just came out. And Kristol talked about the loss of grand figures and grand narratives. And this is something that dovetails with the rise of postmodern philosophy in the last 40 to 50 years where there is no grand narrative to life, there is no higher truth, there is no telos, end goal to existence itself. We all have our truths, and communities have their truths, and you sort of muddle along as best you can. And that's an altogether deficient understanding of life because life is to be lived as a great adventure for the glory of God. Well, I think it is at some level the loss of Christianity from society because Christianity at its best does not tuck you in at night and say, "The goal of life is just to be safe." The Christian message is all about light entering darkness. It's all about God coming to Abram in Genesis 12 and saying, "Go." It's all about Jesus in the New Testament gathering his disciples after his resurrection and saying, "Go," and make disciples. And so there's this gravity, and energy, and momentum in the Christian story that you cannot miss, but that has been robbed of Christianity, it's been extracted from Christianity. And as Christianity has been largely pushed out of the mainstream of Western life, that means that we've lost a sense of adventure, of risk, of going in the name of God. You think even about how imperialism and colonialism are treated. I'm not here to offer some full-throated defensive either, but the rejection of each of those realities dovetails with the broader postmodern attack on the Christian message. Yes, it is. I would differ from the author of that text on several counts, and I would not encourage Christians to use or apply critical theory. I think the resources we need to re enchant the world are all in scripture itself, and in Christian theology as traditionally understood, if you will. But I definitely think that the loss of stories from people's lives is a huge part of why there is such little purpose, meaning, and worth in the existence of many people around the world. In your country, in mine, and again, across the world. Suicide rates among young men today are sky-high in America, for example, and it's baffling. It baffles many people. Because material conditions are relatively very good in terms of prosperity, in terms of money, in terms of earning power. They're not what they were. Our economy has been suppressed in recent years, and that's sad to see. But still, we're in a very prosperous age, relatively speaking. And yet people are hopeless. They're hopeless. And I think it's not just because of the loss of story, it's because of the loss of true story. That's what you need. You don't just need a story. There are still lots of stories around. The Marvel movies give you a story. And that can distract you for a few hours, and you can even engage that story, and it can even impact you in terms of great literature, or great movies, or great plays in the theatre. But what you need is not just a compelling narrative, you need a true story, and that's missing, and that's what the Bible gives you. The Bible is not a sterile collection of dates, names, and boring moral principles. The Bible has data in all sorts of directions, but ultimately the Bible is the grand story that gives your life, your tiny little story, immense significance. Your life echoes unto eternity. So if you take that away from people if that is taken away from them or they simply lose faith in it because they believe other stories for a time, then nothing but chaos is going to result. Nothing good will come of that. Well, they're free to say that, and I'm glad for intellectual exchange. I'd rather have intellectual exchange than none. I'd rather have fires in the dark, even by warring parties than complete bleakness. But I would say no. The reason why my writing has any ring of truth to it, to the degree it does, is because it reflects God's truth. And God's truth is premised not simply on compelling ideals or symbolic signs. God's truth is predicated on time and space. It comes to us in history, and God stakes a claim not simply in the human imagination, but in lived reality. The incarnation which we're going to celebrate globally in a few weeks came in time and space. God could have, I suppose, perhaps transmitted some sort of salvation to us in some weird spiritual dimension without sending his son. I don't think he would've done that of course, but God can do what God wishes to do. What did God do though? God sent his son born of a virgin. And so God has very much claimed not merely the category of true truth or transcendent truth, God has claimed history. History is God's, and woe betide the Christian, therefore, who gives up on the history God has claimed. Don't relinquish the claim that God has made. And I think that's what is so significant for re enchanting people's worldviews. It's helping people understand that 2,000 years ago just about, Jesus walked where we walk, and Jesus had a flesh and blood body as we have. And God is not shy about entering our world much as we might like to keep him out. Great question. I mean much what you just said, that we must understand the world not in materialist grey, but in IMAX high definition spectra colour as made by God. God has not given us an anodyne creation where there is no joy, there is no taste, there is no delight, and there is no beauty. And frankly, alongside those things, there is no pain, searing pain. There is no suffering, there is no temptation, there is no loss. God has given us a consequential world. God has given us a multidimensional experience of his desire, of his freedom of creation. And God wants us as embodied souls to experience the range of the human condition. So I want to restore all of that. I don't want to just restore the get you saved part of Christianity though. That's everything. That's everything. I want to restore the whole range of emotion, experience, and affection that is supposed to be a part of life in this world. And that too is a part of re enchanting the world. It's very interesting. I was at Oxford and Cambridge just a few weeks ago on a tour and was reflecting on C.S. Lewis' famous journey to Christian faith. A key part of that journey… There are different dimensions people focus on with Lewis, but to plunge us into Lewis's arcana here for a minute, a key part of it was C.S. Lewis as a materialist denying the existence of the supernatural. So living in a disenchanted world where there's just cause and effect and there's nothing supernatural occurring. Lewis had a friend who had gotten very caught up in spiritualism, and in seances, and engaging darkness, and these sorts of things. And sparing your viewership and listenership the details, this man, it appears from my reckoning as a Christian became demon-possessed, and I do mean demon-possessed. And the man for two weeks lived with C.S. Lewis, and the man was so tormented, whatever precisely was going on with him, that C.S. Lewis as a materialist mind you, would have to hold him down on the ground. He would tremble and shake so violently. He was having visions of demons and spiritual beings just at bay from him. And the experience is a key part of why C.S. Lewis crosses the line from materialism or secularism as we would probably call it today, to belief in the supernatural. And I would say it's the opposite. The way this is often presented today at leading establishments, and all the fine colleges and universities that students want to go to across the world. It's the opposite of how they present it. To understand the world, you have to write all of that off. To understand the world, you actually have to embrace all of that and welcome it in. Not in terms of being demon-possessed, God willing, but in terms of seeing the world in its dimensional reality. Yeah, that's a thick reality. And the thin reality is you're just a collection of atoms bumping around together. People do what they do, merely because they're cogs in a machine. There's no greater purpose to life. There's no ought in the cosmos. That's not a thick reality. Your materialist vision, your secularist vision, your atheistic vision, your skeptical vision, that's not thick. That's thin. I'm over here, not because I'm better than you, but I'm over here by the grace of God understanding transcendence, understanding that there must be a creator of all of this, understanding that a tiny baby entered the world sent from heaven so that that tiny baby would grow up 30 years later or so and die on a cross. And in so doing, affect atonement for my sins. That's a thick reality. Thin reality is avoiding all of that. Yes, nicely said. It's kind of like families of a middle or upper-class tone who when you get together for the holidays, only discuss polite things. You avoid the sticky stuff, right? You avoid the tough topics. You're not necessarily hashing out the meaning of life with your uncle who clearly disagrees with you. You talk about sports teams and pleasantries, and then you go out on the porch and watch some sports, and go home at the end of the night. That's not a thick reality. That's a thin reality. And that's what is sold to us from high culture today. That's what the arts, to switch the conversation back to the arts, that's what our arts communicate to us over and over again, that there's nothing beyond this. That's not deep engagement with the world. That's a polite conversation over the holidays. What Christianity does at its best, and I will admit that all churches do not show this necessarily, but Christianity at its best doesn't invite you to a stiff, polite conversation where you don't talk about anything real. It invites you to a live rollicking discussion, where there's pipe smoke, and there's merriment behind you. Then somebody gets into a fight outside, and then you're hashing out the mysteries of life with people who are listening to you. And at the end of it, you all sing songs in the halls of kings together or something like that. That's a thick reality. And that's what people are longing for, but they're not going to find it on little screens, in sterile classrooms, and secularist paradigms. Yeah. And there's an aversion in all of us to the pain, and the struggle, and the risks. There's that word again, that real life brings. To have a child is to risk something awful befalling your child. And growing and maturing actually, as a father or mother is not thinking you can control your child and everything around them. Growing, and maturing is realising, "Okay, I darn sure better do everything I can to disciple this child in the Christian faith, and train them, and right and wrong, and how to think well, critically, but ultimately I can't control them." And so there's this terrifying reality of releasing them into the world. But that's real life. Real life is not a sanitised, anaesthetised life. Real life is a risk. Real life is marrying someone you are in love with, but you probably barely know. And then navigating, God willing, for 50 or 60 or 70 years, the ups and downs of life together. And by the way, the personal ups and downs each of you bring that necessitate not sterility around a holiday dinner table and polite conversation, but real, getting into each other's battles, sin struggles, pastimes, and backgrounds. But all of it Brendan, is worth it. That's what we have to say above all. It's not just that it's exciting to do it. It's worth it. And what the reformers recovered in their era in the 16th century is that it's not only just generically worth it, but all of life is coram deo. All of life is lived unto God. It's not the priests alone who live unto God. Every person who is a Christian is a priest unto God. And so when you are doing the hard work as a mother of training your kids day by day, when you are doing the hard work husband to wife of saying, when you are doing the hard work of building in your vocation, when you are a student or a young person and you are denying the flesh again, all of that is coram deo. It's not just that you're in a story and it's a good story at the end of the book. It's that right now matters. Every moment matters. You are. Lewis and I might tangle over free will to some degree. I would more straightforwardly confess the sovereignty of God in all things than he would in certain respects. But I find Lewis a profound thinker, and I think he's onto something when he is discussing the worth it-ness of this great enterprise of life. And I think, to go all the way up, I sense we're probably concluding soon, but to go all the way up, I don't want to read creatureliness onto God because we must not do so. He is the creator, we are creatures. It's vice versa. But God represents himself in scripture as a God who loves to love for example. And so I wouldn't use the term risk of God, meaning attempt an outcome he can't secure. But I would say God enters into a relationship with humanity and kickstarts this whole venture, invests our lives with immense worth, potential, dignity, and purpose, and lets us do things. I think if we were writing the story, we would think, "We shouldn't do that. God, just write us as automatons, write us as robots in this story. And you do it. You do it. We'll watch you do it." And that's not at all what God does. God calls us to live lives that are at once microscopically small, and at once epically significant. Yeah. I'm not trying to get us into any societal debates or something, England versus other societies. So bracket that. But just being in London and seeing the statues that these societies have erected of great figures, you go to Trafalgar Square, and there is this massive statue of Lord Nelson who led England to victory over the French, the Imperial French in 1805 and died for it. And again, not to get into the particulars of this society against that one, but when you look up at it, you're transported, you're taken to a vision of humanity that's greater than you would otherwise think. And then you recognise that there's something far beyond a great naval figure, forgotten as he is. People walk past these statues, by the way, without a second thought, without a glance at them. And I almost couldn't make my way through London. There are so many statues. I love the grandeur they represent. I love that they convey the nobility of the human person and the potential of the human person. But far greater than that is the grandeur of God, the greatness of God, is the God who is acting in our lives. A temptation for us is, is to think God acted in his life, or God acted in the biblical figure's life, but God is not acting in my life. And what we need to do is recognise… I was reading the story of Joseph recently in the Book of Genesis. God is with Joseph, yes when he is in power in Egypt. But God is equally with Joseph when he is in a prison in a dungeon. And that's true of us. Yeah. At the end there, you got onto something I was about to go to, utopian cleansing. It's a kind of savage Lockeanism, referring to John Locke and his idea that the human person is a tabula rasa, a blank slate. There's a kind of savage form of that today where you're supposed to rewire humanity, rewire figures of the past, and deny those who had any failing in their existence. To respond to those pulling down statues, we don't say, "Those figures were perfect. Those figures got everything right. How could you do this?" We do the opposite. We do what we've been talking about in this conversation, and we should be able to do this in schools, colleges, and universities. We should be able to treat historical figures as if they were complex people. Christianity, by the way… Again, thick reality like we were talking about. Christianity is the worldview. It's often identified with thin reality, but it's the faith that rightly gives voice to complex humanity. You think of David, the man after God's own heart who slays the husband of the woman he seduces. And he is yet a man after God's own heart. So we have categories for complexity as Christians. The ones who don't, they're not doing any justice to the complexity of the human condition, the human person. Are the ones who yes, would pull down statues of heroes, of grand figures. And they're not just pulling down statues of Washington or someone like this, some soldier from the American Civil War. They're pulling down the very idea that there is nobility. They may not say that that boldly, they may not even know that consciously, but they are rejecting heroism, even as they are thinking of themselves as heroes. So there's an irony there. You destroy the real heroes, at least some of them, and yet you anoint yourself as a hero for doing so. And in so doing, you doubly condemn yourself. Yeah, And I think you're right. Your supposition is right. And here again, those who are dynamiting the past, erasing the past, are the same ones who are selling themselves as the answer. And there is a profound problem there. It's not a small problem. It's a category five hurricane of a problem, where they're saying the people of the past are bad and need to be erased, but we are the ones who have it figured out. When in reality, there's real light in the past. It's not all light. It's not all light, but there's real light there, and you need to behold it, and you need to look into it, and you need to go there and see what is light there, and be influenced by it and learn from it. But instead of learning from it, you're extinguishing it. And so young people are being trained in exactly the wrong instincts. And this is where the Christian faith cuts in once again. About the patriarchy, just to resurface that for a second. First of all, what is the patriarchy? It sounds like the world's worst advertising agency. But beyond that, have men sinned badly in years past? Yes. Does that mean though that you therefore banish men from leadership or something like this, or call strong men toxic? Is that the move to make? No. The thing to do is to go back and see where there's light, and learn from the light, and have some of it reflect on you. And then you go forward into an uncertain future having learned from it, but not having gone there to extinguish what is light, what light there is to be found. The more you go on in the Christian faith, the more you find you wait on God and you are dependent on God. But the form of total dependence that the Christian life takes hold of, and expresses in us is not exactly what we'd expect. The total dependence of the Christian found in the Bible is, a bit ironically, there's that word again, a very active dependence. It's not a passive dependence where you do nothing. It is an active dependence where you risk much. And God has everything sewn up from the beginning. God has written out every one of our days. God has not only allowed trials, challenges, and failings even in our lives. God has appointed all of that, to use a more technical biblical term. We don't experience that in terms of a printed-out list of directions for the day, turn-by-turn maps, or something. We don't have that. We don't have any of it, and yet God has it all sewed up. But in terms of our experience, we are called into a life of active dependence, where we set out, and we try hard, and we risk much. And God works through all of that, and men are called to lead out in that. It is better today in cultural terms to not risk and thus not risk bad verdicts upon you than to risk and have challenging consequences arise. The Bible has the opposite. In the Bible, it's better to launch out and live boldly for King Jesus. It's better to proclaim Christ and take the consequences as they come than to stay silent and risk nothing. And so what we need to recover in our boys and our youth, in general, is a sense of godly adventuresomeness. We need to let kids adventure. We need to feed them the Christian story as something exciting and not merely something soothing. We need to give them a Jesus from the pulpit who has fire in his eyes. Not a Jesus who is here fundamentally to tuck everybody in at night, but a Jesus who actually comes to you as you're sleeping, and shakes you awake, and you wake up, and you're startled, and you're getting your bearings. And there's this kind face right here, but there's fire in the eyes. The eyes are kind in an Aslan kind of way, but there's a fire in them and he says, "Come on, let's go. We've got work to do." And with that, he's gone. And so you're not walking step by step, you're flying behind him. That's true Christianity. And some of that spirit as I know we're wrapping up, is found in the Narnia books. I don't agree with everything in them. But C.S. Lewis has some very key things that lots of people don't get. One of them is the sense of northernness, transcendence, and majesty of God, of the Aslan figure. And another of those dimensions is the sense-spirited adventure, that courses through true biblical Christianity. Thank you. That's very kind, and I've loved the discussion. And I pray with whatever else has been put on the table in this little conversation simply that we will think of ourselves as servants because that's all I am. I truly am not anything. I'm just a servant. I'm just a footman in a great castle of God. Dr. Owen Strachan is Provost and Research Professor of Theology at Grace Bible Theological Seminary. Before coming to GBTS he served as Associate Professor of Christian Theology and Director of the Residency Ph.D Program at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. He earned his Ph.D from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, his M.Div from The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and his AB from Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. He is married and the father of three children. Strachan has authored numerous books, including Reenchanting Humanity: A Theology of Mankind, The Pastor as Public Theologian: Reclaiming a Lost Vision (with Kevin Vanhoozer) and Christianity and Wokeness: How the Social Justice Movement is Hijacking the Gospel - and the Way to Stop it (2021). Strachan is the former president of the Council on Biblical Manhood & Womanhood, the former director of The Center for Public Theology at MBTS and is the President of Reformanda Ministries. His latest book is titled: The War on Men: Why Society Hates Them and Why We Need Them

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• Episode Description

On this episode of The Inspiration Project, Brendan Corr talks to former Premier of New South Wales Mike Baird about modeling good Christian leadership. They discuss why Mike decided to enter into politics, how he became the 44th Premier of New South Wales, what the job involved, The Lindt Cafe Siege and the responsibility to look after the families and communities impacted, how Mike became a Christian, why faith has played an important role in Mike's life and career, Mike's new role as CEO of HammondCare, and the contrast between public service vs private service. Yeah, I mean, obviously he was a prominent Christian who decided his way to minister was to remind the world that they needed to think about eternity, of where they would spend it. And so he used to go out at night, catch the train and sort of write on footpaths and walls and all over the city "Eternity". And it started discussions and thinking. All to the point, you might remember there was one New Year's Eve, which was only a few years ago that actually had eternity on it. And it was a reflection and acknowledgment of someone that played a key role in the city. And under knowing to many, he really was asking the pertinent question, where are you going for eternity? Are you sure about it? If you don't, should you consider it? Some say he was pointed to Jesus through that. Yeah, I would say a combination of all of those. My mum was an incredible woman and all the siblings, and my father will point to her and her role modeling, very talented, very humble, but very giving. She, for example, saw and became aware of these orphans that lived on the tips in Cairo and rather than being impacted by it, which she was impacted, but then she acted. And so she went and visited Mother Maggie over in Cairo. She saw the work she was doing and she became an advocate down here and sort of raised funds, a network of support. There are 30,000 orphans in Cairo today who had some form of accommodation, some form of schooling, some form of medical support, a small part of my mom's support, but I needed and did something about it. And I think that was always mom's approach. She spent years going to prisons and talking about redemption and agape love through Cairos. Some e-listeners may know it Cairos and they do a ministry into prison. So she did that, but she didn't just go to the mission. She would then go back for not days or weeks or months, but years, and would visit these prisoners and continue to remind them and care for them, engage with them, and love them. So that sort of role modeling is hard not to respond to. My father in public life had a lot to do with refugees and visited every single refugee camp and took some very unpopular and tough stands in terms of how we had to do much more to protect them and care for them. So I think that that sort of role modeling is important. And I think if you, in reading the gospel, it's clear the good Samaritan didn't keep walking. The good Samaritan saw a need on the side of the road and put everything aside to act and respond to that. And so I think we're called to that as well. But yeah, faith, role, modeling, appearance, I think they all played a role. Yeah, you wouldn't call it linear and it wasn't. But part of it, as I had that wrestle, and I was married by that stage with Karen, and she's always been my soulmate on the journey, and we talk about it, and often we'd leave work when we could and rush back and lead Bible studies or youth groups or take kids away trying to shape them and help them to understand the gospel. But it ultimately came down to a moment where I was at a breakfast and I'd been thinking about maybe a way I can do this is to become a minister, a church minister, and I can look after others and kind of lead a congregation in a way that can impact community and potentially state and country. And I was at a breakfast and it was a challenge. It was the Christian sort of prayer breakfast and it was almost a thunderclap. I said, "That's it. I'm going to go to bible college." And I'd looked at some bible college, I looked at Regant, and as I grabbed Karen's hand and we left the breakfast, I said to her, "We're going to Regent. I'm going to become a minister. I'll see you tonight." I'd like to unpack and more consultation was required, clearly, but that was part of the journey. So my sense was that's how I thought I could have more of an impact. And I told Deutsche Bank where I was at, it made for an interesting Monday morning whip meeting. You normally, want to go around the room and share the transactions where they're up to and the statuses. And I said, "By the way, I'm going to Bible college at Regent." And it wasn't expected, but it doesn't attract, I strongly believe we need Christians in investment banking. There are some amazing Christian men and women who have made a massive, in terms of integrity, culture, and values and had an impact on many companies and thousands of employees in a way that's quite profound. But for me, that really was a blur. And so I went to Regent, and at Regent is where I sat down and sort of wrote my life story. And if you haven't done this, it's quite amazing. Talk about your journey of faith, where you've come from, what has brought you to this point, and where you're going to go on the life journey. And as I did that, I wrote it down and it was cathartic. I loved it. My end conclusion was that I look forward to serving as a minister of the flock and sort of faithfully caring for them in a way that we're taught in scripture. And the lecturer then put next to it "Or maybe in Australian politics?" And that was the moment that I hadn't thought of politics. My father had been in politics, but I'd run a million miles on it. I'd obviously reference it in my paper. I think words to that effect, but I said, "Well, hang on. Well, could you make a difference in politics? Is that something I've discounted that maybe I should think about?" And through the rest of that year, that became the journey. Yeah, yeah, no. So yeah, the traditional story dragged along to Sunday school, materially unhappy for most of it until about year nine when I noticed that there were girls there as well from adjoining school. So that became of interest and I became a regular attendee as it turned out, and I joined a bible study group, a faithful guy who used to pick five of us up and one by one all in the car, have a Bible study at someone's house and he'd drop us all off and then head back home. And yeah, it was a night that we didn't necessarily have to do much homework and had a lot of fun together, trying to lead a Bible study. We didn't pay much attention. But about a year in one of the guys, Bush Beast was his name, Jeff was his real name, and we were away. He took us away camping and surfing and we're up at Crescent Head, for those in that Crescent Head. And right at the end of the caravan park, there used to be, I think there are vans there now. There used to be a spike that you could get a great sort of tent and be right on the point and look out. And so three of us in a two-man tent, and it was really windy. And as we were going to sleep, Jeff said, "Mike and Mike," there were two Mikes in there. He said, "I just have to. Do you know how much Jesus loves you?" And I'll never forget the look or the way he did it. And we said, "Yeah, Jeff got it. All good, all good." And he said, "No, no, no. Do you know how much Jesus loves you?" And it stopped us in our tracks and didn't respond then. But over the next few weeks and months, I actually started to pay attention to the talks, and to the Bible studies. And by the time I got to the end of year 12 as a camp and I was ready, I was ready to give my life to Jesus, I understood his sacrifice for my sins and that I was going with him for eternity. And I shared that around a campfire and haven't looked back. Yeah, I mean, I've always been emotional. I kind of connect on an emotional level, I would say, although my wife says I'm a bit repressed at times, so that is something, I like fact and I won't accept anything unless there's substance or reason. There were some compelling, I remember there were talks given on the veracity of Christian history, the number that saw Jesus who was resurrected, and the impact of his words at times, it became a compelling proposition. And I saw people, there was one particular person I saw, his name was John Ridgway. He is a missionary who went to India. And he came back and just talked to the church and he came and talked to the youth group. And I remember just being so amazed that he was just this kind, gregarious, talented, faithful man that just, he was so convinced that he just gave up everything and went to become a missionary in India. And that commitment, seeing that in action and hearing his story, that's undoubtedly one of the jigsaw pieces on that journey. But yeah, it wasn't just something that I had to tick the box on or join the crowd. I've never done that. Yeah, and it was deeply personal and all parts of the being mind, and spirit by all felt connected. I mean, it's incredibly important. And in the Bible, it's clear we're there to support our governments and it's leaders. And I think there is vilification of governments, there is blaming governments for the ills of many or others or the particular issue. But it's incredibly important. It's influential, it's impactful. It's one of the key institutions. And our role as Christians is to support. We've just had a new minister come into our church and he's connecting with the local leaders. It doesn't matter what's a political badge or if they don't have a political badge, it's who they are as people, how we can support them as leaders, but also encourage them that our church is there to support them if they're victims of domestic violence, if those that need sort of clothes or food or visiting, there are natural disasters, call on us and participate. And in government, you respond to all of those things. I suppose you respond to social challenges, you respond to daily life challenges, to health, to security, to education. Every kind of facet of life is impacted and influenced. So having a good government with good leaders is an incredibly important part of society. So to have the chance to participate in that, it was clear in my mind, how do I go there in a faithful way, sort of reflecting my faith, living my faith, but how do I use the skills and experiences I have to the betterment of others, community, state, and country? And obviously, I had a banking background as I went in, so how can I use that in a finance context and how can I connect in a social context? So yeah, I think it's something that we underestimate. And I would say that churches more broadly don't engage enough in supporting and encouraging those to go in and support those that are in there. No, and I think we don't wrestle enough with this as churches. And I strongly believe one of the beauties is that in our congregation we have people doing all types of things. And it is one of the things you looked at Regent. How do you live your faith working in one of the major retailers? What does that mean? Working in our major banks, working in our major construction companies, I saw talks on God being a garden. There's incredible passion and interest in gardening. So those who are in landscaping and gardening, how do you bring that to life? And often, I mean, look, God is there and amongst it and has given design and principles and approaches, but we are just not getting in on it. Eugene Peterson is challenging with that, how do you get in what God is doing? Most spiritual formation for Christians takes place in the workplace. So it's kind of remiss not to connect faith and your work and those that kind of Christians on the Sundays and disconnected, I'm just doing work, they're missing everything. The wonder and the mystery and the opportunity to shape and impact with your faith and obviously influence and impact others through whatever role you have. So whether it's in politics or whether it be in the organisation, both different, but both have impacts and potential impacts as did my time in banking. And so there is a way you treat customers. There are things that you don't need royal commissions to do and shine a light on. Are there practices that should have been done if people of faith had been leading or Christian leaders had been having inputs on some of those decisions? Could there be different outcomes, better outcomes for customers and community and state and country? So yeah, to me there there's an energy that comes that your faith can be applied in so many different ways. That's a big question and I would need to go back to my history teacher to run through that. Look, I think as I look at government, I mean there is a natural resistance to impingement on freedoms and choice and being told that this is what we must or mustn't do. There's undoubtedly that, but I don't know whether that's a government thing. I don't know whether that's a societal thing. Social media is undoubtedly having a very, very significant impact on culture and values, but also on government. I can tell you the impact of social media on government is huge. Like anything, it can be unbelievably positive, but it can also be very destructive. There wouldn't be a politician out there who was telling the truth. If they were telling the truth, that is, would say that social media call it 10 years ago to today, has hurt them, damaged them, and impacted them in ways they'd probably not prefer to talk about because it's personal and visceral. I couldn't repeat some of the things that were said when I was there and you'd have mechanisms to do it. There's also the power to stop the government trying to look after. I mean, you want your health system to be the strongest and the best it can be. I mean, that's a noble thing. All governments should be trying to do that, they have the responsibility. But if you have three or four issues that people aren't happy with, well the supporters, the individual issues can coalesce very quickly with significant numbers and have an impact on policy making and slow down governments and people. So you've got the personal, you've got the policy side, but there's also great things. I mean, you become aware of issues that you'd have no idea. There were personal stories that came to me through social media that I never would've known about and going to investigate them as a treasurer, seeing them firsthand and having a chance to influence and shape policy on the results. So like anything there was good and bad. Well, to me it was clear. I was quite clear. So I mean I was obviously a Christian of faith, but that's me. My role is not to legislate my faith. My role is to govern for all. How I responded and reacted was obviously influenced, at times, by being a Christian. After the Lindt Cafe Siege. I was hugely impacted and indeed really personally impacted for many years. But in that response, it was clear to me that the media reaction was to care for those who lost loved ones, to care for the hostages, to care for the Muslim community, to connect in and try and pastor a city that was in the midst of just something so horrific and so horrendous. And that's happened right in the heart of our city and state and country. So how faith, that was me in a personal response, but undoubtedly faith, it kind of shaped me. Role modeling that I saw through my mom that I've been inspired through scripture to care and to love and to try and encourage to focus on unity and grace and not anger and hate and retribution. So that's just, I guess one example of that. It flows out into a broad public context, but I am very clear. Some of the most significant criticisms I got because I would participate in need with the Muslim community and sometimes fasting is a big part of that for them. So I would fast as a Christian, and when I'd go and speak at events, I would talk about that. I'd say, "Look, we have in common and they're focusing on good deeds and prosperity." And I'd say, "Look, for us, it's about praying and we're praying for others. We're trying to draw closer to our understanding of God." And I would share that in a personal way. Now, some Christians found that very, very difficult because we've got to take a very strong stance against the Muslim community and the Muslim faith. But in the concepts of governing for all, trying to care and connect, I saw that pathway. So there are different ways, but I was always clear that it was not a "what is the Christian policy outcome", it's "what is the policy for all". And obviously part of that input is who I am and what I believe. And then it goes into a cabinet discussion before legislation comes out and it's an input, not a determinant. Yeah, I mean US politics is headed more towards, here is the Christian wishlist on which we must legislate. I don't think that's helpful. I mean, on our part, what is needed for the state? What is needed for the country? What is the best possible policy we can pursue? Now as part of that, there will be social issues, but that's where I think the conscience rate is incredibly important. That's where you bring your personal self on a single decision and your vote with your conscience and as distinct from this is government policy and this is what we need. So yes, it influences, as I said, but it's not the determinant and the determinant is governing for all and how we deliver the best policy for the majority. Look, I mean there's a couple of elements of that. At Regent, I read this book by Martin Buber called I and Thou, and it was recommended by Eugene Peterson, the most incredible book. And long story short, there'll be many academics listening that could put it in much better ways than I can. But there are really two ways of relating. There's the "I, it" and there's the "I, thou". And most of the world operates in this "I, it" capacity. And that is relationships, interactions, everything you do is functional, it's needed, it's transactional. It's not what is the "I, thou". The "I, thou" is kind of all in, every part, every being, all essence. That moment is the most significant moment. And that person that you're interacting with is the most significant person in the world. And that has stayed with me all the way. And I think from a leadership point of view, that's how I've really tried to live it out. Whether I am meeting with my leadership team or one-on-one or one of our residents today out in our residential facilities, it's the same thing. Nothing else matters. And that kind of presence, which you alluded to, has hopefully been seen and felt. And I was very conscious as Premier, I mean hold it lightly, use it greatly. And in that, I'm not defined by being a Premier. That's a role I've got and I've got a stewardship of that role. But I was conscious that the Premier, in whatever event I was going to, and it was, you got invited to how many events? About 15,000 events a year. So you got invited to a lot. There are a hundred thousand letters that came in at 15,000 events. So the ones you got to, that's probably the only time for that organisation celebrating its 80th year or 90th year or the particular volunteer, the Premier was going to be there. So I never wanted to come in, "How are you? I'm going to get on as I've got something else to go to." So how do I stop that relentless push of the diary? And the most speeches I gave in one day was nine. So it's this relentless push. So how do you? And Martin Buber kind of said me, "I would try and be as present as I possibly could." And then on the authentic piece, I always, as I resolved, and I had time and opposition to think about this before it went in government, but what struck me as I kind of observed the political process, and I don't pretend I'm a great politician in any way, shape or form, but if you watch the political process, your political capital gets spent. Now, if you do something or you don't, it eventually gets spent. So my sense, if I'm going to be attacked, I would want to do it for what I believe in and who I am. I don't want to pretend that I'm someone else I'm not. I love surfing and I've been surfing for a long time. I didn't just pick up a surfboard because I thought it would be good as a member for man. And so trying to be genuine and who I am a guy called Tony Story who helped me with social media, said that it's pretty clear, just be yourself. I want your voice, what you think, and your humour, which it's been described invariably as dad humour intensive, as in not funny, but I find it funny. So just be yourself. And it was the same thing when I ran for parliament. What's the saying we going to do? Because I won pre-selection, I worked in a few local groups, but across the election, no one would know who this banker who lived amongst us was. So my sense is, "Well, we have to tell them who I am." So I got 20 friends and I said, "Just give me three words, three words that you think describe me and then I'll try and honour those words." So it's almost a contract to my community. It was two hours. It was an amazing night. And they came up with passion, integrity, and results. And those words, someone challenged me, "Well, you'd need to put them up somehow in the office." So I've got three people that represented those and I had integrity was William Wilberforce And all he did. Our passion was Martin Luther King and Roden Cutler was the person I chose because he achieved for the community, he was a manly resident, and he saved people from sharks. He was a World War hero and did public service as a governor. So I've still got those pictures up in my office and still try to live those. So trying to be who I am and bring who I am in a way that is authentic and real was important to me. To me, I actually think that's a recipe for political success. Be yourself and do what you believe in. I mean, if you ask me two things, I think you've got a chance of influencing and impacting well beyond trying to be something you're not and pursuing things you don't believe in. Well, obviously it's shaped through your parents early on, obviously shaped through my faith in that decision. But as a wrestler, it became clear to me that I wanted to make an impact on the community, state, and country, and I wanted to live my faith to the fullest I could. By the time I was early twenties, I think all of that was in place and it was just a matter of applying it and living it. So I've always had a sense of standing up for what I believe in and not being afraid of hard work to try and achieve those results. Yeah, look, I mean I think it has at times. The first week that I was Premier, I think that the city Herald did their news review on me and their headline. What was the headline again? I can't believe I can't remember that headline. What was it called? I'll have to find it. I'll have to find it, I think. No, it wasn't flattering. Basically, they were challenging my faith. So it was, hang on everyone, this new person in the chair just letting you know, they seem to be a pretty keen Christian, so draw your own conclusions, but we're nervous. Reading between the lines. And look, the context there, "Wow, okay, do I shut that down? Is that something that we can't talk about or can't do?" And my head of media Emray Sosinski said, "Well, if only you're a member of a cult, that'd be okay. No problem here that you're a Christian, you want to sacrifice, serve others, you've cut your salary." Whatever have you done because you want to come to serve, like stop it. Just don't do that. So that was kind of helpful. It was just like, "No, no, no, that's who I am." I do remember when you attack for things of integrity or competence, it does hit hard, but your identity is an audience of one. And I think that that rock in anchor, it didn't matter the hurricane that's happening around you, your understanding of how much, going back to Jeff's words, God loves me. And that's what matters. And I think so whether that gives you more courage to be strong in your convictions, certainly, it gives you the right perspective to be able to perhaps be braver than otherwise you would. Because if you're worried about focus groups and calling groups and political colleagues, you could go around in circles all day and make no decisions. Well, I mean every day. I mean the integrity is deep and real here based on Bob Hammond and what he did. And there's a mission that I've never seen as connected to a group of people as it is here. But there are also ways that we report and ways we engage with regulators, ways we engage with families. There are some tough things and we're not always right. And the way you deal with those issues, you've got to try and I think deal with the most transparency you can, the most integrity you can, and take accountability when things are wrong and gone wrong. So like any organisation, they're challenges that you'll face and trying to hold those. In terms of passion. Well, I've seen the most incredible people. And for me, the question is: how on earth can I help them spend more time and caring in better ways? Anything I can do that can take an hour out of their admin and give them an hour with our residents or clients or patients in our hospitals, our palliative care patients, well, that's worth doing. And that's contagious here. That's across the leadership team. That passion. And results, the same thing. I mean, well give you an example of the passion. In the middle of the pandemic, there was almost 50% of our head office was out in facilities, sleeves rolled up, cleaning, and cooking while the carers we had were doing the caring that good, they were doing conga lines of PPE equipment up and down the coast, east coast of Australia, trying to get it to our carers. So that passion's there. And results, it's the same thing. How can we deliver care in new ways, innovative ways? How can we influence and shape the sector? How can we influence the government as they're thinking about the Royal Commission and responses and looking after those who are living with dementia? I mean, we've got incredible advocates for that here. And every fibre of their being. One of our team has been here almost 30 years. She's this incredible talent and every ounce of her is about how can we improve the lives of people living with dementia. And she'll go to government forums, she'll go to public forums, she'll go and encourage carers. So it's not hard to be focused on results when you're dealing with those sorts of things. Brendan, thank you for the privilege and it's just been great to reflect thank you for your faithfulness and Jay's faithfulness and putting this podcast, and look forward to connecting down the track next chapter. Michael Bruce Baird AO (Mike Baird) is an Australian investment banker and former politician who was the 44th Premier of New South Wales, the Minister for Infrastructure, the Minister for Western Sydney, and the Leader of the New South Wales Liberal Party from April 2014 to January 2017. Baird represented the electoral district of Manly in the New South Wales Legislative Assembly for the Liberal Party from 2007 to 2017. Before becoming Premier, he was the Treasurer of New South Wales in the O'Farrell government between 2011 and 2014. On 19 January 2017, Baird announced his intention to step down and on 23 January he resigned as Premier and member for Manly. He now works as the CEO of HammondCare.

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• Episode Description
• Professor of Moral

On this episode of The Inspiration Project, Brendan Corr talks to Emeritus Professor Nigel Biggar about what attracted him to an academic life, why books became an important part of Nigel's life, what captured him about History, why Nigel went from studying history to ethics and morality instead, How Nigel became a Christian, the deep existential question about what draws you to faith, religion and God, How Nigel sees the sea of humanity wrestling with this idea about what is right what is ethical and what is moral, wars and religion, Colonialism and the West, And why the West should be grateful for Colonialism. Well, as you know Brendan, when you live in a place, you take it for granted. And I've lived here so often, I take it for granted. But I will report to you that I have an American friend who spent several years here as a student, and whenever he comes back he says, "This is a beautiful city." And it is. It's a small city. It only has a population of about 170,000 people. But the heart of it, of course, is mediaeval, lots of mediaeval colleges and buildings. And it's a very walkable city. We do have a motor car, my wife and I, but I prefer to walk everywhere and I can do that. And in fact, from where I'm sitting right now, on the western side of the city centre, I can walk into open fields in five minutes. And there's a canal five minutes away. I plan this afternoon to take a five-mile walk around, into the countryside. It's just gorgeous. Well, like most people really, you concentrate on what you think you're good at. So, throughout my school years, primary school and secondary education in the schools I was at, I was very successful and I majored in that. Although my father's family, my father's Scottish family, has a tradition of providing members of the Scottish national rugby team. At the age of 12, I was 6'2". I think I rather disappointed my father by not becoming a rugby player, but I was never really very interested in sports. I think my mother was a reader and so early on, from a very early age, I devoured books. I still devour books. My father, by contrast, I don't think he ever read a book in his life. He read the sports pages of the newspapers every day. So it was partly my mother's influence as a reader. We weren't a particularly conversationalist family. We didn't sit around the table debating things very much. But my school years were very encouraging and I was very successful, at least until… My undergraduate career was a disaster actually, but I persevered. I went to Regent College in Canada, as you alluded to earlier, and it was there that my academic career recovered, without having any strong sense of what my career should be. And I think most people after university, most people don't have much idea of what they're fitted for in life, but they just follow their noses. They push it open, they push doors to see if they'll open and they do. And I knew I had abiding intellectual questions and I wanted to pursue them. My parents, although somewhat bemused, supported me. And one thing led to another, I ended up with a Ph.D. and then I ended up with a job. And make a very long story short, I got to where I am now. No. I think, yes, I've always been a bookish person. I think partly, Brendan, my childhood, I was born rather in a big house, about two miles out of a very small market town in southwest Scotland. I had a brother, but he was six years older than I am. So whenever I was in one place, he was another. I didn't really see very much of him. So I spent a lot of my childhood at home alone, not feeling lonely, but I learned to be solitary, and that did wonders for my imagination. And as I say, from an early age, I remember reading books that now in retrospect astonished me that I was reading Graham Greene at the age of 12. I'm not sure I appreciated him very much, but there I was. My brother was also a serious book reader, both of us much more so than our parents actually. Yeah, so both my brother and I went away to boarding schools. I went away to prep school at the age of eight. The schools I went to, neither of them were front-rank, high-powered places, but they were good schools and serious schools. And I suppose in both those places, my intellectual and academic inclinations were nurtured and encouraged. All my life, history has been my preferred interest in reading. And there was a schoolmaster in my prep school in Scotland. I remember his name, Mr. Cooper, who was a remarkable man. He had a handlebar moustache, all white. I think he must've been in the Air Force in the war or something. And he always wore shorts, khaki shorts, no matter what time of year, shorts. But he was really entertaining and fascinating about history, and I think that's, certainly, he was someone who really encouraged and inspired me to read history. Yes. That's interesting. I certainly love my dates. I remember, I can still recite them. Boring though it was, actually, it did me the benefit of giving me some framework in which to understand how on earth we got to where we got to. And I rather regret that school kids these days tend not to learn dates, because they just don't know when things happened. But I love my dates. So I think certainly in my early years, history was presented to me as featuring really important people. And that's an immediate way in which history can grasp your attention because you're dealing with human beings and fascinating human beings who do great and strange things. So to this day, I remember that Mr. Cooper, way back in the 1960s, described Mary Queen of Scots as his puppet. He was clearly very keen on Mary, Queen of Scots. I'm not really sure she, I'm not sure she deserved that really, but I still remember that. So it was a fascination with people in the past. And of course, I had my own family, and I was born 10 years after World War II. And when I was 10 years old, 1945 seemed a century ago to me. Now, of course, it was a very short time indeed, and I was surrounded by reminders and vestiges of an enormously important part of history my own parents have taken part in. Yeah, that's a crucial part of my story. I mean, the intervening thing, which we can talk about later, is theology. Because I began my first degree in history and then subsequent degrees in theology. Although, as you rightly point out, I focused on ethics. But sticking to the question you've just asked about, from history to ethics. I grew up in Britain, as I said, in the late '50s and '60s. The '60s in particular were throughout the Western world, a time of cultural change, of the beginnings of the throwing over of conservative, conventional morality, particularly sexual morality. And I was aware of that. I was aware of that. In Britain in the '60s and early '70s, I was at secondary school, ‘68 to ‘72, in my teens, all sorts of the heroes of the past and the conventions of the past were being mocked. Monty Python came onto the scene and other comedy programs where younger people, as they do, mock their fathers and their grandfathers, and I laughed with them. Except I do remember one of the figures of mockery, I think in a Monty Python sketch, was an RAF pilot, a Second World War pilot. To our ears, the way he spoke was terribly portioned, odd, and laughable. But I did reflect on this young pilot, no matter how he spoke, he took risks… my security, my future, that none of us took or have ever needed to take, and here we were mocking him. So I've always had a reservation about the cultural revolution of the '60s. Nowadays, I refer to my inner Edwardian, which maintains itself and has always resisted that. So I think moral questions arose in my mind early on. In fact, the first letter I ever wrote and published in a newspaper, at the age of 15, was on that question. Yeah. So I wasn't brought up in a church-going home, Brendan. My parents didn't go to church. My mother was the daughter of a lapsed Methodist daughter of a Methodist lay preacher. My father was a non-church-going Presbyterian. I once went to Sunday school at my local Presbyterian church and was bored and never went again. So my parents themselves did not communicate Christian faith to me. But I do remember experiences even before I got to my prep school, where my headmaster and mistress were evangelical Christians. There's one particular experience of a direct intuitive religious sense that I had. But when I went to my prep school, as I say, my headmaster and mistress were evangelical Christians. She used to read us Bible stories in the dormitory before lights out at night. I went to Christian camps for the ages of 11, 12, and 13. And in secondary school, I responded to a call to accept Christ and was a Christian thereafter. I think looking back, what was attractive about Christianity? I think, yes, the vision of a world where there are important things that are not physical, that are spiritual. And that there are moral anchors, spiritual anchors, and principles that are not ephemeral. That seemed to me to be enormously attractive. And so there was a connection between my faith and then… In my early 20s after my history degree, I hadn't quite figured out just how ethically concerned I was, but I wanted to study theology just to understand better why I believed what I believed as a Christian. So I started off with theology, but within a few years, it had focused on ethics, which in fact had been my driving concern for a long time, I think. Well, in a sense I've spent the whole of my life resolving it. In my case, and I think in most cases, what draws you to faith and religion and God is deeper than simple thought. Deep, existential, spiritual needs and intuitions are what draw you. But yes, since most people around me, including my family, were not Christian, the question to me was, "Nigel, why do you believe this stuff?" came early. And in a sense, I spent a lot of my life trying to figure out why I believe this stuff. That's why I wanted to study theology at… I decided that I do believe it and I could give fragments of reasons why I believe it, but I wanted to be able to give a better account of why I believed it. The fact that I'm still a Christian means that I came to the view some long time ago that intellectual integrity and Christian faith need not be at odds with one another. I mean, to be frank, Brendan, believing in God raises all sorts of questions to which easy answers are not always to be found. But my response to that is that if you don't believe in God, that also raises questions to which easy answers are not to be found. So whether you're a theist or an atheist, both of us have large questions we can't answer. And so, I don't feel on any weaker ground than a non-believer on that. There was a film that came out, I think about a year ago, called Bronte. And this was about the Victorian novelist, Emily Bronte, who was the author of the famous Victorian novel Wuthering Heights. Now, Wuthering Heights is a story of grand sexual passion. Now, the filmmaker, the 21st-century filmmaker, decided Emily Bronte could not possibly have written such a novel unless she herself had had a living experience of wild sexual passion. So the film, as it were, purports to reveal the truth, the truth about Emily's own personal experience, which is what led her to write this book. Well, the truth about Emily Bronte, as far as we know, is that she remained unmarried to the end of her life. She never had any sexual affairs. She was stuck up in the moors of Yorkshire, and yet she wrote this book. Now, to me, that's really interesting. It's interesting because it calls into question our present assumptions that people can only write about their own lived experience and that any successful human being has to have had some wild sexual fling. But the 21st-century filmmaker just could not cope with that, and so, allowed the 21st-century viewer to see a reflection of themselves in the film, which, to my mind, is boring. I know us. I don't need to see us again. Tell me something different, which might make me reflect on us critically and might illuminate us in some way. But you're right, it's narcissistic… which I find tedious myself. A very important question, Brendan, and you're quite right, and no one cares about the ancient empires of Mesopotamia, Rome, and Greece. No one cares about more recent Arab empires the Zulu Empire or the Comanche Empire or even the present Chinese Empire. The focus is all on Europe and especially the British Empire. So that raises the question of why. I think there are two reasons. One is that the assault on British colonialism is the British or commonwealth equivalent of the assault on race in America. And I think a lot of the obsession with racism and colonialism is something that we in the Anglosphere have imported from America because of America's dominant cultural influence of which you're aware, and I'm aware. Certainly, I think I can back that up with reference to the chronology in 2020 when George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis. I think it was in October 2020, was it? December? The Black Lives Matter movement experienced a resurgence in America, and in no time at all, it appeared in Britain. It appeared in Britain, and you have a placard. I have a memory of an English woman holding a placard at a BLM protest here in England. And the placard bore the words, "Disarm the police." The oddity is that, as most people know, the British police are not normally armed. But this lady had not noticed that Britain is not America. So I think we quickly imported this Black Lives Matter notion that America is radically racist because of slavery. And then in Britain, Britain is radically racist because of slavery and, yes, because of our colonial history, which is all about slavery. So that's one reason. The second reason is, I think, and it's a broader reason that I think the British Empire stands as a proxy for the West. There's a historical reason for that up until the end of the First World War thereabouts, or the 1930s, Britain was the leading power, or the British Empire was the leading power in the Western world until it was overtaken by the US. And then to some extent, US dominance since 1945 was built on the British Empire. I mean, some of the US military bases were British imperial bases. And so the British Empire stands really for the modern record of the West, and therefore the attack on the empire is an attack on the record of the Western world. And the claim is the Western world is radically racist and oppressive. And I think, particularly at a time when the likes of Vladimir Putin in Ukraine and President Xi are rattling a sabre over Taiwan and threatening Southeast Asia, it's a bad time to be denigrating the West. I'm not saying that the West doesn't deserve criticism, Brendan, of course there are lots of things to be critical about the West, but to denigrate it indiscriminately in the way in which the decolonizers do is a politically dangerous thing to do at this time. Nigel Biggar is Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology, and Director of the McDonald Centre for Theology, Ethics, and Public Life, University of Oxford.

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