In this episode, Ryan sits down with Madhavi Nevader and T.J. Lang, both biblical scholars at St. Andrew’s School of Divinity in Scotland. In a conversation that roams from the Tower of Babel to journey of the apostle Paul to the third heaven, they discuss how the understanding of God’s identity—as Yahweh in the Hebrew Bible, as Jesus the divine man, as multiple Persons who are yet one—has unfolded in time.
From unpacking the many conceptions of God in the Old Testament, to the scandal of Jesus’s claims to oneness with the Father, to the fruitful give-and-take between Greek philosophy and early Christian metaphysics, they contemplate the nature of tradition and the way that historical and geographical forces shape it. Modern scholarship, archaeological science, and the ambiguities of translation all become tools to gain a deeper understanding of the revelation of who God is and His relationship to His people.
The concept of who God is changes with each author in the Old Testament
In the Hebrew Bible, “we're reading a text that was originally produced in a limited, polytheistic culture that turned into a monotheistic one. And we see very obvious vestiges of that polytheism in the text”
The name Yahweh does not imply a specific field of power as (e.g., a storm god)
“We have authors who are having to tell a story over time and across multiple worlds and multiple lands. And in that respect, [the Hebrew Bible] has kind of an epic nature to it that we just do not have from any other corpus of literature in our possession, because they aren't trying to do that thing. [...] We may have law; we may have history; we may have wisdom from all of the accompanying Eastern cultures. But no one has tried to put it into a story. And in that respect, [it] obviously is also going to tell a story about God”
What is remarkable in the New Testament is not that Jesus would be called divine, but rather his profound identification with Yahweh/the Father
“Jesus is doing Yahweh’s stuff;” when Jesus acts, he is not acting on God’s behalf as Moses did, but acting as God
When early Christians first worshiped Jesus, they knew it was okay to do so based on experiential encounters, not primarily through theological or metaphysical reasoning
Jesus spoke Aramaic, but we only have his words in Greek
Some of the language ambiguities that Greek provides are not present in Hebrew; Greek translation forces they metaphysical questions in a way that the original language did not
The question of the one and the many was being debated in Greek philosophy already as Christianity came on the scene; Christianity intervened in this conversation, discussing the oneness of the Father and the Son, and shaped it and contributed to it in very serious ways
Using the word theology can cut off discourse about the nature of God and the world from the larger philosophical conversations that those questions are a part of —Reintegrating those conversations would require academic humility from philosophers, to recognize the development of thought around Jesus to by philosophically complex; and theological humility from Christian thinkers, to recognize their discussions as one amongst many
“To somehow rarify these texts as separate from the cultures that produce them is just doing them a disservice. It's doing us a disservice, because we don't understand where we came from”
“The paradox of tradition is that tradition says to itself that we're always the same, while at the same time, always having to change if it is to be alive, while somehow figuring out and fighting about ways to be recognizable to itself across time”
“There's such a profound unwillingness to settle in scripture, whether that's Jewish scripture or Christian scripture. Nothing is black and white. Everything is gray. And when we try to superimpose order on it, it just always comes back at us and wins”
Biblical archaeology has been plagued by the search for the Bible, destroying evidence that doesn’t fit into a scriptural narrative through carelessness
“It makes me sad for myself and all of us that we've lost a lot of the imagination to look up and look across and read the world and think about what it means and why it is the way it is”
“It's so boring to see ourselves in all of these individuals, because they aren't us. When Jesus becomes a hipster, or when Jesus becomes a bodybuilder, or when Jesus becomes a biblical scholar—it's profoundly narcissistic; but it's also very boring, and doesn't allow that weirdness to speak”