How Should Christians Think about Human Flourishing: A Conversation with Joshua Jipp

The world is becoming increasingly proficient at telling stories that deny God. As such, we need thinking Christian to become as natural as breathing. Welcome to the Thinking Christian podcast. I'm Dr. James Spencer. Through calm, thoughtful, theological discussions, Thinking Christian highlights the ways God is working in the world and questions the underlying social, cultural, and political assumptions that hinder Christians from becoming more like Christ. Now, on to today's episode of Thinking Christian. Hey, everybody. Welcome to this episode of Thinking Christian. I'm Dr. James Spencer, and I am joined by Joshua Jipp today. He is professor of New Testament at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, my alma mater. He's also the director of the Henry Center for Theological Understanding. And more importantly, perhaps, he is the author of Paul and Theology as a Way of Life, a vision of human flourishing in Christ. And that's really going to be our topic of conversation today. So welcome, Joshua. It's great to have you on, man. And thanks for being here. Thanks, James. Looking forward to our conversation. Yeah. So tell me a little bit about just, you know, so people have a bit of a background on who you are and what you're interested in. How did you get into New Testament studies? What's your, what's your kind of academic pedigree? But I guess more importantly, you know, what's the story that led you toward this book and and what we're going to be talking about today? Yeah, sure. Well, I mean, for me, my sort of like intellectual and sort of like the beginnings of my intellectual interests went back to high school when I kind of started to take my faith seriously. And I started to read the Bible on my own pretty diligently. And together with that was not just sort of like an interest in the Bible, but was just really sort of like I just became a voracious reader and learner and excited to just learn the world that God had created, but especially the scriptures. So without giving you all the academic pedigree, that then basically led me into a lot of focus and training, both my own education and work on my own where I just wanted to be able to be a good reader of scriptures and then be able to to be able to share that, to teach with others. So that's really been sort of my life's passion has been learning about the Bible and then doing my best to sort of make that clear to my students that God's entrusted me to. But then also, you know, when I have the opportunity and occasion arises to do that in a church context through teaching and preaching as well. So I guess, you know, getting into the book project, I've always, it's never been as if the Bible was just sort of like an intellectual exercise only, or, you know, I was just interested in the history or how to parse this Greek, you know, verb or understand the syntax or, you know, understand how this, you know, you know, verse fits with this doctrine. I mean, yes, for sure. All of that. But for me, it's also been a lot of like, how do we make sense of the world that we live in? The questions that I have about what it means to live in a difficult and complicated world, how it, what it means to sort of address or talk to my neighbors or my friends that may have the same or may have different questions. So my book, Pauline Theology as a Way of Life, is certainly very much trying to understand Paul as, you know, the person who wrote 13 letters of our New Testament, writing scripture, robust theological texts, but also in a way that I hope is relevant to what it means to be a human and for anybody that might be interested sort of in questions of, you know, what are we supposed to be doing here? Why, why are we here? How do we live well? How does what Paul says about how we're supposed to live, how does that intersect with or maybe, maybe critique other people's visions of what it may mean to live well or live the good life? So. And do you find, this isn't, so that human flourishing topic, and we'll kind of dive into it a little bit more, but the human flourishing topic is really interesting to me. And honestly, it piqued my interest in the book when I first started reading it because I've done a fair amount of research now on artificial intelligence, technology, notions of progress, how society and culture advance. And what I find in those questions or those assumptions, I suppose, progress and advancement is that there is some sort of implicit understanding of what human flourishing is going to look like that we're all sort of directed to, but isn't exactly articulated. Nobody's saying this is the way we need to be human. Right. And so this is the way this technology or this, this new movement, this change, this quote unquote innovation is going to help us be more human. Yeah. It's going to help us flourish. It's almost always linked to little features like efficiency or productivity or mastery of the world, power control. Exactly. And so, you know, as you, you know, as you begin this, you, you talk about Paul's, you know, your argument is going to be that Paul's understanding of human flourishing is linked to sharing life with God. Yep. And so maybe talk about how you also deal with ancient philosophy and in positive psychology as chapters in the book. But, but talk about how maybe those other philosophies, the ancient philosophy and the positive psychology, how they frame human flourishing in ways that oppose the gospel. Right. So, Oh, there's so, yeah, there's so much there. I'd love to unpack or just go down a bunch of different rabbit trails. It's okay. We can, we'll, we'll go down a bunch of rabbit holes. And if you have questions in the middle, I'll ask you. Yeah. I think what's super interesting, what you said about AI and technology, because I mean, I really had a lot of fun reading positive psychology and I resonate with a lot that, you know, it's trying to do, but what's interesting is sort of like it's classical practitioners or articulators. They don't want to actually posit a specific like end of what it means to be human or what the good is. They actually want it to sort of like be transferable to, I think a lot, a lot of Christians have gotten into it now and have used it, but they posited their own end of, you know, that's more amenable to Christianity. But a lot of the earliest practitioners, you know, think of it as almost like, Hey, whether you're mostly secular or you're Buddhist or you're whatever it is, here are some techniques. Here's some strategies. Here are some ways, you know, that you might, I mean, I don't want to, it actually, there's a lot to learn from it, but it's sometimes it can be like, Hey, you'll be happier if you cut down your commute, you know, sort of like transferable, you know, there's more robust things. I don't want to be too cheeky about that, but you know, it could be transferable to sort of like, you know, you pick what your, what your end goal is. Positive psychology can kind of like help you, help you achieve that. So that's interesting. I wonder about, I mean, I, I haven't done a ton of reading on AI, but I do think a lot of, you know, sort of, yeah, that's super interesting that like the, probably if there's unexamined sort of notions of what is flourishing or what the good life is, I mean, my guess is a lot of them would have to resonate either with how do I like minimize how do I minimize vulnerability, you know, how do I, or stated more positively, how do I exert control, you know, sort of over my surroundings? And a lot of ancient philosophy is actually motivated by that. They know life, there's a lot of like tragedy, bad luck, like stoicism in a lot of ways, sort of like, how do I, I mean, one way to think of it is to sort of think about like, how do I control what only I can control and thereby minimize like, you know, so the only thing that's good is basically, you know, my mental ascent or my judgments that I make about something, you know, the death of a child. Well, you know, they use language to get around this, but it's like, it's not, you know, or the loss of your job or exile or, you know, all of these things that are universally, we would say bad. They're trying to say those aren't, you know, those are only what you can control rationally is associated with your good. It's very much minimizing sort of, you know, bad luck, vulnerability, and yeah, I, so there's a lot, or I think there's Epicurean philosophies that are still with us today that are basically, you know, something like how do I have peace of mind, tranquility, serenity in a chaotic world? And that's sort of like the, you know, so I need, I need a couple of good friends. I need some, you know, some decent food and wine. I need my private, I stay out of politics. I have my private little, you know, garden, right. You know, there's something along those lines. I think a lot of those ancient philosophies are still with us, even if we don't call them stoic or Epicurean. And I think Paul would probably be sympathetic to all of those that are trying to live those good lives, but his, his vision is pretty different. So. Well, I think the interesting thing is, and I was, I was an Old Testament guy when I was at TED. So, you know, as I've reflected on, let's say the Israelite law. Yeah. Right. We have, and, and Dick Averbeck

revelation to help him understand the order of the world and how to live within it. Yep. And so as I think about, as I was reading your chapters on ancient philosophy and even the positive psychology, what I see are sort of echoes of the Israelite law. These are things that allow people to navigate chaotic situations in ways that are gesturing toward the order that God has created, although in a much more minimal way than like the Old Testament law, because they're not recognizing God as triune and all those kind of fun things. Right, yep. But at the same time, we can't say that they're bad necessarily, because what we're looking at is this sort of project of restraining evil that is actually quite important. It's probably not, well, I would say it's definitely not primary, but it's important. And so I think that's why when we talk about these things, and I appreciate your approach to it, you're not trying to trivialize them. These are important things. They're just not the utmost of importance. They don't raise to the level and they're so limited and lacking that it's easy to relegate them to something that is more marginal and foolish. But the reality is, I think, every person in the world, whether they get the revelation from God or not, has to try to figure out, how do I restrain this evil? How do I deal with suffering? What does it look like for this life to make any sense at all? And these philosophies are trying to do that. They're just lacking huge pieces of, really, what you argue, the theology. Right. No, totally. Yeah. I think, you know, there's a... I would rather talk to, you know, someone that is sort of like a contemporary Stoic or Epicurean, or like at least has some sort of, yeah, the world is difficult. The world is chaotic. Here's what I value. Here's how I'm trying to, you know, if there's sort of like, you know, some examination of this is how I'm trying to live in the world and this is what I value and this is what I think is good. Like, that's easier to talk to in terms of like, oh, I resonate so much with that. You know, you may, as a, you know, say I can only control what I control, so I don't put my good, your modern-day Stoic on, you know, anything outside of my control. And I might want to say, well, you know, all of the world is like God's good gifts to us, and we can actually, instead of, you know, only engaging in rational assent, we can, you know, trust. I mean, here I'm talking about Jesus, I guess, and Matthew 6, less than Paul, you know, but like have that type of conversation as opposed to, I think, you know, the, I don't know, I don't, I should ask some of my friends this more frequently than I do that aren't, aren't Christian or whatever, but sort of like, you know, how do you stave off sort of like the, you know, the impending doom of your death? You know, it's like, how are you doing? How are you dealing with that right now? I imagine, you know, a lot of it's just sort of like distraction, you know, it's like, it's, you know, all our human projects are going to come to an end, you know, like how do you, how do you keep going? So anyway, I don't know if that's making sense, but I, I, it's fun to be able to have conversations and talk with people that have engaged in some reflection, at least a little bit on that and aren't just sort of like, I'm just distracting myself with money, pleasure. Well, and I think the, so I worked as a personal trainer when I was going through my MDiv. I mentioned this a lot on the podcast, but I, I was working as a trainer when 9-11 happened. And it was this interesting moment where the facade of control that most people thought they had, the way they were making sense of the world was completely shattered. Right. Yeah. Like this horrific event happens and now how do I, how do I have any hope at all? How do I? Let me ask you a serious question. If something triggered a major market drop in the coming months, would your retirement be ready or exposed? With inflation, market volatility, and ongoing global uncertainty, more families are taking a closer look at whether their retirement plan is truly built to hold up. And many are finding that adding a layer of protection makes a lot of sense. Sanctuary Metals is a Christian owned company that helps families strengthen their retirement savings with physical gold and silver through a gold IRA. During uncertain times, many people look to precious metals as a way to add stability when other assets may be under pressure. If you'd like to explore whether a gold IRA is a good fit for your situation, Sanctuary Metals makes it easy to get started. Text GUIDE to 94878 to receive your free retirement defense guide or call 888-958-6579 to speak with one of their knowledgeable team members. Again, text GUIDE to 94878 or call 888-958-6579. Walk into a, you know, I was in Chicago at the time. And so how do I walk into a busy Chicago building like the Sears Tower? How do I go into even just a, you know, a Target or a Walmart and feel secure in the way that I used to? And that facade was completely broken down by that event. Now, I think that's dissipated. I think it's sort of, we've renormalized. But in the moment, it was really a compelling way to start having these type of conversations. Is that that control is gone. That facade of control you thought you had, all those things that you could go, well, I can really only control so much of my life and here's the realm in which I can control it. You start to realize, no, you don't control any of it. There's so many factors that you're not even looking at that could impact the way, the impact who you are, how you think, how the world makes sense. These things are just out of your control completely and your system isn't big enough to handle. That's right. Yeah. All the ambiguities that could come in. That's right. And I think, I mean, it's one of the things I find, I mean, for some people believing in, you know, a personal God and resurrection may just be too difficult or it's too much or whatever. But I do think like any, you know, one of the things that should resonate, I think with Paul's with something Paul says with even your, you know, secular person is, at least in my mind, it's, you know, Paul is definitely like human flourishing is not fully possible in this world. Because, you know, the world that we live in, the material conditions of it, just, I think for any honest person, they're not fully conducive to full human flourishing for the things that we long for, that we desire, whether that's peace, whether that's love, you know, all of these sorts of things, like we get glimpses of them. I think we get tastes of them. We get real experiences of them. And yet the material conditions of this world just aren't fully suitable for, you know, complete happiness, complete human flourishing. And even if we think we've got it or we've achieved it, right, there's nothing that can like, you know, keep it secure, you know, in, if this world is all that there is. So when you, you know, you kind of ease into Paul's theology in a really simple way, I think, talking about transcendence and the sharing in Christ's resurrection, right? Like easy topics, right? Totally the most important. You've got to accept this one. But I think, you know, throughout your book, you, you sort of scatter comments linking that sort of resurrection life to suffering. And I think that's actually a strength of the Christian message and particularly Pauline theology that is often neglected. Right. We like to think of the resurrection life as just sort of being realized now. Yeah. And to some extent, that may be true, but the reality is that we're following the pattern of Christ through his suffering, death, resurrection, and glorification. Is that, is that a fair way to put that? Can you talk a little bit about that sort of sharing in Christ's resurrection life, maybe? Yeah, for sure. I mean, it is, I think of like, you know, sharing in Christ's resurrection life. I talk about some of the, I'll get to the suffering in one second, but I talk about the transcendence in terms of we're created, as you've noted, to share in the life of God. How does that happen? It happens through the incarnate, resurrected Christ. So we're joined together with him. He wears our humanity, our human flesh, and basically is sort of like the, I'm using Hebrews language, I guess now here too, but like, you know, the anchor, right, the one that's sort of like where he goes, we go. And so we follow him, right? We're promised through the Spirit to follow him to resurrection life, to the day when we will see God face to face, you know, beatific vision, the day when we will share in God's glory. These are all different types of images that Paul uses as sort of like the ultimate destiny and hope, right, which is basically, you know, knowing, sharing, having fellowship with the God of life who is love. But, right, as you're, to get to your question about suffering, you know, we get there by means of also sharing in the sufferings of Christ. Paul makes that clear in a variety of different places. Philippians

Times in which, you know, there are, how do I say it, overreactions or something that contains a thread of truth, but it's too far that can be a little bit, you know, making the suffering a good. But I think suffering does serve, right? Paul, I think, is clear about this. You know, suffering does serve to conform us to Christ in ways in which it builds strength and it builds character. It builds hope. You know, Romans 5, 3 through 5 is a, you know, clear text where Paul is talking about this so that we're able to see this whole, this world isn't our ultimate home. It's able to then, you know, work in a way that it produces endurance, which leads to hope. And what is that hope in? Ultimately in resurrection. Or it can, I mean, Augustine in the city of first few books of the city of God talks about this and at times maybe, I'm not an Augustine scholar, but in my mind it seems like maybe it goes a little too far in some ways, but I think there's a lot of truth in what Augustine says that basically sufferings can also wean us from basically inappropriate loves or false loves that are not oriented towards sharing in the life-giving love of God. If we, you know, love this world too much and its pleasures, you know, suffering can also, you know, have sort of this educating force that teaches us like that's not my ultimate value. That's not my ultimate love. So yeah, anyway, those are a few thoughts on that. Yeah, it was interesting. I, so I teach a Bible study on Wednesday mornings with a group of guys just on Zoom and we're going through Romans. And one of the questions that came up was what will keep humans from sinning in the new creation? That's a great, wow, that's a really, that's a good Bible study. Right. And, and so my answer was, I don't have, I don't have a lot of surety about the answer I'm about to give you, but here's what I would say. It involves suffering. We, we understand the negative. In other words, we're, you know, when, when Adam and Eve first sinned, they've only experienced paradise. But we experienced the negative all the time. We feel the friction of living in a broken world. We experience the pain of it. We understand what it is to have, to live in a world that is so broken that we don't have control, that God is not glorified, that we are not experiencing this human flourishing that you're talking about. And so I said, the best answer I could possibly give you, I think, right at this moment off the top of my head was suffering has something to do with it. It's refining. It gives us that sort of negative relief that when we're in the new creation, we're going to appreciate it in a different way than we would if we hadn't experienced the suffering and the pain and the turmoil and the difficulty beforehand. Yeah. Yeah. Now, I don't know whether that's right. That's a tough, like that was an off the cuff sort of, you know, random Bible study question, but that's where my mind went. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. I wonder too. I haven't thought about it that way, but it's sort of, if, you know, you're thinking of Romans 8, if, if at that point when creation's groanings give way to, give way to basically, you know, the new heavens and the new earth and the restored, you know, creation, you know, there's both the material conditions of the world have changed, you know, so that, and I would think like, you know, you see God face to face or the imperfect has been taken away, right? So that you're capable of loving and, you know, and there's nothing that can like prevent you or keep you from always choosing what is right or what is good or what is beautiful. That's a, yeah, that's a great question. Yeah. I thought it was a great question too. And I, it wasn't one that I had an immediate answer to, so I was, I was, I was sort of on my heels answering it, but I think as I've thought about it more and you, you consider what human flourishing needs to look like, the fact that we don't experience it in this world, that we have this sort of underlying suffering that happens, the underlying tensions that we experience. Yeah. It's starting to feel maybe more right than when I gave the answer, but. Oh, that's cool. Yeah. So when we think about, you know, when you're talking about it in Pauline theology, he wants us to share life with God. Try to explain that a little bit in, in a different way, maybe that listeners will really grasp. Yeah. What does it mean to share life with God? Yeah. Yeah. I think of it as, you know, Paul, Paul doesn't, Paul uses all these images and metaphors, and I stay a lot at that level. I mentioned a few of them already, but they are, you know, sharing in resurrection life. They are, you know, 1 Corinthians 13 or 2 Corinthians 3, something like Christians would call the beatific vision, right? Seeing, seeing God face to face or sharing in God's glory. So maybe, you know, if I take those images, one of the ways I could try to explain it would be, you know, in Ephesians, he talks about, you know, sharing in the resurrection life of God as the opposite of death. And he talks about death as something that's not just, you know, for, for those that are listening, I'm thinking here of especially the end of Ephesians 1 and the beginning of Ephesians 2, if you want to look at these in more detail. But he talks about death in as, as if it's not just something like the, the, the cessation of biological existence, but death is actively, is actually something like actively moving away from the life of God. Okay. What do I mean by, what does Paul seem to mean by that? He seems to mean a life where basically you might have a supreme good or an end or a vision of human flourishing, and it's bad, right? And you're actually, you know, you know, what you, what you pursue or what you actually love can never give you joy, can never give you peace, can never give you happiness, can never satisfy. Or maybe it's, you know what it is, right? But you're always going in the wrong direction, right? You kind of know, hey, that would be right or that would be good, you know, but it's the, but, but you're addicted to some other sort of, you know, desire or love and you're never able to go in that direction. And so Paul talks about death, like, basically I think of it as like, you know, kind of like humans, like, like zombies, like people that are alive, but they're going, you know, they're dead in the sense that they're going actively away from God. They're going towards that which actually can't make them happy, can't satisfy, can't give flourishing, can't give life, can't give joy, can't give peace. So it's the, to some extent, I hope it's helpful to think of it as, in some ways, it's the opposite. It's the life-giving God of the universe loves you, wants to know you, has made you to love him and to love others, to live in sort of like ordered relationship with your own desires, to live in a good relationship with the world that we live in and with other humans. Sharing in the life of God has a lot of, to some extent, you know, it's a long answer trying to say it's, it, it has something to do with that, you know, that I think we have these sort of like senses of in our humanity where it's like we, you know, most everybody intuitively values peace at one level. They value joy. They value order. They value, you know, all of these, you know, beauty. They value all of these sorts of things. Life with God is, you know, the fulfillment of, of that. It does. I, I think a couple of questions out of this. Yeah. Number one, it, it strikes me that, and when I read Paul, I see this sort of stark dichotomy between the right way and the wrong way. In some ways, in a world of gray where we tend to like nuance and, and detail, and there is a lot of that to be had, but Paul is not trying to strike a balance between right and wrong. He's actually painting a hard boundary, isn't he, between, I mean, I go to like Romans six. You're either a slave to sin or a slave to righteousness. These are your two choices. Is that, is that a fair dichotomy to paint for Paul? Yes. So I think Paul, sometimes I think Paul gets a bad, I mean, in some ways he is absolutely black and white. And in other areas, he's a little gray, but this regard, he is absolutely black and white, I think. And this is where he is, you know, he'd be offensive or problematic for positive psychologists in that it is, this is the singular supreme good. The image of God is Jesus Christ. Humans were created in that image. That means to like, you know, to live well as a human, you know, there's, there's one supreme good, and that is being in right relation with the image of God who is Jesus Christ. That's what you're created for. It's what you're created to know. Or, you know, as you said, slave to God, slave to sin. There's no in between. Yeah. Right. You're alive or you're dead, you know? Right. Yeah

Let's say there's a human problem that is sin, and that has resulted in the brokenness of the world. And now a positive psychology is, it's a human solution to a human problem. What Paul tends to argue is that those don't work. Like that doesn't bring about a resurrected life. And so there's a sense in which, the more we try to decouple our ethic, let's say, from Christ, we're automatically at a deficit. We put ourselves on the slaves of sin's side as opposed to the slaves of righteousness's side. But then I think the counterbalance to some of that is Acts 17, right? You know, I see that you are very religious people, but you're worshiping an unknown God. Let me inform you about this God that you're worshiping. Let me tell you who he is. And so I think we have to be careful, to your point, it's not just about a dichotomy. There's also this gray area for Paul, it seems like, where it's like, some people may be a little closer to discovering God or seeking him and finding him as opposed to others who are dismissing God, following their own desires in ways that are more pernicious. Yeah. Yeah, no, I think there's definitely, I mean, to some extent, one of the, I had a few goals in writing the book, but one of them, maybe a subsidiary one, has to do sort of with saying, yes, Paul posits a singular supreme good, and that is going to be, for those that take that seriously that aren't Christians, it's probably going to be offensive or off-putting, likely it is. But let me show you, or let me try to show a way in which sort of how he understands what the good life or what flourishing is and all of the implications for the world that we live in. Now that we've looked at it, hopefully I've done a halfway decent job in terms of unpacking what Paul says, does that make better sense or worse sense of your experiences, the world that you live in, your hopes, your longings? So thinking about the Acts 17, sort of like, come in and look, see what it looks like in this world, and tell me if it doesn't make better sense of the experience of grief and death. Tell me if it doesn't make better sense of where beauty comes from, these sorts of things. Yeah. It's interesting. So kind of moving on from transcendence, I want to move into now moral agency and the idea of sharing the mind of Christ. And I think even the way that you've labeled your major chapters in part two of the book, you know, sharing in Christ's resurrection, sharing the mind of Christ, and the body of Christ, they do emphasize the crux of the problem between those who are in and those who are out, let's say. It's Jesus. Right. Christ is the entry point for all those who would really share in the life of God. And he is the stumbling block for all those who refuse to share in the life of God. It isn't to say that there aren't intermediary structures that can get you sort of quasi closer, let's say. And I know that may be a tough language to use, but the idea of, you know, sitting back and saying, as opposed to, I reject God totally, to being sort of an open person who says, yeah, I know there's a higher power there. I don't know how to know him, or I don't know that he's knowable, those kind of things. I think there is a spectrum on that other side that we need to acknowledge. But the reality is, when you frame moral agency, you talk about it in terms of sharing the mind of Christ. And so how would you explain that sort of connection of what can be a very generic term, moral agency, and a very particular term, sharing in the mind of Christ? Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean by it, to some extent, something along these lines. And again, Paul, this is where Paul is, not everybody loves Paul because of some of this, like, you know, Jesus is the only way, or it's black or white, you're in or out. You know, for Paul, there is, I think, you know, I think in a way that can make sense of kind of what you were saying, you know, people being on a spectrum in terms of their knowing, seeking, you know, pursuing God. That for Paul, there is this sort of like, we as humans, we want to know what is good, and we want to do what is good, and we want to feel what is good. But that is something that ultimately, it goes back to transcendence, is outside of us, we don't invent, we're actually given as a gift, basically, to know what is, you know, true and false or good and bad or beautiful, you know, all of these sorts of things. And it's revealed to us in the person of Christ, who is the one who both reveals this as a reality, but is then also the one through the Spirit that is ultimately capable of forming us to be people that not only know, but actually have the right emotions that feel and are then capable of doing. So I think for Paul, you know, this goes back a little bit to some of the other visions of human flourishing. Transcendence is not something that is, or the ultimate good or your life meaning or value is not something for Paul that you invent or you create, which could be seen as a gift. It's actually, you know, not your, up to you, it's actually given to you. And part of human flourishing then is that the person of Christ through the Spirit is the one that is actively uniting sort of like our knowledge and our loves and our wills, you know, in that direction, right? So that we do experience a foretaste of human flourishing in that regard. I don't know if I'm, if I actually am getting at, I kind of went on there in terms of, you know, what, why moral agency and the mind of Christ, you know, is sort of like the next Paul chapter, but I don't You know, I think I get that. And I think it makes sense that moral agency and the mind of Christ are connected simply because as we define Let me ask you a serious question. If something triggered a major market drop in the coming months, would your retirement be ready or exposed? With inflation, market volatility, and ongoing global uncertainty, more families are taking a closer look at whether their retirement plan is truly built to hold up. And many are finding that adding a layer of protection makes a lot of sense. Sanctuary Metals is a Christian owned company that helps families strengthen their retirement savings with physical gold and silver through a gold IRA. 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And if we're talking about human flourishing and what we're trying to do is move a lost society toward Jesus, right? Giving them the ability to be, the way I usually phrase it is less lost, right? By being, you know, by adopting some sort of moral framework that is, again, abstracted from the theological context but makes us feel better, right? So it's wholesome instead of holy. We've given them something that is, I think, I don't know, tempting, right? It sort of, it lends itself toward complacency. Yeah. And when I read your chapter on this, that moral agency, there is no real complacency here. There can be no set of principles that we enact so well, even after saving faith, that we should be comfortable with where we are. Is that a fair way to say it? Yeah, it is. And it's, you know, it's kind of related to Paul's, I mean, this could take us far afield in some ways, but it kind of, I think it's deeply connected to Paul's understanding of the place where human flourishing is supposed to take place and where it can only for him take place is in the body of Christ. So that it is, you know, where, you know, I wish we had more texts where Paul just sort of said, let me now address outsiders or like how you should think about society. And we do have some, you know, like Romans 13, but there's not a lot. It's mostly, hey, right? It is the body.

Again, sharing in the body of Christ, it is the body of Christ where basically the spirit of the risen Christ is going to be at work to form you as individuals and you as a community to embody basically these virtues of forgiveness and reconciliation, peace, ultimately love, like divine love is to be made known in that community. So whoever said it, you know, you hear it once in a while that the church is supposed to be God's apologetic, right? It's, you know, I think that's somebody said something like, right, it's basically like the church is supposed to be the place where people, not perfect, of course, but where they encounter, you know, a new form of belonging, a new form of love, a new form of peace, people that reconcile, people that forgive, people that put others ahead. You know, in other words, that it's a pretty strongly Christian ethic that is something that can't be, I think you can, if you value those things, then they can form you to live a certain way in the world, but are going to be hard to be sort of like, expect, you know, your employer or your work or society at large or other people that aren't part of the body of Christ to embody those same sort of qualities. And again, in part, because Paul's going to say, the only reason those qualities are fully on display for Paul is if the spirit of the risen Christ is at work, you know, creating those virtues that are ultimately an imitation of Christ himself. Yeah, because I do think it gets to the counterintuitive Jesus that we have, right? Like the conquering lamb of Revelation, right? This is a contradiction in terms. And so there's a reason why living this way is not going to make a lot of sense to, like you said, an employer or, you know, whomever. At some point, it's going to run aground. Yeah, right. Because it just doesn't make any sense. Yeah, no, it is. I mean, I think, you know, for Paul, it's like patrons and clients in the body of Christ are equal, right? Male and female, it's sort of like, okay, all these social identities exist in the world and they're not, some are, we might look at some and say they're bad, slave and free now, you know, we wouldn't, you know, they're not necessarily all bad, but all these social identities, at least in Paul's time, they continue. But they're not like the fundamental way of orienting, like being oriented towards one another in the church, right? There is, I think, kind of like a strong ethic of equality in Christ, you know. There is a strong sense of like, you don't get to act like a patron as if other people in the church are your clients, you know, in the body of Christ. That's a different form of relating that's rooted in the fact that Christ is the singular, you know, gift that God has given, right? If a patron has access to it and a client has access to it, that's God has given them all he can give to them. If male has it, female. you know, and so insisting upon certain forms of status, certain forms of power and hierarchy, certain forms of, and, you know, just considering others' interests as equal to or even better than your own, right? That's supposed to be expected in the body of Christ. But probably not, Paul's not expecting that you're going to find that in, you know, the rest of Rome or any other sort of like place that's not, you know, the body of Christ. Well, let's pivot a little bit to sort of chapter seven of your book, which is spiritual practices, cultivating the character of Christ. Right. So there's the, what we need to do. We need to share in the life of God in order to experience this human flourishing, however imperfectly we can. And we need to be the community that provides that apologetic to the world to show them what it means to really flourish as humanity. And that requires, I would say discipleship. It requires us to learn to obey all that Christ commanded and to imitate him in all aspects of life. So there's the what, but then there's also the how. How do we go about doing this? What does this really look like? How do we go about structuring our lives such that we can live in this flourishing? So talk a little bit about the spiritual practices you discuss in this chapter and how Paul thinks about those. Yeah. Yeah. There's the first thing I would say would be there is, there is for Paul, certainly never, I think I, we kind of already made this clear earlier. There's no sense that one achieves human flourishing fully in this life. And so Paul is very much adamant that it is, you know, an ongoing quest. And so he uses so many, you know, metaphors and images, whether it's, you're a soldier, there's military, you know, there's, there's training, there's, you know, Philippians three. Like I, I have, I do not consider myself to have obtained this or have been made perfect yet. One thing I do, I strive forward. So I think it's key, you know, to understand for Paul, that is for his people that he's writing to and for us as it's our scriptures, that it's like, yes, we do look backwards to we've been saved. We've been baptized. We, we belong to Christ, but there's still the future, the forward-looking element, which means that like, we're still moving. We're still on this active, you know, quest to know Christ and to love Christ and to be conformed to his image. That's not necessarily just a, a spiritual practice per se, but it is sort of like an overarching, like we need then these disciplines and practices in this sort of like ongoing quest that we have. So let me just mention a couple of them. There's, there's a variety. Let me mention a couple that are important and across Paul. One is, you know, I can't remember the exact language I use, but it's something like patient endurance in the midst of, midst of suffering. The life of a Christian is going to be one at times of persecution at times, it's going to be one of just experiencing pain, loss, grief, as we, you know, are, are made to know Christ and we do know him and we long for the fulfillment of that reality. Right. Paul frequently reminds the believer, his churches that in the now, in the in-between time, in the now, basically we endure, we're patient as we're filled still with basically hope. I think hope is really important. I need, I need people to keep reminding me of hope, right. You know, in terms of, you know, giving me fresh vision, imagination, you know, looking forward to the resurrection, looking forward to the return of Christ basically as, as our final goal over and over. So that constant practice of faithful, patient endurance with hope. The second one I would add would be one of thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is sort of like God's covenantal, you know, the covenantal response that we offer to God. God has acted in the person of Christ to change us, to transform us. And one of the simple things that we do is basically respond, you know, over and over to that with gratitude, with thanksgiving. There's a lot of overlap here with sort of like the positive side. Everyone now will tell you sort of like, you want to be happy, be grateful, be thankful, right? Paul, Paul got there way before, you know, a lot of people did, right? Absolutely. You know, it's like almost every beginning prayer in his letters has to do with, right. Eucharist. Eucharistia. Thanksgiving. Gratitude. Not just because it will, you know, make you happy and you'll feel good, but it's like, that's the right human response to what God has, has already done and has promised. So that would be a second one. And the third one is honestly just one of corporate worship. Paul is, you know, all of these letters. We could, you know, if we read them devotionally on our own individually, we might need to just continually remind ourselves, need to continually remind ourselves, you know, these are written to the church at large. So there's a lot of like, you know, not you singular language when Paul's talking. There's a lot of you all plural or us or we, right. In other words, the, the exhortations, you know, speak truth to one another, love one another. All of these sorts of things presume sort of like the context of the corporate gathering, eating the Lord's supper together, you know, praying together, singing hymns together. So just, it's, it's almost like so obvious that to an individual Christian reader, you might forget all of Paul's letters are written sort of like to, you know, presuming basically this corporate worship of the triune God. So there's a few more we could add, but those would be a few of the like foundational practice, spiritual practices. Paul gives to us in terms of the how. Yeah. And so that, just that last one, just so I make sure it's clear. What we're really saying is there's an individual application. All of us should be involved in corporate worship. Yep. There may also be this other sort of broader application that says, how is it that we encourage the community to worship? How is it that we start building the body of Christ and building into the body of Christ so that it isn't just about our own personal spiritual lives, but that it's also about how we leverage our own personal spiritual lives to build the body of Christ. Is that? Yeah, I think that's right. It's, it's sort of, you know,

how do you, you know, almost like to go to Philippians, for example, you know, Paul's saying, basically, he wants them to have this pattern of wisdom or this pattern of thinking that was in Christ, Philippians 2.5. Well, how is that embodied or enacted, right? You can't do it on your own. It requires sort of like the corporate community, right? Or when Paul is saying, like, you come together and eat the Lord's Supper, I mean, in 1 Corinthians 11, it's all suneikamai. You are a Greek word for when you come together, this is what you're doing. So a lot of Paul's exhortations or spiritual disciplines, for sure, meditation, memorization, prayer. There's, you know, I don't wanna deny the importance of sort of like the individual emphasis for the individual believer, but all of it is, you know, in many ways also oriented and geared towards sort of like the people of God, you know, living these realities out together. Yeah. Man, this is good. I think we've gotten kind of through the whole book. Anything else you want to add just to give people a sense of what this looks like from your writing? Like, what would be your final thought on Paul? I've done a few podcasts, and you're the first one that sort of like helpfully worked me through all the Paul chapters kind of sequentially. So in many ways, we got there. I guess I would just wanna say, you know, and I hopefully it's come across, and hopefully for most of you that are, you know, are reading Paul. Paul, I do, and a part of the reason I wrote this book was as much as I've learned from the, this is a New Testament discipline, Pauline theology, was as much as it can be helpful to sort of order his, you know, texts in ways that fit doctrines. I'm not against that. But what I don't always love about that is it doesn't always communicate how just deeply involved in human existence Paul himself was and how deeply all of Paul's theology is in service of, right, actual human lived experience seeking to know God and to live in this world faithfully. And so, you know, my hope, you know, if anything good comes out of the book, it would be that basically, you know, my main desire was to try to communicate just the way in which Paul is a deeply existential thinker, very much oriented towards the human condition and to be read in that way. So I hope in that way he, you know, challenges you, provokes you, convicts you, you know, you wrestle with him, you're encouraged by him. That's my main hope in terms of, you know, people's reading of Paul, I guess. Very cool. Well, last question, and this is something I'm asking of all my guests. What does the church need to be thinking about today in order to be and make disciples in this contemporary age? Yeah, I think there could be, I'm sure there could just be so many good responses to that question. So let me just pick the one that came first into my mind. It might not even be the best. It's just the first one that came to my mind. And it's one that I think I struggle with too. Some of it may be season of life, raising kids that are very active and involved. But there is an element of sort of like how do we, it would be the chapter six, sharing in the body of Christ. And how do we live faithfully in the world, but in a way where we're also prioritizing our importance and commitment to the church as the place that is the body of Christ, that is the place where we're supposed to be formed and shaped and molded. Maybe this doesn't resonate for everybody, but at least for me in a world, you know, living in a world that's very individualistically oriented or living in a world where there's a lot of competing sort of like, you know, things to take my time. That's at least where I find I need the help. Like how do I live out Paul's theology? How do I live out the Christian scriptures? How am I faithful, you know, in a corporate gathering? So. No, it's good. I mean, I have kids as well. And, you know, sports tournaments on Sundays often takes away from town. And it's been a point of tension, a lot of tension, you know, because I don't want to, I don't want my kids to be strange in that way, right? I'd like them to be able to participate in sports, but I know just intuitively that it's not a good thing that we're gone on the weekends and missing church and not developing that community. And it's one of those pressures that I think parents in a contemporary age have to struggle with. Yeah. Because we are supposed to be corporate beings, and we are supposed to be involved in the body of Christ. And so I definitely resonate with that, man. I think it's a great answer. So. Yeah. Well, thanks. Yeah. Well, Joshua, man, thanks for being on the podcast. This has been fantastic. I would recommend Joshua's book, Pauline Theology as a Way of Life. It's available on Amazon.com. You can check it out in the episode description. And so you'll have the link to buy it, but I would encourage you to purchase it. Get through it. Really great stuff. Thanks for writing it. And thanks for being on the podcast today, Joshua. Oh, totally my pleasure. It was really a fun conversation. Appreciate your great questions. Yeah, absolutely. Well, we'll catch everybody on the next episode of Thinking Christian. Have a great day. I just want to take a second to thank the team at Life Audio for their partnership with us on the Thinking Christian podcast. If you go to lifeaudio.com, you'll find dozens of other faith-centered podcasts in their network. They've got shows about prayer, Bible study, parenting, and more. Hello, hello. Quinice Petway here, co-host of the Your Daily Bible Verse podcast. Are you someone who loves to take a deep dive into God's Word one verse at a time to explore His will for your life and desire to draw closer to Him? If that sounds like you, I'd love to invite you to head over to lifeaudio.com and search Your Daily Bible Verse to tune in and subscribe for daily inspiration, life application, and spiritual transformation through the in-depth exploration of God's Word.