“Christianity’s Surprise” with Kavin Rowe

Shownotes:

In this Holy Week episode, Chris and Eddie are joined by Kavin Rowe, author of Christianity’s Surprise: A Sure and Certain Hope. After 20 years of scriptural immersion as the George Washington Ivey Distinguished Professor of New Testament at Duke Divinity School, Rowe began to discern the growing significance of Christianity’s groundbreaking impact when it first entered the world. His book evokes the lost sense of the explosive power at the heart of Christian story, detailing the new hope and fresh vision that brushes up against the familiarity of scripture. Christianity’s Surprise draws readers closer to an understanding of Christianity as a gift from God, a never-ending mystery filled with a robust, joyful sense of surprise.

Rowe discusses the missing sense of imagination in American Christianity, how God’s promises for the future reach into the present, the interconnectedness of humanity, and how Christian institutions have evolved over time. Rowe’s insight in this conversation offers encouragement to all who need hope and who are longing to rediscover the heart of Christianity. It ushers in a refreshing perspective on the life-giving power of hope.

Resources:

Check out Kavin Rowe’s book Christianity’s Surprise here:

https://www.abingdonpress.com/product/9781791008208/ 

Learn more about Kavin Rowe here:

https://divinity.duke.edu/faculty/c-kavin-rowe

Transcript:

Eddie Rester 0:00

I'm Eddie Rester.

Chris McAlilly 0:01

I'm Chris McAlilly. Welcome to The Weight.

Eddie Rester 0:03

Today is a special Holy Week edition of The Weight. We're going to talk with Dr. Kavin Rowe, who wrote a book called "Christianity's Surprise." It's a book that I think if you're a deeply committed Christian or an explorer, or maybe considering what it means to follow Christ, it's a great book. Dr. Rowe is a New Testament professor at Duke University. We have a lot of Dukies who are part of the conversation with us.

Chris McAlilly 0:33

This book is, it's just, it's a powerful, short and precise, concise exploration of the vision of and the power of early Christianity. And it kind of is set in the context of a conversation about the ways in which most of the Christianity that we see around us is just frankly, boring,

Eddie Rester 0:56

Not surprising at all. There's nothing that sparks the imagination, there's nothing that says, "outside of duty, I want to be a part of that."

Chris McAlilly 1:06

It's rooted in... The surprise of Christianity is rooted in Holy Week, it's rooted in Easter, it's rooted in the power of the resurrection.

Eddie Rester 1:13

The person in the life of Jesus.

Chris McAlilly 1:15

Yeah. It's set against the power of death, the ways in which death wants to hang over all of our life and say that, I'm, you know, at the end of every good life, or every good attempt at meaning and purpose, I'm the end of the story. And the surprise that comes through in Kavin's writing and in this conversation is that there's more. There's more that comes from the side of God that breaks into this world and offers us a new vision and a fresh hope.

Eddie Rester 1:48

We think you're going to really enjoy this, particularly as you prepare for for Holy Week, for Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter Sunday. So share it with someone else. It's, I think, a significant conversation about what it is that gives us joy and hope here in this moment.

Chris McAlilly 2:07

[INTRO] We started this podcast out of frustration with the tone of American Christianity.

Eddie Rester 2:14

There are some topics too heavy for sermons and sound bites.

Chris McAlilly 2:17

We wanted to create a space with a bit more recognition of the difficulty, nuance, and complexity of cultural issues.

Eddie Rester 2:24

If you've given up on the church, we want to give you a place to encounter a fresh perspective on the wisdom of the Christian tradition, in our conversations about politics, race, sexuality, art, and mental health.

Chris McAlilly 2:37

If you're a Christian seeking a better way to talk about the important issues of the day, with more humility, charity, and intellectual honesty, that grapples with Scripture and the church's tradition in a way that doesn't dismiss people out of hand, You're in the right place.

Eddie Rester 2:52

Welcome to The Weight. [END INTRO]

Chris McAlilly 2:54

Well, it's Holy Week. We're releasing this episode on Thursday, Monday, Thursday, as we approach Easter, and we're honored today to be joined by Kavin Rowe, professor at Duke Divinity School, who's written about "Christianity Surprise: A Sure and Certain Hope." Kavin, thanks for joining us today.

Kavin Rowe 3:15

It's a pleasure to be with you.

Eddie Rester 3:16

We've been looking forward to this conversation for a while. Chris and I both dug into the book, "Christianity's Surprise," and it's one of those books, it's not a long book, but it is...

Chris McAlilly 3:28

Punchy.

Eddie Rester 3:29

Punchy. Yeah. That's a good word.

Chris McAlilly 3:31

Yeah.

Eddie Rester 3:31

I mean, just thick with meaning and hope in it, and a good word, I think, for the church in these days. You know, one of the things just right off the bat on the back of the book is the little tagline, "Human life is just too hard to have a boring Christianity." That really caught me. So say a little bit about that. Why did you write this book? What was the movement behind this?

Kavin Rowe 3:57

Sure Eddie, It really emerged more out of my teaching, as I reflected on it, it does have, of course, a connection to my long-term research interests. But I realized that after almost 20 years of immersion in the New Testament and early Christian materials, and teaching these materials, that I had a growing sense of the significance of the fact that Christianity exists at all. And then a growing awareness of the significance of the particular things that it brought with it when it came into the world. And so I can just say a little bit about each of those things, to frame the answer to your question.

Kavin Rowe 4:48

It's remarkable that Christianity exists, rather than not. It is so easy for us, after two millennia of it's penetration into almost every society and every culture in the North Atlantic West, to forget that fact. But that it once was not here, and did not have to be. It's not a part of the unfolding of the world in the way that a tree is the part of the unfolding of the acorn or something like that. It's actually put into the world as a gift. And to remember that it surprised the world when it came into the world is to draw close to something of an understanding of what God intended it to be, when He gave it to the world as a gift.

Kavin Rowe 5:40

We have, of course, done various things with that gift over the years, some reception and some rejection, but that it was put into the world as a gift to and for the world, is something of its original surprise. And a way in which you can get at that question is by remembering that it actually did come into the world. It's not just a permanent feature of the world.

Kavin Rowe 6:03

And then the second thing was to look at some of the most significant and surprising particularities that came into the world when Christianity came into the world. So I look in the book at the story of everything, the question of a crucified and resurrected Jewish man as the center of all things. That's a surprising thing to believe. I look at the view of the human being that came into the world with Christianity. And then I look at the institutions that the early Christians developed in order to create a kind of durable presence and to be in the world as the body of Christ and to witness to Christ.

Kavin Rowe 6:43

And then the final thing I'll say is that having seen those things, the surprise of Christianity itself and of its particularities, what I hope is that we can recover a robust and joyful sense, that we also have things with which to surprise our world. And that's more or less what I thought I was doing when I was writing this book. Obviously, I didn't write it for scholars. I think they could learn some things if they read between the lines, but I really wrote it for Christians, to encourage us and to help us discover or rediscover some of the things that make our faith so joyful, and a gift.

Chris McAlilly 7:25

In the book, and kind of behind--that's a great kind of just summary of what you cover--I want to know... There's a diagnosis at work here of American Christianity. And I want to know what you think is wrong with the current instantiation of Christianity in America. Like, what, I mean, there are various things that come through, but I guess, how do you diagnose the problem?

Kavin Rowe 7:56

It's a great question. There are multiple layers to it really. It's... so that the macro layer of Christianity in America currently is really tied up with long, or developments that are long in the making, and have the character of a, "It's here, and it's gone," kind of moment, where we are extremely familiar with all kinds of Christian images and language and terms and so forth. And at the same time, a lot of the basic Christian commitments that we've long had as part of our culture have been eroded, and are on the way out, are being pressed back.

Kavin Rowe 8:44

And so at one and the same time, Christianity, as it, you might say, is originally depicted in the New Testament is both familiar and utterly forgotten. That makes for a very confusing time. And so when I then think about what is it that's presented to us as Christianity on a mass scale, I don't mean necessarily in every church in every town in America, but on a mass scale, what you see in the media and so on, what we typically see is distortions of various sorts. One example might be political party Christianity, or another example might be a prosperity gospel Christianity, or an identity politics Christianity of one sort or another. And these things distort what Christian witness has been and could be when it is tethered to its authentic expression in the New Testament and as Christianity got growing in its strange host culture.

Kavin Rowe 9:54

So I think I would say that the problem, as I did just a minute ago, has multiple layers to it. But if you were to ask what's at the root of it, and you were to press me for a particular answer, I would say it's a loss of touch with or tether to the New Testament and the imagination that scripture gives us to be in the world as Christians.

Eddie Rester 10:20

Yeah, as you were talking, I was thinking, it's like, we've become unmoored. We've kind of drifted, and you use the word "tethered" there. And I feel like that's significant, particularly as we move through Holy Week to Easter it, because this is the moment that begins to not just hold us but begins to, as you say, ignite our imaginations for who we can be in the world. You know, one of the three things that you talk about in the book is the story of everything, nd that's one of the chapters I've re-read multiple times. Talk for a minute, what do you mean, when you say, "This is the story of everything"? Because that's a pretty big claim.

Kavin Rowe 11:07

It is. I'd be glad to talk about that. When I say story of everything--I'll talk about both parts of that--the reason that I say "story" is because I take it that there is no more comprehensive way than "story" or "narrative" to understand ourselves and the world in which we live. Whatever account we give of all of that will turn out to be storied. And it turns out, of course, that this is a scriptural point, as well as a philosophical one. That is to say that scripture is construed as a narrative that tells us a story, from alpha to omega. And I say "everything" because the story of alpha to omega is the story of God and all that God made, which is to say, the story of God and all that is not God. And that's all there is. There isn't anything else.

Kavin Rowe 12:09

It's the largest story that you could imagine. And it's surprising, I suppose, in many ways, but I'll just mention a few that come to mind as we're talking. The first one is, and this is really at the heart of Holy Week, it's focused on a particular Jew, who as far as the public was concerned, was ignominiously crucified. And what the story of everything says is this particular person is nothing less than the truth of and the key to the cosmos and the human drama within it, our predicament and our rescue from our predicament, and so on. So not in some generally available insight, or some program on reform or anything else like that was the final word about God and human life and the world and so on, but in fact, in this particular Jewish man from Nazareth.

Kavin Rowe 13:10

So there's a very interesting and utterly surprising link between story of everything, God and all that's not God, and the key to that story, which is this one human being. So that didn't mean... That is a what I think about and teach about as interpretive audacity in the first century. There's a tiny little sect in Palestine, looked out on the whole Roman world, the Empire, the religious heritage, the various peoples and so on, and said that all of that is included in our story. It would never occur to a Roman official, for example, that Caesar's history and Rome's importance was discerned or made sense of inside the narrative of a little Jewish sect. For Rome, whatever is going on out in the world is going to be treated in relation to Rome. But for the early Christians, the whole kit and caboodle, everything out there was related to God's act and Jesus from Nazareth.

Eddie Rester 14:22

And Paul's even willing to leverage Rome and the power of Rome to proclaim the gospel to the far edges. You know, as you think about the role of the state, even, within the story, the state's not the end. The story is the end.

Chris McAlilly 14:40

I think that, you know, what strikes me in this conversation is really just the critiques that I think are fairly common for Christians, for the claim that the story that Christianity has to offer is a story of everything, re-articulating that claim in 2021. I feel like the pushback from friends of mine who are outside the church, who are not compelled by this story, tends to both go in kind of the pluralist direction, kind of there are a lot of cultural directions, there are a lot of alternatives on offer, a lot of different stories that are out there, that make claim to our humanity, and to give an account of the way things are. Probably the most compelling for a lot of folks is the scientific account. Could you just kind of, what would you say to someone who might be listening who's not yet persuaded by the power of the story of Christianity? Or might be, you know, fairly compelled by some of these alternatives?

Kavin Rowe 15:43

Well, again, there are multiple layers. Great question. So I heard a couple of different things in your comments. One is the the question about pluralism, and about the competition between stories. The idea that there is no one great story, and that they're just a bunch of different stories, all of which have varying degrees of truth, but none of them which have the Truth with the capital T, as it were, is, of course, just itself, one more story of everything. Namely, that there are no stories of everything, or telling to say that there's no story of everything. That's your story of everything. So all of that is just philosophically defeated by its own premise. It's not particularly compelling on the philosophical level.

Kavin Rowe 16:36

On the experiential level, on what human beings experience in the world, of course, there's a remarkable sense in which, when we experience difference, and the claim to truth that is not finally reconcilable in one human life--that is to say, you can't live both as a Christian and not as a Christian in exactly the same time. You can live as a hypocritical Christian. You can live as a sinner and confess, but you can't both say Jesus is the Messiah and not the Messiah at one at the same time in the one life. So when you discover that, it does create a kind of confusion, or you might put it positively an invitation to take seriously the claims of various stories to be the account of your life.

Kavin Rowe 17:25

The second level, so let me just say, there is a sense in which Christianity is one competing story among other stories that compete for our lives. That seems to be endemic to the human condition. It was the case in early Christianity. It was the case now. I mean, it's just part of the way human beings make it through the world. We have to make certain kinds of macro choices, just to be human.

Kavin Rowe 17:58

And the second question was about what I would say, as someone who's not persuaded by the story. That's trickier. Because I'm not sure when it is that the story persuades and when it's, in fact, you know, I would talk about it as the power of the Spirit and the way in which Christ makes himself known, that is beyond our ability simply to be intellectually persuaded. It's often more in relationships and an encounter with Christ's love through other people, that that kind of shift from "Naw, I'm not so persuaded," to, "Well, maybe I am," occurs.

Kavin Rowe 18:42

Just very quickly on the scientific the scientific account, of course, this is an account that begins and ends inside the parentheses of the givenness of creation, or of the world or the cosmos or however you want to name. It cannot and will never answer the question, "why is there something rather than nothing?" That's something science can't answer. As soon as you started to answer that question, you're in religious claims or philosophical claims that are theologically funded.

Eddie Rester 19:12

And Francis Collins helped me with that years ago, when he wrote his book, I can't remember the name of it off the top of my head, but just about unraveling the genetic code. He said almost the same thing. Science gives us what we can see but not what we can't see. And as a scientist, he had to believe that there was more that we could not see, even than what we could see. As we think about the story, one of the particulars, and it's maybe the most surprising point of the story of everything, is this idea of resurrection. As we approach Easter, speak to us, if you would just why is the story of resurrection so surprising and captivating for those of us who not just who claim to be Christian, but who live in this world?

Kavin Rowe 20:12

Well, that's a terrific question. I guess I begin by saying, I mean, in a sense, the resurrection is the thing on which all other things Christian really hangs. I mean, it's the sine qua non. Paul, in his treatment of the question, basically says what seems to be true and reverberates through the ages of Christian reflection on the resurrection, which is, if Jesus has not been raised, then we've been deceived and we are to be pitied for believing a lie. And what he's getting at in part is that if God has not acted from his side of death to raise Jesus from the dead, then death does win. There isn't an inherent capacity of the human being to transcend its own death. There isn't an inherent capacity from the creature side of the God-creature relationship to pull ourselves over the threshold and get into God's side of life.

Kavin Rowe 21:39

And what the resurrection is about, is about putting to work that death-defeating and life-giving power in the present, so that it takes the shape and form of hope, and trains us over time to be able to face our deaths. Not just individually, but in ministry, in contexts where death might be an actual result of being Christian, as it was for the early Christians, but also in our individual and familial contexts. And the resurrection of Jesus, therefore, is really the thing on which our hope is staked. You might as well just give the whole thing up if death has the final word.

Eddie Rester 22:31

Yeah. Because no matter how good we can become, it ends. No matter how far down the road we go, it ends.

Kavin Rowe 22:39

That's right.

Eddie Rester 22:40

There's a fatalism to it if death has not been defeated.

Kavin Rowe 22:45

And there's also a way in which--and this again is a Pauline understanding of death--but death isn't just waiting for us. Death comes for us. It's a power and intrudes. It seeks people out, gets them before they're ready, wreaks havoc in families and in communities and destroys our hopes and dreams and creates fear and actually has remarkable potential for destruction.

Chris McAlilly 23:19

It seems like it just, again, so part of part of what I hear in your work is just this distance between kind of the Christianity that we experience today and what you have seen through this long immersion in the New Testament writings and the writings of the early church. Talk about the the power of resurrection as a both kind of as an idea and a lived reality in the experience of the early church. What, I guess how have you come to embrace and come to an even greater understanding of the power of resurrection in the early church that needs to be recovered today?

Kavin Rowe 24:04

Sure, well, it has two sides to it. And in some ways, I touched on them just a minute ago. The first one is, again, the training for death side. So part of what the early Christians did was, when focusing on the hope that the resurrection brings, is to pattern themselves in the world in a way that meant that they were training not to fear death. You can't just sort of spontaneously not fear death. And there's a way in which you'll never not fear death. But you can train against death, to hope in life and to hope beyond your own death. And the early Christians were intentional about this and had a robust sense that this is what they were doing.

Kavin Rowe 24:55

So that then when, for example, in the early part of the second century, a Roman governor in northern what we now call Turkey and then was called Asia or Bythynia and Pontus to be more specific, the provinces discovered that the Christians were ruining the meat market, because they would no longer buy meat in the sacrifice to the idols. They didn't want to do that, and that was having an effect on the meat market. And like any good governor, he worried about the meat market back then. So he hauled them up for trial, and said, "You need to curse Christ and confess the Roman emperor is Lord, and then we'll let you go and you can have your normal life back. And if you don't, we'll kill you off."

Kavin Rowe 25:44

And you don't spontaneously have the courage to face that moment en masse, as it were, one Christian after the other after the other after the other. You might find an individual here or there who's courageous enough, but not as a community. But if you've trained for death, with the hope that resurrection gives you, then you are prepared. You've rehearsed enough for that moment to know that death is not the worst thing that can happen to you. That's one feature.

Kavin Rowe 26:16

It occurs also in the plagues. There were two major plagues in the first three or four centuries, first three centuries of Christian life, and the Christians would nurse those who were very sick. And they were totally unsentimental about it and non-superstitious, they didn't think, "Oh, you know, I bet God will protect us, and we won't get to plague because we're doing good work for him," and so forth and so on. They just knew that they needed to be caring for these people. And so they cared for them. And many of them who cared for them turned out to get sick and die. But you don't draw near to the plague unless you've trained not to fear death, because of the hope you have in Christ.

Eddie Rester 27:02

I was just gonna say in the chapter, one of the turns that you make that really caught my attention, and we could probably sit here and talk about this part of Christianity's surprise, all day. But you say that the fundamental question that we have to begin to ask is, what time is it? That we are living in this in-between time where the future, God's future reaches into the present and what you're talking about there, whether it's facing down a Roman governor, or looking into a plague and the people impacted by the plague and stepping into that moment, it's understanding that our hope is not generated by right now. Our hope is coming to us from the future. Am I reading that correctly?

Kavin Rowe 27:52

Yeah, yes, the origin of the hope is on God's side of things. So that's right. It is coming into the world, breaking into the world, and meeting us where we are. And when it does so, it reminds us that the time of the world was changed in the resurrection of Christ. So the time of the world now, that Christians claim as true, and in which we hope to live is the time called New Creation. And what New Creation partly means is that we've been set free to live in ways that bring repair, that bring healing, that embody hope, that direct us toward the future, even as the future is coming into the present now. And so all that's correct, absolutely.

Chris McAlilly 28:55

Another dimension of this startling and surprising, I guess, Christian view of things, on the other side of the resurrection, is the view of humanity in, you describe it in, I guess, the third chapter of the book, in a very basic kind of claim that Jesus of Nazareth is The Human, not just a human, but The Human. And all other humans are his image. Talk about what you're trying to do and the chapter on the human.

Kavin Rowe 29:29

Sure. So a lot of times when we ask, what is it to be a human being or what is the human? We gravitate, especially in the modern world, toward certain kinds of capacities, such as rationality to be human animal is to be the kind of animal that can think. That can reflect. That can ask questions like, What kind of thing am I?" You know, a cat does not ask, "What kind of thing am I?" A worm does not ask that. The human being, insofar as we know, is the only thing that says to itself, "What am I?"

Kavin Rowe 30:08

Or we might focus on the moral capacity. We're the only creatures, insofar as we know, that have a sense of right and wrong, or that they may vary obviously, from culture to culture, but that there are some things we ought to do and some things we ought not to do, our sort of moral dimension. Maybe that's what makes us human. So we look at particular things, and abstract them from the rest of our humanity, and say, 'Well, that's the essence of being human," or "That's what it really is to be human." And the early Christians didn't go about it that way. They said that, to be human was to be in the image of Jesus Christ, full stop, so that everything that shows up in the world, as human is in the image of Christ.

Kavin Rowe 30:59

You can see right away how that gives you a language and a practice that includes folks that, say, are, for example, profoundly handicapped mentally, whose rationality would be, and any other account of rationality, questionable. Or who are profoundly deformed and don't share the same kinds of possibilities that other humans have, and are therefore, in some accounts of being human, subhuman or less than human. Christianity says, if it's a baby that's born in the world, that's a human baby, that thing is in the image of Christ. All of it is in the image of Christ.

Kavin Rowe 31:44

And what that did for them was to say that any and all things human that are out there are things that God has claimed as his own, for redemption and for care and for stewardship, and so forth.

Eddie Rester 32:06

And if God claims them, then that places a claim on how we live in the world with those other humans as well.

Kavin Rowe 32:15

Absolutely. It means that when you see another human being, to see them christianly means that you cannot divide their person from Christ, that Christ has already claimed that person. It raises all kinds of questions, of course, about sin and transformation, and people who spend their entire lives kicking against that reality and so on. But that it is the case that all human beings are understood to be so-called in the second Adam, that we are recreated in Adam, is the New Testament's view of humanity.

Chris McAlilly 33:00

I think the most surprising turn in the book is the way in which that vision of the human then informs institutional life. I didn't see that turn coming. I think you have a higher view of institutions than I think I hear kind of generally around me in the culture. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that. Eddie has...

Eddie Rester 33:26

Just, I'm thinking particularly in the United Methodist Church at this moment, how we view institutions. So.

Chris McAlilly 33:31

Yeah, I mean, it's not just that. It's every cultural institution. It's every denomination, it's government and politics and schools and hospitals and all the rest. I mean, I think that we're deeply suspicious of institutions and institutional life. Why are you more optimistic about institutions? And why has that informed kind of your view of the power of Christianity's surprise?

Kavin Rowe 34:00

It's a great question. And actually, the chapter on institutions is the one that I have gotten the most questions about. I think that you're both right, in the sense of your general perception of what the general perception is at the moment, Imean, for many reasons, and some very good ones. In fact, we often think of institutions as kind of bureaucratic stiflers of vibrant faith or places of kind of entrenched evils only or unending balls of red tape or lines of red tape or forms, you got to fill out millions of forms...

Eddie Rester 34:41

So you saw our charge conference packages? Is that what you're talking about?

Kavin Rowe 34:46

Only obliquely of course. I didn't even have in mind and I wasn't even thinking of the DMV either. Just general perceptions of what's out there when you say "institution," this is usually what comes to mind. But the thing is that it's actually a false question to say should we have institutions or not? We just do have institutions.

Chris McAlilly 35:14

That can be good or bad.

Kavin Rowe 35:17

That's right. That's exactly right. So the only real question is, what kind of institutions will we have? So if we're going to think christianly, which again, is thinking inside the story of everything, anything and everything that you want to think about, you've got, you know, you're going to be thinking christianly about it. There's nothing sort of outside the box, as it were. So if we want to think christianly about institutions, my hunch was, we would do that best if we return to some early Christian convictions about what a flourishing institution was: A) what sort of thing you'd need and B) what went into one. And so that really was was what I was trying to do in that chapter.

Kavin Rowe 36:00

And what the early Christians knew, that we have in some ways forgotten, is that if you want to have a durable presence, and you want the view of the human being, and the practices that surround that view of the human being, to stay in the world, you can't just rely on individual goodwill here and there, or this good, thriving congregation here and there. You've got to establish things with structure and with a kind of lasting presence, so that you can actually incarnate and keep around the view of the human being and the Christian practices that go with it. That's part of what it is to show up in the world as Christians: to testify to the gift that we've been given and the truth that we know.

Eddie Rester 36:57

You know, the couple other authors right now that come to mind who've been writing about the power and the importance of institutions, Yuval Levin wrote a book about that a year ago. Robert Putnam wrote a book called "The Upswing," and it talks historically about the power of institutions to shape and to make a certain view of the world. And as you think about the church as institution, something that is lasting over time, that becomes part of the power that it shapes people into people who can see christianly, as you put it, or to see the world as a part of what's going on. They could see the Roman government for really the role it was playing in the greater story They could see humans in a different way, because of the way they understood them. I think that, we didn't touch on that, but you talk really a lot about the surprise of how this institution, the church, began to see humans, people began to see each other differently in a world.

Chris McAlilly 38:02

Yeah, I think it's important to note that there's a stark difference between a global you know, billion-person denomination and what institutional life looked like in the early church. Talk a little bit about kind of institutions, as you talk about them in the early church that were really kind of pitch towards needs that were, there that were arising in the in the culture at that time.

Kavin Rowe 38:27

Sure. So I talked about three different ones. The first one is the church itself. A lot of people, of course, have an allergic reaction to calling the church an institution and again, for some very good reasons, but it was one and very early. And again, it was the sense that in order to be what the Christians thought they needed to be in the world, they needed robust structure and leaders and all the sort of stuff that goes with an institution.

Kavin Rowe 38:58

The second one that I talked about were institutions of education. And what's interesting about that is that the claim that's embedded in the need to develop schools at various levels, is that you're not born into the world knowing what you need to know. And you don't naturally acquire knowledge of how to be Christian. Your imagination doesn't just sort of by itself run toward Christian habits and formation. Our way of life is a way of life that needs to be taught. It needs to be learned. And that, for the early Christians, encompassed not just a kind of higher education, but also education for children. And so over time, they began to substitute for the Homeric literature and so forth Christian scripture and other stories about the saints, so that the moral imagination and the narrative furniture that lived in the children from the time they were learning on was deeply and hopefully ineradicably Christian. You don't just get to go to school and learn 99% of stuff that isn't Christian and come out suddenly with the Christian imagination. So they were deeply invested in how you actually wind up with Christians in the world. Education was a key part of that.

Kavin Rowe 40:38

And then the final one was institutions of care. And these were hospitals and orphanages and institutions that were designed to care for the poor. And they grew out of the commitment to seeing and then actually treating other people, as the people who were made in the image of Christ. It's often not remembered or not known that actually the hospital as a place where you have centralized care for anybody and everybody who's sick, was a Christian invention.

Eddie Rester 41:25

I was just about to point that out. Because I think people don't realize the vast imagination of the early church in creating spaces and places for people to experience healing and wholeness.

Kavin Rowe 41:38

Absolutely. In fact, there's a very learned scholar called Peter Brown, who himself as far as I know, is not a practicing Christian or particularly delighted about certain Christians commitments, but he just looks at questions in the ancient world of a vast range. And one of them is about Christian finance and the poor. And what Brown observes is what the early Christians have always said when you read their literature, which is basically they invented the ability to see the poor. It's not that there weren't poor people before Christianity or anything like that, but they were seen as citizens or not citizens, the whole frame of reference in relation to these people was vastly different. And when the Christians came on the scene, they began to realize that there are people that we would now call poor, and that we need to pay attention to them in ways that redistribute our goods, so that they do not suffer.

Eddie Rester 42:39

And that that care for the world was truly, we take it for granted so much now, but it was truly surprising and captivating and a part of the mission, drawing people into the story. Rodney Stark years ago, wrote a book, "The Rise of Christianity," and he credits Christianity's explosive growth prior to its power within the Roman Empire, to really its care and love and those structures that you talk about, that enabled the love of Christ to begin to just infect, if you want to say it that way, infect the culture.

Chris McAlilly 43:17

I think, for me, the question still remains for a person who might be sitting on the outside of Holy Week, or may or may not be interested in attending an Easter service, you know, coming up in a couple days, or who's just not compelled by the story as powerful as I find it to be, or that as, you've written about it, Kavin. And I think that the place that I want to kind of highlight here, kind of near the end of the conversation, would just be the story to unlearn. Because I think for me, when I look at college students here, we're in a university town, that the story of the autonomous individual, the idea that I'm the hero of my own tale, to me, that's the one I see just breaking down with a lot of 18-to-25- or 18-to-30-year-olds, of folks that are trying to kind of make their own way in the world, and who are kind of, you know, trying to construct meaning and purpose. Talk a little bit about what you mean by the story to unlearn. Why is that important to you? Why did you want to highlight that towards the end of the book?

Kavin Rowe 44:32

Great questions. I highlighted it in part because I do think it's the most powerful story out there about who we are. Which is to say that we are individuals who make our own lives, who discover our own desires and act on them, and anything that would encroach on our own inherent right to make our own lives is something that threatens our self-perceived identity or our self importance, or is illegitimately constraining our freedom, or anything like that. And I do think that that is part of what underlies a lot of the cultural problems that we currently have. So there's a sense of its power currently is the one that needs to be attended to, if we're going to pay attention to what it is we need to unlearn. So that's one level.

Kavin Rowe 45:25

The other level, you might say, is a pastoral point. The problem with the story of the autonomous individual for the autonomous individual is that, at the end of the day, you're left alone. You're by yourself, and you're utterly lonely. You do not see yourself as dependent or interwoven with other people, or as dependent or interwoven with God who is prior to you, and his love for you is prior to you and will outlast you. And what that means in the end is, it's just you and death. And when you've seen that, with the clarity that actually is there to be seen, it's an absolutely heart-wrenching story to be telling about ourselves. And it results in all kinds of relational dysfunction and anxiety, and crises of self and so forth. So it's wreaking havoc. And I think it's something that needs pastoral care, which takes the form of unlearning.

Chris McAlilly 46:52

Or writing a book called "Christianity's Surprise," which is not just a theological or biblical analysis, it is offering robust encouragement, both to pastors as they offer pastoral care, to Christians as they rediscover the power of the story that we've been given. And I think also just the surprising power for our culture as we try to rediscover and kind of reweave connections that kind of, I guess the tethering of these philosophical or theological underpinnings for a lot of the things that we really care about, anyway, about our humanity. And for that, like, I'm so grateful for this book.

Eddie Rester 47:40

Yeah, just as we close up, just the one quote near the end that, again, I keep coming back to different parts of this book. But you say, "Because they," you're talking about the early Christians, "Because they expected God to work all over the world, they had no boundaries, and no limits." And what a vision for the church. So Kavin, thank you for writing. And thank you for spending a little time with us today.

Kavin Rowe 48:04

It's a pleasure. Thank you for having me. I'm honored to be with you. Lord be with you.

Chris McAlilly 48:08

And also with you. Thank you.

Eddie Rester 48:09

[OUTRO] Thank you for listening to this episode of The Weight.

Chris McAlilly 48:13

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Eddie Rester 48:25

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