The Further Up, Further In Podcast

This is part one of my conversation with my friend, Pastor Daryl Madi, on the subject of 'Church Hurt,' as we talk about the varieties of things that can be referred to by that name and examine both the flaws of the institutional church and our need of it.

Jason Van Bemmel joins me to talk, not just about science and faith and the questions of origins that so often divide us, but about disagreement and conflict in the church, and how we can distinguish between primary, secondary and tertiary differences when we find that we do disagree.

In this episode we talk about three different positions Christians take on the question of origins, not to advocate for any one of them but to better understand them, their appeal, their challenges, and talk about how they interact with the early chapters of Genesis. 

We continue our discussion of faith and science, and we move into a general discussion of views of origins, knowing this is much debated ground in the church, hoping to model a reasoned and respectful reflection on some of the issues in these conversations.

In this interview we begin by reflecting on our shared history growing up at the same church, discussing our experience being rooted in that community of faith, and then move into a discussion of faith and science which continues into the next episode.

In this episode Jason Van Bemmel and I follow up on the conversation about devotional poetry and its value that I had with Leland Ryken, discussing poetry in general and looking more closely at another Holy Sonnet by John Donne and a poem by Emily Dickinson. 

This episode includes the second half of my conversation with Dr. Leland Ryken on devotional poetry as we look more closely at two sample poems, John Donne's Holy Sonnet 14 and John Milton's Sonnet 19, also known as Milton's sonnet on his blindness.

This episode contains the first half of my conversation with Dr. Leland Ryken on devotional poetry, as we talk about how poetry does its work, and why it is worth taking time to invest in it.

This episode concludes my conversation with Dr. Leland Ryken about his role on the ESV and Tyndale's New Testament, focusing mainly on the story of Tyndale's NT and the enormous impact it had on the English Bible.

This episode contains the first half of my conversation with Dr. Leland Ryken on the ESV and Tyndale's New Testament, focusing here on his work on the ESV as literary stylist and focusing in on things like the importance of getting as close in translation to what the original authors wrote as possible. 

This episode concludes the conversation I was having in the last episode with Max Benfer and Jason Van Bemmel, by moving to both the need for depth in the church and to discussing how we can pursue that depth.

In this episode, I welcome in two of my pastor friends, Max Benfer and Jason Van Bemmel, and we discuss one of the central assertions of this podcast, that the American Church is shallow.

Episode 36 looks back and reflects on the jouney of the podcast so far, pauses to reflect on John Donne's Holy Sonnet 14, and looks forward at the plans for the podcast moving forward.

In our final episode on our 4th main theme - root yourself in the body of Christ - and of the first phase of the podcast, we look at the reality that for all our desire to be independent and all our illusions of self-sufficiency, we need one another and it is for our own good to be part of a church, imperfect as they are.

As we move toward the conclusion of our 4th main theme - root yourself in the body of Christ - and of the first phase of the podcast, we take some time to discuss the important reality that we are a body and that the church needs the gifts that God has given to every believer within the church.

In episode 33 we continue to talk about the importance of rooting yourself in the body of Christ as we discuss the importance of valuing both our individual responsibility but also our place in the community of faith. We look at the problem of the one of the many, how the Trinity helps us to understand these things, and conclude with some reflections drawn from Bonhoeffer's Life Together.

As we continue to explore our 4th main theme - root yourself in the body of Christ, community life is non-negotiable - we examine the individualistic nature of American culture and three of the many individualistic strands that have infiltrated and impacted the American Church.

As we move into the discussion of our 4th main theme - root yourself in the body of Christ, community life is non-negotiable - we begin by exploring how the Bible presents a unified vision in the Old and New Testaments of embracing God and his salvation as embracing a place among the people of God.

Our 4th and final "Lesson from Exile" discusses two lessons on prayer, one taken from Nehemiah and the other from Jeremiah, as we wrap up this arc of episodes designed to illustrate the importance of applying the mind to study scripture that we might stand under its authority as we seek to live lives of fidelity. 

Our third "Lesson from Exile" takes a close look at Ezekiel 9 and lessons we can learn from it about the importance of grieving over sin, as we continue to model applying the life of the mind to the study of scripture in our ongoing pursuit of faithfulness. 

Our second "Lesson from Exile" looks primarily at the story of Esther as we continue to model applying the life of the mind to understand the scriptures and learn lessons of fidelity in what we believe concerning God and the duty God requires of man.

This episode examines the story of Nebuchadnezzar as told in Daniel 2-4 as the first of a episodes that seek to combine the three big themes we've discussed so far. As the four biblical texts we'll be examining in these episodes all come from the exilic and post-exilic period of the Old Testament, I call these reflections "Lessons from Exile."

In the previous episode we talked about worldviews generally, but in this episode we talk about Christianity as a worldview, and how it functions as a starting point, a system and a story, and then we conclude our discussion by talking again about the importance of our call to engage culture.

Having talked about faithfulness of belief, theology, and faithfulness of behavior, morality, we turn our attention to the realm of worldviews, faithfulness to engage culture. We'll talk about why engaging culture matters, and then talk a bit about what worldviews are, where they come from and how they function. 

This week we continue our discussion of faithfulness by talking about morality, which we can think of as faithfulness of behavior. We'll talk about the importance of motive to our behavior, examine two different types of biblical commandment and more.