James Orr
Appearances
Global News Podcast
US demands Panama 'reduce China's influence' over canal
He's making a meta-scientific claim.
Global News Podcast
US demands Panama 'reduce China's influence' over canal
Right, right. Well, this is what's so interesting. From the 19th century onwards up until relatively recently, maybe 10 years ago, the standard discussion on campuses that you would see a Christian union put on would be religion and science. How are they compatible? How do you reconcile the two?
Global News Podcast
US demands Panama 'reduce China's influence' over canal
When it's quite clear that the paradigm now, it's really the hard-boiled secularist or the hyper-progressive who is struggling to reconcile the constructive view of reality to religion. the discovered intelligibility of the natural world. So we've seen a huge change here and I think it unsettles the old materialist paradigm.
Global News Podcast
US demands Panama 'reduce China's influence' over canal
I think it's, and I think even, I defer to John here, but if you talk to really cutting edge physicists, they'll be the first to say that matter is a lot more complicated and mysterious
Global News Podcast
US demands Panama 'reduce China's influence' over canal
than it used to be, and we're starting to see now that structure, that relationality, the mapping of relationality through structure, has a lot more heuristic power within the hard sciences than the old sticks and balls physics that you used to learn at school.
Global News Podcast
US demands Panama 'reduce China's influence' over canal
Of course. If you had to pick any kind of being in which these patterns of intelligibility could be united, just as a purely secular matter, what kind of being are you going to choose if not human beings?
Global News Podcast
US demands Panama 'reduce China's influence' over canal
It's worth making the point that, I mean, Luke is seen as... A Greek physician, having a Greek mindset, he refers back to the Old Testament a little bit less often, say, certainly than Matthew. But it's worth saying that the reference to Elijah seems to be a fulfillment of the last two verses of our Old Testament, as it were, in Malachi, which... This is Malachi 4, 5.
Global News Podcast
US demands Panama 'reduce China's influence' over canal
Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord, and he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children and the heart of the children to the fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse. So it's a clear... The sense is that he's fulfilling, that John is fulfilling something, that he's preparing the way for...
Global News Podcast
US demands Panama 'reduce China's influence' over canal
a sequence of events that is going to be a fulfillment of what is hinted at in Malachi and the Old Testament.
Global News Podcast
US demands Panama 'reduce China's influence' over canal
If you look at John 1.14, it says, and the word became flesh and tabernacled amongst. Tabernacle. The word there is the verb from skene, which is the tabernacle, which is the word that the Greek translators of the Old Testament used of the tabernacle.
Global News Podcast
US demands Panama 'reduce China's influence' over canal
Yeah, I mean, I can't find the verse that says that John intended by baptism the efficacious sort of salvation of people who are being baptized. And he says at various points, he says, he actually draws a distinction. So Matthew says, this is what 311 says. "'I indeed baptize you with water unto repentance.'" I mean, you're repenting, and there's an external mark of your having repented.
Global News Podcast
US demands Panama 'reduce China's influence' over canal
I take it to mean, I baptize you. But the Helot coming after me is mightier than I whose shoes I'm not worthy to untie. Then in John, this is in, let's have a look. This is the beginning of the opening chapter. He says, he's asked, why are you baptizing if you're not the Christ? And he says, well, I'm baptizing you with water but there's somebody standing among you who you don't know.
Global News Podcast
US demands Panama 'reduce China's influence' over canal
So it's a kind of proleptic.
Global News Podcast
US demands Panama 'reduce China's influence' over canal
What's interesting is that Marcion not only repudiated the Old Testament, he cut the four gospels down to one. That many parts of the New, right. Which was the one he found most sympathetic and free of kind of Hebrew, the fingerprints of the Old Testament. But we still fight it today.
Global News Podcast
US demands Panama 'reduce China's influence' over canal
But you need the whole trajectory of the gospel fully to see it. There are parallels too. I mean, there's that moment in 2 Samuel where David leaps back at the presence of the ark. And some scholars think there's a parallelism here with John the Baptist leaping in the womb. There's a sort of a presence here. Mary is the Ark.
Global News Podcast
US demands Panama 'reduce China's influence' over canal
Dr. Orr. James Orr, I'm an associate professor of philosophy of religion at the University of Cambridge. Wonderful to be with you all again and to be with new people too. Look, I think we're all agreed that there is something badly wrong at the heart of our culture.
Global News Podcast
US demands Panama 'reduce China's influence' over canal
I think if you said 15 years ago at the high noon of the new atheism that we'd be gathering around the table talking about these sacred texts, talking about Exodus, that it would have the impact that it has had, and what I think this series will have too, I'd have thought you were mad. But there is clearly a need for this. There's a yearning for it. There's an emerging coalition of atheists.
Global News Podcast
US demands Panama 'reduce China's influence' over canal
Do you mean divine sonship? The claim that Jesus is the Son of God is...
Global News Podcast
US demands Panama 'reduce China's influence' over canal
Intellectuals, public intellectuals, Jordan at the forefront, John too, who maybe are not card-carrying Christians, but who recognize the power of Christianity and are beginning to realize that we can't keep running on empty, that it may be the case that we're cutting off, Western culture is cutting off the branch that it's been sitting on, and we're starting to get worried about this.
Global News Podcast
US demands Panama 'reduce China's influence' over canal
Well, no, I think the Greek is adelphos, adelpher. I mean, that could mean cousins, and is thought to mean cousins as well. And he's referred to as the son of Mary, which is very rare and odd that the patronymic shouldn't be used.
Global News Podcast
US demands Panama 'reduce China's influence' over canal
I mean, we've got to remember that, okay, maybe the divine sonship theme isn't central in Mark, but I think in all the synoptics, Matthew, Mark, and Luke... At the moment, both the baptism and transfiguration, you have the divine voice saying, behold, this is my son. This is my beloved son.
Global News Podcast
US demands Panama 'reduce China's influence' over canal
And so I think what we're going to be looking at now, what we're going to be trying to do in a small way is to look for the taproot, to explore the taproot of Western culture, which is the gospel. It's not just the gospels, it's the gospel message. Paul says the gospel just is Christ crucified. It's a scandalous thought, Christ crucified.
Global News Podcast
US demands Panama 'reduce China's influence' over canal
Exactly. So he's the son of the god. Exactly right. So he would be on all the coins you'd have. Weos Tuteu. And in the Greek-speaking part of the world, where the Roman imperial cult, the cult of the emperor, was very, very strong. that's the language that would be used.
Global News Podcast
US demands Panama 'reduce China's influence' over canal
Scandalous, he says to the Jews, and it's madness for the Greeks. And it was an offensive superstition for the Romans. And I think that is still true today very much in our culture. But Christianity, I think, has been tamed. It's been domesticated. We've become very used to it as something which is just part of the furniture. It's now expressed very often in the language of the therapeutic.
Global News Podcast
US demands Panama 'reduce China's influence' over canal
If God had to choose any period in history to leave his authenticating signature on the world in a way that would disseminate and distribute that message as quickly as possible, it's hard to pick a better time than...
Global News Podcast
US demands Panama 'reduce China's influence' over canal
It's hard to imagine the Christian message spreading with the astonishing speed that it does from, say, the early 30s AD to the point where, well, by 64, there are enough Christians in Rome for Nero to be able to scapegoat the Christians as a distinct group from the Jews.
Global News Podcast
US demands Panama 'reduce China's influence' over canal
It's the language of, that's the language of an imperial edict. And in fact, it's worth pointing out that the word, the Greek word for good news or gospel is evangelion, which is the word that emperors would send out. Often it was the emperor's birthday. You would send the evangelion to the towns and villages that worshipped him. And this was particularly in this part of the world.
Global News Podcast
US demands Panama 'reduce China's influence' over canal
We've moved from sin to syndrome, as one theologian has put it. So I hope what we can do here is to reflect on the scandalous nature of the gospel message, to reflect on why it seems like folly, why it seems so offensive.
Global News Podcast
US demands Panama 'reduce China's influence' over canal
And this was the good news, the good news of Caesar's birthday. There's clearly, I think, a semi-conscious aping and mimicking of the language of the imperial cult to assert that Jesus is Lord and therefore Caesar isn't.
Global News Podcast
US demands Panama 'reduce China's influence' over canal
And with that, try and inject new life into Western culture and to learn from the pages of the Gospels, to learn from the figure of Jesus, his teaching, to wrestle with who he claimed to be. Looking forward to it.