Theology in the Raw - The Theology of Paul and His Affections for Christ: Dr. Nijay Gupta

Episode Date: March 10, 2025

Dr. Nijay Gupta earned his PhD in NT from Durham University. He currently serves as Prof of NT at Northern Seminary. He’s written several books including Strange Religion, Tell Her Story, and the recently released: The Affections of Christ Jesus: Love at the Heart of Paul’s TheologyRegister for the Exiles in Babylon conference (Minneapolis, April 3-5, 2025) at theologyintheraw.com -- If you've enjoyed this content, please subscribe to my channel! Support Theology in the Raw through Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/theologyintheraw Or you can support me directly through Venmo: @Preston-Sprinkle-1 Visit my personal website: https://www.prestonsprinkle.com For questions about faith, sexuality & gender: https://www.centerforfaith.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey friends, the XLS conference is right around the corner, April 3rd to 5th in Minneapolis, Minnesota. If you haven't registered yet, you need to do so ASAP. If you plan on coming theology in the raw.com, all the information is there. You can attend live in person or you can stream it from your living room. Again, theology and their raw.com. All the information is there. Okay. My guest today is my good friend, Dr. Nijay Gupta, who earned his PhD in New Testament from Durham university in England. And he currently earned his PhD in New Testament from Durham University in England. And he currently serves as professor of New Testament at Northern Seminary. He's written a bunch of books, including Strange Religion, Tell Her Story, and his newest release

is The Affections of Christ Jesus, Love at the Heart of Paul's Theology. We geek out a bit on Pauline studies, Pauline theology, and kind of the history or the last 50 years or so of different movements going on, Pauline studies. And then we dig deep into this idea, which is very compelling, that love is at the heart of Paul's theology. So really enjoy this conversation. It's a blend of academia and some really, really practical stuff, especially in the latter half of the conversation. So please welcome back to the show the one and only, my good friend, Dr. Nijay Gupta. Nijay Gupta, how are you this morning?

I'm doing very well. How are you? I'm doing well, man. Good to see you again. I don't know what number this is. I don't know, but I was thinking I should get like a dinner jacket with theology in the raw. And it's kind of like the SNL five timers club. I'm getting close. Yeah. Well, you're one of the few guests who have actually driven through Boise. We should have a baseball game. Yes. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, you're still, you're still out in your Portland, Portland, even though you teach in Chicago sort of. Yep. Yep. This is paradise.

Yeah. How long have you been at Northern? I've been at Northern about five years and been in Portland for 10. So you're not Portland's home now. Yeah, we love it. I'm a big soccer snob. I'm a big coffee snob. My wife is super outdoorsy. So we got the Bible project here. We got Bridgetown. We got everything. We got everything you could want more. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Do you know the Bible project guys? I do. It's funny. My daughter was home for winter break and then you probably knew about the fires down in California. And my daughter is at Pepperdine. Oh, she was. Oh, that's right there.

Yeah. She had a bad fire in December that she evacuated for. She had another fire where they delayed school. So, she was home for over a month for winter break, well over a month. And so, the Bible Project actually gave me a scholar in residence desk there so I could get out of the house and get some work done. So, they've been good to me. Oh, those guys are great. Yeah, we toured their facility, probably like three or four years ago now. And yeah, they're just, they're amazing. It's such an amazing thing. The cool thing is several employees there, including some of their scholars,

are either students or graduates of Northern. And so there's some fun cross-pollination there. Yeah. So you and I met, we first met as PhD students in England. Where did, was it? I had like a British New Testament conference probably. Yeah.

Probably something like that. I mean, I probably know you through Joey Dodson. Yeah. And many people know me through Joey Dodson. Yeah, that's right. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. You went to Durham, right? Yes. And you studied under, was it Watson or Barclay? We had dual supervision. I worked for my first year and a half with Stephen Barton, who does social science, spiritual formation, New Testament theology. And then he went on sabbatical and I worked for a good long while with John Barclay and then finished up with Barton again. Barclay is at least top five top New Testament scholars in the world, English speaking, I guess, in my opinion. I think Richard Bauckham is, if I had to pick a number one, I think it

would be Bauckham, but Barkley, everything that guy touches is just gold and revolutionary. Was he fun to work with? I wouldn't use the word fun. Intimidating? He's very intimidating. He's very nice in sort of casual conversation, but he is just so incisive in the best and most challenging sense of the word. So the big thing at Durham was you wanted him as your supervisor so that you didn't get him as your examiner.

I heard he's brutal. I heard him and Watson both, I heard, are very gracious as supervisors, but you flip it around as examiners and it's a different story. Yeah. And the amazing thing about someone like John Barclay is we were doing work on Philo when I was working with him. And I'm using Bible works in accordance, which are these Bible software that has all the information at the fingertips. And he's just working with paper and it's incredible just the amount of knowledge he has about the ancient world, about Judaism, about Paul.

And I need all this software to just even try to catch up with him, which I can never do. But yeah, we were spoiled at Durham with Walter Moberly and Lauren Stukenbrook and all these, NT Wright was the bishop. And we had a fantastic- Dunn was there too, wasn't Dunn? Yeah, Jimmy Dunn was still around to retire,

but still around, Charles Cranfield, CK Barrett. Cranfield, yeah, Cranfield, yeah, he was still alive. Yeah, he was 90, I'm gonna say 96, 94 94 and Barrett was 91, but we got a chance to interact with both of them, which was super fun. A lot of people may not even know those names. Charles Cranfield has written the, I would say, wow, it's hard to label it, but one of the definitive two volume commentaries on the book of Romans. If you do any extensive scholarly work on Romans, you have to start. I mean, you got to interact with Cranfield. C.K. Barrett probably also right there is just a legendary 20th century

New Testament scholar. Jimmy Dunn. I mean, yeah, I mean, it's like an all-star list. It's like the LA Dodgers, man. The LA Dodgers of Pauline theology. Speaking of which, you are no longer a student in Pauline studies. Like I was back in the, you know, 15 plus years ago, you are now, you are now, I would say one of the premier current new Testament scholars. Like you're part of this emerging generation, people our age in the forties or whatever, um, that are now, uh, writing the commentaries and stuff. So why don't you, let's give it, can you give us an overview of Pauline studies? And this may be a little bit nerdy for some people. I got a pretty nerdy audience. Let's go back to, yeah. Give us the lay of the land from like

the mid to late seventies. Cause there was a lot of fresh work coming out on Pauline studies. And now that's kind of just opened up this wide field of different approaches to understanding Paul. Yeah. Well, we got, thank you Preston. And I just admire your work so much. We're both kind of just giddy youngins who still admire the greats that are in their 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, but happy to do the things we're doing. I got to start with Martin Luther because if you're going to think about Pauline theology today, you have to think about the impact that Luther has had on all Pauline studies, whether you're Catholic, Orthodox or not, it's impacted the West so much. So, Luther, I'm just going to be super,

super fly by overview. He really established that Paul was the theologian of justification by faith. And he has a lot of great stuff. I have worked on some of his material. There's some things of Luther I value, but I think one of the downsides is this bifurcation between law and gospel, or law and grace. And so, Luther saw in Paul an apostle of just absolute grace and unfortunately, he positioned the Old Testament as the text of law, judgment, divine wrath, that sort of thing. Luther just saw things very black and white. And unfortunately,

so I think there's some good things Luther we can talk about later, but one of the unfortunate things is that he fueled anti-Judaism, anti-Old Testament, anti-Semitism. And that had a huge impact. It had an impact on Europe, it had an impact on the United States. And so, fast forward early 20th century, and you have the rise of Hitler, you have nationalism in Germany, and Christian theologians are a part of that. Some pastors listening may have those TDNT volumes, the Kittel volumes. We had mold on ours and someone told us that you could get rid of mold by putting it in your freezer. So for like months we had TNT in our freezer. People open our

freezer, get ice and they'd see this theology dictionary series. The theological dictionary of the New Testament. Yeah. Where you take these words. Yeah, Kittel. So you'll have like all the made major Greek words. You got like 10, 15, somebody's 20 page essays on like a gaphe. And they, we discovered throughout time that Kittel was a Nazi sympathizer. And so now we're like, don't use Kittel. Use something else. Use something else. Use chat GPT, but don't use Kittel.

So early 20th century, you have theologians, not all of them, not Bonhoeffer, not Barth, not Casimonde, but you have these German theologians who are sympathetic to anti-Jewish sentiment. You have all this kind of stuff and that obviously horrifically led to the Holocaust. We just recently had Holocaust remembrance. And so, there's something called postwar theology. And postwar theology is this reckoning of how did we get to this place where people who love the Christian Bible, somehow hate the Old Testament or somehow hate Judaism or somehow hate Jews. And that led to a lot of soul-searching and a lot of rethinking,

a lot of repentance, not enough, but led to some repentance. And so, in the 1950s and 1960s, you start to have scholars. If you haven't read about Jürgen Moltmann's life, incredible life, he actually, I just read about his life recently. He actually was drafted into the German military as a young person and fought for Hitler, not realizing what Hitler was doing, really. And he got actually caught by allied forces and he was a prisoner of war for considerable time. And in that time, some Westerners gave him a Bible, he started reading it and they actually showed him pictures of the Holocaust and Holocaust survivors and the camps and finally he admitted it and recognized

it and repented and then he became a force for good and repentance of what happened to Jews. All that to say, you have 1950s, 60s, 70s, a lot of rethinking about Judaism. In comes Ed Paris Sanders, an American who wanted to study Jewish texts in their own right in the ancient world. Long story short, he said, hey, Christians have long been saying Jews are legalistic, all they only care about boasting, meritorious righteousness. And he said, when I read Jewish texts from that time, Josephus, Philo, Dead Sea Scrolls, Old Testament Pseudopagraphas, Septuagint, early rabbinic texts, he's like, I don't see that, I see grace.

And that led to this thing called the new perspective on Paul and T. Wright, James Dunn, Richard Hayes, others. And so the new perspective, Preston, you know this, you've studied all this stuff. It's not really a full-blown Pauline theology. It's a corrective. It's kind of like smelling salts for Pauline theologians saying, hey, we got this wrong and we need to repent of this. Paul never abandoned this. Paul never

abandoned Judaism, he never hated Judaism, neither did Jesus. And so 1960s, 70s, 80s, you start to have this sea change. Not everybody bought into it, but there's this idea of maybe there's a more unitive approach to the Bible where instead of Paul with a sword fighting against the Old Testament, it's more like a baton passing. Where he's taking the next leg of the gospel journey. That's the way I see it. And so, you kind of have two streams flowing at the same time in the post-Reformation period. You have Luther's kind of law versus gospel, but then you also have Calvin and others more, the Bible is a story, salvation history.

More continuity. More continuity. More continuity, fulfillment, covenant, you know, in the more reformed tradition. So you have several things going on in the late, you know, mid late 20th century. You have salvation historical, which sees the Bible as a story that's unfolding. You have Luther's kind of perspective on justification by faith. You have the new perspective, which is really correcting things saying, hey, Judaism isn't what you thought it was. And then you have this rise of something called apocalyptic theology with people like Ernst Casemann, a German scholar, later one of his students, Lou Martin, J. Louis Martin,

Beverly Gaventa, Douglas Campbell, and others, Christian Becker. And what they're arguing really is, I like to say it is Luther transposed into kind of a sci-fi key or a cosmic key. So, it's basically Lutheranism. I know that sounds reductive, but it's basically Lutheranism, but they actually widen the view from the individual to the cosmic level. So, that means what Christ did on the cross, it's not just paperwork, hey, you're justified, but it's actually defeating the evil powers, the cosmic powers of sin and death, what Beverly Gaventa calls the anti-God forces. Now why did this apocalyptic view emerge?

It emerged because the new perspective is trying to push covenant. And I like that. I personally like that. They're trying to push covenant and a covenant relationship there is two, takes two people to tango, takes God and humans. They have to come together in this relationship of faith, of unity, of loyalty, this and that. Well, some of these theologians thought, hey, we got this wrong because it's not like I bring 50%, God brings 50%. Apocalyptic view is, it's not like you

coming to a negotiating table with God. It's like you're in a dungeon and you're in prison and God has to liberate you from your enslavers. And so sin isn't just, hey, I'm going to stop sinning because Jesus is good. It's like you're under the hegemony, the slavery of these powers of sin and death. And so we struggle sometimes in knowing whether we should capitalize the word sin and death in Paul's letters when we do it in English, because Paul sometimes used them as personified forces. So, that's the apocalyptic approach is saying, really the focus of Paul is liberation from evil, liberation from cosmic powers of evil, sin, death.

Then we have another stream, which I'll just mention briefly, which is the participation in Christ stream or union with Christ. And that is people like Edward Schweitzer, but then you have today people like Michael Gorman with his Cruciformity. You have some of my work on this. You have, you know, Calvin talk about this. Luther talks about it a little as well. So you have this kind of range of different approaches to Paul. And whenever I introduce to my students, Preston, they always say, why do we have to choose?

Can't it be all of them? That's what I was going to Paul. And whenever I introduce to my students, Preston, they always say, why do we have to choose? Can't it be all of them? That's what I was gonna say. Every time you described one of these streams, all of them kind of sound good. How do they conflict with each other? Yeah. What I tell my students as a scholar is just like to argue. It's what we do for a living. And we just want to be more right. We don't like it when everybody's right. So we just want to be more right than everybody else. So really the question is, what's the center? What's dominant? What is the view that explains all the other views? What's the view that if it were missing, everything will fall apart? That sort of thing. So, yeah, take your choice. Where would you place yourself in that? It sounds like more of the union with Christ. Yeah, that's a good question because I'm often seen as sort of the 21st generation,

21st century representative of the new perspective. If you read my Galatians commentary, that's because I got the chance to be a TA for NT Wright when I was at Durham. I got a chance to spend time with Jimmy Dunn. John Barclay in his very early days as a scholar was pro-new perspective and then he kind of took a turn on that. And I have a huge amount of admiration for Sanders and Hayes and some of those guys. So I would say I like the corrective aspects of the new perspective and I like the emphasis on letting the texts of Judaism speak for themselves. But theologically, I really think the center and focus of Paul's theology is a dynamic

living relationship with Jesus Christ through the Spirit. So I credit scholars like Gordon Fee with his emphasis on God's empowering presence, Christ's empowering presence through the Spirit. Jimmy Dunn also does a lot with participation. You wouldn't know that based on how much press he got from the new perspective, but if you read his humongous theology of Paul, which is like this thick, he does a lot with in Christ language. And then the biggest influence on me is Mike Gorman, for sure, with his work on cruciformity. He has another book called Participating in Christ. And I just think he has a great comprehensive approach. He's great. What about you, Preston? Let us know

where you stand. Well, I entered Pauline studies out of an interest in the new perspective that was still pretty hot in the late 90s, early 2000s when I was finishing up my master's degree and exploring PhD programs. So I wanted to do something on Paul and the law. What is Paul's relationship with the law and even more specifically his relationship with Judaism. I wanted to be an expert in early Jewish literature. So pre-70 AD, pseudepigrapha, Dead Sea Scrolls and stuff. But yeah, my project, I've read

more Jewish literature than Bible in my three and a half years doing a PhD. Just put your cards on the table. You studied with Simon Gathicoll, right? Yeah, a critic of the New Perspective. Who is stridently anti-New Pers. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And his doctoral supervisor was Jimmy Dunn. James Dunn. He studied under James Dunn so that he could critique James Dunn. The best. Yeah. The best. Isn't that so European? Like here we just, we don't have those categories. Like, no, I want to study under the person I agree with. He's like, no, I want to study under the person I agree with. He's like, no, I want to study under the person that I disagree with so that, so that I can like, uh, have the fairly push back to my credit to Jimmy too, because he had to accept a student that was going to

strongly argue against him. And Simon speaks incredibly highly of like EP Sanders. I mean, but again, that's kind of the European British way is like you're indebted to these people that you ultimately disagree with. Did you know Simon was my external examiner? Oh, no, I've heard he was pretty brittle. He was very difficult. He was very difficult. He made me, Simon, if you're listening,

he doesn't listen to these things, but Simon, if you're listening, you made me, Simon, if you're listening, he doesn't listen to these things, but Simon, if you're listening, you made me conjugate Latin. Because he saw a mistake in a Latin word that I had used. And he's like, I don't know if this guy knows Latin. He made me conjugate Latin. I passed, but that was, I still have nightmares about that. It's funny because he's such a down to earth, nice guy.

I mean, he would invite his students over to his house. We lay on the carpet. He'd have beer out for all of us. We'd watch Lord of the Rings on our stomachs in his living room. We went to the same church together. I saw him in the nursery watching children and such a nice guy. But when it comes to scholarship, he can be brutal. He was very young too, when you were working with him. He had to be in his early thirties? Yeah, he's like four years older than I am.

Yeah, it's crazy. Yeah. So I entered Pauline studies thinking I was originally gonna critique the new perspective. And then the more I read, I became really sympathetic with it. I was like, oh, I think this is right. And then I read Francis Watson's, um, uh, the Herman Paul and the hermeneutics of faith. And so

I was utterly convinced. Uh, it's funny. I read it twice. The first time it didn't do anything to me. And then a year later I read it again. I'm like, Oh, this is it. Uh, and Francis is hard to pin down. He would be more of like a Bardian, like reading the hall through more of a Bardian lens. That might be the wrong way to put it, but yeah, kind of apocalyptic a little bit, like this radical emphasis on divine agency and salvation, grace, without some of the cosmic stuff that... He's his own thing. That's the best way to put it. Francis is his own thing.

And that's a personality thing too. I think he just is always going to carve out a niche of nobody else. So, I ended up, my main critique with the New Perspective was, I do think Paul emphasizes divine agency in salvation more than anything else we see in Judaism. So, while I don't agree with Lutherism, this strong dichotomy between law and gospel, I think there's a lot more continuity there. And I don't think Judaism was filled with just all its works righteousness. But when Paul says something like, God justifies the ungodly, like that would have been, I mean, the Desi Scrolls say exactly the opposite, like God does not justify that, you know, like,

so I do think there is a radicality to how far Paul pushes grace. So that that's, And the Desi Scrolls say exactly the opposite, like, God does not justify, you know, like, so I do think there is a radicality to how far Paul pushes grace. So that's, yeah, that would push me more in the Watson camp. But I do think, and I don't think these things are, like, one of the things that the New Perspective did well is situate justification language in the context of ethnic reconciliation. You see this clearly in Romans 3 and 4. You see it in obviously Galatians and if you even would dabble in Ephesians. So, it's not that we're justified by faith and not by our own merit. That's not the contrast. We're justified by

faith, not by keeping the works of the law, becoming Jews. So I do think there's a lot more of a social context that is driving Paul in his concerns for justification by faith. So even that, like everything I said there, it sounds very new perspective. I just don't think, going back to these tight categories, I think you could take the best of the new perspective and still, you know, I do still think there's some critiques there. But yeah, fun times, man. Oh my gosh.

I wish I can go back in time and do it all over again. Old debates. Yeah. I thought it was super busy and quite stressful last few weeks. Deadlines were piling up. The stresses of life were caving in. And man, these things can take a toll on your body. I wasn't sleeping well or definitely not sleeping enough and this

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Make sure to check it out. Drinkag1.com forward slash TITR to get this offer. That's drinkag1.com forward slash TITR to start your new year out on a healthier note. Your newest book, The Affections of Christ Jesus, Love at the Heart of Paul's Theology. I don't see a lot, when we talk about Pauline studies, this seems a lot more, for lack of a better term, practical or spiritual or pietistic. Is that, how would you, What led you to this book and

why don't you unpack where you're going with it? Yeah. I'm really excited about this. I wrote a book called Paul and Language of Faith a handful of years ago. I'm on this kind of path of kind of figuring out what I really want to say about who Paul is. Let me start with this. I have a lot of students who will come to my classes, they know that I'm a Paul guy and they'll say, I don't like Paul. And they'll say, I'm a Jesus person or, you know, they'll talk about, you know, I like sermon on the mound or that kind of thing. And the reputation that Paul has sometimes is that he is kind of a jerk, kind of, you know, hot headed, that sort of thing. And maybe they're thinking of

like first Corinthians where he says, you know, do you want me to bring gentleness or a rod of discipline, you know, or are you thinking about like Galatians where he says, you know, who has bewitched you, you know, that sort of thing. But when I think of Paul, I think of Philippians where, you know, he says how deeply he loves and misses these people. I think of Paul, I think of Philippians, where he says how deeply he loves and misses these people. I think of 2 Timothy, where he talks so lovingly to Timothy. I think about his close relationships with Priscilla and Aquila, with Barnabas from the Book of Acts and that sort of thing.

But this reputation persists that Paul is not a warm and friendly person. And what happens then if he's rightly recognized as the church's first and greatest theologian? Then we can detach theology from personhood, emotions, love, and make it this thing that we have to solve in order to have salvation or justification. So what I like to joke with my students is, like, we preachers or teachers sometimes think that when we get to the pearly gates, there's going to be a theology test, and our job is to make sure they're prepared for that test. And as a commentary writer, I've written a handful of commentaries.

I do a lot of close work in Paul's letters. Whenever you do that kind of commentary work, you discover things kind of serendipitously. And what I discovered is the paradox that Paul has this reputation for being brash, for being stubborn and hard-nosed. And at the same time, he always uses the language of love. So if you think about, if we were in a roundtable discussion about Paul's most important ideas and you got someone over there saying, you

know, justification, you got another person saying fulfillment, you got another person saying the cross. If I were to raise my hand, I would say love appears in every letter. That's not true for most of the things that we say is the center of Paul's theology. It occurs in ethical sections. It occurs in relationship to what we owe to God. Paul says, 1 Corinthians 16, cursed is anyone who has no love for the Lord Jesus Christ. He's cursing people, Preston, on the basis of whether or not they love Jesus Christ. That's a pretty powerful thing. Love occurs in his understanding of who God is,

of Christ, he says in Galatians chapter 2, the Christ who loved me and gave himself for me. And so, that started me down a path of saying, what is Paul really all about? And one of the things that spurred me on is when I studied Greco-Roman religion for strange religion, which we've talked about before on this podcast. And this was actually insight from Lerner Hurtado. He said, I'm paraphrasing Hurtado. He said, when a pagan would pick up a Pauline letter,

if a pagan would pick up a Pauline letter, if a pagan would pick up a Pauline letter, what would be the first thing they notice about this person's religion versus public religion? And one of the things he said was how often he uses the language of love. It's plastered all over his letters. I was translating Ephesians for this book. It's one of the last chapters in the book,

and it's almost like he overuses the word. He just throws in in love, by love, through love, for love. It's just always on his lips. So I'm wondering what it would take, Preston, to change the way we think about Paul, and then Paul is the gateway to think about the whole Bible as a text about love. I'm going to throw it back to you in a second here, but I just want to quote this because I don't know about you and your writing process, but I always put in a placeholder introduction

as I'm writing a book because I need to have something there. And then when I finished the book, I really stressed out over how to start the book because the introduction is so important. And I don't know if I told you this, when I did Strange Religion, I just wrote it, sent it to my editor, Brian Dyer at Baker Brothers. And he, the one thing he really wanted me to change, he said, your introduction is boring.

You need a really interesting introduction. And so I completely erased the introduction and I started from scratch and I came up with Coconut Water if you remember that illustration. So for this book on love here, I realized if I'm going to talk about love, I got to talk about Augustine. And what's amazing about Augustine is, and this is totally me ripping off Jamie Smith, what's amazing about Augustine is he understood this one thing about Paul that we have missed for hundreds of years. That we're not going to point our life in the right direction, we're not going to understand ourselves, we're not going to understand why we do the things we do that are both right and wrong,

unless we understand that everything we do is oriented towards love, whether we know it or not. So let me read this quote, which actually starts the book out. Augustine said, when we ask whether someone is a good man, we are not asking what he believes or hopes, but what he loves. And I'll just give you another quote. This is from Mike Gorman. He says, Paul was nothing if not overwhelmed by the love of God.

That's to me, instead of love being sort of, so when I look up a big Pauline theology like Douglas Moo or Jimmy Dunn or NT Wright, love is often put at the end of the book under ethics. And this is something you're obligated to do. And my argument in the book is love has to be the very first thing we say about God. The first thing we say about the be the very first thing we say about God, the first thing we say about the gospel, the first thing we say about human religion, our expression towards God, and the thing we say about our mission in this world. I mean, it makes sense. Paul's letters are very contextual, right? He's addressing certain situations and so even when he's talking about the the cross in Romans and Galatians, lots of justification language, but in Ephesians and Colossians, a lot

of cosmic, you know, disarming the powers kind of thing. And Philippians does his own thing. And then other letters don't even talk about justification, you know? So it is interesting that within this diverse contextual situations that occupy each letter, that love is one of the few things that is shot all throughout. It's everywhere. Think about Philemon. Think about how much scholars have said Philemon has nothing theological in it. It doesn't talk about eschatology, doesn't talk about the cross, death, and resurrection,

but it does talk about agape. Yeah, it does. Yeah. Which is fascinating. I've come to believe that Philemon, I think is the only letter that Paul wrote where he took his professional hat off and wrote as himself. And so it's interesting even then he talks about love. Interesting. Can you, okay, so when I hear love, it is such a watered down Christian-ese term that

almost it's like the word the, you know, it's like a watered down Christian East term that almost it's like the word, the, you know, it's like, yeah, yeah. And especially we have a modern lens. When we hear love, we think usually emotions, positive emotions. We think maybe sexual intimacy or something, you know, help us take us into the nitty gritty of when you say love, love of God, God's love for us, our love for God, our love for each other, what, unpack what that is and what that isn't. Yeah. I'm going to take you back to 1996, maybe 1998, when Richard Hayes published his famous

book, Moral Vision of the New Testament. And he, when he was studying kind of how Christians should live, according to Scripture, he came up with three focal lenses, cross, new creation, and the community of the church. Now, he admits in the introduction that someone might wonder why he doesn't choose the word love. And he actually defends that by saying love is much abused in modern discourse and he calls it a cover for all manner of vapid self-indulgence. So, I think you're putting your finger on something Hayes was talking about that we can throw around this word and it can be like, I love French fries, I love Chick-fil-A, I love the TV show

Severance. Like we can use it for all these different, I love French fries, I love Chick-fil-A, I love the TV show Severance. We can use it for all these different, I love my children. We can use it for all these different things. So yeah, we have to be clear about that. I actually talk about this in my book because in ancient Greek, the word love was used for everything. One of the words for competition was love of victory. You would use these terms constantly the way that we would, so they would have the same problem as well. I think it's important that we have a range of terms, kind of like semantic domains, we'd say in academic, but you might think of Venn diagrams if you don't know the term semantic

domains. We're thinking of Venn diagrams. You have a Greek word like phileo or phylos that can cover the gamut of the most deep personal love and then, you know, love for a nap or love for cookies or whatever it is. But the Christians really latched onto this word agape. Now, I had to do a lot of debunking in my book. So I had to debunk the idea that this is unique Christian terminology that never existed before. Agape was actually a word plucked out of obscurity. It kind of had kind of a, it was an underutilized word in Greek vocabulary. And then the Septuagint, which is the Greek translation in the Old Testament, made a choice. I don't know why.

And I explained that in my book. There's some reasons, but I don't think we know why. They chose to translate some of the Hebrew words for love in the Pentateuch, like Exodus, Deuteronomy, as agape. So Jews, Greek speaking Jews, second century BC, chose agape, the noun, and agapao, the verb. They latched onto that. I refer to the book as the mascot word. So they said, ah, we're going to use this as our word. So they latched ah, we're gonna use this as our word. So they latched onto it as their word, and then that affects Jesus, that affects Paul, that sort of thing.

But I found the most helpful way to approach love is to think about it using emotion theory. So I do a lot of stuff with emotion theory in the book. So there's this thing that I latch onto called appraisal theory, the appraisal theory of emotion. The appraisal theory is some of our micro emotions are just response to stimuli, right? If you, if lightning strikes nearby to you,

you're gonna jump in fear. It's just instinctual. But some of, but our macro emotions, how, not how is your, you know, day, but how is your year, but how is your year? Some of our macro emotions, where are you at in your year? These theorists say reflect how we look at the world. Our macro emotions reflect how we look at the world.

So let me give an example, which I gave for the book. I grew up in Ohio where there's lots of thunderstorms. And I grew up with them. I know we're not going's lots of thunderstorms. And I grew up with them, I know we're not gonna die from thunderstorms. And so my mom has huge windows in her house, and so I love to be there during thunderstorms, be able to look out and see thunderstorms. My kids grew up in Oregon, where we have no thunderstorms. And so when we visit my family in Ohio, when there's a thunderstorm, they go running into

the bathroom where there's no windows and lock the door because they're afraid of dying. So when I hear same event, I experience wonder and joy and they experience terror. And so the same event is happening, but we're experiencing different emotions. And a lot of it is our perception of safety, well-being, thriving, some of those things. What happens with love is, is love like, oh I'm smiling because that's a cute baby or something like that. That's a macro emotion, but that's, excuse me, that's a micro emotion, but a macro is we experience love, we experience joy, when we feel like what we are engaging with leads to thriving, leads to goodness, leads to things that are going to be ultimately good for us. So the way I like to explain this, Preston, is think about your soul.

This is kind of weird. Think about your soul and you having tentacles. And when we love something, we are allowing ourselves to wrap our soul's tentacles around that thing. So you think about your spouse, you think about thing. So you think about your spouse, you think about your children, you think about your parents, your best friends, that sort of thing.

But even with hate, I've come to understand hate is actually kind of, it's kind of a form of love because you're taking the same tentacles of your soul and you're wrapping them kind of in a stranglehold around something you shouldn't, right? When you hate someone or something with that kind of deep a stranglehold around something you shouldn't, right? When you hate someone or something with that kind of deep hatred that we have, is you're using up your love tentacles on the wrong thing. And so, what's really fascinating, Preston, is how often

the Bible commands emotions. Rejoice, be at peace, do not fear. And I remember thinking to myself, how do you just produce joy? How do you just produce love? You can't. What they're really doing is they're using that pathway to ask you what you have your tentacles wrapped around. You only have so many tentacles and you can't wrap them around everything and you shouldn't wrap them around nothing. So there's a challenge there that first and foremost, they must be wrapped around God. But also that means releasing them from idols, releasing them from other things, which is why I go back to Augustine, which is why I go back to Jamie Smith.

Belief, commitment, loyalty, faith, these are all ways of talking about love because this is what we're wrapping our soul around. So, when I think about love, you could talk about infatuation, you could talk about sex, you could, but they're all manifestations of the same phenomenon of what we are holding near and dear to ourself in hopes and expectation that it'll bring us fulfillment and that they can be good things and they can be bad things. Man, there's a lot there.

So you might've answered my question. I was going to ask, okay, love as an action versus love as an emotion. We often hear love as an action, but then when we talk about loving God, we often think of like emotion. It sounds like the two are interrelated in that the emotions will spring from right action, right focus, right dedication. A wrong dedication would be idolatry, clinging to this, clinging to that rather than clinging to Christ. So the command to be happy, rejoice, don't fear, like those are not just conjure up these emotions out of nowhere, just conjure up these emotions out of nowhere, it's a plea to cling to the right thing from which these emotions spring.

Cling is a great word. Cling is a great word for it because you think about the Shema. So all biblical religion goes back to two or three foundational things. You can talk about creation, but I'd like to say Exodus, the liberation of Israel, which signals that the loving God has liberated them to be His own people. And then the Shema, hero Israel, Deuteronomy 6, hero Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your strength, and so forth. It's amazing, isn't it, Preston, that the central, creedal, and prayer-filled command

of the Old Testament, if you had to choose one thing that Israel prays every day, it's a prayer of love. I mean, isn't that crazy? The one thing. You could say, you know, fight off your enemies. You could say, worship with holiness. You could say so many things. The one thing is love.

That's the one thing. So what does that mean? Love the Lord your God with all your heart. Well, you have so many, you have so many, you know, people out there in the ancient world who were forced to be subservient to their kings like Pharaoh or their gods and fear them. So when Yahweh says love the Lord your God, he doesn't just say externally with bowing only or externally with bringing sacrifices. He says, and internally,

it has to come out of your heart. So, I think what the ancient Hebrews understood was this tentacle idea that it's got to be deep down in your soul, you're latching on, you're latching on to this. Think about when you're, do you have siblings? Yeah, I have one, yeah. Yeah, think about when you're little and your parents, you know, you're fighting with your siblings, your parents say, you guys apologize to each other right now.

So we didn't mean it. You know, you said it in a mean way, you slam your door. You didn't mean it. So, you know, we way, you slammed your door. You didn't mean it. So, we look at that now and we say that doesn't really do anything because, but what Yahweh is saying with Deuteronomy 6 is love the Lord your God and mean it. It's actually a pretty easy thing to pretend to love somebody. It's a much harder thing to mean it. So then I think what you're asking in your question is really,

how do you mean it? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. How do you actually mean the love? Yeah. And I have some stuff from psychologists like John Gottman. I have stuff from philosophers like Simon May, but ultimately it comes back to this Augustinian concept of really evaluating what are you pouring out your attention, your passion, your life direction, your commitment to, you said cling to.

That's a very hebraistic concept. That gets right to the heart of it. When we experience resentment, we're clinging on to something we shouldn't. When we would give up our lives to save our children if our house was burning. That's that, you know, to ultimately care about something. Think about Philippians 2, 3, and 4, do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility, consider others better than yourselves. Look not, this is Scott boss, the language of fixation, Look not to your own interest, but to the interests of others.

So that looking, that's fixation, isn't it? Fixate, not on your, but on the interests of others. So think about like, you know, you're in a building and there's an active shooter. It's a horrible scenario. Hope this doesn't trigger everybody. I'm sorry about that. But let's say there's an active shooter. Like, are you thinking, I got to get myself out of here? Are you thinking, I got to get my kids out of out of here? Are you thinking, I gotta get my kids out of here? But then you're also thinking, I gotta get everybody's kids out of here. Or else you're thinking,

I gotta get everybody's kids and the elderly out of here. That's love, right? Cause if it's just you and you high tail it out of there, you love yourself. But if you're thinking, I gotta get my kids out of here and I gotta get everybody's kids out of here, then you're loving them, right? It's care, fixation.

Can you, this is really helpful, man. Really helpful. out here, then you're loving them, right? It's care, fixation. This is really helpful, man. Really helpful. I read Jamie Smith's book several years ago and I think I need to go back and read it again because it is kind of a big paradigm shift. The book, You Are What You Love, is that the... I read the bigger, the more academic one. There's another one. Oh yeah, I know what you're talking about. Desiring the Kingdom? Maybe that's the one. Yeah. I think You Are What You Love is a more practical one. Oh yeah, I know what you're talking about. Desiring the kingdom? Maybe that's one. Yeah. I think you are what you love is a more practical one. Can you help me sort through something? This is actually a very personal question. I find myself being such a

cerebral person, my personality. I have emotions. I do have emotions. I get passionate when I'm speaking and I get passionate about certain things, but I just, my faith is much more on the cerebral side, where sometimes I feel like when people talk about loving God, it often is cloaked in this high emotionalism. And I just, I don't resonate with that nearly as much. And I also feel guilty about that. Like when around people that have the much more emotional love of God, they'll think about God and they start weeping. You know, they spend hours in prayer and they just get like an emotional high from spending alone time with God. I'm like, I just, I don't. There was a time in my life when I was younger when I had maybe more of that, but as I've gotten older, it's just become such

a cerebral kind of love. And that's where I guess my question is, is that a kind of love? Am I imbalanced? Should I feel guilty? Am I missing something if my faith, my commitment to God, it is, I wouldn't say duty. That sounds like I'm begrudgingly pursuing the kingdom and pursuing God. I'm not at all, but it is more like this is the right thing to do. And I know that because I figured it out on an analytical level. Therefore, I get passionate about doing the right thing, saying the right thing. It's not like a stoic kind of, I don't know, does that make sense? I mean, I don't know. It does. It does. Help me. Yeah. Help pastor me.

I think we have to avoid two ditches, the two gutters on each side. One ditch is over-emotionalizing the concept of love. That like, I gotta be crying at every worship service. I gotta be, you know, dancing, you know, joyful dances. I think the danger with that is it can look like love, but not actually have the commitment of love. I mean, people are different. Some people, you know, my oldest daughter's, you know, whenever we're watching a sad movie,

she likes to scan the room and see who's crying because she doesn't often cry. She'll be like, ah, they got you, you know? Everybody's different, so that's okay. But we have to avoid the ditch of over-emotionalizing it, like someone might come up to you and be like, I notice you're not really, you know, getting emotionally involved in this.

I think that's dangerous. I think the opposite is problem two, where we underestimate the value of emotion and we say, love is just duty. Have you ever heard someone say like, I love them, but I don't like them. As like just sheer duty. And the problem with that is that can have a knock on effect

to how we view God, that God begrudgingly saves us. Right. I, you know, I work with a spiritual director who's kind of like a therapist to me and we've had to work a lot on my perception of God. And so when I'm going through something, you know, he'll often say, what do you think God is saying to you? And early on in our time, I'd say, he wants

me to get over it or he wants me to da-da-da. And he's like, sounds like God's pretty judgmental. And I was like, yeah, he's like, why wouldn't he just say like, I'm here with you and I want to feel what you're feeling before he gets onto the advice part. And I was like, I don't know. And so, you know, a lot of this is going to, how we see this reflects in how we see God. And if God, you know, a lot of people have kind of a view of God as kind of just a cosmic, neutral being that just is pushing buttons and having to solve our problems. And this idea that God created our humanity, he structured our humanity based on his personhood, and that we have emotions as God has emotions. That's a whole different thing.

So I think this idea of sheer duty, that the truest form of love is begrudging sheer duty, doesn't fairly reflect God. Preston, I feel like this is a therapy, so I should be charging you Preston. I think for me, what I would do if I were talking to you just on casual conversation about this, I'd say is, how do you show love to your wife and kids? How do you feel when they lose a baseball game? How do you feel when they win a baseball game? What do you say to them? What do they say to them? What do they say to you?

And I think we need to recognize the personhood of God and say, I should love God the similar way I love my family members, I love my friends. And some people are gonna be more teary-eyed about it and some people aren't, everybody's personality is different. But I think some key aspects here would be time. Where are you spending your time? You know, it's funny, like my wife can drive my kids to soccer, you know, 30, 40 minutes, and they'll have these really long deep conversations. And

I'll drive my kids to soccer and we won't talk at all. We'll just listen to music and sing. That's just my norm. You know, that's just what I do. So she'd be like, what'd you talk about? Like, we didn't talk. Like we just, but we have different ways of bonding. We have different ways of bonding and they know that I'm there for them. They know I care about them because I show up. I don't pay someone else to drive them. You know, that would be different.

So I think time is a big one. I think just attentiveness, like a key aspect of relationships is you just know each other, right? And you don't always have to be crying or talking. You know, you really know each other. And so I think that's the aspect of it. So I think it's really, I think what I'd say, Preston, is don't always have to be crying or talking. You really know each other. And so I think that's the aspect of it. So I think it's really,

I think what I'd say, Preston, is don't overthink it. Just think, how do I express love in my human relationships? The people that say, I feel really loved by Preston, what are they talking about? I don't know. Ask your kids. I think a lot of it is just attention and interest. Yeah, no, that would, yeah. Yeah, we just just attention and interest. Yeah.

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That's E-L-I-C.org forward slash TITR to learn more. For me, the hard thing too, as you're talking about me, I feel like my emotions are connected to materiality. Hugging my kids, seeing my wife, audibly hearing her voice, you know, spending face-to-face time, whereas my relationship with God, it can, and this might sound cynical, this is what the critics would say, right, but it's like, I'm hanging out with my invisible friend, you know, like, the lack of materiality, I think, plays a role in the difficulty in me having the same kind of emotions that I might have when I'm loving my family or loving friends versus my love for God.

I think that's where the cerebral nature does kick in. Like, how do I know God is near? Well, because the Bible says so and logically, you know, like, it just might, I have to like convince myself cerebrally that this whole thing is true because I can't look, touch, taste, see, hug. I know some people say, Jesus hugs me every morning. I'm like, but does He? I don't get that. Yeah. No, He did. I'm just imagining you looking in the mirror hugging yourself.

Even like God's speaking to me. Again, I've never heard God's voice that I could capture on my iPhone. I just have. So, when I hear speech, I hear an audible, you can record it and replay it. Yeah, for sure. You know, and I just, I've never heard God's voice in that way. And then I'm not saying God doesn't speak in that way and other people have. It's just even with all the language we talk about God, we use all this interpersonal material language toward a very non-material relationship. And I think that's where I have, I don't know, just kind of fall back on my cerebral, holding this whole thing together, you know? Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Again, we shouldn't over-emotionalize love or exclusively

emotionalize love. So you can express love in all kinds of different ways. But I would say two things if this is helpful. One is my wife and I got in the habit of listening to scripture on the Hallow app, which is a Catholic prayer app, which is fantastic. And so it's Jonathan Rumi, who's the Jesus from the chosen, but he does the scripture reading. So just hearing a human's voice is powerful, I think. I experience scripture a little differently, just hearing a person's voice. You can hear women reading scripture. There are a variety of apps that do that. But you know what I would say, Preston, and this might be really helpful for you, and you just got me thinking about it, is think about Paul in prison, experiencing great darkness, great loneliness.

And what does he tend to write when he's in prison? I thank God because of you Christians. What he's saying is, I experience the tangible, physical love of God through believers. So when you're hugging a friend at church or you're having coffee with your pastor or with someone in your small group and you grab their arm because you're praying for them, like this is the body of Christ. I think it's a metaphor, but I think it's more than a metaphor.

The materiality comes in. I mean, think about Paul, how often he does this. I thank my God because of you. And in some way, he's experienced the ministry of Christ through the physical contact with people of God. I've often said, when people say, how do you experience God? It comes down to this. This is a good reminder.

It comes down to, I experienced God most through other people, through community. And the verse that I often cling to is Ephesians 1, 22, and 23, you know, where God put all things under His feet, gave Him as head over all things to the church, which is His body, the fullness of Him who fills all in all. And I've often used that text and others like it to argue that I think, because we often think you experience God the most when you're by yourself, quiet, doing your quiet times. And I don't want to take that away, but I hear it's like, is there a case that we made that the fullness of God is actually experienced in community? Not necessarily just being bodies in a room together, but when there's that rich, vibrant bread and wine, confession, fellowship, speaking to each other, hugging each

other. So for me, I think that's where I would say I actually experience God the most because He is expressed in materiality and more than just, oh, other believers also love God, but like, no, these other believers are His body. His physical body. And you could push that maybe a little bit too far, but I mean, I think there is a very real, tangible manifestation of God in the body of believers. Would you agree with that? Is that heresy? Yeah. No, I think that's spot on. There is also an aspect to our spirituality of longing because we're not in the physical presence of Christ. So, Paul talks about Philippians, about the possibility of him dying and how

that'd be great because he could depart and be with the Lord. I don't think he wants to necessarily end his suffering or pain, but I think he just so desperately wants to be with the Lord. He talks about, in 2 Corinthians Corinthians being naked in a sense, sort of in his death, but then being clothed with a new building or a new body, whatever, with Christ, kind of that longing. So think about this, like my daughter's in college and she can call me on FaceTime and I can see her and talk to her basically whenever I want. But think about my parents who came to the United States in the 70s, and it was so expensive to do phone calls. You remember those days, so expensive to call overseas in the 70s. They would go sometimes weeks, maybe months without talking to their loved ones,

their parents or their aunts and uncles or their siblings. We don't really know what that's like, their parents or their aunts and uncles or their siblings. We don't really know what that's like, but does that mean they don't love them? No, they love them deeply, but they have almost no contact. So there's deep, genuine love in absence, you're saying, or distance, or yeah. I think about how much convenience we have

in contacting people, but what if we lived, what if you sent your kid off to college and you wouldn't be able to talk to them for nine, 10 months until they're back home for the summer? And that's many people's experience in a pre-21st century period. I mean, there's a really strong already not yet element here too, right? The fact that our love of God will always be a shadow, this side of resurrection, and it cultivates kind of a longing for the full manifestation of love. So, if our love for God now feels incomplete, it's because it isn't. It is, right? If there's a longing there,

there's an absence. I want to turn to a couple of questions from some followers here. I want to turn to a couple of questions from some followers here. This is okay. So Mike wants to know, can you speak to, he's going to take a turn here. Can you speak to progressive Christianity's emphasis on love over truth? And then he cites, I've not read it, Jared bias's book, love matters more. Do you have any thoughts on, do you have any thoughts on that? I mean, I get this question a lot because when I say Paul was all about love, then there's questions about justice and truth and discipline. So I think about me as a parent and I think about what I want for my kids.

Loving them does not mean giving them whatever they want. It doesn't mean blank check. They could do whatever they want. Love means that we are on their side no matter what and we want nothing but the best for them. And so when God loves us, that doesn't mean, I remember Josh McDowell, remember Josh McDowell? Oh yeah. I remember Josh McDowell, I remember going to one of his major speaking engagements, Big Ten kind of things.

And I remember him saying, I'm glad when I was like a 10 year old, God didn't answer my prayers because I wanted to be a cowboy. And so, God can love us and love us deeply and love us to the fullest extent and withhold things from us. Yeah. Love has boundaries. Love has boundaries. Absolutely. Giving somebody everything they want could be very unloving and pretty hateful.

Absolutely. But here's the point, and I get this actually from Charles Cranfield, who we talked about earlier. Cranfield in his commentary says, Paul's gospel can be summed up in Romans 831 in four English words, God is for us. If God is for us, who could be against us? Think about the ancient world where you were terrified of Jupiter, the God most high in the Roman world. You were terrified of the wrath of the gods. You were terrified of, you know,

you did something to offend the god. They take away your family. They take away this, they take away that. And to hear this message from Paul or another evangelist, there's one God most high. He has all the power in the world. He is for you. So one thing I learned when I read Strange Religion was the Greco-Roman world had hundreds, maybe thousands of gods, but they did not have a single patron god of the week. Not a single god of the week. They had gods of healing, they had gods of empowerment, but a god who identified and had a special interest in the weak. And you have Jesus, a man of no reputation, right, who came to earth in the form of a slave, as Paul says in Philippians. And in 2 Corinthians, he says, he's crucified

in weakness, but he lives by God's power. That's amazing. So, to answer that question about love, yeah, there is an extreme you can go to if anything goes. And I'm so glad when I was welcomed into a church as a 16 year old and converted from Hinduism to Christianity, the people that loved me in the church, like my youth pastor, also said, you're immature and you need to grow up. That too is a part of love. Truth telling, seeking someone's growth is a part of love. So I'm glad you asked that because again, it's not about making someone happy in the

short term. It's about wrapping your soul's tentacles. I'm hoping people will never forget this weird image. Wrapping your soul's tentacles around a person and saying, I've now adopted you as someone that I am for. That's a powerful sentiment. That's good. All right.

Another question. This is going to be from a different angle here. John wants to know, Luther, et cetera, can be both great and have, and at blind spots. Paul did not teach right from a blind spot, but isn't his rejection of Mark and Acts a blind spot? The rest of the story with Mark is great, of course. God triumphs, but in spite of, but in spite of Paul, which should give all leaders hope. So I think what he's asking is, you know, is this Paul messing up? Yeah. Yeah. Cause he, Paul's, Paul's 13 letters are inspired, but it's not inspired, right? Would you know? And the best example of this, I think is Galatians 2, where Paul and Peter have this confrontation over Peter's

behavior in Antioch, where he is withdrawing from eating with Gentiles. And it says Paul opposed to Peter in his face because it was really, really, really clear that Peter was wrong. I mean, that's my paraphrase. It's just blindingly clear. So, Peter can be wrong. That happens. So, that be wrong, that happens. So that means Paul could be wrong. But what inspiration means is what they say in their writings is theologically inspired by God. Now this gets into murky waters

and what's the limitations of that. But I will say this, one of my favorite examples is 1 Corinthians chapter one, where Paul says, I'm so glad I didn't baptize any of you except these people and then anybody else I don't remember. So it's like, is his not remembering inspired? And in what way? But what I would say is, okay, let's talk about Mark real quick, John Mark. It would be interesting to have a conversation about this. I'm not a hundred

percent sure I would say that was a mistake because I think relationships sometimes end. We have strategic relationships that end. And the question I'd want to sit down with Paul and say is, is there sin in the way you did it? Is there sin in your heart? That sort of thing. But relationships end. And I don't think he hated him. I think he just said, you proved yourself irresponsible. And I don't think that you're the right person for this job. Yeah. Maybe Mark has been a knucklehead too. And Paul made a good leadership decision. Yeah. What we know is that Barnabas and Paul disagreed on Mark and the approach to Mark, but to come right out and say, this is something that later on, he would realize that he made a mistake on. I'm not sure. I'm open to that happening,

but I'm not sure that that's what happened there. But is that a lack of love? I don't know if that would be a lack of love. We don't know enough to say probably whether it was or not. I like his outburst in acts. God is gonna strike you, you whitewashed wolf. Yeah. Somebody smacks him in the face and then he apologizes.

Like, oh, I didn't realize what you're the high priest or something. Yeah. One way I explain this Preston in terms of things like anger, rebuke, justice is kind of like wavelengths. And there's, maybe this isn't the best illustration, but just our resting places love, even though we may modulate to places of anger for good and right reasons, or places of confronting somebody,

or lament, right? We go to these places, but then we come back to our resting place of love. All right, we got a couple more, I know we're just about out of time, a couple more questions. We'll see if we can get to both of them. I'm gonna go to both of them.

I'm gonna go to Peter first here. He says, this is really, I have the same question. How do we reconcile the disconnect between our ability to deeply love those close to us while struggling to extend that same embodied love to those whose lives or choices challenge our beliefs? If love requires genuine relationship and understanding, how can we authentically

love people we're instinctively inclined to keep at arm's length? It made me think of even a book like Boundaries or there's certain relationships that you should never hate anybody, but the relationship itself might be kind of toxic and might be unhealthy to stay in relationship. How do you navigate that? That's great. And this gets back to love is a very capacious term and we're going to have different loving relationships with different kinds of people. And so you can't love everybody. This is the ancient philosophers like Aristotle and Seneca, Epictetus, all these ancient philosophers talking about friendship and they would instantly die if they realized

you could have 5,000 friends on Facebook. Because the idea of having thousands of friends is a contradiction. When it comes to deep, close friendships, they really believed you could only have a few. And really those people you should actually live with, basically. And so you really have these circles of relationships.

You're going to have the closest relationships with your spouse, your best friend, your children, maybe. And then you have another circle relationships with relatives and maybe people you work with and so forth. Where I think I would answer this distinction is not in everybody needs to be in the inner circle. That's impossible and you'll water it all down, right? I have a commitment to date my wife. I don't have a commitment to date other people. You know, what I would say is what distinguishes loving them from not loving them,

whether it's a stranger, an enemy, an estranged person or your best friend is, am I for them? Then it's up to God how you are for them. So, you know, let's take an example that you and I experience a lot. You'll get random emails from people asking for favors. I get it all the time because I'm a public figure and they'll say, can you talk to my small group?

Can you talk to my Bible study? Can you talk to my, I just feel terrible, Preston, because I can't and I wanna help and I'm not a super famous celebrity or anything, but I get these emails from strangers. Can you send me, you know, I'm in India, can you send me money? Because they assume I'm rich.

Can you send me books? I feel terrible. I feel terrible that I can't do stuff for people. But you know what, I could say, God, I want to be for this person, tell me how to do it. So maybe it's just sending a loving email. Love you, praying for your ministry, hope it goes well, sorry me how to do it. So, maybe it's just sending a loving email. Love you, praying for your ministry, hope it goes well, sorry, can't help. So, you got to really

discern. How am I for them? First, you have to say, do I harbor hatred? Am I against them? You have to pray against that. Then how can I be for them and that can be love? And some people aren't going to accept that. They're going to say, you should have been there for me. You have to't going to accept that. They're going to say, you should have been there for me. And you have to live with some of that. And being there for that person and that person and that person and that person means you're saying no to this person, this person, this person, you know, like, Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I've had to battle that too.

And it's so hard, so hard to get that heartfelt email or, hey, can you, same thing like that, can you get on the phone and talk, you know, it could be a tragic situation. But when you get piles of those, you just don't, there's just not enough, not just time in a day, but just not enough even emotional bandwidth to invest in that many people in the same way. So, ooh, that's hard. It's really hard. It's probably hard.

I would say it's one of the hardest things in my ministry. I probably think yours as well. Just having to say no to good people, good things, you know? But hey, we got to wrap things up. So there's another question we didn't get to, but yeah, thanks so much, man, for being on Theology and Error. I really appreciate it again, as a least yearly, if not bi-yearly guest. I think it was last year this time when I had you. Yeah. Well, you keep writing like a book a year and every time you read a book, I want to have you on the talk about it. So again, the book is your latest book, The Affections of Christ Jesus Love at the Heart

of Paul's Theology. Check it out from one of the premier Pauline scholars, DJ Gupta. Thanks DJ for being on the show. Always good to talk to you Preston. Thanks. This show is part of the Converge Podcast Network. Hi I'm Haven and as long as I can remember I have had different curiosities and thoughts and ideas that I like to explore usually with a girlfriend over a matcha latte. But then when I had kids I just didn't have the same time

that I did before for the one-on-ones that I crave. So I started Haven the Podcast. It's a safe space for curiosity and conversation. And we talk about everything from relationships to parenting to friendships to even your view of yourself. And we don't have answers or solutions, but I think the power is actually in the questions. So I'd love for you to join me, Haven, the podcast.

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