Breaking the Spell of Disenchantment with Tolkien and Lewis

Is it biblical to believe in ghosts? For a large part of his Christian life, Pastor Andre says, the obvious answer was no. In this episode he comes back to the question, looks at some evidence and offers some tentative conclusions. "My short answer is that yes, I think that it is biblical to believe in ghosts." "But probably not the way the culture means it." And on seeking them out he is as firm as he gets: "absolutely under no circumstances are you to initiate contact with the dead."

Is our world too small for the supernatural worldview the Bible gives? Pastor Andre asks whether one of the problems facing Christians is that our world has simply become too small: just not big enough to handle everything that the Bible talks about. We confess an invisible world, God, angels, demons, heaven, resurrection, the incarnation, spiritual warfare. But how much does that actually shape the way that we really imagine reality?

What does the persecuted church count as supernatural? Pastor Andre is joined by the show's first guest, his friend Dan, who has spent the last seven years working with the persecuted church, to test a common belief: that if God is still acting supernaturally in the world, he is doing it on the front lines. Dan's answer is yes, but it's a bit more nuanced than that. Christians under pressure see more of God, he suggests, and a lot of it is probably to do with our hunger, with whether we are looking for it, and with the things that get in the way.In this conversation Andre and Dan ask what we reach for when we say supernatural. We go big, they agree, and Andre suggests we gravitate towards whatever makes life easier now: healing, money, our best life now. Dan's biggest learning from spending time with persecuted Christians is their heavenly perspective: it's going to be okay, one day I'm going to be with Jesus. He remembers a North Korean Christian who told him, you don't realise Jesus is all you need until Jesus is all you have, and he passes on the story of a pastor who was told to convert or die and would not, whose family were absolutely devastated and yet pleased that his faith was still intact till the end. For Andre, the fact that someone is able to endure to the end is a profoundly supernatural thing, not a natural ability, and that is as true for Christians here as it is there. Christians can feel disenchanted with their faith, he says, because they fail to see the extraordinary work of God in the ordinary moments. Dan has a name for it: the everyday supernatural.Along the way: a pastor held at gunpoint who shared the gospel with his captors, and who says he has never found God to let him down; Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego and the fourth man in the fire; Andre's own conversion, when it was as if God grabbed him by the scruff of the neck; his warning that the great temptation for Christians in the West is to hear stories like these and begin to target Muslims as the enemy, when Paul says our struggle is not against flesh and blood; evangelists whose attackers heard what could only be described as the sound of heaven, dropped their weapons and ran; and Dan's challenge that the persecuted church's experience is far more consistent with the New Testament than ours. God moving in miraculous ways is the norm, he puts it to Andre. We're just out of step with it.The conversation ends on forgiveness. Dan tells of a friend who prayed the Lord's Prayer whilst being attacked and forgave the people attacking him in the moment. Andre is careful to say that this is not about telling a victim they must forgive or else; these are people convinced that to be a Christian in this world is to be an agent of love. He recalls C.S. Lewis on miracles, doing quickly what the Father does slowly: forgiveness that happensinstantly is miraculous, and no less miraculous for being slow. Where the supernatural and the natural meet, Dan says, is loving our enemies.REFERENCED ALONG THE WAY- Open Doors: the list of the 50 hardest places to follow Jesus, cited by Dan- C.S. Lewis on miracles, as Andre recalls him- Scripture: Colossians (Paul's prayer for strength to endure), Daniel 3 (Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego and the fourth man in the fire, the story named on air), Ephesians 6:12 (quoted), Ephesians 2, the Lord's Prayer, Matthew 5 (quoted: love and pray for those who persecute you)This conversation includes accounts of violence against Christians. Names and places in these stories are left out of these notes for the safety of the people in them.Website: https://between-two-realms.pages.dev/Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/@Between-Two-Realms?sub_confirmation=1#persecutedchurch #forgiveness #supernatural #christianliving #christianpodcast

Heavenly minded, or no earthly good? Pastor Andre takes the old jibe, so heavenly-minded that they're no earthly good, and turns it round. He has never met a Christian like that, and the Bible seems to direct our thinking in exactly the opposite direction: if you want to be some good in this world, you've got to be heavenly minded. The church's real problem, he suggests, is that we're not heavenly minded enough, because when heaven stops being real, heavenly mindedness starts to look like escapism.

The atonement reaches both realms. Because our world's corruption is both visible and invisible, Andre argues, the salvation we need concerns both, and Christ has come not only to deal with material things but also with the immaterial: not only with matter, but also with spirit. In his view, Christus Victor is what Jesus came to do, and penal substitutionary atonement is how he has done it.In this episode Pastor Andre treats the atoning work of Christ as one diamond seen through its different facets, and warns against playing the models of atonement off against each other. From 1 John 3:8, he came in the flesh to destroy the works of the devil, he traces the Genesis 3:15 promise of one who would crush the serpent's head through the promise to Abraham in Genesis 12, and through Adam, Israel, David and Solomon, sons of God who all failed, to Jesus, the true Adam, the true Israel and the true king, who meets Satan in the wilderness, resists him and binds the strong man. In Mark 5 an entire legion of demons kneels in terror before him, and Andre reads the drowning pigs not as mercy to the demons but as sending them back to the abyss.Along the way: why the decisive turning point comes not in the wilderness but through Jesus' death and resurrection, where the tables were turned and Satan, the accuser of the brethren, no longer has any legal basis for accusation; how the two models of atonement come together; the harrowing of Hades, Matthew 27 and the keys of death and Hades in Revelation 1, and why, as Andre puts it, Christians are never described as being dead: we go up, not down; Ephesians 4:9 and the descent to the dead in the Apostles' Creed;the church as a sacramental icon of the kingdom, an outpost behind enemy lines and God's own temple, with Christ in the midst of his people; why churches are extraordinary, even though lots of people get hurt in them; the Great Commission and the Lord's prayer; and Babel, Deuteronomy 32, Psalm 82and Daniel 10, the cosmic geography Andre sees looming in the background of the Great Commission, which makes the local church the front line of the warfare. We needed a champion to come and defeat Satan so that we could beset free, and that warfare continues today through the church's mission.REFERENCED ALONG THE WAY- John Chrysostom on Colossians 2: there death received his wound, having met his death stroke from a dead body- Leon Morris's commentary on Matthew: Jesus as the Lord of both the living and the dead- Hilary of Poitiers on the opened graves of Matthew 27- Meredith Kline on Babel as an anti-God scheme, satanically conceived- Michael Heiser on the allocation of the nations according to the number of the sons of God in Deuteronomy 32- The Apostles' Creed: he descended to the dead- Scripture: Genesis 3:15, Genesis 9, Genesis 11:4, Genesis 12, Deuteronomy 4:19 to 20, Deuteronomy 32:8 to 9, Psalm 82, Daniel 10, Matthew 27, Mark 3, Mark 5, John 15, Acts 2, Romans 5, 1 Corinthians 3 and 6, 2 Corinthians 4, Ephesians 3, Ephesians 4:9, Philippians 2, Colossians 2, 1 Peter 2, 1 Peter 3, 1 John 3:8, Revelation 1, Revelation 2 and 3, Revelation 19, Revelation 21This episode picks up where the series left off, after the episodes on the supernatural in creation and in the fall, with a pointer of hope to the coming of Christ.Website: https://between-two-realms.pages.dev/Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/@Between-Two-Realms?sub_confirmation=1#atonement #christusvictor #unseenrealm #biblicaltheology #christianpodcast