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?

In this episode Andre starts with Colossians 1 and the Nicene Creed: creation is all things visible and invisible, and this is basic Christian cosmology. The supernatural is not only the dramatic stuff that makes headlines. What about prayer, worship, baptism and the Lord's Supper, the gathering of the local church on Sundays? Christianity is supernatural all the way down, from top to bottom. Then he takes the objections in turn. Isn't that dangerous? There are real dangers, and scripture gives us the boundaries that we need, but we are not safe if we stay away from these things: there are dangers on both ends. Isn't this a distraction from the main things? The incarnation, the victory of Christ, the church, spiritual warfare and Christian hope all involve the unseen realm, so these are the main things. Doesn't it lead to speculation? We mustn't go beyond what is written, but the Bible actually reveals far more about the invisible world than we often realise, and ignorance isn't safe either.

Along the way: asking people on the street whether they have ever had an experience they couldn't explain, and how often "no, no" turns into "oh, actually"; a culture that is strongly materialist and yet just can't let it go; Michael Heiser and Hans Boersma, each credited with reservations, both challenging the flattening of the Christian cosmos produced by modernity; horizons that have shrunk to the political, to the bodily, to the cultural; why boredom with the Bible is not the Bible's fault; and the central claim, that the two realms, visible and invisible, interact, with traffic between them, especially in the far less spectacular: worship, prayer, the preached word, bread and wine. Christians don't need a world made more magical, Andre concludes. The biblical world is astonishing enough, and Christianity is wonderfully strange already.

REFERENCED ALONG THE WAY

- Michael Heiser

- Hans Boersma

- David Aune

- John Milton

- The Nicene Creed and the Westminster Confession of Faith

- Scripture: Colossians 1:15 to 20, 1 John 3, Ephesians 3, 1 Samuel 28,

Isaiah 34

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#supernatural #invisiblerealm #biblicalworldview #biblicaltheology #christianpodcast

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.

In this episode Andre asks what heavenly mindedness is, and what it means to live inside a cosmos that is both visible and invisible. With Charles Taylor's A Secular Age he describes how the West has moved from an enchanted world to a disenchanted one, from the porous self to the buffered self, and how even believing Christians breathe its air and end up with a functionally disenchanted faith. With Meredith Kline's archetype and ectype, and Michael Heiser's unseen realm, he sets out one cosmos with two registers, heaven and earth not sealed off from one another but interacting, so that heavenly mindedness is about understanding what the real world is. Then he follows the New Testament upwards: Abraham in the promised land but still camping, looking forward to the city that has foundations, whose designer and builder is God; heaven as our homeland, a created realm, the pattern for the tabernacle and the most real place there is; and our citizenship in heaven, which Paul does not set alongside earthly citizenship as an equal but radically relativises. Along the way: a church in London of about 100 people with 27 different nationalities; the Narnian horse of The Horse and His Boy, who keeps talking about his home country even though he can barely remember it; how the heavenly citizenship becomes a plaque on the wall while we live by our other passport; Colossians 3, where the Christian life is heavenly all the way down and heavenly mindedness is not one box amongst many; Hebrews 12, where you have come to Mount Zion, the church's worship is joined to the heavenly court, and why losing that turns church into just a social club; the inheritance kept in heaven in 1 Peter 1, with the great institutions of Israel relocated upwards and fulfilled in Christ; and Romans 8, where creation groans and the Spirit produces a yearning and groaning for heaven in us. Heavenly mindedness, Andre concludes, is what makes us of earthly good.

REFERENCED ALONG THE WAY

- Charles Taylor, A Secular Age: the porous self and the buffered self, and

the move from an enchanted world to a disenchanted one

- Meredith Kline on archetype and ectype: mountains and the glory cloud

pointing beyond themselves

- Michael Heiser on the unseen realm and the divine council

- The Horse and His Boy, from C.S. Lewis's Narnia series

- Scripture: Genesis 1 to 3, Hebrews 11:8 to 10, Hebrews 11:14, Revelation

21, Ephesians 2, Colossians 3:1 to 4, Hebrews 12, 1 Peter 1, Galatians 4,

Romans 8, 2 Corinthians 5, 2 Peter 3, 1 John 3

This episode takes stock of the series so far: the divine council, the fall

of the supernatural realm and the work Christ is doing to raise the dead

are all aimed, Andre says, at helping us to become more heavenly minded, so

that we can fix our eyes on Jesus, who is the author and perfecter of our

faith.

Website: https://between-two-realms.pages.dev/

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#heavenlyminded #heaven #christianliving #biblicaltheology #christianpodcast