Steve Nichols Interview (2017)

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Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry coming to you from Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.

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No Compromise Radio is a program dedicated to the ongoing proclamation of Jesus Christ. Based on the theme in Galatians 2, verse 5, where the

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Apostle Paul said, "...but we did not yield in subjection to them for even an hour, so that the truth of the gospel would remain with you."

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In short, if you like smooth, watered -down words to make you simply feel good, this show isn't for you.

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By purpose, we are first biblical, but we can also be controversial. Stay tuned for the next 25 minutes as we're called by the divine trumpet to summon the troops for the honor and glory of her

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King. Here's our host, Pastor Mike Abendroth. Welcome to No Compromise Radio ministry.

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My name is Mike Abendroth and I'm your host. And today is the day that we look at books that can help you.

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I think of Harry Truman even saying that leaders must be readers. John Wesley, I believe, said that you should read four hours a day or get out of the ministry.

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And so I'm trying to encourage you to read books about the Word, about our Lord, and about church history so you can learn biblical truth.

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And today on the line we have Dr. Stephen Nichols, a well -known author. And Dr.

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Nichols, welcome to No Compromise Radio ministry. Oh, thanks for having me. Looking forward to the conversation with you.

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Well, I've read many of your books. I maybe have them all, I'm not sure. But I specifically want to talk about Made in America today, subtitled,

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A Cultural History from the Puritans to the Passions of the Christ, a book on IVP Academic.

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Dr. Nichols, give us an overview of what the book is, Jesus Made in America, and then we'll kind of look at some specific chapters.

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Sure. You know, one of my interests is just American church history, American evangelicalism, and just the way as American Christians we're so influenced by American culture.

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And as I began to try to figure out how to put some of my ideas on the paper, I thought I need something sort of specific to focus on.

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And I thought of, well, let's talk about how we think about Jesus, because there's really nothing more crucial than that.

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It gets right at the heart of the gospel and right at the heart of what we're about as a church. So the book explores how

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Jesus, and it looks at some of the past centuries, and it starts right off with the

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Puritans, and then it spends a lot of time in the 20th century. And in the 20th century we explore music and film and even trinkets, you know, the bracelets and the holy hardware,

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I think sometimes it gets called, and just looking at where Jesus pops up in culture and how that affects how we think about Jesus, how we worship

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Jesus, and then even what an on -looking world thinks about when they see all that stuff.

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Well, Tim Challey said, I read his review of your book, one of the most engaging, informative books

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I've read this year. How about that? That was very kind of him. I appreciate that.

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I love the introduction you start off with, Robert Detweiler, and here's his quote,

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Americans apparently want Christ, but they do not want Him straight. Why'd you start that off, the book off that way?

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Well, that was a great quote, and to me it gets right to it. We have this tendency to want to read our own context into the

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Bible, and I think we have, especially when we look at Jesus, we end up with Him wanting to look like us.

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We want Him to endorse us and endorse what we're about, and this is just so true,

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I think, of the American Jesus. I mean, I think all cultures are susceptible to it, and you look at how

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Jesus gets depicted down through the ages, He looks a lot like the culture in which is depicting

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Him. But as American evangelicals, I think especially because, you know, we sort of pride ourselves on being

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Bible -only, without tradition, you know, that we're sort of susceptible to some of those cultural pressures, maybe more susceptible than we'd sometimes like to admit.

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Well, Dr. Nichols, now you've spoiled my childhood, you mean that picture that my grandma had with kind of the feathered -haired

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Jesus, white skin, blue eyes, that's not what Jesus looks like? That's right.

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Yeah, you know, it's such an interesting thing, I mean, that's an interesting study in itself, the actual pictures of Jesus, you know, and I get into this a little bit in the book, but in the

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Victorian era, Jesus is always, He looks like a woman, you know, He's got the high cheekbones and long flowing hair, because the

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Victorian culture just prized motherhood, you know, so you always have Jesus as almost a woman, and He's always surrounded by children, you know, that's the sort of typical

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Victorian portrait. So, yeah, I think sometimes, you know, our conceptions of who

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Jesus is sometimes have a lot more to do with us than the straight

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Jesus from the text of Scripture. Well, this is deviating,

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I think, a little bit from the book, but when I tell people, I think Jesus looked pretty much like His mother, is that a fair statement or not?

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I guess He couldn't have any of the attributes of Joseph. I never thought of putting it that way, but that's great.

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Well, the book... I'll have to do a second edition and have it. Yeah, that's right. Stephen Nichols is online,

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Jesus Made in America, IVP book. The titles range from The Puritan Christ, Jesus as Gentle and Meek and Mild, Jesus Hero, Jesus on Vinyl, Jesus on Big Screen.

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I really have enjoyed this book, and if you're listening today on WVNE, I'd suggest you get a copy,

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Jesus Made in America by Stephen Nichols, a great church history scholar in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

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I almost said Lancaster, Mass, since that's my hometown, but Lancaster, Pennsylvania. And you are a professor there at Lancaster Bible College, and you got your

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PhD from Westminster, and this is a book that is very readable and very engaging. Let's talk about The Puritan Christ.

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We have about 20 minutes left, so we should talk a little bit about The Puritan Christ. When you say

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The Puritan Christ, what do you mean? Well, I start with The Puritans, because chronologically, that's where we start with American Christianity.

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But I also think The Puritans, and they had their faults, but I think they had a lot of things right. And one of the things they had right was they had good stress on both the humanity of Jesus and how

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Jesus relates to us and connects to us, but they also had a place for the reverence of Jesus and the deity of Christ, and to see

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Jesus as God. So, the first thing is they were very confessional in terms of the great ecumenical early church creeds of the

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Nicene Creed and the Chalcedonian Creed. So, when they talked about Jesus, they made sure they were very theological and holy or fully biblical about their view of Jesus.

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But the other thing is, we sometimes paint the Puritans as being all heady, all intellectual, but they were also very much, if I could just say, worshipping

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Jesus. You know, Edwards, Jonathan Edwards, as an example, talks about the sweetness of Christ and relishing the beauty of Christ.

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And also Edward Taylor, a great poet, he kept all his poetry sort of hidden, and it wasn't until the 1920s it was discovered, and so we have this great poetry.

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But he would write this wonderful poetry, mostly Saturday nights, anticipating Communion Sunday the next day, and would just be overflowing with sort of emotional language in his expressions of his devotion to Christ and his love of Christ for the greatness of who

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Christ is. So, I start off with the Puritans, because I think they give us a good example of being both theologically sound, but also recognizing that there's a lot more than just an intellectual commitment here.

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Well, Stephen, you're a church history buff, or church history expert, and you know what

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I like is, I like that you talk about pop culture a little bit, and you have a sense of humor as well.

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And so, see, sometimes I think of these church historians as stodgy, very kind of dour, almost like the liberals think of Jonathan Edwards, yet even in your little subtitle there,

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Puritan Christ, WWJED. I mean, I just like that. Well, you know,

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I think that comes from teaching undergrads. You know, you can't get away with dry, boring history with 18 - to 22 -year -olds.

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You've got to sort of stand on your head sometimes, I guess. Well, that could be true.

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Now, moving quickly to the next chapter, Jesus for a New Republic, the politics of piety of Franklin, Jefferson, Washington, and Paine.

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And of course, this radio station is going out here in Massachusetts. And so, what do you say to our friends who are listening, evangelicals, who think that this is an

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American, excuse me, this is a Christian nation, and all our founders were Christian, and I have to say the

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Benjamin Franklin quote, My mother grieves that one of her sons is an Aryan, another an Arminian made my day.

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Yeah, you know, this is the chapter that got me in hot water.

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You know, you go after, it's a sacred cow, the Christian America thesis. But if you use the litmus test of what did they think about Christ, that puts the conversation in a whole new light.

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I think clearly the founders were very religious, and I think it was a religion that was clearly tilted towards Christianity.

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But then it's another thing to say that these were all devout, orthodox Christians. I'll give you one example of this.

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John Quincy Adams, of course, son of John Adams, once wrote a letter to his father, and here you are in Massachusetts, here

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I am outside telling you this, but once wrote a letter to his father saying, Your view of Christ to the real thing is as a farthing candle to the sun.

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And a farthing candle is a cheap candle, you can get it for a penny, essentially. And what

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John Quincy Adams was accusing his father of being, as a deist, is not having a high enough view of Christ.

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So the chapter explores that. I'll just have to say it's probably safer to let readers just read that and determine for themselves where the truth lies.

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Well, I thought it was interesting when you quoted Weems regarding Benjamin Franklin and how he was looking on his dying bed for comfort via a picture of Christ, and he said,

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Oh, it was a noble picture, sure enough. It was the picture of our Savior on the cross. So happy Franklin died, blessed in death, with his closing eyes piously fixed upon Jesus.

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And there's no historical evidence for that at all. So that's the humor there,

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I guess. But it sounds so good. It's like the mother who gets interviewed by the TV show and her son has committed an axe murder and the son has been convicted red -handed and she says,

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My son didn't do it. And basically she's probably saying, I love my son. Let's talk a little bit about Jesus in pop culture.

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Tell me about the whole Jesus is my boyfriend thing. Did you coin that or did Mark Driscoll coin that?

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No, I didn't coin that. Actually, I think that first showed up, I can't remember the author's name, in an old magazine that IVP used to publish.

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And it was coined early on as a criticism of the contemporary

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Christian music that basically speaks of Jesus, love for Jesus, in romantic sort of ways.

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And so it came up with this idea that all you have to do is take a typical pop love song, pull out

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Bobby or whatever the guy's name is that the person's singing to, put in Jesus, and now all of a sudden you have a

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Christian song. So he came up with these Jesus is my boyfriend songs. Yeah, Debbie Boone, you light up my life.

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Yeah, precisely. So the ambiguity there is even more telling.

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And her dad, of course, factors into the story because Pat Boone was in the 60s and in the 70s when

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Christian contemporary music was starting up with the Jesus movement, people out in California, most of them were getting baptized in Pat Boone's pool in his

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Beverly Hills home. So all these stoned musicians would come to Pat Boone's house.

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He'd tell them about Christ, they'd get saved, and then they'd go out the patio door and go out back and jump in the pool and they were baptized.

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And next thing you know we have Christian contemporary music industry.

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And you have in this chapter Jack Hiles preaching a sermon in 1971 entitled

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Jesus Had Short Hair. Jesus had short hair. So now you've got the counter to the

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Jesus movement where they saw Jesus as a hippie. He was a countercultural rebel hippie with long hair, wearing sandals.

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I mean you can see where the hippies that hate Ashbury just love this. Well, to counter this,

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Jack Hiles, very conservative, comes out with the Jesus Had Short Hair sermon.

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So Jesus is now a cultural conformist who even cut his hair short to show his conservatism.

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That was his answer to the Jesus movement and the hippies. Wasn't that kind of like Paul having

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Timothy circumcised? You have a quote here regarding this whole music issue and I am in complete agreement with you because what

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Christians do as they follow the world is they usually do things too late and they do it poorly.

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Hank Hill, although I've never seen King of the Hill, the animated series, said in relation to Christian rock in your book, you aren't making

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Christianity better, you're just making rock and roll worse. That is so true.

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It's just a cheesy knockoff of what the world does so often. Yeah. And these things are fun, like I said.

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I try to bring some humor into the book and I enjoy talking about the book. But the thing is here, we've got to look at how others look at us.

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And I think sometimes that self -awareness, we're not always comfortable with it. But we really need to hear what others think about us.

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And I think sometimes the stuff we do to a watching world just looks silly.

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And the gospel really suffers for it. We think we're being relevant and connecting. And boy, sometimes they get us for what we really are.

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Well, we're talking to Stephen Nichols, author of Jesus Made in America, IVP book, A Cultural History from the

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Puritans to the Passions of Christ, really talking about how people make

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God in their own image. He's kind of this malleable piece of clay, and everyone seems to want

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Jesus to be just like them. Dr. Nichols, tell us a little bit about the next chapter that I'm looking at here,

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Jesus on the Big Screen. You quote Brooks, every Jesus film has been about the current movement or moment.

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What do you mean by that? Yeah, well this chapter explores all the Jesus films.

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And again, here's where it's really easy, because when you go to film, you've got to fill in a lot of things.

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You've got to fill in dialogue. You've got to fill in, obviously, how he looked. So I think it's a medium that sort of lends itself to being more about the current moment than it does about Jesus.

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Probably one of the best films is the Campus Crusade, the Jesus film that's been shown around the world and tries to be very true to the biblical dialogue.

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But when you take that one out of the mix, all of the other movies, whether it's The Passion of the

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Christ or The Last Temptation, Martin Scorsese's, which of course was very controversial.

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In fact, it's interesting that two of the most controversial films of the entire 20th century were

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Martin Scorsese's Last Temptation and Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, and controversial for different reasons.

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But they have to fill in a lot of places in the text that aren't there to sort of make the story work on screen.

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And I think that's where the influence comes, the cultural influence comes in. So you would say that it's not necessarily seeing a picture of Jesus that is incorrect, but what the theology is behind the movie, that would be the thing that we'd have to watch out for.

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Would that be a correct statement? Yeah, I think so. The Passion of the

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Christ was an interesting movie, and certainly a lot of people use it for evangelistic purposes.

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I heard stories of churches that would rent out a storefront next to a movie theater and try to present the gospel to people as they were coming out kind of a thing.

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But when you look at the gospel accounts and then you look at The Passion, clearly the gospel accounts talk about the physical suffering of Christ.

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But The Passion of Christ just sort of elongates it in a way that even the

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Scripture doesn't present it that way. And, of course, what's really going on in the cross is not just the physicality, but that separation of Christ from God, that breaking of the

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Trinity, and Christ bearing the cup of God's wrath of sin and paying for our sin. How do you put that on the screen?

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You can put the physicality of it, but to get the real theological meaning of what's happening there, a film just can't cut it.

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It's interesting, yes. How do you show the wrath of God and propitiation being made at Calvary?

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The Scriptures say that the world went dark from noon to three, and many times

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I see in the Old Testament darkness as the judgment of God. And so I guess you could have three hours of darkness and sit through that.

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I'm not sure if that would sell well. Tell us a little bit about chapter 7,

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Jesus on a bracelet. Now, when I read the part about Charlton Heston, I almost fell off my seat.

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We're talking to Stephen Nichols, IVP book, Jesus Made in America. Did you really talk to Charlton Heston?

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That's a true story. I'm so glad. That's my favorite paragraph in the whole book.

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Oh, you've got to tell. We've got about six minutes left. Go ahead and elongate. Speaking of elongation, go ahead and tell us the story.

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Yeah, well, back when I was in seminary, I went to the Christian Booksellers Association, and these days it's no longer called that.

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It's now called the International Christian Retailer Show, which shows you, you know, Christian bookstores have gone away from books and are now trinkets.

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That's a proper title, at least. Exactly. But at that time it was still called the

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CBA, Christian Booksellers Association. It was in Anaheim, California. Went there, and Charlton Heston had just narrated a video of the

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Holy Land and then narrated an audio of the Bible, and they were selling it, or promoting it.

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And they had an autograph table with Charlton Heston. And at the time, I don't know if your listeners remember this, but there were these series of Bud Light commercials that were running with Charlton Heston in them.

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And so when it came my time to go up to the table, I said to him, I really liked you in those

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Bud Light commercials. And I don't know if he was offended because, you know, here he was,

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Ben -Hur. He was Moses. He was Planet of the Apes. And here this, you know, 20 -something punk is coming up to him and talking about a commercial.

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He literally, like, waved me, pushed me with his hand and looked at the next person to come up and get the autograph.

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But then what I found out later was, I don't think I put this in the book, but what I found out later was, because of those

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Bud Light commercials, there were people who were picketing him for being at the Christian Booksellers Association.

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Really? So apparently on his way, like, out of the limo and into the venue and then back into the limo, he was getting accosted by picketers.

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And so maybe that's why he was a little grumpy. But that was my Charlton Heston experience.

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Well, maybe you should have given him a dozen of the witnessing golf balls that have the John 316 on them.

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That's a true story, too. Well, go ahead. Oh, no, no, you go ahead.

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Well, I was just going to say, we've got about three minutes left, Dr. Nichols, and we've done some critique. Tell our listeners who are actual

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Christians, they have been born again by the Spirit of God, give them a couple minutes of exhortation on where they can find the real

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Jesus and maybe some practical things they can do to make sure they know who the real Jesus is.

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Well, I appreciate that, and that's really the whole point of the book, because we can point our fingers at others, but the real question is, how susceptible are we personally to our own predilections and our own cultural pressures?

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And I think we need that self -awareness and self -criticism so we can have that sort of healthy, sound doctrine.

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But I think the bottom line issue here is we've got to take Jesus as he comes to us. You know, we are very good about talking about Jesus as our friend, and certainly

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Jesus is full of mercy and a friend of sinners. But he's also the righteous, holy judge, and he's

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God, and there's that piece to it. So we can't have a pick -and -choose Jesus. We need to do the full justice to Jesus as he comes to us in the

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Gospels. And when we take an honest look at that, Jesus is very complex, and he's hard to fit into a political party's ideology, or he's hard to fit into a cultural norm.

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He very much transcends those things. And so if we're going to be honest disciples of Christ, we can't pick and choose the

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Jesus that we want to follow or the Jesus we want to emulate. We have to take Jesus as he comes to us in his fullness and in his complexity in the

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Gospels. And that's the Jesus we also need to present to a world that really needs him.

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Well, that's a great answer. And when I look at Colossians, for instance, or the book of Hebrews, the great high priest, or, of course, the

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Gospels, we just see Christ who looks nothing like the man -made

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Christ that we as society have come up with. We see him as a king and alpha and omega and the surety and the sun.

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And so I try to get our people who are listening and those here at the church to read the Gospels.

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And I was listening to S. Lewis Johnson the other day, and he said the Americans' problems usually come, evangelicals' problems come, because they don't read their

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Bibles enough. And so if people are listening today, I'd encourage you to open up the book of Matthew and read it, and you'll never see anyone like Jesus Christ because there's no one like him because he's the

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God -man. That's great. See, I start preaching now all of a sudden. I'm supposed to interview, but I'm supposed to preach.

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It's in your blood. It is. Stephen Nichols, Jesus Made in America. I'd encourage our listeners to get the book on IVP Academic.

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There are other great books he has on other publishers, with other publishers. The Reformation, How a

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Monk and a Mallet Changed the World. I really appreciated that book as well. Ten seconds to go.

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Do you have any other book in the works right now, Dr. Nichols? Well, I just had a book come out called Church History ABCs.

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So it's a great book for kids. Introduce them to some of the great heroes of church history. Perfect.

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For those that like more information, you can go to IVP's website or Amazon, our Christian book distributors.

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God bless you, Stephen. Oh, thank you. God bless you too, Mike. Thanks for having me. It was great. No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Abendroth is a production of Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.

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Bethlehem Bible Church is a Bible -teaching church firmly committed to unleashing the life -transforming power of God's Word through verse -by -verse exposition of the sacred text.

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Please come and join us. Our service times are Sunday morning at 1015 and in the evening at 6. We're right on Route 110 in West Boylston.

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You can check us out online at bbchurch .org or by phone at 508 -835 -3400.

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The thoughts and opinions expressed on No Compromise Radio do not necessarily reflect those of WVNE, its staff or management.