#88 What If Pentecost Happened Today? TikTok, AI, and the Tower of Babel + Dr. Greg Forster

My question today is, if Pentecost happened today, what would it look like? Would we see it on TikTok?

Would it be translated on podcasts? Would we have AI at foot? And so today

I have an expert, Dr. Greg Forrester. Pentecost is really the central action in the

Bible that marks that transition from God's people having their own country to God's people being a people around the world.

So it seems like that Pentecost was the pinnacle of this change. For this moment in Pentecost, the walls between cultures dissolve.

If Pentecost happened today, where would you kind of expect to see it? Hello, hello.

Welcome to Biblically Speaking. My name is Cassian Bellino, and I'm your host. In this podcast, we talk about the

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Thank you so much for listening. Now let's get to the show. Hello, hello. Welcome to Biblically Speaking. My name is

Cassian Blino, and I am your host. Quick question about Pentecost. I'm sure that all of us remember kind of that vision of chaos, those visions of many languages being spoken.

My question today is, if Pentecost happened today, what would it look like? Would we see it on TikTok?

Would it be translated on podcasts? Would we have AI at foot? Would we be blaming

AI? Would we be thinking it's AI? How would we even recognize it? So in Acts 2, the

Holy Spirit, for those that don't remember, the Holy Spirit comes and people don't leave their cultures behind.

Everybody starts speaking the languages of the world despite there being many cultures present, and before not being able to speak all these conversations.

It's like if Times Square, suddenly you could hear all of the languages of your culture being spoken in places they do not speak your language.

And so today I have an expert, Dr. Greg Forrester. You are the president of Karim Fellowship and the affiliate professor of biblical and systemic theology at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.

You're also the author of 10 books, the editor of six, and your most recent book is

Nationalism and Heresy in Augustine. And today we're gonna be mentioning a few things about that book because it just released.

I can't wait to get into that. But your major scholarly focus is gonna be on the structures of culture and civilization, family, work, education, business, politics.

And due to your work, you've done major research on Pentecost. Welcome to the show. Why did you decide on Pentecost?

Well, I didn't set out wanting to study Pentecost. I've set out wanting to understand how the church fits into culture.

We live our lives in cultures around the world. And one of the biggest challenges

Christians face is how can I be faithful and at the same time live as part of the community around me?

It would be really easy to be faithful if we could just withdraw and not have anything to do with the world around us.

And it would be really easy to live in the world if we didn't care whether or not we were faithful. But to be faithful and to be living out in the world, that's a tough challenge.

And I began looking into it. And what I discovered is that historically, for most of the history of Christianity, Pentecost was understood as the baseline for thinking about this problem.

You have a big transition from God's people in the Old Testament time.

They have their own separate country. They have their own special culture. And so if you want to follow

God, the best thing to do is travel to that country and make yourself part of that culture.

But in the New Testament era and continuing to today, that's no longer the case.

Why do God's people no longer have their own single special country where everyone is supposed to move there and have a special Christian culture that is separate from all the others?

And Pentecost is really the central action in the Bible that marks that transition from God's people having their own country to God's people being a people around the world.

I've never even thought of it that way, that his nation of people were physically a nation in a particular,

I feel like today we would call that a cult. Like those people out in the field that believe that one thing like that was the norm for the early

Israelites, for the early church. Well, for God's people in the

Old Testament time, God gave them a special covenant under Moses that said,

I'm giving you this land. This is a special land. It's not like all the other places and you're gonna be a special nation, not like all the other nations.

Now that didn't mean they were supposed to hate all the other people. Their job was to love all the other nations of the world and bless them, but to do it from their own home base.

They did have their own physical territory and they had a set of laws. God gave them a set of criminal laws.

It's all this specific stuff about how the economy is supposed to work and how family law works and all that stuff.

He wrote all their laws for them and said, here are the laws you're going to live under. He established a kingship for them.

First, God was their king and when they demanded a human king, he gave them a human king.

So he gave them their own system and he said, be my special country, my special people group in their own land under their own laws.

And from that home base, you are to bless the world. But that all gets inverted when

Jesus comes. After Jesus comes and accomplishes his saving work, he says, now you go out.

You don't have a home base anymore. Now you go out to the world because you bring them my message and my love and my holiness.

I'm sending you, right? So there's an inversion from a come in movement in the

Old Testament to a sent out movement in the New Testament. So it seems like the

Pentecost was the pinnacle of this change. This was the tipping point of these people over here where they were kind of separate, very set apart into a more integrated within the larger cultures of non -Christian beliefs.

But Pentecost is that moment that they mix. Yes, and the significance of that is it's because Jesus has done his saving work and now

God's people are going to be different because the saving work has been accomplished.

Jesus says, it's to your advantage that I go away because if I go away,

I'll send the helper, right? That's the Holy Spirit. So Jesus accomplished our salvation but now it needs to be applied.

John Calvin famously said, Jesus dying and rising again for us would be of no value at all unless we get connected to it.

It has to somehow become ours, right? Jesus dies and rises again, but until it becomes applied to me, it's of no value to me.

And that's what the Holy Spirit does. The Holy Spirit is poured out in a whole new way. Of course, the

Holy Spirit has been present and active before, but in a much more limited way.

At Pentecost, the Holy Spirit hits the church like a freight train and their lives are transformed, their hearts are transformed.

And because Jesus now has accomplished his saving work, we can be the people who live in that resurrection power that Jesus has accomplished.

Okay, wow. I wanna get into a little bit of exegetical understanding. So what

I wanna do before we understand the larger concepts and applications on how it brings people in, I'm gonna read

Acts 2 verses 1 through 11 where this is all taking place because maybe there's somebody listening that's like, what is

Pentecost? And maybe it was just a sermon that was too long ago, but this is what happens at Pentecost, which like put it in modern terms, how this would look like in your head if it happened today.

Okay, so starting with chapter two. When the feast of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place. Without warning, there was a sound like a strong wind gale force.

I'm sorry, this is the message version, if anybody is confused. So, okay.

There was a strong wind gale force. No one can tell where it came from. It filled the whole building. Then like a wildfire, the

Holy Spirit spread throughout their ranks and they started speaking in a number of different languages as the Spirit prompted them.

There were many Jews staying in Jerusalem just then, devout pilgrims from all over the world. When they heard the sound, they came on the run.

Then when they heard one after another, their own mother tongues being spoken, they were blown away. They couldn't for the life of them figure out what was going on and kept saying, aren't these all

Galileans? How come we're hearing them talk in our various mother tongues? And then it lists all of the countries.

So they're speaking our languages, describing God's mighty works. So that's insane.

What is going on in the world when this is happening? Why was this, you know, I think we always like in my head, like, oh, back then, crazy things were happening all the time.

This seems pretty crazy, but was it also crazy to them? It is a very freaky experience and it would have been for them as well, because we have to remember that miracles are very unusual in history.

God does these amazing works that stand out and really point to the fact that God is doing a special thing.

You know, when somebody walks on water or when the dead rise, that's a marker that God is doing something really extraordinary, but it has to be extraordinary or it wouldn't be a miracle, right?

If people walked on water every single day, you wouldn't call it a miracle. You would call it natural. That would be science, right?

If you could walk on water anytime you wanted, walking on water would not be a miracle. It would be science, right?

And our physicists would study it and understand it and explain it, right? Because it would be normal, just like gravity, right?

Things fall when you drop them. Physicists explain that because it's normal. Miracles are not normal.

That's part of what makes them a sign of God doing something unusual. And there's a connection between the sign, the miracle, and what

God is doing, right? Jesus walks on water to demonstrate his mastery over nature, right?

Jesus made water and he can do whatever he wants with it, right? Jesus feeds 5 ,000 people miraculously from just a handful of loaves and fishes to show that he nourishes people and takes care of them, right?

That he cares for their needs, right? Again and again, the miracles are not just arbitrary. It's not like magicians waving their wands and pulling a rabbit out of their hat.

It's not just random and unconnected. The miracles always show you something about God, right?

That walking on water shows mastery of nature and so on. So at Pentecost, you have these dramatic visions and sounds, right?

You have this loud sound of wind and you have tongues of fire. Well, they would have known that those are symbols of the

Spirit of God in the Old Testament because they had their Hebrew scriptures and both wind and fire are key symbols of the

Holy Spirit in the Old Testament. So this is announcing the presence of the

Holy Spirit. But then something that they couldn't possibly have anticipated happens. They hear one another speaking in their own languages.

And this reverses the story of Babel. We'll get into that later,

I know. But since the Tower of Babel, the human race has been divided and unable to understand each other because they speak different languages.

There's no precedent for God making cultures able to understand one another past that language barrier.

So if you spoke a certain language, you wouldn't hear it. This would have been shocking. Oh. Like you wouldn't have multilingual people.

Well, people could learn other languages, but that's one person doing the work of learning someone else's language.

Then that one person can operate over here in this language group and operate over there in that language group.

But the groups are still separate, right? I as an individual could know both

Hebrew and Greek and I could go to Jerusalem and speak Hebrew or Aramaic.

I could go to Jerusalem and speak Aramaic and I can go to Rome and speak Latin. But Jerusalem and Rome don't therefore understand each other.

That's why these very few people, because until the modern world, very few people spoke more than one language.

These people who could move from one world to another were unusual and they had a very unique standing.

Like this person could actually go to Rome and understand what they're saying. That's really crazy.

But nobody could actually bring the cultures themselves together. You're always either operating in one culture or operating in the other culture.

For this moment in Pentecost, the walls between cultures dissolve. And I speak and one person hears me speaking in Aramaic and another person hears me speaking in Greek and another person hears me speaking in Arabic.

The dividing walls have all been broken down. You mentioned

Tower of Babel. How is that connected? This is, I think, the key to understanding

Pentecost and the people involved at the time, they knew their Hebrew scriptures so they would recognize this connection.

When God made the world, we all spoke one language. And as a result of that, you can think of the whole human race as one culture.

Because language is, it's called, the saying is language is the storehouse of culture.

If we speak the same language, then we're operating within the same cultural environment. So the whole human race is essentially one nation or one culture because they all speak one language.

But then humanity in its sinful rebellion begins using all the power

God put in us to do things against God, to defy

God's commands and to set ourselves up, is secure and safe without God's protection.

The actual beginning of the Babel story is a technological innovation. We invented a better brick.

And that was as revolutionary for them as the invention of the internet or AI are for us.

They have a better brick. And so they say, ah, with our superior brick technology, we can make a city that will be bigger than anything anyone's ever imagined.

The tower at Babel is actually a city that is built on layers going, floors going up and up.

If you look at all the classic depictions of Babel, you'll see it's a ziggurat. It's a pyramid shaped structure.

And every time you add something new to it, the pyramid gets bigger and bigger and bigger. So it's not a tower like we think of a cylinder going up.

It's a big city going up and up. And what they said is with our better bricks, we can be secure and safe here in this one place.

God told us to fill the world, but we're not gonna do that. We're all gonna gather in one place and we're gonna be secure in ourselves in defiance of God.

And God looks at that and says, wow, I made these human beings to do really amazing things, but they are using their power for evil.

So I have to limit their power. I have to limit their ability to get things done.

So he confuses their language and suddenly they all speak different languages. And it's a funny thing.

Human ability to do things depends on cooperation. Your ability to do things and my ability to do things is very, very limited if we can't work together with other people.

But when we can work together with other people, we can get much more done, right? Two people working together don't get twice as much done.

They get four times as much done because they can specialize and exchange and all kinds of other things.

So by limiting our ability to cooperate, God limited our power. He had given us all this power to do things and he placed a limit on it because we were sinful and rebellious.

Right. And then when the saving work is accomplished and the Holy Spirit is being poured out so that a people is being reclaimed for God, he takes the limits off.

He's taking those training wheels back off the tricycle, right, the bicycle. He's saying, okay, now that you are a saved people following a resurrected

Messiah, you can handle this power. So I'm giving you the car keys back by making you able to understand.

Yes, we can now understand and cooperate with people who are culturally different because the

Holy Spirit makes us able to care more about the other person than we do about ourselves, to care more about what's right than about what my culture wants, right.

I care more about doing what's right than I care about being a good member of my group.

And that allows us to cooperate with people in other groups. It seems like we have a lot of responsibility now today, given the fact that we have things that can live translate in our ear and we have the ability to connect with anybody across the world and with Google Translate and just through the internet itself.

So it's almost like, what does that say about like unity today? It seems like there's a grander responsibility.

Right, in fact, brother Martin over here, Martin Luther King used to point to increasing technologies that connected the world more and more.

We can pick up a phone and talk to someone on the other side of the world. We can get on a plane and fly there.

And this was totally new. And he said, we're going to need goodwill and understanding more in a world where we are better connected.

Because if we don't have goodwill and understanding when we're better connected, then the connections are going to drive us against each other, right?

The more connected I am to people I hate, the worse off we both are.

If I'm going to be more connected to people, it's all the more important that I love them better. So the demand for goodwill and understanding is going to be much greater in a better connected world.

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Take a breath, slow down, and dwell in the good things. Now back to the show. That makes sense.

Okay, so we've talked about what was happening before Pentecost, that there was this like post -Babel separation.

There was this, that culture over there that lives by its own rules, its own laws. They follow this Hebrew God.

And then Pentecost is like the enmeshment of now people have the opportunity. They get the car, the car keys back, and now they can love each other and work together and be cooperative and proactive.

So what happens after Pentecost? What happens right after? The church gets sent out into the world.

And part of the reason that happens is there's severe persecution in Jerusalem and Christians spread out because they're avoiding that persecution in Jerusalem.

But also God empowers the church with a desire to spread the word.

And, you know, Paul goes on his missionary journeys and others go on missionary journeys to spread the good news about what

God has done. And if you read the book of Acts, wherever they arrive, they arrive in places and they have to introduce people to the idea that God is now coming to them with a message of salvation.

At one point, Paul says, during the times of ignorance, God overlooked your rebellion against him, but now he's come here with a message of salvation.

And he has appointed a day where he's going to judge the world. So he commands all people to repent.

So this message comes to the nations as a new thing, right? God's not reached out to these nations before with a message of redemption and reconciliation.

And so both for bad reasons and for good reasons, right? There's persecution going on in Jerusalem, but there's also a desire to bring the news to the nations.

Christians spread out and you see churches getting planted throughout the Mediterranean world and gradually further than that.

And Christians now have to live in places like Greece and Rome and Africa, and eventually, even further afield,

Spain, and they get to Asia. Like lots of people are not aware that there are Christians in Japan in the early middle ages.

It's, gospel got there much faster than most people think. So the message goes out and Christians have to ask, well, what does it mean to live as a follower of Jesus, you know, in Northern Germany in the third century, right?

Or in Spain or in Africa? And that's tough, right? It's tough to be a

Jesus follower in these cultures that are dedicated to pagan gods and don't really like the

Christian message very much. It can be very disruptive. Yeah, and it's just, the thing that you said at the beginning of all that, that really blew my mind is that, you know,

I think as a Sunday school Christian, you think, okay, yeah, Jesus had an amazing ministry and then he died and his death was so impactful that everyone ran out of their house to start spreading the gospel.

But I think I've underestimated what Acts really did, what Pentecost did, because, and like, correct me if I'm wrong, if Pentecost didn't happen, then there would have maybe been that remaining seclusion.

It would have stayed an isolated cult in a designated area. But because of Pentecost, because those keys were given back to them to drive that car away, that is how we got that massive global gospel spreading of, you know, in these countries.

Yes, that's right. And this was always part of the promise of salvation. When God makes the promise of salvation to Abraham, he says,

Abraham, all the nations of the world are going to get a blessing from the promise

I'm making to you. And God reaffirms that when the patrimony is passed from Abraham to Isaac, he says to Isaac, all the nations of the world.

And when it's passed to Jacob, he says to Jacob, all the nations of the world. And then later the prophets in Israel begin filling in more details about this.

They talk about the message going out and people around the world turning to the true

God, right? People in these pagan empires. Isaiah has these mind -blowing images of these pagan empires that are enemies of God all turning to the true

God and worshiping the true God. And I'm sure when people, you know, when Isaiah shared this, people must've been saying, you're nuts,

Isaiah, right? These pagan empires are never gonna turn to the true God. So it was always part of the promise.

When the Messiah comes, he's gonna do the saving work. Then he's gonna send you out to the nations of the world to reclaim the nations for God.

Yeah. It always happens in the least expected way. You know, like God is so predictably unpredictable.

And so even when you hear that, that all the nations of the world, it's like, okay. So, you know, it makes me think about the promises of revelation of like, okay, so like we're gonna see it on an iPhone.

We're gonna see him come down from a cloud. It's like, I don't know, you know, it's gonna happen in a way that we can't even fathom right now.

The same way no one could have fathomed Pentecost. Well, that's right. God's promises are always fulfilled in unexpected ways, but they do authentically fulfill the promise.

One of the promises in revelation is that the nations will be redeemed, not just individual people.

If you read Revelation 21 and 22, this theme is actually hit really hard. It says the nations will come to Jerusalem and the kings of the nation, the new

Jerusalem, not the old Jerusalem, the new Jerusalem that comes down from heaven. The nations will come and the kings of the nations will bring the glories of the nations into the new

Jerusalem and lay them at Jesus's feet. And there'll be a tree of life and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.

It's just like nations, nations, nations, nations, almost like God thinks this is really important. Or Pentecost itself is a surprising fulfillment.

So if you knew that the nations of the world were separated at Babel by being given different languages, if I told you

God's gonna reunite the nations, you would probably say, oh, he's gonna make them all speak the same language again.

Yeah. Right? Because we all spoke the same language and when it was time to divide us because we were sinful,

God made us speak different languages. If I tell you he's gonna reunite the nations, you probably say, oh, he's gonna make us all speak one language again.

But guess what? He has a card up his sleeve you're not expecting. He's gonna glorify himself by the diversity of the nations and revelations hits this too, every tribe, tongue and nation, right?

So all the Chinese Christians and the Ugandan Christians and the Brazilian Christians and the

American Christians are gonna glorify God in different ways. And he's gonna use that to show millions and millions of different facets of himself.

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Thank you so much. Now back to the show. Whoa, that's such a good tangent.

But okay, so now we kind of fast forward into like the present day. This is kind of post -Pentecost, but also happening today is you have

Christianity existing within pagan societies. You have Chinese Christians that operate within Tao beliefs,

I believe, or just like paganistic beliefs or whatever it might be. You were mentioning before we jumped on that there needs to be a permeable membrane because at the end of the day, what is the downfall of an isolated

Christian community that does not go into those paganistic Tao, atheist communities?

This is really important for understanding how we live faithfully as Christians. I want to note first though, you don't have to go as far as China to find

Christians living in a pagan culture, but I won't press that too hard, but I will say this, every culture has both believing and unbelieving like elements.

So Christians are present everywhere. So there is a Christian influence in every culture in the world.

So, and including in China, right? Let's not think of China as a culture that has no Christian influence. There are millions of Christians in China and they have an impact on their world.

At the same time, every culture also has a lot of paganism in it, right? There's no culture in the world that's clean of that.

So we're all in this paradoxical space where Christian influence and anti -Christian influence are struggling for control of the culture.

This is just, and nobody can fully control a culture. Cultures can't be controlled in any kind of serious long -term way.

So it's a permanent struggle. And so Christians have got to learn to live in a world where we need to be faithful.

So it can't just be anything goes. We can't just go with the flow. We can't just say, well, whatever my culture wants, we should just do that so that we'll be thought of as nice people, right?

That's a perennial temptation. We want our neighbors to think of us as nice people so that they'll like Christians and they'll like Christianity.

But it can't be anything goes because we have to be faithful. We have to be holy. We have to put

God first. And that means we need a Christian community that is distinct.

We can't just say, well, I'm a Christian out there in the world when I'm on the job, when

I'm voting, when I'm in school. We have to have a distinct place where we say this is the

Christian community where we think together about how to be Christian, where we encourage and build one another up in being

Christian, where we love each other, where we care for each other when we need it. We form that Christian identity and character.

And we have that Christian mission that gets sent out from those communities. At the same time, while there's a temptation to knock all the walls down and just have anything goes, there's also a temptation to build a big wall around the

Christian community, right? A big, high, thick wall and say, well, the world is evil.

The world is pagan. The world is unholy. What we want is to protect our Christian space so we can have purity and holiness inside this

Christian space. And the problem with that is, A, you're just abandoning the mission to bring the love of God to the world, right?

The reason they went out from Jerusalem and went to all those pagan countries in the first place is because the mission of God is out in the world.

The mission of God is not inside the church building. It's outside. We form ourselves inside the church building for the

Christian mission that's outside the church building. But the other problem is when you build that wall, that wall starts to form you, right?

You start by saying, I want this space to be protected so it can be formative, so it can help me develop

Christian character. I'm gonna build a wall around the space to protect my formation. But the wall also becomes formative.

You become a wall builder. You become a person whose job is to shut the world out.

And it becomes a spirit of hostility. You're constantly having to build the wall higher, to make the wall thicker.

The wall gets knocked down, so you have to rebuild it, right? So we get into this mode of hostility and opposition, which is really not

God's love for the world. Right, right. And it sounds like that almost leads to a fragile faith because although you might have a big, strong wall, you don't really have a strong defense.

Yes, that's right. In fact, it's caused by a fragile faith. The reason people go into this isolationist mode is because they know that their faith is fragile.

At some deep level, they know that they don't have a strong enough trusting

God to handle the dynamic and chaotic world outside the walls.

That protective movement where we withdraw and build a wall around ourselves is because we lack confidence that the

Holy Spirit will empower us for a mission to the world, right? The more we trust that the

Holy Spirit is in us and is working in us, the more we'll be able to get out of those walls and be confident in a chaotic and really dark world.

Interesting. It's such a parallel because before there was a wall, before Pentecost, they were a separate nation in a separate place.

And they were still kind of fostering it and it was growing and they were nurturing this faith. And then it basically hit its ministry with Jesus coming and spreading the gospel.

And once Pentecost happened, they were invited to go back out and say, now to knock on other people's walls, to say, hey, let me climb over your pagan wall, let me in and let me bring my

Christian faith in with me without being overtaken by your pagan faith. No, that's right.

The New Testament describes the Old Testament time as a time of training and education.

God did in fact set his people aside because they needed to learn, right? They needed to grow to the point where they were ready for the

Messiah to come to save them and have the Holy Spirit poured out on them so that they were equipped to go out into the world.

So it's right to have that period. It's actually compared to childhood, right? It's right to have that period in childhood where your parents protect you.

That's right because you're not ready yet and you need to grow, you need to be trained, you need to be formed.

But it's not right to remain a child when you ought to be an adult, right?

Paul says, when I became an adult, I put away childish things, right? We have to, we are now, because the

Holy Spirit's been poured out on us, we are now spiritual adults and we have to be out in the world handling the tough things that adults have to handle.

Wow. Okay, so once we're in those communities, I feel like I really found

God, if I'm gonna be honest, when I went to Thailand. I was living alone for my first time, but I was living in this very polytheistic, very

Hindu -Buddhist culture. But then I found this little community of Christians that were so supportive and so loving and that's where the idea for biblically speaking was born.

But while I was in Thailand, I wanted to honor the temples, I wanted to honor my friends' culture.

And so I would go to temples with them and I watched them pray and give offerings and there's tons of holidays for the

Buddhist gods in Thailand. So for people like that, let's modernize this, is you don't wanna be preaching, you don't wanna be that person that's like, sorry, can't go in and support your culture.

You wanna be loving because you have to go into the shadows to bring people out, but you also can't be silent and passive.

And so in a modern sense, what is Pentecost teaching us on how to operate? Really, I find it really helpful to think in terms of transformation, right?

Neither isolating nor just assimilating and going with the flow, but rather seeking transformation.

When Paul in Romans 12 wants to encourage people to be holy and to be on mission for God, he says, be transformed by the renewing of your mind, don't be conformed to this world.

But what prevents conformity to the world is not isolation. What prevent, and in fact, in another place,

Paul says, watch out for people who say, do not taste, do not touch, do not handle. Many people leave out the last part.

He says, these rules are of no value in promoting holiness. It doesn't even accomplish the holiness it's supposed to accomplish, right?

Nevermind all the other problems with it. You're not even getting holy by doing this, right? So he doesn't say, don't be conformed to the world, isolate yourself.

He says, don't be conformed to the world, be transformed by the renewing of your mind, right? And so it's the

Holy Spirit changing us through the experience of everyday life on mission for God, and also the experience of the

Christian community, worshiping with God's people and engaging in spiritual disciplines like prayer and Bible study, right?

These things transform us so that we can be different people and when our neighbors see us out there in our jobs, in our communities, in our neighborhoods, in schools, they look and say, why are those people so weird?

They're not like us. They don't do things like us. What's wrong with them, right? But sometimes in a good way, sometimes they'll be hostile.

Nothing can stop that. But very often that will say, you know, there's something about that.

So that's, we wanna stand out, not because we've isolated ourselves and made ourselves into a hostile group, but stand out because we're present in these spaces on mission for God and doing things in a transformed way.

Do you think, like, what are some healthy boundaries that you think Christians should have in other cultures that, you know, is weird and open, but also protects the faith?

Through my mind, so I'm a fan of Dallas Willard and to my mind, Dallas Willard really got it right when he said, the first rule is a quiet, but firm non -cooperation with things that are clearly wrong.

And we often skip that. We are looking for something flashier. We're looking for something, you know, with more razzle dazzle, but actually simply declining to participate in things that are unambiguously wrong is first of all, the most important thing, because if you compromise yourself by going along when you know it's wrong and you go along anyway, if you compromise yourself that way, nothing else is going to go right, right?

You've spiritually, you know, fumbled on the one yard line, right? On your own one yard line, right?

You've spiritually tripped and fallen on the very first step of the dance, right? If you cooperate with things that you know are wrong and we have to keep that front and center, that's always the first rule.

And I'll tell you something, it gets noticed. It gets noticed. We don't notice it as much as the world notices it, right?

Silence, non -participation gets noticed. So that's not at all like a movement of withdrawal because you're not removing yourself.

You're present, but you're not participating in the thing that's wrong. The second thing I would say is we're made in the image of a creative God and we are called to be creative ourselves.

So when we face a tough choice, when the world wants us to compromise, the world will give us binary choices.

It'll say, you have to do this or that. And those are your only two choices, right? You know, sign the paper that you know is telling lies or quit your job.

Those are your only two choices, right? But we have the power of creativity and we can say, instead of doing it that way, what if we did it this way and offer people an alternative that is morally right and accomplishes the goal?

Usually it'll accomplish the goal better, right? Now, worldly powers will be upset because we are in fact circumventing their wrongness and we have to be ready to take some blow back there.

But instead of accepting the A, B choice, right? This or that, that we're presented with, we have to be ready to think creatively, to have imaginations, right?

You have to have a good imagination to be a Christian on mission for God in the world, because the world will try and put you into a rut and you have to be able to imagine how do

I do something different that will keep me faithful and get the mission done?

Yeah, I mean, it's so empowering to be like, we have that spirit of creativity within us, that thing that makes

God unpredictably predictable, like we have the power of the resurrection within us. And so, I think it's hard because we want to believe that we are choosing option

C, that we are being creative, but sometimes there's just trends and there's the world and that there's just things, like how do we discern the spirit aside from getting caught up in cultural trends?

Right, no, you are right that although we want to be looking for those creative alternatives, you can't always do that.

Sometimes you actually have to make a hard binary choice. That's just the way life is. And we really need wisdom.

So you talked about discerning the spirit, discernment. So along with imagination, we need wisdom, which, excuse me, involves spending a lot of time on those spiritual disciplines, being in church and worshiping the

Lord sincerely from our heart every Sunday and spending time in the Bible every day, spending time with the

Lord in prayer every day, and not just going through the motions either, right? For years, for years,

I did daily prayer and daily Bible study because somebody told me I had to do it and I didn't understand what it was supposed to be all about and what it was supposed to be for.

I just, and it was boring and it was a burden and I was checking off boxes on a list and it was just, it was awful, right?

Eventually, I figured out prayer is supposed to be intimacy with God. And that was the beginning of a long, difficult path to figure out, well, how do

I have intimacy with God when I spend time with Him every day? It was not easy. But eventually, if you stick to it, you'll be able to accomplish that and spending time in the

Word to seek wisdom, to grow in wisdom. David Miller, my friend at the

Princeton Faith and Work Center likes to say, it sure would be nice if God sent me an email every morning telling me what

I'm supposed to do today. Right, that would be easy. But the problem with that, and this is what

David's point is, the problem with that is you would never learn, you would never grow if God sent you an email every morning telling you what you're supposed to do every day.

We're supposed to be studying the Bible and being in Christian community, learning with others about what

God wants from us so that we gain discernment, so that we become people who are not carried about by winds of TikTok trends, if I may appropriate a

Bible verse, but I think it's a valid application. That's funny. Yeah, I mean, there's just so much here to unpack and I feel like we've gone through it quite well.

I mean, what did it look like before Pentecost, the isolated societies? And then within Pentecost, what was that enmeshment, the keys given back to the car?

And then we were able to go out into the world. And once we were out into the world, how are we remaining in the spirit and discerning of that option

C where we were supportive and loving and bringing people into the church, but not affected by the world? So I guess like my final kind of thing

I wanna focus on here is like, if Pentecost happened today, which if we had that enmeshment of our faith into a secular world, where would you kind of expect to see it?

Do you think it would happen? Yeah, I'll just pose it there. And when you ask if Pentecost happened today, it makes me want to draw a distinction.

On the one hand, Pentecost is a unique event, just like the cross is a unique event, right?

If Jesus were dying on a cross today, what would that look like? It's kind of an unnerving question.

But on the other hand, the difference in the Holy Spirit's work is that Jesus's work is finished and accomplished and done.

But the Holy Spirit's work is every day and every moment of every day. So there is a real sense in which

Pentecost is always happening because the Holy Spirit is always dwelling within us.

Because this is one of the biggest themes in the New Testament, that we are the temple of God, right?

In the Old Testament, there was a physical temple, a building, and God's special presence was uniquely in that building.

You could not stand in the special presence of God, the glorious presence with the light so bright that you can't even look at it, right?

You could only get that in the inner sanctum of the temple. But now we are the temple, and God lives in every

Christian the same way he lived in the temple in the Old Testament period. So the Holy Spirit is always present in us, excuse me, being poured out afresh, right?

So we can always turn to God and say, pour out your spirit on me again, because he's always there and he's always being poured out on us.

And we can invite that and receive it intentionally. So everything that happens to us is an opportunity to experience that transformation.

Fred Sanders said once, wherever you are and whatever situation you're in,

God sent you there. And Christians should think of themselves as sent people.

Because in the high priestly prayer, in the high priestly prayer, Jesus says, the

Father sent me into the world. And just as he sent me, I'm sending you into the world.

He said to every Christian. He says, I'm not just talking to you who are here in the room with me. I'm saying this for everyone who's ever going to believe in me.

The Father sent me into the world and just as he sent me, I'm sending you. So wherever you are, you can think

God sent me here. What did he send me here for? What can I do here that will accomplish the mission of God?

And that, if we take that seriously, we're gonna learn really quickly. We can't do that on our own.

We gotta get that Holy Spirit stirred up in us because God can do it. We can't do it.

Okay, so with that concept of God sent me into this situation, to this place, to this job, to this person, what lessons from Pentecost should we apply in that moment when we kind of carry that with us?

I would focus on two things. One is what the

New Testament calls hospitality. Now, we trip over that word because in English, especially in modern

English, we use that word to mean welcoming someone into your home. But the original

Greek term there is philozenos, which literally means love for strangers, love for people who are different, right?

A zenos in Greek is a person who's different from you, foreign to you, right?

Philozenos, love for the foreigner, love for the person who's different from me. Pentecost shows that the love that Christians are supposed to show to others because it's the love that God has poured out into them is a love that does not discriminate between cultures, classes, backgrounds, whatever.

I mean, read the book of James. James says, now I hear that when rich people come into your church, they get treated differently than when poor people come into your church.

I'm here to talk to you about that. That is not okay, right? James is the district attorney of the

New Testament. He's a very serious character. And what gets him angry is when people discriminate and they treat one person better than another, you know, for arbitrary reasons.

So we need to have that philozenos, that it's called hospitality. We love people even when they're different, when they're strange, when they're off -putting, when it's difficult.

And the other thing I would emphasize is we are people of hope, right? At Pentecost, they didn't just hear one another's languages.

They heard them talking the mighty works of God in other languages. They were talking about what

God was doing when they heard one another in other languages. And Peter then gives a sermon, right?

The capstone at the end of the Pentecost story is Peter goes out and he talks to the people who show up and say, what's going on?

What is this weirdness? Are you people drunk? What's, you know, it's the middle of the day. What are you drinking?

What's going on? And Peter gives this sermon about how God is saving the world, right? And God is at work in the world.

So we don't walk by sight. We walk by faith. However bad things look, we know

God is saving the world and we get to be part of this, a little part of that story, right?

So we're looking forward to the future where Jesus is gonna come back and fix everything in the world.

And then we ask, okay, how can I here now be a tiny little preview of what it's going to be like when

Jesus comes back and fixes the world? Oh my gosh. That was amazing.

I appreciate you going so deep into that because there's so much there that you just don't get when you read

Acts 2, 1 through 11 initially and even go forward. But it clearly is a pivotal moment in the timeline of the

Bible and just how we literally still see it today. You had a book that came out recently.

It was a Nationalism Heresy in Augustine. Tell me about it. It came to this because in the fourth century,

Christians were facing this really difficult problem. The Roman emperors had converted to Christianity.

And so you had two major camps in the church. In Europe, the dominant view was great.

The Roman emperors are Christian. Now the Roman empire is the church. And what we want to do is have the emperors conquer the world and make everybody

Christian. Eusebius, who is one of the most influential figures in the early fourth century, writes this amazing passage about how great it is that Constantine is going to conquer the world and force everybody at the point of a sword to be

Christian. And isn't that a wonderful, glorious thing? So great. I'm exaggerating a little bit for comedic effect, but this was a very serious problem as people really thought in these terms.

Meanwhile, in Africa, you had the opposite problem. You had isolationism because the

Roman emperors were oppressive to their African territories. And the African Christians said, okay,

Roman emperors, you're Christian now, so you're gonna stop oppressing your African territories, right?

And the Christian Roman emperors said, well, we'll get back to you on that.

But in the meantime, keep paying those taxes that are twice the size the Europeans pay. So the

African church did not think very much of the conversion of the Roman emperors to Christianity.

So they reacted into an equally problematic view that the Roman empire is evil and Christians should have nothing to do with it.

If you're a Christian, you're not allowed to be a Roman citizen because that's compromising your Christian faith.

You can't participate in any part of Roman society because Roman society is demonic, right?

So you have this extreme isolationism, which is the equal and opposite reaction to the

European problem, which is an extreme idolatry of political power. So Augustine is a man with a foot in both worlds.

He's born in Africa, he's educated in Europe, he returns to Africa and serves as a pastor in Africa.

He becomes a very important pastor in Africa. And he begins wrestling with this problem and he rebukes both the people in Europe who idolize

Roman power and the people in Africa who say, hey, you can't be a Roman citizen if you wanna be a good

Christian. And it was Augustine who kind of carved this path for thinking of ourselves as being good citizens of our nations without idolizing our nations and selling out to political power as the path to spiritual growth.

And it was Augustine really emphasized the importance of Pentecost. And I kept tripping over that when

I was studying Augustine, looking for his answers to these problems. He's really coming back to Pentecost a lot.

I gotta look into that. That was kind of the starting point for me in reorienting my thinking around biblical bases for thinking about the church and culture.

Wow, wow. So what was it about Pentecost that Augustine kept going back to that applied in that scenario?

The transition from the Old Testament time to the New Testament time. And here's an easy way to think of it.

Both the Europeans and the Africans were looking at the Old Testament model of a holy nation, right?

In the Old Testament, you have a special set apart holy nation. So for the Europeans, Rome was the holy nation, right?

And the Roman emperor is like the Israelite king. His job is to rule his country with Christian laws and enforce piety at the point of a sword.

Because in the Old Testament Israel, you did have civil laws against blasphemy and apostasy and all these other things, right?

So the Europeans were taking that Old Testament model and importing it to Rome. The Africans were viewing their churches as the holy nation, set apart, separated, right?

Like Old Testament Israel was separated and had a separate community with its own laws and its own culture and its own rules.

And what Augustine said is no, after Pentecost, you're not allowed to use Old Testament Israel as a political and social model.

It still matters, right? The story of what God did in Israel matters, but after Pentecost, it's no longer the model for social organization, right?

Now Pentecost is the model for social organization, a church that is dispersed among the nations.

Whoa, oh my gosh. So where can we get this book? Well, it's published by Wipf and Stock under their

Pickwick Publications imprint. But if you just type in Greg Forster and Nationalism and Heresy and Augustine on fine book selling websites everywhere, you should be able to find it.

That's amazing, congratulations. Thank you. Definitely gonna link that below for anybody that's listening so you can easily access that.

Other than that, any courses that you're teaching that people can enroll in in the coming year? Yes, as a matter of fact, at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, which

I miss no opportunity to spread the gospel. Woe to me if I speak not the gospel of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.

We offer distance courses and I teach at different times the introductory courses.

I also teach an advanced seminar at Trinity on the nature and mission of the church where we do deep dives on exactly these issues.

You gotta get through the introductory courses before you get to the advanced seminar. But if you become a distance student at Ted's Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, you'll eventually be able to get to that advanced seminar and I teach that for them.

Amazing. Well, I'm so grateful that we kind of skipped the line and got to access some of your wisdom without taking those courses, those preemptive courses.

But it's just such a pleasure to have you here, Dr. Forrester. I'm so grateful for your time and your wisdom.

And I think you're always welcome back. So let's find another reason to bring you back on. Oh, I'd love to.

This is a lot of fun and I always love talking about these issues and it was a great privilege to be here.