Beeson podcast, Episode 443
Mark DeVine
May 7, 2019

Announcer:          Welcome to the Beeson Podcast, coming to you from Beeson Divinity School on the campus of Sanford University in Birmingham, Alabama. Now your host, Timothy George.

Timothy George:     Welcome to today's Beeson podcast. Today I have the pleasure of having a conversation with a dear friend and colleague of many years, Dr. Mark DeVine. He joined the faculty of Beeson Divinity School in 2008, he teaches in the area of church history and doctrine, he's the author of several books Replant, How A Dying Church Can Grow Again and Bonhoeffer Speaks Today, Following Jesus At All Costs.

Timothy George:     He's written a brand new book and that's what we're going to talk about today. Shalom Yesterday, Today, and Forever. Dr. DeVine, welcome to the Beeson Podcast.

Mark DeVine:        Thank you Dean George. I'm so happy to be here.

Timothy George:     Now, I want to begin by asking about this title Shalom. Of course it's a word we know a lot, was this the original title of your book?

Mark DeVine:        It was. It really came, the interest in the topic came out of my engagement with the matter of faith in work several years ago, and in exploring how work fits into God's design and plan. It kind of, drove me to the first chapters of Genesis and there I discovered not only that work is a part of God's good plan for his creatures, but that God is the original worker.

Mark DeVine:        He's the creator, he made something and the next thing I knew, I was really engaged in a richer and deeper exploration of the doctrine of creation itself, more than human work. But I found that the word Shalom ended up helping me get at what I thought I was learning, because the word Shalom, it's semantic range includes the meanings of peace, of harmony, and of prosperity.

Mark DeVine:        And each of these helped me get at what I felt I was encountering in the pages of scripture. Not just in Genesis, but throughout.

Timothy George:     I want to come back to that word and to its implications that you're spelling out in this book, but say a word about this project that you directed from a foundation grant, related to faith and work, and how they're connected.

Mark DeVine:        Well, I attended Acton University and got involved with the current foundation on this issue. I found myself very dissatisfied with my own ability as a pastor to address certain major dimensions of the lives of the people I preach to.

Mark DeVine:        Most of their lives, and of our lives are not spent in church, it's not spent in sabbath keeping, it's not in worship, and that is by God's own intention and design. "In six days you shall do you work."

Mark DeVine:        We think of the fourth commandment in terms of it's prohibitions related to sabbath keeping, but it really has two commands in it, "You shall do your work in six days." And so, a major part of our lives Is meant to be expended in work, and it just opened up a whole area of exploration that I felt I needed to explore in order to be a good steward of my position as a minister of the word of God, and really address the needs of my congregations.

Timothy George:     Now, out of this grant we had a connection with our friend Dr. Tim Keller, the pastor of Redeemer church in New York City. And we brought him to campus and he gave a talk. How does this project and how you've just described it, relate to Timothy Keller?

Mark DeVine:        Well, like Keller, I want to hear what God has to say to us about the ongoing significance of our lives in this world. This world in the between time, if you will. We live between, and we do live in a lot of between times.

Mark DeVine:        We live between our expulsion from Eden, and the coming of Jesus Christ. When he comes he's going to bring a place with him that he has gone to prepare for us. And oftentimes I think in my own spiritual formation my interest has been pointed, maybe disproportionately to the world that's to come, and Tim Keller challenges us to recognize that God has a reason for delaying his coming.

Mark DeVine:        He's doing something now. And it's important. We're here in this between time for a reason. It's not only waiting, it's also waiting, and doing, and receiving, and giving, and relating and so, I think our projects overlap in that way, and in certain ways Tim Keller's writings have been a guide and an inspiration to me.

Timothy George:     [inaudible 00:05:30] on the city as a place where God is at work now in the world, and our stewardship to be involved there. Maybe the sort of, idea that you're tilting against here, is exemplified in the stereotype of the person who believed Jesus was coming back on a certain day in 1844, and went out to upstate New York and found a tree, and perched themselves on the limb of that tree waiting for the coming of Christ.

Timothy George:     And so, you're saying be careful that you don't over expect things to come in the future, to neglect what is happening right now?

Mark DeVine:        We're told, I believe, that there is a future beyond this world, and that we are strangers, and pilgrims, and resident aliens, and exiles in this world, because we need to know that in order to live as we were meant to in this world.

Mark DeVine:        And partly that means, that we are to recognize that the permanent and perfect redemption awaits, but it has started now. It's invading now, and that redemption scope is all of what our God made.

Mark DeVine:        He's not going to settle to kind of, escape with some disembodied souls and let the devil have the rest. No, he came to settle us into communities to enjoy the home he made for us, and he promises a new home to come that is not ... It's not the mirror image of what he made in Eden, but it is deeply related to it.

Mark DeVine:        And in the meantime, his interests still extend to all dimensions of what he made, not just to what is invisible, or to some disembodied soul. He cares about it all, and that's why Jesus came and took on flesh, and was raised from the dead, and he healed the sick.

Mark DeVine:        These were the ways he demonstrated that he was the messiah, not by teaching people to become Buddhist and not care about those things.

Timothy George:     Well, throughout your book there's a little bit of a polemical tone, and you say it one time that, this perspective related to creation in particular that you're emphasizing and incarnation, that this is needed today in the life of faith to resist certain ancient heresies, which keep recurring in the history of God's people. Even today.

Timothy George:     What are they?

Mark DeVine:        Well, they are Gnosticism, Marcionism, and Manichaeism, at least. They are all creator hating and creation hating construals of reality in spiritual life.

Mark DeVine:        And I'm very pleased that these are viewed by the church from ancient times as heresies. And when we go down that road we find ourselves having trouble reading the Bible. That's what happened to Marcion.

Mark DeVine:        He hated the creator and the creation, he had some good reasons, because the suffering in this world. And how could ...

Timothy George:     How could a good God allow evil.

Mark DeVine:        Yes, yes. Whoever was involved in helping this physical world come into being, you know, seems to be an aider and abettor of all this suffering. And so, we want nothing to do with him, but then he found himself unable to read the Bible and he manned up and just lopped off the whole old testament.

Mark DeVine:        He thought he could find a resting place in the new testament, because that's where it becomes all spiritual, and I think we use that word wrongly in the sense of non-material, but then he ended up not liking a lot of the new testament too.

Mark DeVine:        Because again, there we have a messiah who shows himself to be the messiah, not by making people sick and making them like it, because he can help them bear up, but by making them well.

Timothy George:     And he was a messiah who had messy diapers.

Mark DeVine:        He sure did, and he came to redeem all that the creator made. And that's why the whole creation is longing for the revelation of the sons of God, because they're awaiting their own full redemption. And it's delayed, but we get glimpses and tastes here.

Mark DeVine:        And by the way, it's not just that our enjoyment of the physical parts of this world are impaired in this life, these so called spiritual goods and virtues, they're not what they ought to be either.

Mark DeVine:        Our ability to forgive sins, to love each other, those also await the coming world when we will know and enjoy them in their fullness, and in their permanence.

Timothy George:     Yeah. Now, you're a theologian, so you've talked about Marcionism and some of these early heresies, Gnosticism. Does Pelagianism fit in there anywhere?

Mark DeVine:        Pelagius used to be my favorite heretic, because we have to thank God for the heretics, because they get things so wrong, so deeply wrong that they really help us to clarify what the truth is.

Mark DeVine:        I've just swapped out Pelagianism lately. He's in the hopper, he'll come back up, but right now its Marcion. I want Marcion to be the poster child for heresy, because he hates the creator and the creation he made.

Timothy George:     Yeah. Well, all these heresies are, as you say, making a point and helping us see, in some ways, the truth more clearly. Without them we would be missing something in what is the true orthodox faith.

Timothy George:     Let me ask you about one of the chapters in your book. It's chapter three in this book Shalom Yesterday, Today, and Forever. And it's called God The Homemaker. That's an unusual designation for the deity.

Mark DeVine:        Well, to answer that question, let me say a little bit about another dimension of the word Shalom that was attractive to me. I'm using Shalom as a designation for what life was meant to look like according to God's good creation.

Mark DeVine:        And what I find is that, it involves three dimensional, three relational dimensions. Our relationship as human beings with our creator, our relationship with each other before our heavenly father, our shared heavenly father.

Mark DeVine:        And then the third dimension is the one that I give more attention to in the book, because I think it has been distorted and neglected, and that is the relationship between us human beings, who are God's children before our God, our shared heavenly father, in the place that he made for us.

Mark DeVine:        Why is it that human beings are created last? Why is it that anything was made but human beings? Why were human beings made with bodies? Why do we wait in line? Because God's creative work is a homemaking work. He never intended to have, and will never have, if he does it'll only be an interim time that is not the full Shalom.

Mark DeVine:        He never meant to have a people without a home, and the universe that he made, he made first so that he could settle his human creatures made in his image, into that home. And when they sinned the punishment and reverberations of that punishment went all throughout every dimension of creation.

Mark DeVine:        And so, now, what should have been fruit dropping into their hands, and tending of the garden that was only enjoyable and productive, now it's turned against them. The relationship between Adam and Eve is now strained, the relationship between human beings and the creation, and the God who made it and to whom it belongs, it's all distorted and twisted.

Mark DeVine:        But God does not at that point say, "Okay, I'll just settle for trying to save these disembodied souls." No, he immediately attends to all the needs of his fallen, sinful creatures and that means providing them with clothes, providing with a place to stay, and promising to settle them into a home on this earth in Zion.

Mark DeVine:        Our God is a homemaker, he's a settler. Punishment involves expulsion, scattering, exile, sojourn, pilgrimage, resident alien-ship. God uses all of these consequences of sin for his own redeeming purposes, but their goal is that these unsettled states will be left behind.

Mark DeVine:        We're headed for, where we started in that sense, a settled state.

Timothy George:     Dr. DeVine, is there any sense in which you can give credence to that common chorus of Christians who sing, "This world is not my home, I'm just a passing through. My treasure's laid up somewhere beyond the blue." Is that just sheer escapism? Or does it have any meaning that we could grab onto, for you?

Mark DeVine:        It can lead to escapism, because everything good can be put to bad use. So, yes, we can become those who are, we say, "Too heavenly minded, to be any earthly good." But we should say, "Wrongly heavenly minded, to be any earthly good."

Mark DeVine:        And the BBibleible has so much to say about how we are passing through, this is not our home and, it sometimes does contrast the kingdom of God with this world, but we also have other pass ... And we love those passages. In my spiritual formation, we seize on those passages, but we also are told this, "For God so loved the world." Okay, so what are we talking about here?

Mark DeVine:        We are to despise this world in its opposition and rebellion against the creator, but we are to love this world as the object of his redeeming work. The whole created order is in the cross hairs of God's redeeming work, and the reason it has to be, is because we're going to have, we're going to need by God's creation, and have a home in eternity.

Timothy George:     And you know, some of this issue, this tension that we're talking about is related to the Greek word Kosmos, which has two different meanings in the new testament. The world, which can mean the physical created order that God made and said was good in Genesis, before the fall.

Timothy George:     And then the world order, the system that dominates the world, which is also depicted in the Bible very often as being under the control of the demonic. The prince of the power of the air, and this same word in Greek Is used in both ways.

Timothy George:     And we have to be discerning as to how we exegete scripture when it comes to the world.

Mark DeVine:        Yes, and the limited authority that the evil one has in this world, he's doomed. That's what's doomed. Death is doomed, tears are doomed, crying is doomed, sickness is doomed, poverty is doomed. These things are doomed.

Mark DeVine:        And so, suffering is doomed. Suffering, I heard, probably at seminary at some point, you know, in Jesus Christ, suffering is redeemed. Alright. Suffering is put to use in the killing of suffering, but it's not redeemed in the sense of being made a good, the way the original created goods were.

Mark DeVine:        And so, for example, Jesus suffered in order to rescue us from suffering. He made himself poor, to make us rich. I may suffer the loss of money, so that someone else might not be poor.

Mark DeVine:        So, what we're involved with here is not a transformation of suffering into a new good, like other created goods. What we're seeing is, the sovereignty of God to make that which is bad, put it to good use and we're seeing something of the character of love.

Mark DeVine:        Love suffers in order to rescue others from suffering, but there will come a time in eternity when there's no more suffering at all, and God's going to be pleased with that. We're not going to be lacking something, because none of us are suffering.

Timothy George:     Good. Now, you've talked about some of, the ancient heresies. Marcionism, and Gnosticism, but what would you say to somebody who says, "We have today's heresies, like health and wealth gospel, and aren't you just giving us a little sugar coated version of health and wealth?"

Mark DeVine:        Well, I do think if someone hears a little bit about what I'm saying, this will be the concern. And it is those people I'm kind of, addressing my message.

Mark DeVine:        The prosperity gospel, health and wealth gospel, name it and claim it gospel, these are heresies. They are not the gospel. Why are they not? Because the Bible does not teach that God intends for his children to be healthy all the time, and wealthy all the time in the time between the times in which we live.

Mark DeVine:        He also teaches that we are not to pursue and seek these things. We are to seek the one who is the provider of blessings, which is not the same thing.

Mark DeVine:        But the problem is this, the heart of the anti-prosperity gospel crowd that I'm familiar with, number one, they're wealthy. They don't realize they're wealthy, maybe, or they feel guilty about it, but they are wealthy. And they also ... They're not divesting themselves, they're not taking vows of poverty, they're not asking anyone else to.

Mark DeVine:        The second problem is this. They hunker down in their anti-wealth, anti-money passages and they think they're finished, but the prosperity folks have their passages, and I look at many of those passages in my book, but anyone who's familiar with the content of the Bible knows it's the tip of the iceberg.

Mark DeVine:        It's very clear in the Bible, over and over again, physical health and material prosperity are, and are to be recognized and received as blessings of God. So, works got to be done. We have got to take seriously the passages that the prosperity folks prize and value, otherwise ...

Timothy George:     Give us one or two examples of that.

Mark DeVine:        Well, in Deuteronomy, Moses says, "God gives you the power to gain wealth." Moses even tells them, "Here's what's about to happen. You're going to be settled into the promised land, and it's not going to be a simple lifestyle you're going to have there. God is going to heap blessings upon you, you're going to build big houses." It says.

Mark DeVine:        "It's going to be a land flowing with milk and honey. It's even going to have pomegranates." Pomegranates have always been a symbol of fertility, and wealth, and luxury. Even my own son a few years ago fell in love with pomegranates, so we had to have a family meeting and make him aware of the fact, we're not a pomegranate family.

Mark DeVine:        He can have as many pomegranates as he can buy. And so .... The other thing that's fascinating about it is, Moses said, "When God heaps these blessings on you, you're going to say that I got this because of something that's good about me, because I'm good, because I worked."

Mark DeVine:        And you would think, "Well, why is God aiding, abetting something that he knows is going to stir up this idolatry and thinking that, you got this health and this wealthy by some merit that you have?" And here's the reason.

Mark DeVine:        The reason is, these are blessings. The fact that we can and do make bad use of them does not change their status as blessings. What redemption does, is put things right, not lop things off, as the vows of chastity, and poverty, and obedience sometimes suggests, and then turn that way of pursuing Jesus as a top tier of discipleship.

Mark DeVine:        No, wrong.

Timothy George:     What role then, does this whole tradition of Asceticism, you mentioned these vows that are taken often by people in religious orders, but it applies to the whole Christian, the whole call to discipleship in some ways, is a call to leave that.

Timothy George:     "Leave your nets and follow me." This leaving stuff. And where does that fit into your construal?

Mark DeVine:        There's much to say about this. Positively we can say this, that the whole witness of the church that affirms the biblical teaching about self-denial, about being separated from this world, about knowing how to be abased and how to abound.

Mark DeVine:        About the warning of the love of money. This whole tradition can, at its best it can affirm these things. And so, there's a way in which it works itself into what's needed here in discipleship, because of the fall. Because of the fall, because of the problem and the threat of idolatry.

Mark DeVine:        But deeply woven into scripture is this, we give up things that are good, even sacrifice things that are highly valuable, perhaps our own lives, perhaps our son, like Isaac. Why do we do that? Because there is a hierarchy of value in the Bible, and that which is of the highest value, we should give up anything of lesser value to gain what is of higher value. God.

Mark DeVine:        So, that's why Abraham is rightly the model of faith. He was willing to give up even Isaac, but sacrifice in the Bible is the path to retaining and keeping what you give up. "He who loses his life is abolished forever." And that's good, now God alone is left. No. "He who loses his life will save it." He who tries to save it, as though it's his, and not to be received as a gift from God, will lose it

Mark DeVine:        The heaven that we're told Is coming, it's not a simple lifestyle heaven is it? We're going to walk on streets of gold, we're going to be healthy, we're going to have everything we need. There's not going to be anything simple about it. It's going to be multifarious and spectacular.

Timothy George:     Amen. But that's then, and not now.

Mark DeVine:        That's right. And now is the time where, what God does, is God in his wisdom and in his providence blesses his children with glimpses and tastes of these kinds of things.

Mark DeVine:        It's not meant for us all of the time. Sometimes what is meant for us is mainly suffering. And I'm not happy about that at all, but sometimes that's what is meant. But sometimes God blesses us with health and wealth, and when he does, we should receive them as that, be good stewards of those things.

Mark DeVine:        And not eschew them and treat them as only enemies that will tempt us to idolatry, but make good use of it. There's a time for everything. There's a fascinating passage in First Chronicles 22.

Mark DeVine:        David has planned the temple, but he's not going to build the temple. Solomon's going to build the temple, why can't David do it? He can't do it because he spilled so much blood, and he's involved in so much war and he's going to bring Solomon, whose name, the spelling of it, is very close to Shalom.

Mark DeVine:        And it says, "I'm going to give him Shalom." Solomon's going to get Shalom. And so, it's going to be a time of peace and God's going to heap the blessings on. So, in this in between time, which is the valley of the shadow of death, woe unto us if we imagine that God prompts us to seek, to lay hold of our physical health and our wealth as the end all and be all. No way.

Mark DeVine:        We are to pursue God and let the chips fall, but woe unto us if we play this game of imagining that we can, as the wealthy people we are in the west, despise the prosperity gospel, keep our dental plans, and imagine that we've gotten the message of the Bible right.

Mark DeVine:        We need to become good ... We're rich, the Bible ... We need to go back to the Bible and let it teach us how to be rich. Is there ever been a time when Christians needed more to understand how to be rich, because we are, but we're going to have to get out of our denial first and admit that we're rich, and we might be taught something.

Timothy George:     My guest today on the Beeson Podcast is Dr. Mark DeVine. We've had a lively conversation about his brand new book Shalom Yesterday, Today, and Forever. Just hot off the press from Wipf and Stock. I commend it to you. You'll find it as interesting and provocative maybe, as our conversation today.

Timothy George:     Thank you for this work, and thank you for your good scholarship and your contributions here at Beeson Divinity School.

Mark DeVine:        You're welcome. Thanks so much for having me Dean George.

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