Beeson Podcast, Episode #668 Dr. Josh Chatraw Date >>Announcer: Welcome to the Beeson podcast, coming to you from Beeson Divinity School on the campus of Samford University. Now your host, Doug Sweeney. >>Doug Sweeney: Welcome to the Beeson Podcast. I am your host, Doug Sweeney. I am here today with our newest professor. Our new Billy Graham Professor of Evangelism and Cultural Engagement – Dr. Josh Chatraw. We are excited to introduce him to you. We’ve been introducing him all summer to pastors and others in the area. Thank you, Josh, very much for being with us! >>Josh: It’s great to be here. It’s great to be at Beeson. >>Doug Sweeney: Some of the folks, Josh, who listen to this podcast have met you already. But most of them have not. So, before we start talking about Beeson and what you’re going to be doing here in your writing, let’s just introduce you again to another audience – our podcast audience. Tell us just a little bit about your childhood, your education, your call to ministry, and your early ministry experience? >>Josh: Yeah. I’m the youngest of three. I grew up mostly in south Georgia. My dad was a fighter pilot and my mom was a teacher. A funny story about that ... my mom is a reading teacher and as a teenager I just wasn’t interested in books. (laughs) So ... >>Doug Sweeney: Was she a little frustrated with you? >>Josh: Very, very frustrated. And so now my parents are still faithful teachers in their church. My dad is a Sunday School teacher, small group teacher, an elder at his church. But they tell the story of there’s hope for your kids. (laughs) Through me. Something happened and I’ll get to that in a little bit, that changed my life and changed some of my interests. But I grew up, as I eluded to, really playing sports and I grew up in a Christian home and heard the gospel from an early age. But it really began to stick in my life in high school. In high school I really trusted in the Lord as my Lord and Savior. Even in those early times I didn’t really know what I was doing but was trying to have bible studies, evangelistic bible studies with my classmates. I went to a public school. But I was passionate but really didn’t know kind of how to do that. When I got to college some men ... I went to Georgia Southern University, which is near Savannah, Georgia, and played soccer there and was a business management major. When I got to school there some guys grabbed me and began to really show me how to have evangelistic bible studies, how to teach, how to really study the bible better for myself. And those were some transformative years for me there. As I began to do evangelistic bible studies with my soccer teammates and other people and was a leader on the campus there I said that the Lord called me into full time ministry. And I met my wife, Tracey, there. And we got married ... what I like to think as “young” but maybe back then and in the south maybe it’s not that young. I was 23 and Tracey was 22. We packed up all of our stuff and went to Southern Seminary. I blitzed through a masters degree. And my wife was a nurse. And we did that in three years. I had more gas in the tank and we sensed the Lord might be doing something in our life as far as more education. And it was really during that period where I just grew in my love for reading and books and theology. So, the kid who his mom couldn’t pay him to read a book (laughs) ... >>Doug Sweeney: You turned out all right. >>Josh: I ended up asking for books for every Christmas and with all the change I had during that time to get more theology and more reading. And just fell in love not only more deeply with the Lord but with the great tradition and the resources to think differently, to live differently, and love Jesus more through that time. I began to pastor during my PhD program. So, the agreement Tracey and I had was she would let me do a PhD (laughs) if I slowed down and started working in the church. That was really one of the best things for me. One of the things that happened was as I was pastoring and doing a PhD really I was doing the research and work but always with a kind of “So what” attitude in my head. Saying, “How do you apply this? How does this work in the church?” And so that’s really where kind of apologetics comes into the picture. Where I’m saying, “Okay, how does this fit into the questions that people are asking me in the church?” Even though I was really doing my PhD in theology but I was the only one close to a PhD in my little community there. And so if people had questions about the bible they didn’t care what your discipline was. If they had a question about God they were coming to me. So, I sort of started looking around. How are apologists doing this? What are the resources that the church has and the tradition has to help us respond? To answer people questions in evangelism, people’s doubts within the church. >>Doug Sweeney: What was the church you were serving at that stage? >>Josh: So, I was at a small church. Well, two different churches. The first part of my PhD I was at Bacon’s Castle, which is in Surry, Virginia. It’s a small town, southeastern Virginia. Then for my dissertation phase I was in Dublin, Georgia, First Baptist Dublin. In both churches I was an associate pastor. >>Doug Sweeney: And you said your PhD was in theology. What did you write your dissertation about? >>Josh: So, I did my PhD about biblical theology and I focused on the gospels in particular Jesus’ teaching on repentance and forgiveness. >>Doug Sweeney: Nice. The connection to apologetics, you started to tell us, was really practical, ministerial, trying to be a good pastor, trying to be a good witness, answering the questions that came your way, deepened your interest in thinking more carefully and maybe in a more systematic way about the task of apologetics? >>Josh: Yeah. Well, it started off ... I wrote my first two books were with Andreas [inaudible 00:07:23] and Darrell Bock. And we were responding to Bart Ehrman. So, Bart Ehrman’s critical scholar agnostic former fundamentalist evangelical. And then became agnostic while he was working on ... well, it might have been after he finished his PhD, but really began to question during graduate school. >>Doug Sweeney: For listeners who don’t know this already, he’s become one of the biggest critics of Christianity in our age. >>Josh: Yeah, that’s right. So, he was writing all of these New York Times bestsellers at a very popular level explaining things like textual criticism, how the gospels work, except of course Ehrman has a very skeptical bent on those topics and on those fields. And so I proposed to Darrell and Andreas, “Hey, why don’t we get together and write something that addresses this from a more conservative perspective on these topics?” And so we came out with a couple of books that do that. So, that kind of got me into this. Not just at a local church level but more at a national stage in writing. And so that was my first entrance into it. Then as I began to think more systematically about the discipline of apologetics, how it should be related to evangelism, how it should be related to the church, and really how apologetics – what I grew in my conviction is that apologetics is really a culminating discipline that takes these other disciplines that you learn at a place like Beeson or in seminary and brings them together for this moment of ministry. So, it’s very similar to preaching. It’s very similar to counseling. Where you’re having to bring all this together. And to think carefully about the integration of history and New Testament studies and Old Testament studies and theology and philosophy. And to do that within the church to help people on the ground. It’s a huge task. But I saw many times analytic philosophers who were doing that work and really I benefited from that work. But I saw that they were bringing kind of really majoring on one discipline rather than integrating those disciplines. And a lot of times analytic philosophers, they haven’t been as plugged into the church as they could be. So, I saw some opportunities kind of with some things that we could do better. Not to say analytic philosophers shouldn’t be part of that. We need them within this kind of team approach to apologetics and evangelism. But they’re one part, not the only part. >>Doug Sweeney: It sounds like your own story or the story of God’s work in your own life as a young man kind of bears out these emphases that you want to make about the task of evangelism, apologetics, and how they’re related to the study of theology, the practice of ministry, being a good disciple of Jesus day by day. In high school you became an evangelist. You go to seminary and you dig deep in bible and theology. As you start pastoring you realize, all right, people have questions that don’t emerge in the same way that questions emerge in seminary that somebody with a seminary degree, somebody with some biblical theological training ought to be ready to answer. And it turns out the Lord had for you a lifelong ministry as an evangelist and apologist. Here’s a question that’s not related directly to your story, but what you said a few minutes ago about your systematic approach to evangelism and apologetics. What is it really? I mean, if you had to give us just sort of one minute on what is Chatraw like as an evangelist apologist? What will he be like as the Billy Graham Chair at Beeson? How does he think evangelism and apologetics are supposed to relate to the rest of the MDiv curriculum at Beeson? To the rest of the life of discipleship? Walk by all kinds of people in the churches ... what would it be? What’s your approach to evangelism and cultural engagement? >>Josh: Yeah. Well, first, it’s to have a really deep understanding of the gospel. And to see the gospel as this diamond that we hold up and we can kind of look at it from different angles and see different parts of it. And it seems to me in the New Testament that there’s all these different formulas we’re given for the gospel or different kind of ways that the gospel is presented. And they’re often just a little bit different here or different things that are emphasized, whether it’s the resurrection, or substitutionary atonement, or just various different aspects that we can kind of shed the light on our adoption as sons and daughters. So, on one hand we need to have this really deep understanding of the gospel which is kind of like what we all need as Christians, to have a deep understanding of the gospel. But then we also need to have an understanding of what’s going on culturally around us. So, one way I put this is we need to understand the gospel stories in all its little bits and big parts. And then we need to understand the stories that are being told around us. So, in doing that, the gospel never changes, the stories that are being told around us change. And by understanding those stories, understanding their weaknesses, understanding what attracts people to the story of meritocracy or the story of romance, or these things that people are actually living for and devoting their lives to – we’re able to say, okay, how is that going to end up? But at the same time we can understand why people are attacked to them. But then we can contrast them with the gospel story. And so what I’ve called this is “inside-out.” We learn to do this but we learn to step inside someone’s story. We learn to step inside how someone is living and say, “Listen, this is the problem with this way. This is where it’s going to lead. It’s ultimately going to lead to a kind of death.” And to find life. This is the gospel story. This is the story of God. This is the story of Jesus. This is the story we were made for. You were made for. Now, that’s going to involve argumentation along the way, various different argumentation. But right from the start it’s not like saying, okay, let’s remove the gospel from this. And maybe if we’re really good at argumentation we can kind of have a chain of argument, chain of argument till we reach the gospel. But rather we can have it and kind of compare and contrast all the way through conversations. I find this is actually much more dialogical than if I sit down and try to get somebody to track along with me with maybe a traditional argument for God. I want to use those at the right time, maybe with the right person. But I can start off with the gospel and boldly proclaim that. And then bring along the argument or contrast with their worldview as I go. >>Doug Sweeney: Yeah. That’s great. And just so our listeners know, several years ago you published an award winning book on this theme called, “Telling A Better Story.” And I want to commend that to our listeners here while we got you. All right, let’s get back to your own personal story, your own biography before we get to the present. When you finished your PhD and after you’d been pastoring for a while I know you did take an academic appointment at Liberty University. And I know you founded a center for public Christianity. Let’s bring your story kind of up to the present here. When did you get called to join up at Liberty and what did you do there? >>Josh: I think it was 2014. I’m getting old enough where dates don’t come to mind. I’m pretty sure it was 2014. It was my first academic post and they threw a lot at me. It was to teach courses and to start a new work there, which was the Center for Apologetics and Cultural Engagement. I taught undergrads as well as grad students and even some PhD students before I was done. But also I worked with students on the ground there who were trying to think through apologetics issues, cultural issues ... one of the great things about being at a divinity school is at Liberty I was able to pull in a lot of the faculty from other departments to think through, okay, what does the integration of literature and apologetics and cultural engagement look like? Or law? And so we had academic fellows from different departments at the university that worked with us at the center. And developed some material out of that. >>Doug Sweeney: And after several years doing that, I happen to know you moved to Raleigh, North Carolina to start another center. Tell our listeners just a little bit about that. >>Josh: It was a very different center. It was really grounded in a Fellows program where we took 20-30 emerging leaders in the city who were Christians who were trying to work out in different vocations, different callings within the city, most of them not in full time ministry, and they’re trying to work out, okay, how do I be a Christian leader in this particular field and care for my community, and be a faithful witness to the gospel? So, we took them through a kind of nine month Bonhoeffer, Life Together, throw in some Schaeffer, Labri kind of cultural engagement. And then really I think really some of the best from the devotional life of the church. And pulled them into a nine month program. And that was a special five years for me and my family to lead so many bright emerging leaders in Raleigh. And serve the church there. >>Doug Sweeney: And it was a super fruitful ministry and a time where you were able to continue your writing ministry as well. That all sounds wonderful. So, how did the Lord move you from there to Beeson Divinity School? What was the draw? How did we get you to come? >>Josh: Yeah. Well, I felt that I was done with the kind of being in the academy full time. I had kept my foot in the academic world but I felt, okay, I’m going to be kind of serving in this church role as a resident theologian and doing this kind of work as a center that kind of connects with the academy but then brings it to everyone. And I told Tracey, my wife, two or three years ago ... Doug, I’ve told you this story after you hired me ... but we were saying, this has been really good here in Raleigh, and she said I don’t really want to move again. I said, “Don’t worry. The only school I would go to is Beeson Divinity School. And they’re not going to call me. So, don’t worry about it.” (laughs) And it was because of the vision that I had seen here, just from a distance. The kind of life on life that I have the conviction that theological education and formation of future pastors and ministry leaders is ideally done in person and shared life together. And the respect I had for the faculty at Beeson. And just the ethos of Beeson. I’m convictionally Baptist that really likes hanging around other protestants as well. And I learn a lot from my Anglican friends and my Lutheran friends. And Presbyterian friends. And I really enjoy being in that environment. And for all those reasons, not in any way was I reaching out to Beeson. I was just telling my wife, “That would be the only place. And it would have to be a God thing, because I don’t think that’s going to happen.” And so when the job came available and I got a note saying, “Hey, maybe you should apply for this.” We began to really pray and consider it just given the fact that we had kind of told the Lord, “This is the only place.” And then we got an email. >>Doug Sweeney: Well, we sure are glad you said yes and the Lord brought you here. Of course all of us have a lot to learn from you. We’re looking forward to learning from you this year and for many years to come. What kinds of stuff will we learn from you this year? What do we have you teaching this year? >>Josh: Yeah. I’m teaching Evangelism and Church Planting, and I think that’s going to kind of be my baby that I’ll own here and I’ll teach all of the students. And so I’m excited about that. I’ll teach a course on Theology and Pastoral Ministry, and then I’m teaching a J Term on Augustinian Apologetics. >>Doug Sweeney: All right, that last class is a great segue to the next thing I wanted to ask you about. Because we’re not only going to learn from you as a teacher here in the building, we’re going to continue to learn from your writing ministry as well. Of course we’ve already mentioned, “Telling A Better Story.” That’s probably your most famous book. It’s done very well. But you’ve got a couple of other very recent books that I want to let our people know about. And one is called, “The Augustine Way.” So, Augustine has been something of a model for you, a resource for you, as you’ve thought about gospel witness. Can you give just a one minute version of what you’re doing in that book to our audience? >>Josh: Yeah. So, Augustine is obviously an important figure. Everyone recognizes that. And yet he’s a figure that hasn’t been incorporated actually very much into conversations about apologetics and evangelism. And so when you look at kind of methodologies you don’t have people who are constructing methodologies appealing to Augustine. Yet Augustine, as a pastor ... I’d say first of all he was a pastor, as a bishop we kind of look to Augustine as a theologian and yes he was; a political theorist, in some sense maybe he was. We look to him as a philosopher. But first of all his identity was a pastor. A pastor who was really concerned about conversion. And really concerned to persuade not only the mind but the heart. And so we found as I wrote this book with Mark Allen, my friend and former colleague, as we were writing another book we kind of realized no one is really appealing to Augustine in this way. So, we had these intuitions but of course deadlines are coming and so we couldn’t really explore that. But we made a note of it and we kind of came back and started reading his Confessions and City of God. And we just ... Augustine really helped us to not only articulate some things we were thinking but really go much deeper and learn from him. And we’ve tried to bring those lessons from Augustine to the church and to leaders. This book is a little bit ... if you’ve read, “Telling A Better Story,” it’s a bit more academic. But there’s connections that we make between the two works. >>Doug Sweeney: As someone who has read it, it’s a great book. Anybody who loves to read good books and knows a little bit about theology and is willing to go through it, it’s for them, too. It’s very clearly written. >>Josh: Yeah, we appeal to pop culture stuff, Ted Lasso, Apple+ TV shows ... stuff like that as we go. Partly because we see Augustine appealing to things in his own context that were kind of in at the moment. So, we felt like if we are going to write a book called, “The Augustine Way,” we actually need to try to in some sense reflect how Augustine would go about doing things today. So, we tried to tell story and use story throughout the chapter to kind of outline what we were doing. We were trying not to write a boring academic book. But I just wanted to give a little bit of a caution that we ask a little bit more of you than, “Telling A Better Story,” does. >>Doug Sweeney: And your newest book is hot off the press, by which I mean you’ve gotten one copy so far. I’m not sure anybody who has ordered it yet has received it. But they’re about to receive it. It’s called, “Surprised By Doubt.” Another good book. Another book that’s kind of challenging in some ways because Christians don’t often want to be honest about doubts that occur to them from time to time, and that they wrestle with from time to time. Tell us a bit about that book and what you’re doing there. >>Josh: Well, I wrote it with another friend of mine, Jack Carson, who was my former student, now finishing up his PhD at Aberdeen. Really what we saw is a lot of students, a lot of young people, but not just young people were having these doubts and were having these doubts about their faith, or deconstructing as sometimes people put it today. There were kind of two things happening. Either on one hand people would kind of say, “Doubts are great! Doubt everything. Doubt!” It’s kind of this embrace of doubt. We didn’t think that was quite right from a biblical perspective. (laughs) And so on one hand this kind of celebration of doubt wasn’t the right way to go. On the other hand there was this condemnation of doubt. And what we saw and what Charles Taylor the philosopher talks about as a secular age, there’s this contestability that we feel today, especially young people. It’s not limited to young people. Who now feel the fragility of having a view that they were always taught growing up, but then they hit a certain age where really smart people disagree with them and bring out objections or other things that they don’t really know what to do with. And then they turn to the church and sometimes they become very disillusioned with the church. Maybe in some of their responses to their questions or maybe just combined with the general failures of the church that are all over the media today. And so what we’re trying to do in the book is to say in some cases at least people have kind of explored the faith through what we call “the attic” in the book, which is a kind of form of Christianity that’s separated from the great tradition. And hasn’t positioned itself within the small “c” catholic tradition of Augustine and CS Lewis and all these great thinkers that we like to think about when you go to seminary. But most evangelicals, they don’t know too much about them. And most students don’t either. And so what we’re trying to do is say, “Hey, actually, maybe you should leave the kind of attic and come to the main floor of Christianity where you’re surrounded by this great cloud of witnesses who have had their doubts, too.” And they’ve created these kind of different pathways to help you deal with them. So, that’s what we’re doing in the book. We’re really using CS Lewis, Augustine, and Paschal as our tour guides. >>Doug Sweeney: Sounds great. Sounds like a wonderfully Beeson-esque sort of book as well. Sort of rooting people in the great tradition, the great roll call of the faithful, the great cloud of witnesses that help us run the race that the Lord has set before us today. Well, listeners, I think you can tell we have an exciting new Billy Graham Professor here with us, Dr. Chatraw. We’re really grateful for you and your faithfulness to the Lord and your ministry and your willingness to come and do ministry with us. We always end our podcast interviews by asking guests the same question. And that question is what is the Lord doing in your life these days? What is he teaching you these days that we might leave our listeners with as a way of kind of edifying them, helping them run the race that the Lord has set before them? >>Josh: I have a 14 year old and a 9 year old. Without embarrassing them on this podcast, I’m still figuring out how to be a dad. (laughs) And the Lord is teaching me patience. The Lord is reminding me I need to ask my kids for forgiveness. And that the Lord loves me even in the midst of my failures as a dad. Yeah, so all those things I think in the midst of the chaos of a move, where everything is kind of ... tensions are heightened within the family. >>Doug Sweeney: You had a slightly stressful summer. >>Josh: Uh, the Lord has been working on me. And I come back to the gospel, you know? That, as Tim Keller used to say, “we’re bigger sinners than we can imagine, but we’re much more loved by God than we can imagine as well.” And we know that through the cross and through Christ. >>Doug Sweeney: Listeners, this has been our newest faculty colleague, Dr. Josh Chatraw. He is our new Billy Graham Professor of Evangelism and Cultural Engagement. I hope this interview has whetted your appetite for more from Dr. Chatraw. Please come on to campus and get to know him yourself. Hang out with us and with him a little bit. He’ll be preaching in chapel in January. He’s got some great new books. Thank you, Josh, for being with us. And listeners, thanks again for tuning in. We love you, we’re praying for you. Please pray for the ministries of Beeson Divinity School. Goodbye for now. >>Rob Willis: You’ve been listening to the Beeson podcast; coming to you from the campus of Samford University. Our theme music is by Advent Birmingham. Our announcer is Mike Pasquarello. Our engineer is Rob Willis. And our show host is Doug Sweeney. For more episodes and to subscribe, visit www.BeesonDivinity.com/podcast. You can also find the Beeson Podcast on iTunes and Spotify.