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00:00:01
With Dan Paterson
75 Plays2 years ago
Today's guest reflects on a traumatic childhood event and how it shaped his pursuit of God. These kind of experiences can cause many to wrestle with the love or the hiddenness of God. How can we journey with others to find a God of purpose and hope?
Dan Paterson is the founder of Questioning Christianity, an Australian ministry helping you connect the Christian story to life’s deepest questions. He has experience as a pastor, lecturer, and public speaker, having studied Theology and Apologetics in Australia and at Oxford. Dan currently lives in Brisbane with his wife, Erin, and their favourite job is raising three wonderful boys.
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Transcript
Introduction to PEP Talk and Guests
00:00:10
Speaker
Hello, and welcome to another episode of PEP Talk. I'm Kristy, and I'm joined by my intriguing co-host, Andy Bannister. Andy, hello. Intriguing, that's an intriguing adjective you've chosen this morning, my friend. I know, it's because you called me intrepid in the last episode, and so I thought I'd give you something, you know, that Gans and I, and you know, that was the only thing that came to mind, and you are intriguing, as it is our guest today. He is, yes. Dan, hello, welcome to the show.
00:00:39
Speaker
Hey, Chrissie, it's great to be on. Well, we're really looking forward to our conversation with you today, Dan. You are a speaker for questioning Christianity and we were just talking before we started recording about a whole host of things that you're involved in, which we'd love to kind of touch upon in part. But to begin, we'd love to just hear
Dan's Background and Spiritual Journey
00:01:00
Speaker
your story. Please tell us a little bit about your background and maybe one or two formative events for you.
00:01:06
Speaker
Great. Yeah. Well, in case your listeners haven't picked it up yet from the strange accent they're now listening to, I'm Australian. I was born here and this is the crucible of Darwinian natural selection because here on our continent, everything is trying to kill you, which means you grow up with a high degree of possibility of being an elite sports person. As a result,
00:01:30
Speaker
Sadly, I missed that boat. I love my cricket. I love my footy. But for the most part, I'm just an average player on those fields. But I kind of grew up in Melbourne and Brisbane on the east coast of Australia and had a pretty normal average Aussie life. Australia is pretty secular, I think, in its dominant outlook. There's strong religious backgrounds and a lot of people who identify as being Christian still in the census. But for the most part, it's such a laid back country and decent lifestyle that most people don't give much thought to the God question.
00:02:00
Speaker
I grew up with folks who were Christian and took us to church when I was young. But when I was nine, probably one of those key events in life was on a family holiday. We had a car accident where my mum headbutted a truck at high speed.
00:02:15
Speaker
And that was a life altering event for our whole family. She received really bad head injuries as a result, as well as other things, and was airlifted to hospital where they performed emergency surgery to remove a third of her skull. And it was after the surgery that the doctor said to my dad, look, she she's had a really significant trauma here and it's unlikely she'll come out of it on the other side. And if she does, she'll be very different. This is significant brain damage.
00:02:41
Speaker
And so I kind of grew up through my late childhood and then teenage years with the scripts flipped a little bit from parent to child relationship. And it never quite sat with me how if God really is there and he could have stopped it, why he would let that happen to mum and by extension, the whole family.
00:03:00
Speaker
And so I kind of took a bit of a backseat to the God question, didn't get involved with you group or church in my teenage years. And it wasn't really until I finished school, I went to a state school with a ton of mostly secular friends, atheists and apotheists and the rest of it.
00:03:17
Speaker
I guess having seen the fragility of life in my mum, I wanted to make sure that I was going to use what time I had well and enjoy life. And so I probably had a bit of a deeper outlook than most of my other 17-year-old mates in asking, why are we here? What should I be aiming for? And it was in the midst of asking questions like these that a friend of mine put a Bible in my hands and just said, look, I think you should explore whether or not this Christian story has answers to some of the questions that you're asking.
Finding Meaning in Christianity
00:03:41
Speaker
And for a whole host of reasons that I won't go into, some of the romantic interests, I ended up reading as much as I could as quick as I could and found myself compelled by the portrait of Jesus in the gospels. Most of the Bible confused me. But these stories about Jesus, it felt like he was just reading my mail and that the kind of questions I was asking for, for meaning and purpose, for significance were ones that he was speaking about, but pointing mostly towards him as the source of meaning and purpose and fulfillment and hope.
00:04:11
Speaker
And so I find myself having a profound spiritual experience and encounter with a sense of love and guilt and wonder as I was reading about Jesus, particularly in John's gospel and found by the end of it, I just believed in him. And that kind of prompted a journey of wanting to make sense then of what's this Christianity about? And can it stack up when I'm asking bigger questions around suffering and meaning and purpose and kind of led into what I'm doing today?
00:04:37
Speaker
So now, of course, you run this this outfit down there down there on Australia called questioning Christianity. And I think it's a great title, actually.
Christianity's Perspective on Suffering
00:04:47
Speaker
But let's let's start down with that question that yourself wrestle with. You know, I meet frequently people for whom the suffering question that you ran across as a young person, as a young man. That is the show.
00:05:01
Speaker
stopper. Then asking the question in the theoretical is something, something has happened in their lives that you know, has caused them to go, well, okay, if there's a God, where could he possibly be in this? How do you start with that? I mean, there's all kinds of clever answers out there. There's meters of shelves filled with full erudite books for people on that question. It's such a personal question. When you meet somebody who's had that issue wrestling with something, where do you begin?
00:05:26
Speaker
Yeah, I probably begin mainly for percussive force, sort of where I've ended up on that question, which is if I have to suffer, I'd much rather suffer with Jesus than without him, because certainly there is a force to the intellectual problem of suffering. And it's framed as a contradiction within Christian beliefs, all powerful, all loving God existing with evil and suffering. How?
00:05:51
Speaker
And so often, the person who's asking from the outside saying, see, this is a problem you can't make sense of, but suffering is something that touches us all. And there are deep intuitions that we have in the face of suffering that this is wrong, or it's not how things ought to be, or that certain events really are evil and should be stopped. Intuitions that seem to make far better sense to me within the Christian story than within any other secular version of our world story. And so I found, I guess, over time,
00:06:21
Speaker
that whilst the Christian story didn't offer total answers to all of the dimensions of that why question, it does offer some answers. And it certainly makes more sense of our feeling that the train of this world is off its tracks because the Christian story starts with a world created for good, but now damaged by evil. And I think more than anything, it offers a God who draws near to us, reveals the depths of his love for us in suffering alongside us and for us where his wounds speak to our own. And it actually offers hope.
00:06:50
Speaker
So, I rewind to where I'm a nine-year-old boy and I'm watching what unfolds with my mum and our family. And you were to sell me two stories. One, completely random, it's chance. There's no rhyme or reason to it. It's just bad cosmic luck. Or two,
00:07:07
Speaker
You know what, whatever happens here, this is not the end. That her death or her suffering doesn't have to spell the end of the story, but there is hope for resurrection, for eternal life, for someone to draw meaning out of all of this chaos. And there's someone who promises to be with you through the midst of that. You're not alone. I know which of those two stories I would much rather inhabit. And so I think the Christian story speaks volumes to the problem of suffering, both in offering answers, but more so offering a way forward, offering hope. And that's probably where I'd start in a conversation like that.
00:07:38
Speaker
So beautifully said, thank you so much. I'm just wondering, what was your initial response to that as a nine-year-old and as you grew up thinking about the goodness of God and the hope and the comfort and rather suffering with Jesus? Did you ever have kind of a period where
00:07:57
Speaker
you were just angry. Like how did you come to that sense? Yeah, I wouldn't say angry. I appreciate that sort of probing as much as we can be conscious of how we thought and felt so long ago. Probably going to misremember and imprint different things over those experiences. I just remember sadness. I think sadness was a real element of
00:08:19
Speaker
watching my mum struggle to have to learn how to do things again, struggle with disability struggle with just her chemical imbalance in her brain being so off kilter that she would go from full rage to suicidal ideation to laughter and happiness at the drop of a hat without any control. And I was just sad for her and sad for what that meant for my dad and a loss of meaningful partnership and agency and know that he's carried that so beautifully over the years.
00:08:49
Speaker
So, I wouldn't say anger. Confusion and sadness would have probably been the two dominant feelings more so than anger directed towards God. I think the confusion just made me take a back step rather than become an anti-theist or something like that, wanting to go out and disprove God's existence. And so, that's probably more the defining characteristic that I remember.
The Hiddenness of God
00:09:13
Speaker
That confusion piece that was interesting as we were chatting before hitting a record and talking about the fact that you do a lot of work with young people and students and engage their questions. I know that one of the other questions you said that often comes up for people is another one that can have confusion attached to it. There's this whole issue of the hiddenness
00:09:33
Speaker
of God. And I find, you know, Christians can wrestle with that sometimes, actually, as much as non-Christians. But I remember talking to a university student about two, three years ago, really interesting, who the conversation started with atheism. But by the end of the conversation, he said something that really struck me. He said, look, I guess I'm an atheist, but I don't want to be an atheist. If I could see God, if I could just see something, I want to believe. I just don't know how.
00:10:00
Speaker
And it was quite a moving sort of conversation, really. How do we engage with that one? People who, they're not hostile. They just haven't seen God and almost wish that they had. Yeah. I think we ask a whole lot of questions to draw out a person's story because you're right. There are dimensions to the hiddenness of God that touch unbelievers. People who say, look, I'm willing to believe if only meaningful evidence was presented to me.
00:10:26
Speaker
And then there are dimensions to that question, which really touch believers who are experiencing seasons of doubt or dark nights of the soul. They say, I don't feel my faith the way that I once did, or relationship with an all powerful God hasn't exactly turned out how I expected. God doesn't seem to answer my prayers. Heaven seems shut or silent, the God forsakenness and experiences of life. And so this is a really deep question. And it's one that I found coming up in the Bible a lot.
00:10:54
Speaker
And not just in the literature of the Psalms and the questions that David cries out, where are you, O Lord? Why do you stand so far off in times of trouble? Those sorts of experiences, but it's on the lips of Jesus himself. You know, this God forsakenness on the cross, a sense of heaven mourning the suffering of the Son of God. But the sky is going dark and heaven seeming shut and no answer visibly coming.
00:11:17
Speaker
And you see it in some of the greatest figures like the Apostle Paul speaking about despairing even of life itself or of many of the prophets in the Old Testament wishing that they perished at birth or some like thing. You realize, wow, there's a heaviness to a life with God that isn't always expressed in many of the praise songs in church.
00:11:35
Speaker
questions like this around making sense of God's presence and absence right across the biblical story, where I just think wrestling with these stories helps to get a picture about what God is doing. In one sense, the Bible would say that there is a way that God speaks, that he speaks in nature and that he speaks in Scripture and he dwells amongst God's people.
00:11:57
Speaker
And so I don't think we are devoid of God's revelation. I think there is adequate, even beautiful testimony that's given to him in the heavens above and in humanity and in history, but it's not always compelling or overwhelming.
00:12:12
Speaker
And, you know, I experience firsthand in conversations the frustration of some skeptics and doubters who wish they could believe if only they had a religious experience, pointing back to some of the things that I had around my conversion and say, man, I wish I could give you that. I don't know why God isn't revealing himself more actively to you in this way.
00:12:37
Speaker
There are some things that I stumbled across within the Christian story that I did find helpful. Sometimes the Christian story says that God seems hidden because we're the ones hiding, not Him. And that reality in the garden of the first sort of effect of human sin, the shame of wanting to cover over ourselves from fig leaves from each other and then hiding behind filling bushes to hide from God.
00:13:01
Speaker
There is a sense where we don't always seek in the way that God desires that we seek, the way that He's promised to reveal Himself. There's another dimension to God's hiddenness, though, where the Bible says that God hides to achieve some greater good, that in the same way that His endgame is to develop wise, mature agents who are going to reign and rule with Jesus in the new creation.
00:13:25
Speaker
Well, developing that kind of agency sometimes actually requires the degree of his absence that we learn to operate according to the gifts and capacities that he's given us to grow up and to take responsibility and to forge virtues and courage and character that we otherwise wouldn't have if he'd been overwhelmingly present. Like I think of that with my own little boys. They'd love me to carry them everywhere. I'd do everything for them. No, it actually requires sometimes that I step back and have to learn things on their own for them to grow up into the role that they're meant to play in the world.
00:13:54
Speaker
And there's other times where God needs to be hidden in order for the cause and effect web of events that's necessary to bring about that endgame actually comes about. And it's a crude analogy, but you think, you know, the picture in the Marvel series in Infinity Wars where Dr. Strange looks at all the possible futures and whether or not they can finally defeat death Thanos and have a great resurrection and overcome evil.
00:14:21
Speaker
But to bring that reality about actually required that Dr. Strange disappear for five years. And so it's his knowledge of what needed to happen so that a complex web of cause and effect events played out exactly as it did that sometimes requires absence rather than presence and darkness rather than light for that period in order for the right things to line up to bring about God's final endgame.
00:14:44
Speaker
And so there's a few thoughts that I had. I'm like, oh, these are kind of helpful. They're inching us towards something. And there's another way in which what happens with Jesus on the cross shows that sometimes God's absence isn't actually absence at all. That even though it looks like God is absent, actually he's present in Christ, reconciling the world to himself. And so just our senses don't necessarily perceive the nearness of God or what he's doing in the world or the meaning that he's drawing through these events.
00:15:12
Speaker
So there's some thoughts I had on that, and there's one that teenagers particularly love, and it's more about how God chooses to reveal himself. If his goal is not just that we believe that he exists, but that we believe in him, that we come to form a deep and meaningful relationship with him, then the means by which he reveals himself may actually be necessary to be what it is to bring about that end.
00:15:35
Speaker
An example would be, you can imagine what would happen if I was to turn up at the door of my now wife before we were married. She'd never met me before, but I knock on her front door and say to her, hey, I've been watching you every day of your life and I know everything there is to know about you and I'm madly in love with you and you need to be with me forever. Coming on that full and that strong
00:15:57
Speaker
would overwhelm any meaningful way that she has to form the kind of feelings towards me that's necessary to engender a yes. That is not how relationships work. I'm probably walking out of that scenario in handcuffs or at least with a restraining order. But if I gave signals of my interest from a distance,
00:16:14
Speaker
things that gave her signs that she had opportunity to reciprocate or to build those similar affections or if I failed my intensity for a little bit just to slowly try and win her over and that would have a much higher degree of success than if I came on overwhelmingly.
00:16:29
Speaker
And I'm old enough to remember a brilliant movie that I watched growing up coming to America with Eddie Murphy, the original, not the terrible remake. You know, where there's the King of Zamunda, where he wants to find a queen, but he doesn't just want her to love him for his role. He wants to find a woman who will just love and relate to him as he is, for who he is. And so he moves over to Queens in America and pretends to be a poor,
00:16:54
Speaker
immigrant student just in order to try and win over the affections of a woman for his character, not for his money or his position. And I just love that image. And I think there's something similar in how God chooses to come humbly in Jesus, not born in a palace, but in a stable, to be able to help win us over by who he is and not just by the raw degree of his power.
00:17:15
Speaker
some elements there which all feed into this hiddenness question. And so, unless you get to know someone's individual story, you've got no absolute answers to the why, but you can start pulling in some of these resources to maybe help make sense of why God seems to be more absent than we would want him to be.
Building Evangelistic Communities
00:17:30
Speaker
Dan, thanks so much. That's
00:17:34
Speaker
disturbingly beautiful threads that you've just teased out about God's presence and absence. What do you think it looks like to create a culture of
00:17:48
Speaker
like an incubator of such evangelistic approaches in a local church context. Like how can we be creating those communities where one another, as brothers and sisters, we're having those kinds of conversations and we're taking things in those directions as we reach out to friends and family and work as co-colleagues at work.
00:18:08
Speaker
Yeah that's really good i think there's a number of ways you can do something like that i think part of that would be i'm creating spaces for as the gathered church so i think sundays and special events where you're doing let's do q and a once a month after a service or let's do some specially training together so that we can talk about these things bringing people from the outside who might be helpful catalysts in.
00:18:31
Speaker
preparing Christians for having better God conversations. That could be a key thing. I think in our medium groups, you know, a lot of churches break down into gatherings during the week where they need homes for meals and to study the scriptures. And part of that could just be developing a prayerfulness of spending five or 10 minutes praying for opportunities to actually share our faith.
00:18:50
Speaker
through the week and then come back and report stories on what happened to get excited with where God's at work together and to laugh over the times that we fumbled on those opportunities. But just to build that expectation that God wants to move and in those contexts maybe do a little bit more rigorous training.
00:19:07
Speaker
I can think of great resources like some of the solar stuff or even some of the videos that QC puts together where we're trying to create meaningful responses to these kind of questions in ways that are digestible and memorable so that others can use it in conversations with their friends and family. So bringing some of those resources in and getting familiar so that people are writing down one or two dot points on what they might say if a question like suffering or hiddenness comes up so that they feel better prepared next time that happens.
00:19:34
Speaker
And then at just that individual level, I think people thinking through carefully, why do I believe in Jesus in a world of spiritual options? And why is Jesus good news for me? That why and what when it comes to the Christian story, I just think are two things that we want to be preparing people to be ready to go with so that when they're having conversations at work or amongst family members and meals, that you've just got something ready and meaningful and sharp that you can
00:20:01
Speaker
ingest into those conversations in a way that's helpful. So there's a few thoughts on big, medium, small. We actually put together a bit of a document for a question in Christianity last year, just called the game plan, helping Christians and church leaders think through this a bit. So that might be something we could put in the show notes for people too.
Engaging with Questioning Christianity
00:20:16
Speaker
It's hard to believe but that has been kind of 20 minutes. We've packed a lot into that, Dan. Thank you for all of the wisdom and practical stuff, very real answers that you shared. Look, folks who've been intrigued and found this helpful and want to dig into more of what you've done, what's the best place for people to find you and catch up with your work and your colleagues? Where do people find your stuff?
00:20:38
Speaker
Yeah. QuestioningChristianity.com is our website, but probably our most active space would be on YouTube and Instagram. So, QuestioningChristianity.qc on Instagram. You'll find us at QCSocials. Either of those, you'll be able to get the links, I'm sure, in the show notes if you want to follow that through. Absolutely. We will indeed put a link to QuestioningChristianity there in the show notes. So, Dan, it just falls for me finally to just, again, thank you for taking the time. Thank you for joining us for the other side of the world. It's been a privilege having you.
00:21:07
Speaker
Hey, I'm honored to be on with such intriguing hosts. Intriguing hosts. Yes. Well, join us next week, two weeks time rather, for another episode of PepTalk. And hopefully, Christy will have discovered a different adjective to introduce me with, me with or me her with. And we hope you've enjoyed this episode. Hope you found it helpful. And thanks for tracking with the show. Bye for now.