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Gang, welcome back to the podcast. I'm Zach. I'm so delighted to be joined by Zoe. Sorry, I didn't know if you're gonna say my name or not. Sorry about that. Yes, I am joined by Zoe. Guys, I've got to be on my best behavior today because we've got a very special guest.

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who also happens to, I think you are still the president of the place where I study. So I need to be on my best behavior. Please welcome Graham Tomlin. So great to have you. How are you doing this morning? Zach and Zoe, lovely to see you. Really good to be here. Yeah, I've been very well.

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Got up early and drove down from Oxford, where we live, down here to London. So must be back in a place we used to live here in Fulham, which is where this has been filmed. Super cool. It's really good. Thank you so much for joining us. Guys, before we get into this episode, it's going to be super fascinating. You guys know the drill. Our vision here is to reach every young person with the good news. We can't do that alone.

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So if you're watching this on YouTube, hit the subscribe button, hit the notifications button and drop us a little comment. We'll tell you what to comment at the end of this video. Yeah. And if you're listening on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, drop a follow and drop us a review of what you think. And as I always say, that's not just to big up ourselves, but because we want to big up Jesus and we want people to know him through everything that we do. So...

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Hit all those buttons. Yeah. And let's roll the credits. I'm super excited. Roll the credits.

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Well, Graham, we always love to start by hearing a little bit of our guest's story. So I'd love to hear a brief kind of synopsis of your own journey with Jesus and also how that led you to study and become a bishop. We've got a bishop in the house. What a gift. Yeah, well, I guess the story is that I was born into a Christian family. My dad was a minister. He was a Baptist minister, in fact.

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And I kind of grew up, as you do, in a Christian home, believing what your parents tell you to believe and learning to pray and learning to think of God as my father and Jesus as my savior. And I kind of didn't question that at all as you grow up through your early years. Until that was, until I hit about 15, 16, that kind of teenage years where you do start thinking for yourself a little bit. And I guess I went through my...

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sort of teenage rebellion at that stage. But my teenage rebellion was not sort of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. It was reading Nietzsche. It was reading these sort of atheist philosophers, which was my rebellion against my parents in my upbringing. And I think it's funny, when I think back on it, I think I actually went through a period where I would have said, definitely, I'm an atheist. I don't believe, probably from around...

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1516 through to 1718 that sort of period and i think the reason why i did that was because um i remember seeing you know one or two other friends who were at church and they were at school and i kind of thought well the way they acted at church was pretty different from the way they acted at school it seemed a little bit odd and i thought you know these are hypocrites you know i look back on it i was being very judgmental on them i was being really unkind on them but i kind of felt that

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And so partly because of that, I started questioning things. I started reading all these philosophers and so on. So I really had this period of being an atheist for a number of years. But then gradually I was drawn back into Christian faith, partly because my...

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My parents kind of made me go to church during that time. I didn't really want to go, but I kind of went there, and I would sit at the back, and I'd read the Bible trying to find the mistakes, you know. And I would listen to sort of sermons and try to pick holes in them. But I think gradually over that time, I think what happened was I kind of, what I'd rejected was a fairly childish understanding of Christian faith, which was fine for me when I was 12, but wasn't any good for me at 16. But I realized there was a kind of more adult version of Christian faith that I could actually...

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believe and make sense of and so gradually some partly hearing despite myself in a Christian faith being explained from the front I also knew a group of friends who were Christians in a youth group in the church that I was sort of connected into who didn't give up on me even though I was pretty rude to them and rude to their faith and there was something about them and the way they lived that I was secretly envious of there was a sort of peacefulness about them there was a

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a sense that they would devote themselves to the good of other people in a way that I didn't really want to do. But I thought, I kind of like that. And so in a way, I was pulled away from Christian faith by the behavior of Christians, but I was also drawn back to Christian faith by the behavior of Christians, which tells you how important it is that we act in Christian ways. But then I guess when I came back to faith,

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When I found myself, and it wasn't some great moment of revelation for me. It was over a period of time where, you know, you'd have asked me one time, I'd have said, no, no, I'm not a Christian, I'm an atheist. Maybe you'd ask me three or four months later, I'd have said, well, maybe I am. I don't know. Maybe I'm just getting in that direction. So I gradually found myself back into Christian faith, starting to pray, starting to believe in God, starting to kind of engage in God.

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church stuff again. But as I did that, it was important to me that the Christian faith kind of made some sense, that I could think about it and I could make some sense of it. So I wasn't drawn back into Christian faith primarily by intellectual arguments.

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But it was important to me that when I rediscovered faith that I tried to understand what that faith was about. Therefore, I started reading Christian writers and theologians and philosophers rather than the atheist ones. So that was part of my journey of discovering Christian faith. And that's always been an important part of my faith, that kind of aspect of understanding the faith better. So anyway, I went and did an English degree at university.

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After that, I thought I was being called into church ministry, so went back to do another degree in theology. And after that, got ordained in the Church of England. I've actually spent most of my ministry life teaching theology at St. Miletus. Great place to train. Shout out. Exactly. Shout out to St. Miletus. And in Oxford, a place called Wycliffe Hall, where I taught for many years. Absolutely.

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And then became a bishop a bit later on. And so, yeah, most of my life has been an excuse to study theology, really. That's kind of what I do. That's awesome. Yeah. So, yeah, that's a bit of my story. That's awesome. I feel like it's interesting that you have this sort of, like, intellectual journey with your own faith. And do you think that's, like, helped you to love theology?

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God more? Like has understanding him more, if I can call it that, has that helped you to love him more? Because I think sometimes that can just lead to doubt when we don't find the answers or even like feeling like we've kind of got everything figured out when we don't. I think it's definitely helped me to love God more. I mean, I,

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For me, I think of study as a kind of spiritual discipline. It's as important for me as prayer. Interesting. It's not just a kind of optional extra. It's something that is part of my discipleship, part of my being a follower of Jesus. You know, Jesus echoed that bit from the Old Testament that we're called to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength. That includes the mind. So we serve God with our hearts, by our kind of emotional engagement with faith. We serve God with our strength, with our sort of,

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physical way in which we sort of help and serve other people with our hands and bodies but we serve we serve god with our minds by learning to love him and i think the way that works for me is when i'm thinking about the god that i serve the god that i've come to know i want to i want to know who this god is um as i was reading this morning in my bible reading this morning this little verse that says you know let us let us strive to know the lord and

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And it strikes me that's at the heart of what the Christian faith is. It's a striving to know the Lord better and better and better all the time. And that's what theology is. It's trying to put words around who this God is. Now, we can never totally get that absolutely right. And one of the great insights, I think, of theology, which has really helped me, is one that the early Christians had, especially in the kind of Greek part of the church,

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Well, they say that the theology is about, it's not about getting all the right answers. It's about knowing God better and knowing God better and better in a way that you never get to the end of that. Even in heaven, even in the new creation, we never get to the bottom of God. There's always more to be discovered. There's more to be experienced of his love. There's more to be understood about him. And therefore, theology is a bit like... Wow.

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It's a bit like when you're seeing something through a, you know, a sort of a zoom lens, you know, you're maybe taking a picture or something and you're trying to get the thing in focus and you're trying to kind of, you know, twiddle the lens to make sure you can see it as clear as you can. Maybe it's a bird or a...

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or a mountain, or something like that. And you want to see it with its perfect clarity, and see how wonderful and beautiful it is. And so you sort of twiddle a lens tightly so you can see it really clearly. And that's kind of what theology is about. It's why the early, why, you know, Christian theologians get very kind of pernickety about words, about how you describe it rightly, how you describe God rightly. Because they're trying to kind of understand, who is this God? So you can see him in all his beauty, and clarity, and glory. And that's what

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I think theology is for me that the more I understand this God as he's revealed himself in Jesus, the more I think, yeah, this is a God that's worth everything. It's worth serving and worth worshipping. And that's why theology really helps me understand

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to love god and in some ways you know as i say you never get to the bottom of this which is why actually your your doubts and your questions are a really helpful thing because they help you ask the right questions and they keep make help you keep thinking about it and you and you don't just think i've got this all sorted out let's get on with life you never get this sorted out you carry on thinking you carry on exploring you carry on discovering who this god is and which leads you more into worship and service and the rest of your life

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Oh, I love that. I love the merging of. Dang. Yeah, I know. It's crazy. I love the merging of the mind and the heart and just the direct line that we have to loving God through that and through the way that he's created us, which I think is so cool.

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And I understand that you've written a book on Blaise Pascal, who was a theologian, mathematician. He was. Et cetera. What was it about Blaise Pascal that drew you to him? Like, tell us more about him, why you wanted to study him out of all the theologians, I guess. Yeah, sure. Yeah.

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Well, he's a really interesting man. He lived in the 17th century. He was born in 1623, died in 1662. He was only 39, didn't live for very long. And he was a remarkable man. He was right at the cutting edge of scientific exploration. At that time when, you know, modern science was beginning to be born in the kind of Western world, he was a

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The mathematician did groundbreaking work on things like probability theory. And so he had a big influence on a lot of things that we think of. So, for example, he invented the first mechanical calculating machine that actually worked, that added and subtracted and did multiplication and division up to about hundreds of millions. And it worked. It was a brilliant thing. So when the story of the computer is told...

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The story of his machine is part of that story. He invented probability theory. In other words, how you work out, how you manage risk, how you kind of do it. So insurance policies, for example, are based on management of risk, you know, working out how likely it is you're likely to have a crash in your car. Therefore, what...

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insurance premiums you should pay or how long you're likely to live. And therefore your life insurance, that's basically all down to Pascal. He was one of the first people to wear his, his timepiece on his wrist as opposed to in his pocket. So that's, that's Pascal too. He did experiments on,

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air pressure, that air weighs something. And such a thing looks like the vacuum exists. So you think of all those things, the computer, the wristwatch, insurance policies. That's a lot of stuff. He also invented buses. He had this idea that if you could, you know, in Paris, in the time when he lived...

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Paris was expanding as a city. It was getting very big. And that was fine for rich people because they could get around in their carriages. But for poor people, it was a real struggle. And he kind of thought, well, okay, what if we had a whole lot of carriages and they went from point A to point B and you could stop at various points and poor people could pay a very small amount and they could just go from one point to another. That would be cool, wouldn't it? And so he got this company together. They bought five carriages, five routes, and they established it in Paris, the first bus system in Europe. So all of that stuff, that's all Pascal.

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That is crazy. And so anyway, that's all kind of part of what he's like.

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He was also this profound Christian. He had this really extraordinary experience of the presence of God on a particular night, November in 1654. He always had a bit of a faith, but his faith really came alive at this moment. And he writes about it in a kind of poem that he wrote, and he hid it in the lining of his jacket, and they only found it after he died. He never told anybody about it. But this experience was transformational for him,

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And out of that experience of the reality and the presence of God, he wrote this extraordinary thing called the... Well, he started to write this... He had a lot of friends who were kind of wealthy, sophisticated, cool kids around town, and who, you know, they were all kind of nominal Christians, but they found God boring, really. And so he started to think, how do I convince them that they can only really find happiness in God?

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So he started to write a great, what he was going to be a great sort of book about Christian faith directed at the people who don't believe. Now, he never finished it because he was pretty sick most of his life. He died early, but he left behind all these notes for this book, which was then published, I think, called the Pensée, the Pensée of Pascal, which means thoughts.

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And it's a brilliant little book. And I remember reading it as a teenager, one of the books I started to read when I'd kind of come back to faith. And I read it again later on. I got a lot of work on it. And I thought to myself, one day I'm going to write a biography of this magazine. He's such a fascinating person. So that's kind of why I wrote it. And I think this, the Pensée, has some fascinating things to say about how we go about persuading our friends and commending Christian faith to those people.

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You don't have it and don't understand it. So I learned a lot from him about that. What was his particular approach to that? I'm fascinated by that. Well, he has this real insight into the way we are wired as human beings. And he says...

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basically that our hearts are stronger than our heads, our longings are stronger than our logic. In other words, you can have all kinds of reasons why you believe God exists or why the resurrection happened or why Jesus is the Son of God, but unless you make people want to believe it, they won't believe it. Because the reality is we only believe what we want to believe. We are very good at persuading ourselves that what we want to believe is true.

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And we're very good at persuading ourselves that what we don't want to believe isn't true. What would be like an example of that, of something that I want to believe is true but might not be? Okay. Well, I am very good at persuading myself that I can eat as many biscuits as I like, and it's not going to have any real impact upon my health. I'm very good at persuading myself. Faced with a plate of chocolate biscuits, it's not going to be a problem. Okay.

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And I know in my head that if I eat that plate of chocolate biscuits, it's not going to be good for me at the end of the day. But I'm good at persuading myself it's not a problem. Okay, that's a great idea. So just a little tiny thing like that. But he thinks it's also true about God. And for many people, daddy, if God is boring, why would I want to believe in God? Just restrict my options. There's not much in it. Why would I want to do this? So he has this line in the passé where he says, if you're going to try to persuade someone of Christian faith, he says this, he says, make it attractive and,

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make them wish it was true, and then show that it is. I think that's really, really clever and very insightful. You've got to make it attractive. Make it something that people wish was true. And then you can show that it's true. Only when people actually get to the point where they say, well, I don't believe it, but there's something about you that makes me wish this was true.

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that you're halfway there. That's when the reasons come in. That's super interesting. So that's the kind of beginnings of his approach. Now, he has a lot more to say about that, but I think that's a crucial insight for him, that unless you make people want it to be true, they will find all kinds of reasons for not believing it.

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well how do you think you can make the christian faith look attractive obviously as christians we're like yes of course you should be a christian it's great yeah but i mean i'm reminded of the your testimony that you shared of how it was both like christians um hypocritical behavior that drew you that pushed you away but then also christians yeah peaceful behavior and like

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the behavior that reflected Jesus that drew you back in. Yeah. What, how can we make Christianity attractive? Well, again, I mean, again, this is the stuff I've learned from Pascal really. So, um, one of the things that I think is true about Christian faith is that the Christian faith is, is a, is a faith for people who know they need help.

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If you think you're fine, as you are, you don't need anything, you don't need any help, you can get by in life, Christian faith will always seem a bit irrelevant. It is only something that makes sense to people who know they need help. So in some ways, the first step, I think this is what Pascal would say, is to help people realize that they do need help. And he does that by asking all kinds of interesting questions. So he asks the question, why is it that we spend so much time

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distracted by trivia so in his day he would ask the question why do people spend all their time going hunting or racing or having kind of you know um playing tennis or having witty conversation in the saturday in our day he would ask why do we spend all our time scrolling through endless meaningless videos on tiktok or instagram or facebook or whatever it might be why do we do that you know we all do it but why on earth do we do it why do we distract ourselves with these things that are

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that are actually pretty meaningless. Why do we spend our time worrying about pretty meaningless things like football results? No, that's what I do. I'm a massive football fan, but when I think about it, I think I just really mean a great deal at the end of the day. So he asked, why do we do this? And he says, is it because there is inside of us a kind of deep emptiness, a deep sadness that we don't want to address? Yes.

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And we try to distract ourselves with other stuff to keep away from thinking about that emptiness. And the reason why we have that emptiness is because we were, it's a kind of infinite emptiness. And we were made for an infinite relationship with the God. And the reason why we feel that is because we have lost that relationship with God.

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So he begins to try to ask those questions. He asks the question about, you know, why is it that we all seek happiness? Every single human being wants to be happy. No exceptions, he says. We know there are people who like being miserable, but people who like being miserable, they like being miserable because it sort of makes them happy, you know, so it kind of works in the end. So he asks the question, why do we all want to be happy? Even though happiness is really elusive,

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Because when we think about it, we get moments of happiness every now and again. You fall in love with someone or you see a beautiful sunset or you go to a concert and the music is amazing or there's a moment of sporting brilliance or you're with friends and you get just a brief moment. You think, oh, this is just wonderful. But it doesn't last. Pretty soon you're back to ordinary reality. We have this desire for happiness, for joy, for ecstasy, but it's so fleeting. It just slips through our fingers so quickly. Yeah.

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And he says, well, why do we have this idea of happiness if we don't really know what it is? Or if we only just taste it occasionally? He says, is it because we as a human race once knew what happiness was because we were in relationship with the God who made us and the God for whom we exist?

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But we've lost that relationship. And that's why underneath we sense this sadness, this emptiness. And so he starts by making people aware of the fact that we just need help.

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And then he will talk quite a lot about Jesus and about how attractive Jesus is. And for him, one of the ways in which he wanted to provoke people to kind of see the attractiveness of the Christian faith was by living a life that was Jesus-shaped. As he said, I was attracted by people who lived a life that had a touch with Jesus about them. And for Pascal, what it was, was one of the results of that powerful experience of the

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reality of God. One was that he wanted to persuade his friends about Christian faith, but the other was that he got very passionately concerned for the poor people of Paris. And so he started giving away a lot of what he owned. He lived a very simple life from that time onwards. And it was radically different from what was expected of a well-educated

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sophisticated person like Pascal, very different from his friends. And he says, I love poverty because Jesus loved poverty, because Jesus was poor. He wanted to live a life that has a touch of Jesus about it. And that was provocative for people, and it raised the question. And so these are some of the ways. I think there are two aspects of it. Helping people to recognize that they need...

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And that isn't hard to find because most of us know that underneath the surface. But then presenting Jesus Christ as the one who actually offers...

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the answer to so many of these questions that we have and that offers us a way of life that is so much more satisfying and his character and his personality and his what he tells us about the nature of god and the fact that in jesus christ we see the love of god for us displayed that begins to make christian faith attractive in a way that makes people want it to be true yeah wow that's amazing

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I'm curious on once, once we kind of unlock that someone has

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something that they're seeking and that they're longing for and that potentially God could be this. I guess my question is sort of, do we need to then have all of the right answers intellectually? And do we like bear any sort of responsibility to then be able to answer all of their questions to convince them that Christianity is it? Yeah.

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Because I think I've sometimes met some people who are not Christian, who have this desire for God to be true, but they actually have really good questions, some of which I can't answer. And it makes me, I don't know, feel some type of way, if you know what I mean. Yeah. Yeah, and it seems to me that there are some Christians who are called to that life of,

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Study, theology, apologetics, we sometimes use that word, that digging into the questions that people ask. I think that's part of my calling, to kind of just really think through those questions. Because let's face it, those questions that...

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our non-Christian friends have are also Christians that we have. You know, you don't get rid of those questions when you become a Christian. It strikes me that when you become a Christian, most people I've met who become Christians have become Christians not because they found answers to all their questions, but because they encountered somebody that they trusted did have the answer to those questions, even if they don't know who they are. So in one sense, no, we don't have to know all the answers necessarily.

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Because actually what we're presenting to people is not a package of answers, not a sort of philosophical system, but we're presenting a person to be trusted who is Jesus. And the important thing is not that I have the answers, but that Jesus has the answers. And that even if I don't know the answers yet...

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I trust that he does. But that doesn't absolve us from the responsibility of doing the hard thinking to be able to say something sensible when those questions come up. So when I, which is one of the reasons why I think studying theology really matters for all of us. And the reality is that all of us are theologians.

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The word theology is two Greek words, theos, logos, God, and word. So any Christian who speaks words about God is a theologian, even at the most sort of basic level. So all of us, you want to speak good words about God, true words about God, reliable words about God.

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Because that's why there's this calling on all of us to be as good theologians as we can, given that not everyone's going to do degrees and doctorates and everything else, and that's fine. So when I was a bishop, I would often go into schools, and I would often say to the teacher beforehand, look, you know, go to the class and get them to list any question they've got about God, and then send them to me. Whoa. And they would have things like, you know, why did you create the world? Right.

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You know, is it lonely in heaven? You know, can God die? Those kind of questions.

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Wow. And I would go in and I'd spend an hour with the class and we would work our way through the questions. And they expected me to say something sensible about those things. And there were some questions I said, well, you know, I'm really struggling with that question myself. I don't know the answer, but here's what I've got to so far. There are others I think, well, I've thought about that quite a bit and I can tell you what I think about it. And because it seems to me that, I mean, I think back to my experience of coming to faith. As I said, I wasn't convinced by intellectual arguments. I was drawn by...

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Jesus as I saw him in the people that I knew. But it was important to me that this faith that I was...

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being drawn into kind of made sense and that I could speak. And it was something that wasn't totally irrational. It wasn't something that I just couldn't get my head around in any kind of way. And that I could say something sensible to myself and to my friends. And so I think the answer to your question is, on one level, no, we don't have all the answers. We will never have all the answers. Right. Because Christian faith is a trust in a person who does have the answers, not the fact that I've got them.

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Um, but there's also the calling to, um, to be, to, to be as reliable as we can in the words we say, to be as good theologians as we can be at whatever level we're called to be in that regard. Did you ever get any questions from those students that made you personally doubt your faith? Mm-hmm.

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Yeah, I mean, there are things that happen all the time. I mean, I suppose if I'm honest, I have questions that I just do not know the answer to. And I live with the question for a while. Such as what? What kinds of, if you don't mind me asking, what kind of questions are you asking?

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struggling with yeah well i mean the big one is always the question you know why does god allow suffering why does god allow good people to experience terrible things why is this a why does this particular person who's lived a good life and done everything as well as you can tell

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Why do they suddenly get cancer? Why do they suddenly lose a child in extraordinary ways? I don't know the answer to those things. Now, we can talk about that question and how I approach it as a Christian, but it's not something I say I can give you a neat answer as to why God allows suffering in the world. But that doesn't stop me believing.

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Why not? Because I feel like to a lot of people that would be reason to stop believing. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, and I go back to thinking about pretty well everyone I've known. I don't yet know a Christian who knows a bad answer to that question. Right. I've never met someone who says, I can tell you 100%, here's the answer, no problem. Yeah. Most of us are Christians, despite the fact that we don't know an answer to that question. Interesting.

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In a sense, when we think about the problem of evil, why is there evil in the world? What is evil? Well, evil in a sense is the brokenness of the world. And people say, did God create evil? And I guess I would say something like this, that evil is not something that was created. Evil is not a thing.

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It is a brokenness. You know, you could take this chair, for example, and it kind of works fine. But you can imagine this chair getting broken. You can ask the question, who created the chair? Okay, there was somebody who made the chair and made it work. But you could also, who created the brokenness in the chair? Well, brokenness is not a thing to be created. It's just the fact that it got broken. And so brokenness is not a thing to be created. It's something that happened to the chair.

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It's a different kind of thing. So it's a little bit like, you know, you see a tree on a sunny day and you think of the tree as being a thing that you can feel and touch and get your hands around and so on. But imagine a shadow, the shadow that's cast by the tree. Yeah.

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The shadow is not a thing in the same way that the tree is. So the tree is a thing. That's what God has created. But a shadow is a lack of something. It's a lack of light. And evil is like that. It's the lack of something. It's the brokenness of the world. And so, you know, brokenness is not a thing that God has created, but it's something that has happened to the world. Now, why is it broken? How is it broken? You can go back to the fall and the kind of sin of Adam and Eve at the beginning of the world and all those kind of answers to it.

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It doesn't explain why this happens to this person. Because there's something slightly random about evil in its very, it is randomness. It's a lack of order. It's a lack of sense. And so that sense, evil doesn't make any sense at all because it's the lack of sense. There is no reason for evil because evil has no reason to it. That's partly why we can't give a reason for it.

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And so I suppose at the end of the day, what I think is that I would say to an atheist who comes to me and says, well, I don't believe in God because he allows evil in the world. I say, well, okay, let's delete God. Let's get rid of God. Have you solved the problem of suffering? Well, you haven't really because it's still there. You've still got to face the day with it.

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You've still got to face the day when you get the cancer diagnosis and when your kid gets ill, when something terrible happens to you. You've got to find some way of navigating that. The difference is that you've got to navigate that without any hope that it's ever going to be any different.

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What I have as a Christian is a hope that one day evil will be overcome because it doesn't belong in this world. It wasn't there in the beginning. It won't be there in the end. Jesus Christ has overcome sin and evil and death in the cross and resurrection. So therefore, I've got a hope that evil is temporary. It's not eternal. It won't always be there. And if you delete God, you've not just deleted God, you've deleted hope.

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And you've just taken away any sense that it could ever be any different, that could ever be any resolution, or that evil could ever be overcome. And so what I find in Christian faith is not an answer to why God allows this bit of suffering or that bit of suffering.

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But it means that I've encountered someone who has overcome evil and tells me that evil can be overcome and will be overcome one day. And that gives me the hope to persevere through the sufferings and the struggles of this life. So those are some of the things I think about it. It's not a nice, neat answer, but it's a way of thinking about suffering and evil that helps me to kind of navigate those questions.

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I love what you were saying earlier about like. Not necessarily like the goal is not to win the argument. Yeah. I think that's so helpful because I know certainly I've gone into conversations with people who have different beliefs than me.

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And walked out of that conversation thinking I probably did more harm to their view of Jesus than I did help, even if I might have technically won the argument or not. I think that's super, super interesting. And I like the concept of...

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like the balance of pursuing the Lord intellectually and in our understanding, whilst not trying to kind of solidify all of the answers. Because I feel like that leaves a lot of room for trust. Yeah. Or just trusting that he is our hope. Yeah.

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Yeah, and I think a lot of what we do in this is not so much giving people, you know, here are five watertight arguments as to why God exists. But in a way, faith is something which you, at the end of the day, you can't prove it. You just have to live it.

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You have to try it on. It's a bit like going to the shops and trying to buy a coat and you have a look at it and you can examine it and is it the right size? At the end of the day, you've got to put it on and see whether it fits and see whether it keeps the rain off. That's so good. And that's kind of what faith is. It's trying this thing on. It's one of the things, you know, Pascal,

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would advise people, you know, where they're sort of, you know, well, there are reasons to believe, reasons not to believe, what do I do? And he would say, well, just try it for a while. Try living as if it's true. Living as if it's true that every person you meet this day is someone that God made, that Jesus died for, is infinitely precious and therefore needs respect. Live at this day as if God is there wanting you to pray and listening to every word you say.

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Open the Bible as if it is God speaking to you and listen to what he has to say. Live as if it's true. And so part of what we're trying to do, I think, in our commending Christian faith is to help people see how Christian faith makes so much more sense of the world.

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It kind of explains things. Not everything, but it makes the world look bigger and richer and more colorful. I mean, one of the things I'm involved in at the moment, we set up a website a couple of years ago called seenandunseen.com. Big shout out for that if you want to check it out. Yeah.

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And it's kind of like a kind of Christian commentary on what's going on in culture. So if there's a film or a Netflix series or a political issue or a story in the news, we'll get someone to write on it to see how that story looks like through the lens of Christian faith. Trying to show people who don't have a faith that actually Christian faith makes sense of the world, that it can make the world be a much more meaningful place when you see it through the lens of Christian faith. So that's a large part of what we're called to do, I think.

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I think I would love to know, Graham, if there's a young person out there who's watching this or listening to this, who's really kind of like interested by the things you've been saying and your journey of diving deeper into the intellectual understanding of God. What would you say is like a good first step for them to get into that? Yeah, there's lots of places to start. I mean, the first step is the Bible. It has to be.

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And getting into that habit of regularly reading the Bible every day, spending some time reading the Bible, allowing God to speak to you through it. But not just in a purely devotional way. You know, there's part of reading the Bible, which is, okay, what do you want to say to me today? But really sort of spending some time in it, letting it sort of seep into you and asking the awkward questions.

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There's a thing you don't understand. Okay, fine. Identify that. And just live with that question for a while. Really just press into it. So that's one thing, reading the Bible. The second thing is find someone that you know of who's done a bit of theology and who knows a bit more about this than you do.

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And pick their brains, you know, take them out for coffee, you know, just meet up with them from time to time just to say, look, you know, when a question comes, ask it. Don't just sort of sit there and put it to one side. Say, I want to understand this. Find someone who's done a bit of thinking of this and ask the question, you know, whatever it might be. Why do we talk about God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit? What does that mean? What difference does it make?

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So that's the second thing, find someone you can talk to about it. The other thing I think is to start reading a bit deeper into your faith. There are kind of guidebooks of theology. So one of my, a friend of mine, I used to teach with him is Michael Alistair McGrath, who was a,

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professor of theology at Oxford University, written some brilliant kind of handbooks on Christian theology, which takes you through the themes, the history of Christian theology. Just look him up on Amazon or whatever and pick one or two of his books. And there are many others as well that would do something similar. So start reading. And then, you know, if you get to that point of doing it, well, why not study some theology? Go to somewhere like Simulitis or Wakeliff or whatever it may be. Exactly, you're the man.

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You're the poster boy here, Zach. Yeah, exactly. So, you know, you can go and do a certificate, diploma, degree in theology. You never know where it might lead you. And it might be that just the beginnings of that. And Tony, it was for me, you know, just finding faith as a teenager or finding a faith of my own as a teenager, just beginning to think around it, reading the Bible, talking to people about it.

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You know, you take steps and steps. It led me towards, you know, doing a degree in theology, doing a PhD in theology, writing books about it. It may lead you in that direction. It may lead you in some other direction at all. But I'm sure there'll be people listening to this and watching this today who really have a call to be the next generation of theologians.

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I would love those people to go on that journey. You're not gonna get there right now, but start on it now on those steps, the Bible, finding a friend who can talk to about it. You know, starting to read more deeply into Christian faith, getting recommendations. It may be, you know, when you talk to your friend who's done a bit of theology, they may have some books and say, this is what you need to read, this, this and that. But begin a bit of a reading list. One of the habits I have is to try to make sure every day

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I read for at least about half an hour, at least half an hour, maybe an hour. I'll try to read some theology. I rarely get days where I can sit and read for all day because there's too much else to do. But that habit just means that, you know, over time I can keep on reading a lot of stuff and it just keeps me...

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thinking it keeps my faith alive for me that's an important discipline of really digging into my faith more more deeply so that's the kind of route i'd recommend i love that and i feel like that's a great place to kind of land yeah um yeah talk to someone you know read read your word get in that and of course look out for if you want to study theology yeah huge i'm a huge fan i'm a huge fan

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And thank you so much for driving in and joining us. Can I ask you a question? Yeah. Yeah. But I'd love to know from you, what have you gained from studying theology in your time of doing it? Has you been doing it for the last few years? You've been digging into this and, you know, you're talking to Zoe. He's maybe just beginning on this. What would you say to her as to what you've –

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Teach me. Found about this. Teach me. Yeah. What have I gained? I mean, it's a tough thing to summarize. But I think I would say, I think it's matured my faith. And I think it's taken it from kind of a baseline understanding.

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to really grasp some of the nuance of what the Bible says and the different opinions around it, which I think has, A, allowed me to find kind of my own opinions that are different from my parents or from my friends, but are still kind of like informed views, as well as trusting that I don't know everything. I think that's probably been the biggest thing.

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is before I kind of wanted to know all the answers, I feel like now I do want to know all the answers, but I understand that that's going to come in its time, which I think is really, really strengthened my faith. And even when I'm like doubting, I know that someone has figured it out. I probably just haven't found that yet. And that's okay. I can still walk with the Lord. I can still try on the jacket, even though I don't.

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Yeah, I would often find when people, I would often interview people at the beginning of a course in theology, and I would say, why do you want to study theology? And they would say, well, I want to find answers to all my questions.

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And I would sometimes say, well, probably, you know, you will find answers to some of your questions, but you will realize there are questions you haven't even thought about yet. And you will end up with more questions than you started. 100%. Now, that doesn't mean you don't grow in understanding, but you realize that God is much, much bigger than you think he is. And he is much more full of love than you think he is. He is much more full of creativity than you think he is. You've only just begun to understand this God that you've encountered. And the journey of prayer and theology...

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is the journey of discovering more and more of how amazingly beautiful and rich and creative this God is. It strikes me that in the Eastern church, in the Greek church, the word theology, theologia, was often thought of as the highest form of prayer. So theology and prayer were not two different things. They were kind of the same thing, or at least...

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You know, the journey of theology, the understanding and knowing God is a journey into prayer, of knowing this God better and expanding your vision of God. So I think a lot of what you say makes a lot of sense to me, that sense of, you know, you...

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You do get some answers to your questions, but your awareness of the size and the bigness of God grows. So are you convinced? You want to do some theology now? There you go. Sign her up. Hey, guys, thank you so much for joining us. Graham, thank you for joining us. This has been a brilliant episode.

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And I'm excited to see who's listening to this episode, who decides to study and really dig into scripture and prayer and all of these amazing things. Guys, we will see you next time. Hope you have a great rest of your day. Bye for now.