You're listening to the Bible for normal people the only God ordained podcast on the internet. I'm Pete ends and I'm Jared bias.

Welcome everybody to this episode of the podcast our topic today is the book of acts and the acts of the spirit and our guest is.

Willie James Jennings who is currently associate professor of systematic theology and Africana studies at Yale.

But was a duke for a long time a long time and has this book that we are going to be talking about which is a commentary on the book of acts so who better to talk about a book than someone who's written an entire commentary on it but also has books called after whiteness and education and belonging in the Christian imagination theology and the origins of race.

So I like whenever we can talk to be one of the things that drew me to willie was this one foot in writing a commentary on a book of the Bible clearly steeped in biblical studies and understanding the context and the history and yet one foot clearly in theology professor of systematic theology and that's a hard bridge to cross sometimes.

Yeah I mean sometimes people they put up walls so you'd never cross that but I I always thought biblical scholars have to understand theological kinds of questions and theologians will do their work differently if they understand some of the issues with the biblical text but will he does both of those things and it's it's fun to watch somebody put pieces together in a certain way and to draw an ancient book into.

So a context in which that's just different than that ancient context which is basically the history of Christianity we're always taking the ancient stuff and putting it into another time in place and and he does that in this commentary with on the book of acts so if you are on your way to a family gathering and your nervous and tense listen to this episode where we talk about a possibility of a life together and how it might be full of conflict and yet it can also be full of belonging and love so you know there's your certain.

That's the plan at least that's right that's the plan.

If nothing else maybe I'll just distract you for an hour.

So all right enjoy.

Throughout the book of acts as I like to say the one thing you know about the coming of the spirit is somebody is being asked to do what they don't want to do.

Read each chapter of the book of act and ask what is the spirit of God doing in this chapter?

What has got to asking people to do in this chapter?

If we start with those two questions I think you'll start to read the book of acts in a new way.

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