You Tube Theology

Most of us have inherited a version of Christianity that treats this world as a problem to escape. Get to heaven. Survive until then. But what if that's not what Paul was teaching at all?
Nijay Gupta has spent 20 years studying Paul's letters, and in his new book Paul for the World, he makes the case that Paul was never primarily interested in getting people to heaven. He was interested in teaching ordinary people how to live — how to work, how to handle money, how to relate across ethnic lines, how to engage the arts — in a world that felt just as broken and hopeless as ours does now.
In this conversation we get into:

Why the word translated "world" in Paul's letters is often aion (age), not kosmos — and why that changes everything
What "holy worldliness" means and why Bonhoeffer's theology of incarnation matters for how we engage culture today
The economic realities of the Greco-Roman world and what Paul's "Goldilocks economy" has to say about wealth inequality now
Why Paul was a blue-collar day laborer when he could have been a paid philosopher — and what that challenges in our ministry culture
How Stoicism shaped Paul's world and why it's making a comeback today
Why the arts aren't icing on the cake for the church — they're essential
What eternal life actually looks like if we take the biblical imagination seriously

Every minute you live in this world has eternal significance. This conversation is about recovering that conviction.
Paul for the World by Nijay Gupta is available wherever books are sold.

Connect with Nijay Gupta:
Podcast: Slow Theology (with AJ Swoboda)
Substack: Engaging Scripture
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