Biola University
Jesus was a Jewish rabbi, who was the savior of the world but also celebrated Passover, taught in synagogues, wore Jewish vestments and ordered his life around the Jewish, not the Christian calendar. So what happened. How did the church forget that Jesus was an observant Jew? How has Jesus’ identity as Israel long promised Messiah become such a fuzzy concept in the church? How has Christianity wandered so far from the Judaism in which it was birthed? How does this Jewish background of Jesus help us understand the NT? Join Sean and Scott as they interview Jen Rosner about her new book, Finding Messiah.
Jen Rosner is Affiliate Assistant Professor of Systematic Theology at Fuller Theological Seminary. She also holds academic posts at the King’s University and the Messianic Jewish Theological Institute. She is the author of 4 books and speaks widely on the the Jewish background to Christian faith.
Episode Transcript
Scott Rae: Jesus was a Jewish rabbi who was the savior of the world, but also celebrated Passover, taught in synagogues, wore Jewish vestments, and ordered his life around the Jewish, not the Christian calendar. So what happened? How did the church forget that Jesus was an observant Jew? How was Jesus's identity as long promised Messiah become such a fuzzy concept in the church? How's Christianity wandered so far from the Judaism in which it was birthed? We'll be answering these questions and more with our guest, Jen Rosner. I'm your host Scott Rae.
Sean McDowell: And I'm your host, Sean McDowell.
Scott Rae: And this is "Think Biblically", a podcast of Talbot School of Theology, Biola University. Jen, welcome. You grew up in a Jewish home. Your book, "Finding Messiah", tells that story, but tell our listeners a little bit about how you came to faith in Jesus.
Jen Rosner: Yeah, sure. Well, first of all, thank you for having me. I'm honored to be here, and I would be happy to tell a bit of my story. I did grow up in a Jewish home in Northern California, and I went off to college at a large public state school on the central coast of California, having been raised with certain tenets of Judaism, and a fairly strong sense of Jewish identity. And interestingly, in high school, my best friend was Catholic, and I even remember going to mass with her, but I never actually heard the gospel. I never knew, really, who the person of Jesus was until I went off to college at this large public state school. And it's a crazy story, I mean, it just so happens that all of my friends and roommates were Christians. It was a really interesting time at Cal Poly, which is the university that I was at, and God was on the move. Just as one example of that, the Campus Crusade chapter, which is now called Cru, went from about 30 people to 500 people in a five year period, and that's when I was there.
So something was going on, and I became swept up in it, to be honest. My roommate, my randomly assigned freshman dorm roommate, was a Christian. My next door neighbor in the dorm was a Christian, both of whom became very close friends of mine throughout my undergraduate years. And I eventually started going to church with them, just because I did not like being the only kid in the dorm on a Sunday morning, that's how Christian [inaudible 00:03:00] school that I was at. And I eventually started attending Campus Crusade meetings, which were very impactful for me. And then my roommate started going to a Vineyard Church plant that was just getting off the ground when we were there, and I started attending the Vineyard Church plant with her. And so it was through this set of experiences, and relationships, and connections that I was exposed to the gospel, and the person of Jesus, and the New Testament for the first time in my life. And I was completely captivated by all of it, as well as to some extent, trying to figure out my own Jewish faith, continuing to figure out my own Jewish faith.
And I was a political science major in college, and planning to go on to law school. And by the time I reached my senior year in college, I had done enough spiritual wrestling, and read all the books I could get my hands on, and was involved with these different iterations of Christian community, that I became a follower of Jesus. I found this message, and this story, and this narrative to be so compelling that I could no longer deny it. And so I became a follower of Jesus, at which point I totally scrapped my plans to go to law school and instead, went to divinity school, because I was just so fascinated by all of this religion, theology, Bible, I just wanted to know more. And at that point, I had no idea how to reckon or reconcile my Jewish identity with this newfound faith in Christ, I had no mob for that-
Scott Rae: Well, that was the question I had is, how did your Jewish family react to your coming to faith?
Jen Rosner: Yeah, it's a great question. And that can be a really terrible scenario in people's families, and it can lead to lifelong cutoff in some circumstances, and so my story doesn't go that way. So my brother... I have one brother, and he was actually at the same university that I was, at the same time, and he also began to be influenced by a similar set of friends and community. And so my brother and I both became followers of Jesus within a couple months of each other. And I remember, I will never forget that dinner where we sat down and told this to our Jewish parents. And my dad who is Jewish, both of his parents are Jewish, he was raised in a Jewish community in Los Angeles, but he always was a little bit jaded towards Judaism, and maybe organized religion in general. He saw a lot of hypocrisy in the Judaism of his childhood. And so he was very open minded, he was curious about this new found faith of ours, or this new step in our spiritual journey, my brother and I.
And my mom was much more taken aback like, "Oh my gosh, we've done a terrible job raising you as Jews. Where did we go wrong?" And interestingly, the pastor of the Vineyard Church that I was attending at the time gave me a book by Stan Telchin called "Betrayed!" And the subtitle of the book is, "What do you do when you're 50, Jewish, and successful, and your 21-year-old daughter tells you that she believes in Jesus?" Which was our exact story.
Sean McDowell: Wow. Oh my goodness.
Jen Rosner: Right, it's crazy. And again, the pastor of my Vineyard Church found this book. I didn't know who Stan Telchin was at the time, and he's a voice in the Messianic Jewish movement, I learned later. And my dad read the book and crazy enough, my dad was also convinced about the claims of Jesus and the person of Jesus. And so really not that long after my brother and I came to faith in Messiah, my dad did.
Sean McDowell: Wow.
Jen Rosner: And then within a couple of years, again, through a really interesting set of circumstances and family connections, my mom did. So my entire immediate family, both of my parents, myself and my brother, are all followers of Jesus, which is such a gift and is definitely not the typical story. And I feel really, really thankful for that. And I would say that all of us, in different ways, are continuing to navigate the tensions inherent in our identities, but it's such a gift that we share these core anchors of faith
Sean McDowell: That's really remarkable and encouraging on so many levels, and you should be grateful for that part of your story. I've got a two part question for you. The first part is, when you said that you were Jewish, you know better than I would, there's Conservative Jews, Orthodox Jews, Reform Jews, secular Jews. In what sense were you Jewish and how did you practice it? And now that you follow Messiah, you are Christian way described, how does your Jewishness... How do you still practice that today?
Jen Rosner: Yeah, it's a great question, and the answer is a bit winding because my story has been a little bit winding. I mean my mom... just for a little bit of context, my dad was raised in the Conservative Jewish movement in Los Angeles, my mom was raised in the Reform Jewish movement in Los Angeles. My parents got married and moved to a little teeny town in Northern California where I was born and raised, and there was not much Jewish community to speak of in our town. There was, and there still is, a Reform Jewish congregation that my parents took us to when we were little kids a couple times. And they found it to be too secular, too liberal, not what they were going for, so we grew up without a larger Jewish community. I mean, it was really just our family in our home, and to some extent, our extended family, although our extended family was very secular. So we grew up in the home observing certain Jewish holidays. We had a Passover Seder, every meal we would light Hanukkah candles, but detached from a larger community context.
And as I said, when I became a follower of Jesus, I just had no idea what to do with my Jewish identity, which was still sort of there, but again, didn't find a lot of expression. I also didn't have Jewish friends or community much in college. And so when I went on... I went on to Yale Divinity School to do my M.Div. after graduating from Cal Poly as an undergraduate, and I really did not know what to do with my Jewish identity at all, and I did not know a single other Jewish follower of Jesus. I didn't even know about Messianic Judaism, Jews for Jesus, nothing. And so I just went into the church world for a number of years. I mentioned that I became a believer in the context of a Vineyard Church in college. I bounced around different churches and denominations during my master's program, and I ended up at an Episcopal church that was very formative for me in a lot of ways, but also very disconnected from my Jewish identity.
And it wasn't until my last year of my master's program, which was in New Haven, Connecticut, that through a really interesting set of circumstances related to my cousin, who was living in New York City at the time, and undergoing Orthodox Jewish conversion. Her mother was not Jewish, her father was, and she had always felt this very strong pull toward the Jewish people, and toward my very Jewish mother. And so she was undergoing Orthodox Jewish conversion in New York City and I was in New Haven, an hour train right away, and we would get together and just share about our spiritual lives, and at that point, watching her walk into this Orthodox Jewish life, which for her was like falling in love with God, and the people of Israel, and these traditions. It became very clear to me that I had left something behind, and that it was something really fundamental to who I am. And so the next chapter of the story is I came back to California to do my PhD at Fuller Theological Seminary, and that chapter is really where I began to figure out how to put the pieces together.
And I was introduced to Mark Kinser, who's a leading Messianic Jewish theologian, who very quickly became a close friend and mentor, still is to this day. And so it's been a long process, and I would say that I've moved more towards Jewish observants over the years. Observing Shabbat, and the Jewish holidays, fasting on fast days. And so I eventually became quite comfortable in the Messianic Jewish movement, particularly the more Torah-observant wing of the Messianic Jewish movement, which is a very diverse movement. Met my husband, who was living within an Orthodox Jewish messianic community in Israel, if that isn't like a total contradiction of terms, it's a lot of adjectives. And so we're still figuring it out to this day, so that question is very ongoing for me, and trying to figure out... I mean, we have small children now, how do we raise our kids with both a strong sense of the centrality of Messiah, but also a strong sense of Jewish identity? So stay tuned, right?
Scott Rae: Yeah, it sounds like lots of tensions you faced and are still navigating. So help our listeners understand a little bit about how this dichotomy between Judaism and Christianity got started, because as we're all aware, Jesus was Jewish, church was born in a Jewish cradle, but over time, what you describe as a parting of the ways took place, where you emphasize that both Christianity and Judaism played a role in that. So just briefly, what is the role that Christianity played? What's the role that Judaism played in that parting of the ways?
Jen Rosner: Yeah, it's really interesting, and as I write about it and as I speak about it, I think that the parting of the ways is just so central to the way that we understand these two religious traditions today. And there's a lot of history embedded in this process called the parting of the ways that I think doesn't get talked about enough. I think it's so foundational, again, in terms of how Judaism and Christianity turned out. And so you have, as you said... I mean, Jesus is a Jewish rabbi and the Jewish Messiah, his followers are Jews. I mean, we see in the book of Acts the beginnings of gentile inclusion, which the apostles are shocked by. I mean, they did not see that coming. The story that plays out in the book of Acts, and I would say in the New Testament more broadly, is how do these Jewish followers of Jesus live in harmony with these gentile followers of Jesus? And of course, very quickly, the Gentile, meaning non-Jewish segment of the body of Messiah, grows to be much larger than the Jewish segment.
I mean, much of this is thanks to Paul, the Apostle to the Gentiles, and so you have Jewish followers of Jesus very quickly being outnumbered. You also have a series of Jewish revolts against the Roman Empire, that make it increasingly problematic and even dangerous for these Gentile Christians to associate with Judaism, so you have some of the seeds... Already we see, I think, in the New Testament, but I would say it really begins to play out and develop over the several centuries after the New Testament, again, because of these Jewish revolts against the Roman Empire. And then if we fast forward to the fourth century, we get the Emperor Constantine, who's the first Christian emperor of the Roman Empire, and he convenes the Council of Nicaea, which I would consider to be a really key moment in the parting of the ways. Number one, because as far as we know, there were no Jews present at the Council of Nicaea, so this is an entirely gentile council that is going to have a huge impact on the development of the Christian Church.
I mean, we can read Constantine's really vitriolic words against the Jewish people, and we can see that he's both perpetuating, but also imbibing what's already existing in terms of this growing hostility between the two communities. We see the same kind of language in the church fathers, people like Ignatius of Antioch and Justin Martyr, who are working to define the Christian faith in a way that is in contradistinction to Judaism. And we see the same thing happening in early proto-Rabbinic text, and later Rabbinic texts where each community is squeezing out the possibility of this middle bridge community, which is Jewish followers of Jesus. So what we end up with, after this long twisted tangled process, is basically an entire Gentile Christian Church on one hand, and Rabbinic Judaism on the other. And what gets squeezed out in the middle is Jewish followers of Jesus, who of course, I think in the New Testament and in a very profound way theologically, are a bridge between the two communities, and that's exactly what gets lost in this process called the parting of the way.
So for example, we could fast forward history even more and we could look at 7th century conversion liturgies, actual liturgies of Jews that became followers of Jesus, and they were required to renounce all association with Jewish family, friends, community, all Jewish practices. I mean, it's remarkable. I show these to my students in my classes, and I include some of them in the book "Finding Messiah". And it's just remarkable to see how mutually exclusive these two communities became, such that you literally had to be one or the other. There was no space, socially or theologically at that point, to be a Jewish follower of Jesus. And that reality really endures until the 18th, 19th century, where we begin to see pioneers who would later be these front runners of what will develop as the Messianic Jewish movement, and this reemergence of the possibility of holding onto both. So there's a lot of history there that, as I said, essentially disallows for any kind of overlap between these communities, Judaism and Christianity.
Sean McDowell: It makes sense if you are Jewish, and you don't think Jesus is the Messiah, that you would emphasize the differences. But from the Christian side, it's so unfortunate that we lost this deep roots of our faith, but at least thank God in the past couple centuries, we're seeing that come back, and of course, you explore that in your book. So let's make this practical. How does the Jewish background of Jesus impact our understanding of the gospel itself and how we should communicate it today?
Jen Rosner: Yeah, I mean, I argue this in the book, but I think if the gospel that we preach has nothing to do with God's covenant with the people of Israel, then we're really missing something profound. And just speaking personally, I don't think I've ever heard the gospel preached in a way that has anything to do with God's covenant with the people of Israel. If anything, it's like, "God sent Jesus, because that thing that came before didn't work," or, "We needed grace, because law was a big fat failure, and all we have to do is look at our Old Testaments to see all the ways that the law was a failure." I mean, there's these real strong dichotomies in the language that gets used in many church contexts, I'm sure not all... Such that Jesus came to rescue us from that. There's almost this Marcionite tendency, where by the God of the Old Testament is almost seen as a different God that is wrathful, and it's this works righteousness system, Judaism that is, and Jesus came to set us free from all of that.
So I think there's so many ways in which Jesus ends up getting pit against Judaism and God's covenant with the people of Israel, which I just think is a real fundamental distortion of this ongoing story of God's covenant with the people of Israel, and everything that that meant, and continues to mean to this day. And we see throughout our Old Testaments that there are these inklings in the prophetic texts, and I would say even in Genesis 12, the calling of Abraham, where there's this notion that one day...Israel will be a light to the nations, or the nations, the Gentiles, will be included in this special relationship with God. And I think that's exactly what we see taking place through the person of Jesus, through the person of Messiah, and I think it really only... I mean, this is Paul's olive tree imagery. The Gentiles are grafted in to this existing covenant that God has with the people of Israel, that I think is just so central for our understanding of who Jesus was, and what his life, death, and resurrection was all about.
And I think it has very much to do with this gentile inclusion in God's covenant with the people of Israel. And I think this is a central theme that we see throughout our New Testaments, but we're not always looking at it through that lens. But I think that fundamentally, God's covenant with the people of Israel is the bedrock of the whole story, and Jesus comes within that story not as another story, or a throwing that story out and starting something totally new. And I think that's not emphasized enough, at least in my experience, in hearing these things talked about in the church world.
Scott Rae: So Jen, how do you understand Paul's statements that followers of Jesus are no longer under the law of Moses? In your view, does that apply to both Jews and non-Jews, or is that for one and not the other, or... Help us sort that out?
Jen Rosner: Yeah, I mean, I think it's a great question and I'll say... I mean, my first disclaimer is I'm not a Pauline scholar, but of course, I do have thoughts on these things. I mean, I think there's a couple issues that I would say in response to that. Number one, I do think it's really important to pay attention to Paul's audience, who is Paul talking about in these places, in his letters, where he seems to be saying very negative things about the law? Which of course is this terrible Greek translation of Torah, the teaching that we see God giving as a gift to the Jewish people. And I think Galatians is a place that people are often like, "Look what Paul says about law in Galatians." But I think if we read the letter to the Galatians in the first two chapters, there's five instances where Paul reiterates that he is talking to Gentiles, that his audience is Gentile, that he's preaching the gospel to Gentiles, and so I think that should inform the way that we read Paul's letters.
I think he is upholding what we see happening in the book of Acts, particularly Acts 15, where the Jerusalem council is convened to wrestle with the question of whether Gentile followers of Jesus have to take on a Torah-observant life, have to essentially become Jews in order to follow Jesus. I mean, I think if we just were to pause at that question and how different that is from our own context, that's remarkable. There were Jewish followers of Jesus who were saying, "Gentiles all need to live as Jews." And what the council clearly rules, based upon Peter's experience in Cornelius's household in Acts 10, is that no, Gentiles do not have to take on a life of Torah, Gentiles do not have to live as Jews, God has accepted them as they are. And I think this is one of the miracles of the gospel, is that in the person of Jesus Christ, we see Jew and Gentile living together in harmony reconciled, which is not the story that we see throughout our Old Testaments.
What we see is Israel and the nations warring against each other, the nation's dragging Israel into idolatry, fighting over the land with the people of Israel, and that is what's brought into this beautiful place of harmony and reconciliation, and unity in the New Testament. And so I think Paul is... He's speaking against the Judaizers who would make Gentile Christians believe that they have to be circumcised, that they have to live as Jews, which is exactly against what the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15 ruled. So I think Paul is consistent with Acts 15, and he's talking to Gentiles saying, "You do not have to take this..." As later Jewish scholars would call it, "This yoke of the commandments on, this is not your calling. In fact, it's very theologically significant that Gentiles live as Gentiles, Jews live as Jews." I mean, this is Paul's language in 1 Corinthians 7. So I think that Paul is upholding a certain distinction between Jew and Gentile, not with any kind of hierarchy, but really to demonstrate the beauty of what's happening in Messiah, the same way...
I mean, Paul says in Galatians 3:28, "There is no longer a Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male and female." So there's no longer hierarchy associated with these different identity markers and callings, but I think of course Paul believes that there's still ongoing distinction between male and female. So similarly, I would say that Paul is upholding a certain kind of distinction without hierarchy between Jew and Gentile. And I think that's the lens, at least for me, that makes the most sense to try to understand Paul. And just to tack onto that, sometimes if we have this very antinomian Paul, who's done with the law and has this radical break with Judaism, which is how Paul's been read for a long time, at least since the Protestant reformation following in Luther's legacy, it's very hard to reconcile the Paul of Acts with the Paul of his letters, because the Paul of Acts seems to be this very Jewish Paul who undergoes this temple purification ritual in Acts 21. And so it's like, "Wait a second, are there two different Pauls?"
And I remember in seminary asking my New Testament professor this question, and her answer was, "Well Acts is not historical." She was just simply willing to throw away the book of Acts, because it didn't square with her reading of Paul, and I've never been okay with that. I want there to be one Paul, not these different renderings of who Paul is. And I think that if we understand this Paul, which is very much represented in what's called the Paul within Judaism school of scholarship, it's a consistent Paul. Paul was not a hypocrite, Paul was not confused, Paul was not Torah-observant in some settings and not in others, Paul did see the ongoing... He saw Torah as an issue of covenant fidelity for Jews, including Jewish followers of Jesus, and he was very much upholding that that is not a requirement for Gentiles, as the apostle to the Gentiles. So that's my read and understanding of Paul.
Sean McDowell: That's really helpful, and it goes back to some of the freedom we have in Christ that's emphasized in Galatians as well. Now here's a huge question for you, but I I'd love your thoughts on this, especially in the Hebrew scriptures in the Old Testament, there's such an emphasis on the land of Israel. What relevance do you think the land and/or the contemporary nation of Israel has today?
Jen Rosner: Yeah. Yeah, it's a great question and it is a huge question. I mean, I think part of the problem when we try to discuss the land of Israel theologically, is the modern state of Israel, right? It gets in the way, because there's too much contemporary politics embedded in the modern state of Israel, that it's almost hard to distance that from a more theological stance towards the land. And I think that often that gets us in trouble a little bit, because our stance toward the modern state of Israel, whether we're strong supporters, whether we're critical of the state of Israel, whether we're concerned about the plight of the Palestinians, wherever we land on this spectrum of contemporary Israeli politics, can then inform our theological biblical understanding of the land, and I think that can be a real problem. I think it needs to be the other way around. I think our understanding from a theological perspective about the significance of the land needs to inform our perspective on the modern state of Israel, and so I would say... I mean, the land is central in God's covenant with the people of Israel.
It always was, and I think it always will be. I think that there's a problem with saying, "In Jesus, the land is relativized," or "In Jesus, it becomes about the whole world and not this little teeny plot of land." And I think throughout the history of Christian theology, we've seen the way in which letting go of this faith that is rooted, and grounded, and anchored in a particular plot of land, then it leads down this domino effect of, "Well, soon our bodies don't matter anymore." And we end up with this very dualistic understanding of faith where the goal is to be rid of our bodies, and heaven becomes a disembodied spiritual world where the physicality doesn't matter anymore. I mean, this is Plato, this is not the Bible in my opinion. And so I think wrestling with the centrality of the land, the way in which God's promises to the people of Israel are tied to this plot of land, the covenant can only be fully lived out within the land.I mean, I think this beckons us to have a pretty high theology of the land, which does not necessarily mean that then our hands are tied to support every action of the modern state of Israel. The modern state of Israel is a modern nation state, and I think it deserves to be critiqued as a sign of love, just like any nation state needs to be critiqued as a sign of devotion to it. We don't want to let the state of Israel do things that are unjust, and so I wouldn't equate the modern nation state of Israel with the fulfillment of God's promises. I think it's a very significant historical event, theologically and otherwise, that the Jewish people now have a sovereign homeland. I do not think this is the eschaton by any means, or that this is the full eschatological reality of what the state of Israel is or will be, I think it's not really close to that in a lot of regards.
And yet, my personal views or anybody's views on the modern state of visual Israel is, in my mind, a bit of a separate question, and whether this land continues to have a real central, significant role to play in the unfolding redemptive plan and purpose of God in our world.
Scott Rae: This is not a foreign concept to either Sean or me, because we had a lot of our theological education with an eschatology that appreciates the high place for the land and for the nation of Israel in God's program going forward. But we also also recognize that the Jewish people return to the land, but they also return to the Lord prior to the second coming of Christ. So I think in our view, the reason that matters is because God made literal promises to Israel in the Hebrew Bible that involved the land, and we believe he will fulfill them literally, and so it involves the whole concept of God as a promise keeping God. That's really central and important. Jen, one final question for you. Sean and I are in the business, in our day jobs, of preparing the next generation of pastors, church leaders. How can we help them appreciate the Jewish background to Christian faith?
Jen Rosner: Yeah, I mean, it's a great question. I mean, I'm a professor as my day job and an author, and so I'm also wrestling with this very same question. And I think we live in a really remarkable time, where there's a lot of conversation going on in this regard, there's a lot of resources, there's a lot of organizations that are committed to this very thing. And so I think part of it is just an issue of awareness, helping these future pastors, and church leaders, and professors having an awareness of this set of issues in this conversation. I mean, it's so bizarre to me that in so many seminary curriculums, these things are not really talked about. I mean, there's not a lot of learning. I remember in my seminary program, I was asking like, "Do we learn about Judaism?" And they said, "Oh, well you'll get that in your New Testament class," or, "You'll get that in your church history class," but you never did get it in those classes.
This issue of this centrality of God's covenant with the people of Israel was never a central focus in New Testament classes, or Old Testament classes, or church history classes. It's not there in the way that these classes get taught in many seminary... I mean, that's not true for all seminaries, but it was certainly true in my experience. And so I think the more that we're able to bring these sorts of topics, again, how do we understand Paul and the law? How do we understand the significance of the land? How do we understand Jewish Gentile distinction, which is a really tricky one? I think the more that we can bring these conversations to the fore in classrooms, and conversations, and from the pulpit, I think that's a huge part of it. Just to bring this whole set of issues onto the radar screen of Christians, and to give them space to wrestle with it, to process with it. I mean, for some of my students, all of this is very jarring to learn, and I want to give my students space to wrestle with it in the context of my classes.
Let's talk about it. Let's talk about Jew Gentile distinction. What about that feels uncomfortable? What about that rubs you the wrong way? Let's talk about that, let's read the biblical text related to that concept. So I think just opening up space, creating space for these conversations, and these issues to make their way into our classes, our conversations, our sermons, really goes a long way.
Scott Rae: Thanks, Jen, that's really helpful. And I hope our listeners who are in church leadership, our pastors, elders, seminary students, will take heed to that and to help the people whom they serve to create... More significantly appreciate the Jewish background to the faith that we all want to carry forward. Jen, this has been so helpful. I want to commend to our listeners your book, "Finding Messiah", subtitle, "A journey into the Jewishness of the Gospel," and you really wonderfully weave the theological themes with your own personal story in this together, which is a fascinating story just by itself. But the theological part of this is very, very rich. So super grateful for your time, and thanks so much for your insight, and your wisdom, and continued blessings on your good work in the future.
Jen Rosner: Well, thank you. Thanks so much for the conversation.
Scott Rae: This has been an episode of the podcast, "Think Biblically: Conversations on Faith and Culture". "Think Biblically" podcast is brought to you by Talbot School of Theology, Biola University, offering programs in Southern California and online, including in our Institute for Spiritual Formation. Visit biola.edu/talbot in order to learn more. If you enjoy today's conversation with our guest, Jen Rosner, give us a rating on your podcast app and share it with a friend. Thanks so much for listening and remember, think biblically about everything.
