Mark Durie: Episode Description
On this episode of The Inspiration Project, Brendan Corr talks to Mark Durie, a pastor and academic about the rise of Islam in the West and its dangers. They discuss how growing up in a deeply Christian home shaped his worldview and calling. Why after a very accomplished academic career did he feel the call to enter into pastoral ministry. They dive into the languages that have shaped how people experience reality, emotions and belief systems drawing from the research of the Acehnese language in Indonesia. Durie then discusses his extensive study into Islam following the September 11 attacks. Why there are some similarities and profound differences between Islam and Christianity, how Islam was formed as a Religion and Political structure. What are the dangers with Islam spreading rapidly in the Western World, what radical Islam is vs regular Islam and is there any difference. Plus so much more!
Episode Summary
- Growing up in a deeply Christian home and how that shaped Mark’s worldview
- His early life as a very accomplished academic
- How Mark became a Christian
- Why Mark felt called into Pastoral ministry
- The languages that have shaped how people experience reality, emotions and belief systems
- Why Mark studied Islam after the 9/11 attacks
- Are there any differences between radical Islam vs Regular Islam
- What are the differences and similarities between Islam and Christianity
- What are the dangers with Islam spreading rapidly in the Western World
Mark Durie: Episode Transcript
Sponsor Announcement
This podcast is sponsored by Australian Christian College, a network of schools committed to student well-being, character development, and academic improvement.
Introduction
Welcome to The Inspiration Project where well-known Christians share their stories to inspire young people in their faith and life. Here’s your host, Brendan Corr.
Brendan Corr
Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of The Inspiration Project podcast where we get a chance to talk with people of exceptional capacity that have been able to navigate a successful career and incorporate their faith. I’m delighted that this morning I’m having a chat with Dr. Mark Durie. Dr. Durie is an Australian academic, an Anglican minister. He was born in Papua to missionary parents, but grew up in Canberra. Dr. Durie was awarded a PhD, his first doctorate in 1984 by the Australian National University. And subsequent to that, held various appointments at universities across America, the University of Leiden, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of California, Los Angeles, Stanford, and the University of California, Santa Cruz. Returning to Australia, he held positions from 1987 to 1997 at University of Melbourne. Mark was ordained as an Anglican minister in 1999 and has served on the staff of various parishes and communities in Melbourne with an undergraduate degree in theology from the Australian College of Theology. In 2016, Mark completed a doctorate of theology from the Australian College of Theology and Melbourne School of Theology. He’s written a number of books and publications, most of which are in the area of his academic expertise, and he’s recognised as the world’s leading English-speaking academic in Acehnese, the language of the Aceh Province of Indonesia. More recently, Dr. Durie has published books on the emergence of Islam, including on the origins of the Quran and the place and influence of Islam in modern culture and in local and global politics. Dr. Durie, I hope that little bio did credit to what is an enormously prolific career. How do you fit all of that in?
Dr. Mark Durie
I just leave one year at a time. I feel like I’ve had three. I feel like I’ve had three careers, but no, I think God did it to me. I think it’s his fault. Yeah, it’s been interesting. Very interesting life. Yeah.
Brendan Corr
Full. Then there’d be those who with maybe less kind description might look at that as being the record of an overachiever. How do you feel about the recognition of those accolades and what that has meant to your own inherent sense of purpose and direction and meaning in life?
Dr. Mark Durie
I did have a blessed series of years when I was working in academia. For example, I was the youngest person in my year at school and just went very quickly through the academic track. At the age of 32, I found myself head of a department of 27 people, and I suppose God blessed the work, but I never felt that academia was my final destination. I felt that was something that God had asked me to do each year as things went, but around about 1992, I felt a call from the Lord to train and be equipped and offer myself for pastoral ministry in the Anglican Church in Melbourne. So that actually felt like what God was asking me to do with my life as opposed to the academic work, which I’d enjoyed and learned a lot from and have always drawn from and been really grateful for. But it was the work as a pastor, that was the main work. And I served in three different churches in Melbourne over those 21 years and really enjoyed that work. We saw lots of people become Christians and was able to, I think in each of the churches I was in, help build life and see people come to faith, encourage people. So yeah, that was the blessing to serve. In the midst of all that, when I was working on the language of Aceh in Indonesia, I was exposed to Islam because Aceh is probably the most Islamicized region in Indonesia and I learned a lot about Islam as it’s lived by ordinary people and also about their proud history of jihad and resistance to colonial occupation. And so when 9/11 happened, I sort of knew instantly who had done it and why, and I realised that people all around me had no clue. And so I thought I should devote myself to studying Islam and understanding it better and helping and teaching others. So that began to develop and became a more and more significant part of my life until I resigned from parish ministry at the end of 2019. I devoted myself full-time to writing and teaching about differences between faiths, understanding Islam, and also what’s happening with Christianity in the West. So that’s where I’ve landed now that’s been, so I’ve had three phases. One is as an academic, I felt like I had a successful career and that was a blessing. But then I felt called to pastoral ministry, which I pursued, and now I write and teach about Islam. So yeah, God has given me opportunities to serve in unique ways and I’m grateful for them. I hope I’ve made good use of the opportunities that he’s given me.
Brendan Corr
It seems that you’ve made exceptionally good use of the opportunities and of the gifts may I say that he has obviously blessed you with. Interesting that little synopsis of your career maps, the things that I have been reflecting on as I’ve been thinking about our upcoming conversation and would be hoping that we might be able to explore some aspects of those things, but let me take you back. You were born in Papua in the context of missionary parents. What did it mean for you to grow up in a household that had collectively committed themselves and your experience, your early experience to the service of God? What important role did that give for the pattern of your life?
Dr. Mark Durie
Well, I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t a Christian. We grew up in a Christian home. My father would lead us around the dinner table, reading the Bible and praying about the day and sharing our reflections on what had happened. So I was disciplined above all, I suppose, in the family, but also in church hearing the Gospels read every Sunday and the Bible preached, that had a big formative influence upon me. My mother was the daughter of a Methodist minister and my father really had become a Christian in the student Christian movement in the ’50s after serving as a bomber in the European campaign in the Second World War. So he had a very strong conversion to Christ and a calling to train people for ministry in particular. So yeah, so I’ve always been a believer. There were times in my teenage years where I had a particular advance in my faith. I remember a conference for students when I was at the university at the ANU on Roman, the Book of Romans, that was really helpful and I had a personal experience of the Holy Spirit when I was a teenager, which affected all of us in our family and people connected with us. So that had a big impact on me. So yeah, I’ve always believed, I can’t say a time when I didn’t and I suppose transformed by that experience of being discipled and worshipping so that I had Jesus in my head, if you like. He’s wired my brain through that experience.
Brendan Corr
It’s sort of the water that you swim in and it’s just there. It’s part of the fabric of reality for you.
Dr. Mark Durie
That’s exactly right. His values are, and I was very conscious growing up that most of the students at the school, which was an Anglican school didn’t have faith and there was a lot of hostility to it in fact. So I always felt, well, a fish in water in terms of Jesus and faith, but a fish out of water in terms of the culture around me. So that’s been a long-term thing for me. It was interesting spending my first five years in Papua because I was a white Aussie kid in the midst of a Papuan environment and I felt different. And then when we went to bed, 40 years in Queensland where my dad was serving, and again, children of missionary parents caught between different cultures. I’ve always felt kind of different and not quite fitting in.
Brendan Corr
Yes. Was that a good thing? Did that help you hold your faith in a contest from other influences and…
Dr. Mark Durie
In some ways it was. I never had an urge to fit in or to belong particularly. Maybe that’s just the way I’m wired myself. So I was independent of some of the pressures that young people can feel to be esteemed by their peers and to be in the group that was never an issue for me.
Brendan Corr
Yeah. So as I was thinking about the varied endeavours, the areas in which you’ve committed yourself to work and study and serve, there seemed to be a commonality about focusing on otherness and an interesting choice of language, the language of Acehnese, the notion of getting to know another faith. Are you conscious as you have explored those promptings or those leadings or those interests, that there has been that notion of exploring the other with a sense of curiosity or engagement? Has that come from a place of respect, or intrigue mission?
Dr. Mark Durie
That’s really interesting. I’ve always felt different myself, and I’m interested in how people’s worldview is put together and what makes them tick, if you like. The training I received in linguistics was oriented to field work. So I was trained to, you could drop me in the Amazon and I’d come back a year later with a grammar under my arm, and we were trained to understand people’s worldview and their language, which embodies that worldview from the inside as much as possible, not to impose your categories upon it, not to impose say English grammar on the language of Aceh. And so I was always asking the questions like how is this organised in itself? What is its actual internal logic in the worldview? So those skills were certainly honed through that training and that experience. And then when I was studying Islam, same again, trying to understand it from the inside to make sense of it in its own terms, not to impose an external frame on it. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once said, and this has kind of spoken a lot to me over the years, that we can think we’re tracing the shape of reality, but all we’re doing is tracing the shape of the frame through which we’re looking. So I’ve always been interested in how to get beyond the frame, how to see the bigger picture and understand something in its own terms. And that’s certainly been true and I think that’s been part of my pastoral ministry too, to be aware of people and how their world is put together. I think in essence, in the end of it, with all the things I’ve done, I’m basically a pastor teacher. At the very heart, my calling is to help transform people with the gospel and to shape their world. And in order to do that, you need to understand their world. You need to understand how they put reality together because when you’re preaching, when you are doing the work, an evangelist or a pastor, you’re calling people to allow their thoughts and their worldview to be transformed by the gospel. And to do that, you need to understand where they’re coming from and how they’re put together. So I’ve really wrestled a lot with over the years with what’s happened in our culture, what’s the view of the human person in our culture, how does that work and what does it mean to look at that through Christian eyes and how to understand it in its own terms, in the shape of what people believe in our culture as well. So yeah, those things are all interconnected for me.
Brendan Corr
Yeah, I’m hoping our conversation will allow us to explore some of your reflections on what has happened to western civilization, how the deconstruction of its worldview has been impacted by frames of language and movements of politics. But before we get there, I’ve not heard quite so strongly before the observation or the comment that you are making about the inherent connection between a language and its embodiment of a worldview. And it is, I suppose it reminds me a little bit of some reading I did years ago that was suggesting or proposing that we think with language and therefore the structure of language becomes the structure of our thinking. Is that what you are suggesting or something similar to that?
Dr. Mark Durie
Yes, indeed. There are some word meanings that I think are universal to all languages. So all languages have a word for I or want or I as in me or want and say. But once you get beyond those basic concepts, things become very specific to languages. So for example, psychologists have asked questions like how are the basic human emotions reflected in the languages of the world? But as it turns out, languages have words for emotions that are not easily translatable, that is different languages carve up the human emotional range differently. So for example, the word happy in English is very difficult to translate even into other European languages. Joy is more kind of European and more widespread, but the concept of happiness is quite distinctive to Anglo culture and it’s a bit of a shock to people to realise that when you’re in another language, your emotions are different. The way emotions are put together are different. We know that’s true about colours for example. There are lots of words for colours in English, but there are some languages that just have two or three colours. For example, in Acehnese, the word for green and blue was the same word. The language didn’t distinguish that. And so you can see the colour space can be carved up in different ways, but the emotional space of human beings also is very varied from language to language. Anger is not the same in Russian as in English and let alone Acehnese or Arabic. And so that’s always really interested me how to understand those differences and what does it really mean when someone says something about what they feel in one language or another.
Brendan Corr
Am I right in drawing the extension of that? That it’s not just the taxonomy or the grammar of the language, you are connecting it with our actual experience of life that there is implications for how we understand emotion or how we describe emotion, but it’s not just a description, it’s how we experience emotion, how we experience colour or relationship or-
Dr. Mark Durie
Our language gives us a frame for that experience and it limits what we can see and what we can experience. It excludes things that don’t fit our experience. It doesn’t fit our frame. Let me give you an example. I was involved in planting a congregation of Iranian believers in Melbourne. We baptised more than 150 people and it was a fascinating journey over many years, but one of the things about the Persian language is they have no word for love. They have a word for kind of passion, and they have a word for being compassionate, but they have no word that translates agape, the Christian of love. And if you look at European languages, they all have a word for love that is somewhat similar in meaning because of the influence of the Bible on Europe. But because Persian culture has not been influenced by the Bible in that way, they don’t have a word. So what’s happening as a Persian Christianity of convert church is growing, is that another word? The word for compassion is being adopted and used and it’s getting new meaning because of its use in Christian sense. So that was really important for me when I was preaching because if I just give a sermon on love, I have to come up against the thing, the challenge that Persian culture doesn’t have that word with quite that meaning, and you have to explain that. You have to unpack that for them and describe what it means. Then you need to look at Jesus’ parables and how love is described in the Bible. So that’s an example. Now for a person to develop the whole concept of love, for it to be internalised and to become a guiding principle of their life is a completely transformative thing. A Christian Iranian who has absorbed what love means from a biblical perspective instead of an Islamic frame is changed by that knowledge and that experience, and it changes everything. It changes the way you relate to your wife and to your children and to the stranger and to the people in the church. It’s very far-reaching. So that’s partly the role of a pastor and a teacher is to help people engage with those transformative processes and to facilitate them so that people can live the life of Christ so they can be transformed by the power of God’s love.
Brendan Corr
Without trying to, with the care of not making unreliable connections. The importance of the incarnation comes through in this notion that Christ as the word in whatever language carries penetration or meaning to some degree, but the lived example is the thing that becomes absolutely prioritised. When I say this, I mean this and follow my example. Am I right in making this connection?
Dr. Mark Durie
That’s true. Jesus in the incarnation, he took on the categories, semantic categories probably of Aramaic, which would’ve been his mother tongue and also Greek. He was probably multilingual and he was equipped to see the world through that frame, but also his teachings challenged the frame and he redefined adultery, for example. And he also taught people what love means too, and loving your enemies was a great example. It was the most frequently inscribed verse of the Bible for the early Christians in the catacombs was love your enemies. That was a huge thing to say to people. And so he ended the world of a first century Jew, but he also transformed that and the imprint of his teaching and understanding of what it means to be human and what God asked for us has become deeply embedded in Christian cultures and Christian languages.
Brendan Corr
And I suppose again, some of my own little reflections on these thoughts that we’re sharing is the notion of why the Torah was not sufficient, why the word in scripture and captured in the sacred writings of Judaism was only a frame, and the reality was the word became flesh and lived among us, and we beheld, observed, we discipled according to his pattern of life. It’s a very powerful intellectualising of what Christ was doing in the incarnation.
Dr. Mark Durie
That’s true. I think people’s lived experience of seeing what Jesus did and the way he spoke to people and how he loved his own disciples and his death on the cross, his resurrection, that journey of walking with Christ, it just changed people really, really deeply.
Brendan Corr
And while it remains the absolute priority for us to go back to Christ, his example, his model.
Dr. Mark Durie
That’s true and we’re called to walk with him, but his tears should be our tears. His baptism is our baptism. His resurrection is our life, his cross is our death. We are meant to identify with him. And I think that the experience of walking with Christ is as transformative today through the presence of the Holy Spirit and the word of God as it was for those disciples. Can I just put in something here? Part of my journey involved a very intensive study of the life of Muhammad, that was interesting for lots of reasons. It wasn’t an easy journey, but one of the things I gained out of that was a deeper love for Jesus. I understood Jesus a lot better because of the contrast, and I’d grown up with Jesus in my head like his categories were my categories without even really always knowing exactly how it influenced me, but that experience of studying someone who’s so different, particularly in responding to rejection and opposition, that was really powerful for me. I understood Jesus really much better. So that’s one of the benefits of entering another world, of seeing a different perspective is that you understand yourself better as well. The world looks different, not that you abandon yourself, but you understand how you’re put together better because of the effort and the care of knowing and understanding other people.
Brendan Corr
There’d be some other things I’d love to chat with you about in terms of the frame that we can understand versus the reality that it is trying to give us access to and how we live with the limitations of our thinking, our language, our conceptions, trying to access something that is beyond, but let’s put that on hold for a minute. We have a chance to come back. You’ve introduced this idea of you engaging in some very dedicated study on another faith, and I know that you’ve made some comments that in the Quran, you can see what you call biblical borrowings and similarities of language patterns or styles. I’m interested to hear that while recognising that, your conclusion was such a diametric difference between those two. Can you help explain both of those things? Where are the similarities? Why did it point to a drastic difference?
Dr. Mark Durie
Yeah, that’s been one of the big intellectual challenges I’ve wrestled with over the years. So there’s a lot of the Bible in the Quran. There’s references to Moses and Jesus and Abraham, and there’s lots of bits and pieces scattered through the Quran that have a biblical origin. And scholars have said does this come from Christianity, does it come from Judaism? It puzzles them and there’s a lot. And one of the effects of all that material is that when Christians look at Islam, they look at it through Christian eyes. They look and they see the Bible, they see Jesus, they see what they’re familiar with, and I think they make a mistake because when they see these fragments or pieces from the Bible, whether it’s from the Hebrew scriptures or from the New Testament, the Greek scriptures, they impose on their own worldview. So they see lots of similarities between Islam and Christianity. What I tried to do was to understand Islam in its own terms, and that’s a demanding job. You’d need to study the Quran very carefully, and then there’s what are called traditions of Muhammad which are 20 or 30 volumes of collections of things that he said and did. And then there’s the biographies of Muhammad, which are eight or 900 pages, very detailed. And as I studied all that, I couldn’t help thinking, actually, this is very different from Christianity, but if that’s the case, why is there so much of the Bible in the Quran? And I tried to find some analogies to explain that, and I came up with a couple of analogies. One was from a building. So imagine you had a church and a synagogue and they were demolished and the building materials were then used to build a new building, a mosque. Then the Christian or a Jew visits the mosque and they see bits and pieces of, “Oh, I remember that pillar that’s from a church. Or they see something from different parts of their religious experience.” And it doesn’t mean that the structure of the mosque is actually in any sense borrowed from Christianity or Judaism. It’s rather that there’s recycling that’s happened, a repurposing. So Islam is a biblical faith repurposed. There’s another way of looking at it as well. I was interested in a linguistic metaphor. There are languages called Creoles which borrow their vocabulary from one source. Their actual inner logic, their grammar, their worldview is from another. So for example, Haitian Creole, vocabulary comes from French because that was the language of the masters on the slave plantations. But the grammar, the logic, the worldview of the language comes from West Africa. It’s like a fusion of two different things. The under group, which is the slaves and the over group, which is the French and the over group provides the vocabulary, the elements of the vocabulary, but the actual what they actually mean and how the grammar is put together. That comes from the speakers of the Creole that come from West Africa. So you get this hybrid system, and that’s actually religions like that. So Gnosticism in its form that it derived from Christianity in the first centuries, had Jesus as a kind of Gnostic master. It happens in the new age today. Jesus is this ascended master or this figure that is appropriated and repurposed for a completely non-Christian perspective, and Voodoo is also like that. So Voodoo is basically West African polytheistic religion, but the practitioners of Voodoo used Christian saints, Mary other and even the Lord’s prayer chalice from communion and so on, they’d use these Christian elements, but the fundamental structure of Voodoo is West African multi-gods. So I concluded that to understand Islam, you need to see that its theology is very different from the theology of the Quran, sorry, of the Bible. And that Islam in a sense repurposes biblical materials for a different theology and that raises the question, “Well, what is that theology? How do we understand that?” And that’s been a major focus for me in the last 15 years trying to be able to account for Islamic theology in its own terms without imposing lots of Christian categories like salvation or grace, which are not really Islamic categories at all.
Brendan Corr
Yeah, I want to come back to that. I’ll put a little note on my paper here to come and ask you with the description that we’re having around how language captures worldview represents views of reality, what does conversion mean? What is the dramatic thing that is not just a supernatural experience, which we know it is born again, what does it mean intellectually? But I’ll come back to that. If I’m understanding this deconstruction or this analysis, this taxonomy of language and grammar and meaning in context, it seems to partly give some explanation for those that would see all religions as being so similar that they’re different paths up the same mountain, that they are identifying elements that seem similar across even if they’re virtues or moral principles that are similar across the different representations with a failure to understand the underlying worldview that is animating or giving meaning to those similar elements. Is that a fair appropriation of your thinking?
Dr. Mark Durie
Yeah, so there’s a few ideas about religion that are sort of endemic to western culture and one of them is that all religions are basically the same, and another is that they’re very personal and not public. There’s a few beliefs about religion that have become standard, and I’m vehemently opposed to the idea that all religions are the same. I think they produce very different societies and they instill very different values in people. The difference between Norway and Saudi Arabia, it reflects the different religions. It’s not just about whether there is polygamy or not, which is an issue with Islam, for example, a distinction, but it runs much deeper. What are moral values? What is goodness? What is a good life? What’s the purpose of life? How do we see the human person? These are very, very, very different. And I had an acquaintance who was a school principal and often when I’d see her she would say, “Oh, all religions believe in the love of your neighbours yourself and do unto others as you’d have them do unto you.” She would say this, and I’d actually studied Islam in great depth concerning that issue. And my answer was, “No, Islam not teach to love your neighbours yourself or even do unto others as you’d have them do unto you.” It teaches something that sounds similar, but actually means something quite different. So I think I would say our western culture is in the grip of some profoundly untrue beliefs about religion and it excuses people from having to think it excuses people for having to make any judgments at all, and they can sort of just push religion into the cultural difference bucket and say, “Well, that goes along with differences in food and dress and so on. It’s not all that relevant. All religions are basically the same.” I think this is part of the crisis that we’re in now, that we’ve become unmoored from really fundamental principles that have shaped our society that are profoundly grounded in the scriptures. And as we’ve walked away from that, you can see kind of processes of disintegration beginning to happen in our culture because we’ve lost contact with some really unique and distinctive ideas that have made western democracies possible. And so I’m quite concerned about the future for that.
Brendan Corr
Following that line of thinking, Dr. Durie, why do you think that’s happened? What has happened about our access to language or what has happened to the world view that is informed by the language of the west? And I judge them by their vocabulary. I mean the conceptions that it is trying to represent through language that has become cannibalistic, that it’s destroying its own foundations, it’s decrying its own histories, it’s deconstructing its own foundation.
Dr. Mark Durie
Yes, Christian ideas of freedom have become subverted and have been turned into an ideology of personal self-realisation, which is damaging us. Let me give you a practical example of the influence of faith on our culture that’s really significant. The Bible teaches that human beings are sinful. They have an awareness of right and wrong, but they have an inclination to do wrong, and that’s quite strongly expressed in Genesis, for example. That sin is a universal human challenge. And if you were to ask Christians, and I’ve done it all over the world, what’s the fundamental problem with human beings? The Christian answer is sin is the problem. The Islamic answer is quite different from that. Now, that sense that people are vulnerable to sin has caused western cultures to develop checks and balances to limit the possibility of human sin taking over a society. And so we have the separation of powers between government and public servants, it goes quite deeply, it’s the legal system and the police. All of these are meant to be independent and one not subverting the other. And that idea that it’s necessary to separate powers, which is quite complex and takes effort to sustain, is based on the Christian idea that people are sinful. And if you don’t have that idea that sin is an issue, you don’t need the separation of powers. And so what you can see in Australia is that in many ways as a kind of progressive view of the human person self-realising inherently good people just being their best selves, best versions of themselves, and that’s the ideology of the human person. You can see that authorities are beginning to subvert and undermine the separation of powers. And you see it when the state uses the police in wrong ways or when people exploit the law when public prosecutors are acting politically. And you can point to numerous pieces of evidence of this breakdown that’s happening in our culture today. People are losing confidence in courts because of the political orientation of some of the public prosecutors. And during the lockdowns, I think some of the governments overdid it. They began to reach into people’s freedoms. There’s been an increasing breakdown of religious freedom in Australia and Christians certainly have been feeling it and there’ve been battles in the courts to try and hold onto that. These are all symptoms of a fundamental problem, which is a loss of a Christian worldview. And the problem is that I think secular people have said, “Oh, we enjoy all these freedoms in the west because we got rid of religion, because we suppressed it.” But actually, Christianity is fundamental to those freedoms. It was really interesting recently I was listening to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who was a radical Muslim at one point has become a Christian, and she was just listing these key biblical concepts that underpin western democracies and she’s realised how important they are on having made her journey. One is that the idea that a ruler is accountable to God, that there is a greater power that you are accountable to, and the issue of separation of powers is another that the dignity of every human person. The fact is based on the idea that we’re made in the image of God, as we’ve abandoned that idea that we’re made in the image of God, then we see the advance of abortion and euthanasia. People become more dispensable in different ways, the value of human life has shifted. So yeah, I think we are being profoundly transformed by the loss of faith. And why did we lose faith? I think there are many reasons. Affluence is a factor. Two crushing world wars were a factor in the West in the 20th century and the influence of the enlightenment and the gradual outworking of the idea that reason was the measure of all things. I think we’re entering into a different era now, people are beginning to turn to Christ more and more. There’s evidence of young adults in Western countries increasingly turning to Christ, the Catholic Church baptised 50% more people this Easter than they used to before. The disintegration of the west, the moral disintegration, the spiritual disintegration is actually creating a hunger in the hearts of young people and they would now want truth, they want to be told and a way to understand what truth is and how to live it. So we’re in the middle of a transition that’s happening, but we’re suffering from the things that have been lost.
Brendan Corr
It’s interesting listening to you talk. I’m reminded of those that were the architects of some of the demise, some of the deconstruction, the philosophers that were leading to this current state and the inevitable nihilism that those lines of thought cannot help but take you to. And the hopelessness of which Christianity probably of all the world religions, has the most immediate, most personal, most powerful message is an antidote to that sense of futility and meaninglessness. You’ve studied Islam in depth, it must’ve been a difficult thing for you to step out of your Christian paradigm to truly understand the propositions of that faith. And you made the observation that it strengthened your resolve about the truth of Christianity, that experiencing a different way of thinking. And why did it not lead to more diversity, more inclusivity, more multicultural awareness? Why did it strengthen your understanding of the inherent truth of Christianity?
Dr. Mark Durie
Jesus is amazing. One of the questions that I looked at was how did Jesus respond to rejection and how did Muhammad respond to rejection? I’ve been informed by work that some Christian ministers had done on the effects of rejection on people. And when people experience rejection, they can react in three damaging ways. One is to agree you’ve rejected me, it’s my fault I hate themselves. Another is to fight back. You’ve said I’m no good, but I’m going to make you pay an aggressive response. And the third is a validation response. You’ve rejected me, but I’m going to prove to you that I’m somebody. I will exclude you or I’ll show you. Those three responses can be quite damaging and they can all apply at the same time when someone’s experienced a lot of rejection. So I looked at how Jesus responded to rejection. He had a lot of rejection and his response was the cross. A vindication, not of him by himself, but by his father. He said to love your enemies. He trained his disciples to deal with rejection and respond to it through love. Mohammed was very different. He responded to rejection at first, self-rejection. He thought he was crazy and then he validated himself a lot of self validation and then aggression. He killed his enemies and destroyed them, and the contrast between those two people was so profound because if you take Mohammed’s track, then you end up building a life based on the idea of retribution, of vengeance, of victimhood as well, and that damages everything and it creates problems, which you can see at the national level and cultural level. It was really interesting working with the Iranians and I learned from them, for example, that they said to me that if someone falls over in the street in Iran and you see it happen, it makes you feel good. And I said, “Why is that?” They said, “Because you’re not on the ground. You’re up here, they’re down there.” If you hear that someone else’s child has failed their exams, you feel happy because your child passed. Children are taught that when they go to school, sometimes they’re taught by their parents. If someone looks at you funny, punch them first. Now those incarnations it’s good to feel better than other people. I want to be successful. If someone else has failed, it’s good for me. I should expect aggression from someone else and respond aggressively myself. Those values, which I think are shaped by Islam, have created a culture in which people are exhausted and traumatised. And one of the most striking responses of many of the Iranians who became Christians through the church I was involved in was that they found peace at church. They would go to church and we are in an environment where they sensed people weren’t out to get them or to put them down or to compete with them. A couple of my Iranian friends said, “We love it when people talk about the weather here in Australia.” I said, “Oh, don’t you do that in Iran? It’s a beautiful day, it’s raining, whatever.” They said, no, we don’t have any space to talk about the weather. We have no emotional space to do that and that’s why we love it here. We love having that because it’s a sign that we’re safe. And so this is just one aspect for me, what was a very complex journey of putting Islam together in my head, my job as a pastor is to transform people’s worldview and help them be conformed to Christ. And when I read the Islamic sources, I was always asking, “What would this do to you? How would this change your life? What sort of person would you be if you take all of this Islamic teaching to heart and it becomes your identity?” And I found that quite disturbing and I felt really thankful that I’m a Christian.
Brendan Corr
That is the crux of the matter, isn’t it? That these are not just ideologies that are held as propositional truth. They form our personality. They form our perceptions of ourselves and of relationships and of the world and of politics, and we can’t help but live from that position.
Dr. Mark Durie
Yes, we call that formation process discipleship. And that’s what Jesus was doing with his disciples. He was transforming them and preparing them. And that’s one of the jobs of the church as a collection of Christians is together to help people, help each other to be transformed into the image of Christ. And that is one of the most powerful things in the world is the transformation of the individual through the influence of following Jesus. And one of the mistakes that Western Christians have often made is that they’ve seen the Christian faith in cognitive terms. If I understand principles, if I get the right theology, if I can answer the right questions in the Bible study, if I know stuff, that makes me a mature Christian, it doesn’t. Knowledge doesn’t make you a mature Christian. Knowledge is a resource. To be a mature Christian, you need to be transformed in the way you live and what your values are, how do you love people? How do you do community work? How do you worship? How do you value God in your life? And this is experience. It’s something that you learn by doing it with other people, walking with people. It’s something that is not just a matter of accepting principles.
Brendan Corr
Yeah. And again, it makes or takes the notion of you being born again to another level, right? It is not just a happy metaphor or something that is poetic. It is really saying you need to find a new personality, a new way of being in the world.
Dr. Mark Durie
Yeah, you need to become a completely new person. And Jesus quite intentionally put that in extreme language to people. As he said to Nicodemus, “You have to be born again.” He said, “How can I be born again? How can I go back into my mother’s womb? I can’t do it.” But Jesus is saying, “Yes it is. It’s challenging. It’s not a simple thing, but it is that important.” And he was always taking things to an extreme, I think, to make people realise just how significant that transformation is.
Brendan Corr
That covers some of those things I was pondering around what does conversion mean in that space, and we’ve covered that. I wonder, without being careful not to venture into spaces that are too controversial, but I could not help but think of some of the work that you’ve done and the motivations that you had after 9/11 and what that meant to immerse yourself in that study and your notion of language and what that means for people to ask you some questions around how we are to understand radical Islam, jihad more moderate forms of Islam. How do they understand the notion of resistance and jihad as a combative? What does that mean for multicultural societies? Is multiculturalism even possible with that? Trying to have a group that is so steadfast in their views?
Dr. Mark Durie
Yeah, I think Islam has a very different view of what it means to be human from the Western Christian tradition. The view is that human beings are easily led astray and they need guidance. So the role of the state is a religious role, which is to give guidance to people so that they would be conforming to the way that God has given through Muhammad, which is called the Sharia. And so I think faithful Muslims who are transformed by the message of Islam and the example in the life of Muhammad and all that he’s done and said, “They will inevitably wish to see the principles of Islam embodied in the public culture of their nation.” They would want to see the society transformed so that it would become compliant with the Sharia. Sincere believing Muslims will want to see the principles of Islam expressed in the public institutions of the nation, and they will use what influence they can in the society through democratic processes to advance the cause of Islam. They want to see the kingdom of God as they understand it, which is a society that’s ruled according to the principles of Islam. They want to see that established wherever they are. I don’t think this is a controversial thing that I’m saying, and I’m speaking about a pious, committed, transformed individual who understands Islam well and loves it and thinks it’s the best thing for humanity. The problem is that part of that Islamic call is a permission to use force when necessary to achieve Islamic ends. And the doctrine of jihad is an expression of that idea. There’s a saying in Islam that if you see something bad, if all you can do is think against it, think against it. If you can speak against it, speak against it. If you can use your hand, you should use your hand. So you should use the highest possible, you should use force if you can. If it’s possible to use force to impose Islam, then it would be, some would say it’s obligatory to do so. But if you’re not in a position to use that, then you should speak against what’s wrong and use other means as well. So the deeper question for say Australia or the UK is will Islam become the dominant ideology, spiritual ideology of the nation? And what processes or forces will that unleash in a society? And it won’t be easy, it won’t be pretty, it would be quite challenging and difficult. And what we’re going to see in some European nations in the decades ahead is the unfolding of the Islamization of nations, and it comes with force, it comes with military action as well because Islam does teach that, and the example of Muhammad shows that, that it’s permissible to use force to impose Islam. The goal is understood to be a godly and good one. That is that people should have complete freedom to choose Islam without any obstacles or any sense of inferiority. So that requires the transformation of a society. I think when Western countries came up with the idea of multiculturalism, they thought of culture as somehow some kind of quaint, distinctive characteristics of people, what they ate or how they dress, or maybe their language. These are superficial distinctions, but they believe that people fundamentally have the same outlook. They fundamentally want the same good things. If only you give people a chance to live the life that they want, they’ll all basically have the same ideology because it somehow comes out of a human desire that is universal. And the problem is that that perspective has completely misunderstood the very powerful role of religion in shaping culture. People sometimes say politics is downstream from culture to culture. Culture is downstream from religion. Religion transforms culture. And western secular people have lost touch with that power and it frightens them and they don’t know what to make of it. So they suppress the issue and they go through these strategies not to talk. “Let’s not talk about sharia, please. We don’t want to talk about polygamy, we don’t want to talk about all that stuff as much as possible. That’s hateful to do that, be quiet.” And so they’re frightened of this, but the reality is faith transforms nations and it has done. And the fundamental question for Australia is, will we follow Jesus or will we follow Muhammad? And it’ll create completely different societies, depending which one we choose.
Brendan Corr
As the west has abandoned its own moorings to faith that formed it, it’s created a vacuum into which other faiths are very happy to step in and exert, whether it’s military force or political force or economic force or whatever version that conquest takes. Some of these, or we’re talking Islam particularly, are only too happy to take up the challenge.
Dr. Mark Durie
Some Muslims believe that ultimately it would be right to use force to impose Islam. Not all Muslims believe that, but most religions, other religions in Australia don’t believe that. The Jews don’t believe in the Judaization of Australia for example. Christians believe in the transformation of the nation, but not by the use of compulsion, but through reason and argument and democratic process. You see a very different behaviour of different faiths. For example, in Western Sydney, there’s a significant Christian Arab presence in western Sydney. There are Copts, there are orthodox Arabs, and from Syria and other places, they’re not very politically intrusive, they’re not seeking to dominate the airwaves or to shout, they’re gentle people. And the presence of radical Islam is very different, and it’s six political influences. Many Muslims in that tradition seek power, and that’s a distinction that we’re really struggling with to understand, we don’t know quite what to do about it. One of the worst things we could do is just appeasement is just saying yes to every demand or every request to Islamize public spaces.
Brendan Corr
I get that. In your view, or at least my concern would be that there is not as efficiently robust philosophy as to why western leaders would say no, that their current philosophy is about appeasement, it is about tolerance and diversity and multiculturalism. And those values won’t inform a line, a boundary, or a ceiling. Do you hold those same concerns?
Dr. Mark Durie
There’s a proverb in Arabic which says, play the victim and then take over, and I think politicians are naive that grace will not necessarily be responded to with gentleness. It’ll be-
Brendan Corr
Taken advantage of.
Dr. Mark Durie
It’ll be taken advantage of, it’ll be exploited. Yeah. It’s tricky. I don’t really like stereotyping or painting everyone with the same brush. That’s not right, but Islam’s response to generous acts is not necessarily to respond with equally generous responses. I’ve been involved in training missionaries in the Middle East and some of them, what they find really difficult is that they’ve served for years, for example, providing medical support to families and they’re very generous. They sacrifice a lot to do that. It’s very difficult. They’re working in places like Somalia and others which are dangerous, but then they find that people they’re helping don’t show gratitude. They don’t appreciate the cost that it’s gone through. It’s almost like a right. And for some of them, it’s quite exhausting, emotionally exhausting, over a long period of time to encounter that. I think it’s partly the disconnection from Christian faith that has characterised the public leadership in our country that has made us vulnerable, made us vulnerable to a long-term transformation. The process that I’m alluding to is the long-term islamization of a nation. It doesn’t just happen in a year or two years or 10 years. It could take a century. It’s a long process, but our political cycles are so quick. People are so much focused on getting back elected into power. They don’t see the long-term trajectory, which I think is quite clear and emerging clearly in parts of Europe, and that will be very concerning and disturbing to watch, I believe.
Brendan Corr
With that possibility and knowing that there will be politics that will be at play over the long term. Do you imagine the time when the Christian community in Australia is on mission in Australia rather than Somalia or Indonesia or other parts of the world where we ourselves are living a missional life?
Dr. Mark Durie
Well, there are people, there are hundreds who are doing that, but there’s a need for more. And I think one of the challenges for the church in the West is it’s become quite comfortable. We have the benefits of Christendom as it were, and so we’ve lived off that and left our neighbours alone, if you like. We just do our Christian thing and don’t intrude with us, but that’s becoming harder and harder. The state is more and more intrusive. It’s a big issue in education. I know. Are schools allowed to employ Christian teachers? That’s a big question. Just an example of that, that’s been looming as an issue for decades, and I’ve been watching it playing out. So we’re facing these challenges, but I think what I hope and believe will happen is that as this process of cultural disintegration happens in the West, that the church will emerge renewed with a confident vision for the future. The clarity of what Christ offers will become clearer to people when they see the alternative being played out before their eyes. And I was already seeing that in Melbourne 10 years ago, former atheists becoming Christians and coming to faith in Christ because they sensed that there was something profoundly wrong and they needed to find answers and they found them in Jesus and in the church. So I’m hoping for a revitalization, a revival that responds to the moment of history that we’re in, where there is this, we’re on the cusp of this collapse, cultural collapse, and it’s a time, I always say it’s a time for Christians to be bold. It’s time to speak out. It’s a time to be confident about the message of Jesus, not apologetic or embarrassed about it. It’s time to speak clearly. We are also facing, this is another theme in the West, is that there’s been a re-enchantment of the west. There’s been a spiritual awakening, not for good things. So the mind, body, spirit festival in Melbourne would attract thousands of people interested in witchcraft, Satanism, all sorts of things, and were facing a world. My son was in a school, a leading Melbourne school, and there were two or three people in his year who were avowed Satanists. They were known to be Satanists. We are in an environment of increasing spiritual complexity and spiritual need, and we need to equip our children and our young people, encourage them to be bold in the face of that. And again, as evil as it were becomes more apparent and the breakdown becomes clearer. There’s an opportunity for Christians to say, “Jesus does actually make a huge difference, and we need to be committed to sharing that message with others. This is not a time to be quiet. It’s not a time to retreat. It’s not a time to find a ghetto to live in. It’s a time to be bold, to express our faith boldly and with conviction.”
Brendan Corr
Dr. Durie, so well said as a point of us drawing some of our thoughts to a conclusion. You’ve made several comments through the course of our discussion about the fact that Jesus is powerful and awesome and present through his Holy Spirit in that space. You’ve also described yourself essentially as a pastor-teacher, and I’m so thankful that we’ve had this chance to learn from you and to learn with you and for you to encourage our hearts through what you’ve been able to understand about the word, the word that is Scripture, the word that is the Eternal Son. We will be praying for you and what is the next chapter from academic to Anglican minister to pastor-teacher, to the church, preparing missionaries here and abroad to carry that light. Thank you for your time and we want to pray a blessing upon you.
Dr. Mark Durie
Thank you, Brendan. I do need prayer. I really appreciate the conversation. Thank you for the wonderful questions, and it’s good to think about these such important things for us and for the health of our nation and our society.
Brendan Corr
Just as we close, is there any way in which people might be able to hear a little bit more of you or to support some of the work you’re doing? Is there a way in which they could?
Dr. Mark Durie
I have a website, markdurie.com. There is a giving page there if people would like to support that. My salary is fully dependent on donors. I work at Melbourne School of Theology, but they receive donations. They can offer tax deductibility for donations. There’s also lots of articles on that website that I’ve written, people can browse. And I have a YouTube channel as well, which is not difficult to find with lots of teaching videos on many different topics. So thank you for the opportunity to share about that.
Brendan Corr
We’re very glad to, and we rejoice in the gift that you are to the church universal and for God’s continued use of you in your service.
Dr. Mark Durie
Thank you, Brendan.
