Elijah or Obadiah: Should our Christian witness be prophetic, incarnational or both?
Playback speed
Christians often find themselves disagreeing about what posture to adopt in our increasingly secular and faith-hostile culture. Should we stand apart from society, keeping ourselves unsullied by its godlessness, so we can prophetically call out evil and witness to Christ? Or should we seek to engage deeply in our context, seeing our calling as to shape creation in a kingdom direction, acting incarnationally and incrementally for good? Are we most faithful to the way of Jesus by remaining prophetic outsiders or incarnational insiders? In this episode we discuss this tension and what we might learn from an often overlooked Old Testament passage where two of Yahweh’s followers – each espousing a very different mode of witness – bump into each other unexpectedly in the Judaean desert.
• You can send in your questions for us to discuss on the podcast, or ideas for future episodes, to [email protected]
• kSubscribe to the Matters of Life and Death podcast: https://pod.link/1509923173
• If you want to go deeper into some of the topics we discuss, visit John's website: http://www.johnwyatt.com
• For more resources to help you explore faith and the big questions, visit: http://www.premierunbelievable.com
Released on 24 Sep 2025
Coming up next
Why did a good God create earthquakes and volcanoes? Suffering, creation and natural evil, with Prof Bob White
Natural disasters like earthquakes and volcanic eruptions have caused untold misery, suffering and death over the centuries. Some, like the infamous Lisbon earthquake and tsunami in 1755, have even been held up as prompting turns away from belief in...
The idolatry of Christian Nationalism, with John Heathershaw
It has been hard to miss the ways that right-wing political movements have become marked by Christian rhetoric and language in recent years. Clearly, something about the unstable and fractious era we live in has seen people yearning to turn Western n...
Union and communion: The Trinity demystified
Of all orthodox Christian doctrines, the trinity is perhaps the one which most languishes understudied and underappreciated. Many of us see it as a baffling paradox, a riddle without an answer. Only of interest to egg-headed nerds and without any pra...
