Stay Free - Russel Brand - February 04, 2025


BREAK BREAD EP. 13 - WESLEY HUFF

Topics
Christian revival and Wesley Hough
Hosted by
Russel Brand
Mentioned
Wesley Hough Russell Brand Joe Rogan Oprah Winfrey Jesus Christ Daniel Marianne Williamson Count Zinzendorf Jordan Peterson Eckhart Tolle Follow Jesus Theo Vaughn Wesley Half Abraham Exodus Isaac Jacob John Paul
UFOs, Whistleblowers, and Government Lies – The Truth with Jeremy Corbell – SF530 Gaza Takeover? Trump’s Bold Plan Sparks Global Outrage – SF532

Episode Stats


Length

25 minutes

Words per minute

161.02

Word count

4,141

Sentence count

239

Harmful content

Misogyny

4

sentences flagged

Toxicity

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Wesley Hough is a Canadian apologist, theologian, and scholar. He was born in Pakistan and raised in Canada, but grew up in a Christian home in New York City. He has been a Christian for over 30 years, and is now a professor at the University of British Columbia. In this episode, Wesley talks about his new role as an apologist and theologian in the midst of a Christian revival, and how he s dealing with his new responsibilities as a leader in the field.

Transcript

Transcripts from "Stay Free - Russel Brand" are sourced from the Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool. Explore them interactively here.
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 *Pewds sounds* *Pewds sounds* *BANG* *BANG* *BANG* *BANG*
00:00:29.000 It appears to me at least that we are at the beginning of a Christian revival.
00:00:32.000 Wherever you go, people are talking about Christianity, sometimes in new terms, whilst people that know more about demographics and the motion of theological movements across time would say, well, what about the hundreds of millions of Chinese Christians today?
00:00:49.000 Surely you consider that to be more relevant, but wow, I'm not able to dislocate my...
00:00:53.000 Individualized consciousness was such ease as to even calculate that measurement.
00:00:58.000 But I do know that one thing that has points to this revivalism is a show like The Chosen.
00:01:05.000 People talk about Christianity in sort of cultural and, I suppose, conversational terms.
00:01:10.000 But Wesley Hough is a person who, in a sense, is...
00:01:16.000 Common to the list of beneficiaries of the Rogan effect, like Joe Rogan anoints or appoints someone in the way that Oprah Winfrey used to, with Deepak Chopra and Eckhart Tolle or Dr Oz or Marianne Williamson, all could have flowed forth from the abundant abdomen of Oprah Winfrey.
00:01:36.000 But now it's Joe Rogan that sort of begats the Jordan Peterson, Theo Vaughn, and now I would say Wesley Hough.
00:01:43.000 Canadian apologist, theologian, and scholar.
00:01:46.000 Wow, I didn't know that, that you were born in Pakistan.
00:01:50.000 I'm so excited to have you on the show, Wesley Half.
00:01:53.000 Thank you for joining me on Break Bread with Russell Brand.
00:01:58.000 Well, it's just so great to be here, knowing who you are and growing up with your movies and everything else, and just seeing the clear work of the Spirit in your life recently.
00:02:08.000 I'm just very, very honored and privileged to be talking to you.
00:02:12.000 Thank you, Wesley.
00:02:13.000 I would like exactly the kind of acclaim that you appear to be accruing.
00:02:18.000 Let me demonstrate my understanding of it in this way.
00:02:22.000 Just a couple of days ago, I was on a beach with a couple of Christian men.
00:02:28.000 You know, it's all legit.
00:02:29.000 It's all above board.
00:02:30.000 And the two of them spontaneously...
00:02:33.000 So I said, oh, you know who you've got to talk to?
00:02:36.000 Wesley Hough.
00:02:37.000 Oh, man, that guy.
00:02:38.000 He explains it.
00:02:39.000 He puts it in terms that the laymen understand.
00:02:41.000 Oh, Wesley Hough.
00:02:43.000 I'd already been talking a lot about Wesley Hough because I've seen Wesley Hough on Joe Rogan.
00:02:48.000 Other people are talking about Wesley Hough.
00:02:50.000 Everywhere I go, Wesley Hough, Wesley Hough.
00:02:52.000 To the point where actually meeting Wesley Hough seems almost implausible and impossible.
00:03:00.000 Wesley...
00:03:01.000 How are you dealing with your new appointment as an accessible apologist and theologian, and are you able to manage significant new input using the inherent infrastructure, or does it feel disruptive?
00:03:20.000 Yeah, I think there's a learning curve that you kind of feel at the beginning.
00:03:25.000 Fortunately, I have a very good support system in terms of my wife. 1.00
00:03:29.000 And people around me, my co-workers, my supervisor at the organization I work for, Apologetics Canada, and my pastor.
00:03:37.000 I'm on leadership at my church, and so I'm one of three elders that is in a pastoral role, and they've been very helpful in terms of the navigating of that in a very practical way.
00:03:49.000 I mean, I have three kids, another on the way, so I'm still changing diapers, and it feels like...
00:03:55.000 A lot of things have changed, but I go home and it feels like nothing has changed.
00:03:59.000 So I think it's just an unusual situation to be in, like you said, that Rogan effect that causes the wave.
00:04:08.000 But I think it's just a testament to the fact that I could not have orchestrated any of this.
00:04:14.000 It's purely a work of God to put down the building blocks in order to actually figure out what...
00:04:23.000 What is transpired?
00:04:26.000 It's very, yeah, I reckon, I'd love to understand more about what you just said there.
00:04:34.000 I've undergone radical change recently, and I know that some people are cynical about it, and people in a sense are right to be, gosh, if you were generally cynical in the same way that I'm anti-authoritarian, I'd say it's...
00:04:52.000 I mean, it certainly saved me a lot of unnecessary injections a couple of years back, my general anti-authoritarian and cynical perspective, which subsequently has been verified and validated by important data.
00:05:10.000 What's happened to you is it seems like you've obviously put in a lot of groundwork, you've educated yourself and you have some very unique and particular ability to communicate and make esoteric information exoteric and accessible and that's a great, great ability.
00:05:22.000 It's difficult to think of a more important ability coming out of academia and going into communication.
00:05:29.000 But what's happened to me is like a significant spiritual change rather than a social change.
00:05:35.000 I've had this very unusual thing.
00:05:38.000 I know you'd have had spiritual changes at loads of points in your life.
00:05:40.000 It's not a claim.
00:05:41.000 I'm not making a comparative claim other than that this has just happened to me right recent.
00:05:48.000 I'm meeting a lot of interesting people out of Christianity and just Christians, whether they're influential Christians or not.
00:05:56.000 This person isn't necessarily.
00:05:58.000 This guy Daniel I met the other day, he's a Christian war vet.
00:06:01.000 I guess he's an amputee.
00:06:03.000 That's one of the ways you could describe him.
00:06:04.000 This man's so on fire for the Lord that he seems to be living in one of the most mystical aspects of Christianity and one that I reckon from an expansionist perspective, Would not dwell upon.
00:06:19.000 In so much as because Christianity, when you talk about institutional Christianity, has an expansionist imperative, there's not, I believe, and I'd love your answer on this, this is where the question's coming, sufficient focus on the extraordinary supernatural mystical claims of Christianity.
00:06:36.000 Of course, eternal life and the possibility for salvation and redemption.
00:06:41.000 But then those supernatural claims are backed up with...
00:06:47.000 By motifs and stories that somehow get lost when people use a 20th century post-psychiatric analytic to examine and even absorb the claims of Christianity.
00:06:59.000 People go, oh well, it is better if you're grateful and you accept and you recognise the importance of sacrifice.
00:07:05.000 Almost a secularisation of what would be called cultural Christianity.
00:07:09.000 So that's why I want to draw your attention right from the beginning of this conversation to that angels... 0.94
00:07:14.000 Demons, possessions, exorcism, dark powers in positions, dark powers in principalities, in high places, not battling against flesh, all summarised by my mate Daniel, former marine and vet, who says things like this.
00:07:31.000 Everything's a burning bush.
00:07:35.000 Everything's a burning!
00:07:36.000 And I know, because you've been around Christianity a lot more than me, and you know a lot more about it, that you'll recognise that as a kind of a type, and as a strain, and as something.
00:07:45.000 So, what do you think about this bold aspect of Christianity, this requirement for boldness, a requirement to bring to the forefront that we're dealing with something supernatural and powerful, and how do you as a teacher and an educator handle that?
00:07:59.000 because it seems like a lot of the time people just sort of go, "Well, really, it'll just help you with your marriage breakup, feeling a bit blue down in the dumps.
00:08:05.000 Well, instead of taking SSRIs, why don't you try Jesus?" Like, kind of making it innocuous.
00:08:10.000 I wonder what you think about all that, Wesley Hough.
00:08:12.000 Yeah, I think that's a really interesting observation, Russell.
00:08:16.000 I think what you're capitalizing on there is something that highlights the fact that we live in a world that is inherently physical, but to ignore the spiritual component is probably to miss the point of the entire story and narrative.
00:08:29.000 And I think that there are particular traditions.
00:08:31.000 I mean, my tradition that I fall into, which is a, it's a reformed with a capital R kind of more intellectual stream of Christianity, has gone in terms of the calibration that you're talking about in a direction that is largely unhelpful sometimes, in that it almost falls into this heresy of denying that there is a spiritual aspect.
00:08:55.000 That is inherent to the message of historical biblical Christianity.
00:08:59.000 I'm a student of the Bible, and if you read the biblical text, particularly the ancient Near Eastern perspective of the Old Testament, there's a fundamental understanding of the crossing over of the spiritual and the physical that is...
00:09:14.000 Always there and is sometimes very dangerous in that you have something like the Ark of the Covenant, which is this tangible presence of God, and there's a reverence to it and there's a beauty to it, but there's a danger to it in that God tells them to be very specific in how they move this thing around and treat it.
00:09:32.000 And I think the particular...
00:09:36.000 The era that we're in now, you know, post-Old Covenant, within the New Covenant of Jeremiah 31-31, where God writes His law on our hearts, is that in John chapter 1, when it says that the Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us, that term in the original language is made His dwelling, is literally tabernacled.
00:09:54.000 It's the place where the Ark of the Covenant dwelt.
00:09:58.000 And so...
00:09:59.000 God dwelled amongst us and then dwells us with the Holy Spirit.
00:10:02.000 And so we live in this powerful world where to just think of it as matter in motion is to swallow the post-intellectualism lie that I think you've recognized by running into your friend there and swallowing this idea that even though we...
00:10:21.000 Give credence to, you know, the eternal God-man who stepped out of eternity into the humanity in the second person of the Trinity, that really we then live functional lives as materialists.
00:10:30.000 But that's not the reality of Scripture.
00:10:33.000 Exactly like you said, Russell, that our battle is primarily against principalities and dominions that are spiritual in nature, and that we need to be realistic in our understanding of the world around us to recognize that we live in a world that is just as spiritual as it is physical, and that there's an ancient heresy in the Gnostics that...
00:11:00.000 And so I think it's, you know, keeping this framework in mind of a God who creates and ultimately is going to bring heaven to earth.
00:11:16.000 Temporarily in the now but not yet reality that we pray in the Lord's Prayer that your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
00:11:24.000 But in our ultimate hope, in the new creation, that is what will really happen.
00:11:28.000 That those two realities, the physical and spiritual, will crash together in a way like they did in the incarnation that we celebrate at Christmas time.
00:11:36.000 But that will be a fundamental experience reality for all of us.
00:11:41.000 It's such an audacious claim, because it's nothing short of the assertion that your subjective experience, as either Russell Brand or Wesley Hough or whoever you are watching this, can become an altar for Christ.
00:11:56.000 The crucible of consciousness itself becomes where you know him.
00:12:01.000 Some obvious examples, at least they're accessible to me, I don't know whether they're obvious or not.
00:12:06.000 Like, Elijah, small still voice, is pertaining to consciousness over a potentially pagan perspective, i.e.
00:12:13.000 the earthquake and the volcano, etc.
00:12:16.000 And then right at the top, Genesis, with the spirit moving across the water, and these allusions to and references to water and living water.
00:12:28.000 Any framework has to be held together with tension, even if you're talking about the literal physical frame of a picture.
00:12:34.000 It's held in tension against the other three sides.
00:12:38.000 And what I'm trying to reconcile here is the attention that exists between, as you said, the dualism that emerged out of Gnosticism and the current sort of post-Drousseauian reverence for, you know, I'm referring to the sort of noble savage idea.
00:12:53.000 How do we bring together, how do we bring together, Wes, this, the...
00:13:00.000 Emergent notion, the incoherent notion, I want to say, that we appear to be reaching some sort of peculiar political end time.
00:13:09.000 These cataclysms and collisions, these fractures and crashes that demand nothing less of us than a new framework.
00:13:18.000 To be more specific, when you see apocalyptic visions like drones in the sky and all these orbs, when you hear the continual outlier, the outlier, Dialectic on demons and reptilians and Illuminati and sects.
00:13:34.000 It's odd that these things have scriptural provenance in the Nephilim and demons and serpents and reptiles.
00:13:45.000 This aspect of Christianity, this... 0.95
00:13:49.000 It pulls upon the vivid mystical rather than the kind of psychiatric, emotional mystical.
00:13:57.000 It feels to me like where a kind of libido is going to come from, that it is about carnality.
00:14:04.000 Added to this, if I may, Wes, the idea that...
00:14:09.000 Sexual intimacy and the erotic nature of Christ and the very vivid and deliberate metaphor of bride and bridegroom seems to be important.
00:14:18.000 There is so much prohibition, censure and control around sex, I can't believe that it's not significant and not somehow connected to the direction of the energy and power that we're discussing and the idea that we are to become a dwelling place for him, a living tabernacle, a living tent, just a place for him to occupy.
00:14:35.000 So do you think then that And what is the significance if you can...
00:14:52.000 Add to that, please, Wes, of the carnality and the erotic when it comes to the acceptance of Christ and, you know, given this is break bread, even the eating of the flesh and the drinking of the blood.
00:15:04.000 And you, man, you know about all this stuff that didn't, in a more literal translation of the Greek, something like, gorge yourself on his flesh!
00:15:11.000 Devour him! 0.85
00:15:12.000 Devour him! 0.85
00:15:15.000 Yeah, I think...
00:15:16.000 I think what we're dealing with is that God has clearly created things to be good.
00:15:21.000 I mean, this is the very first page of the Bible, right?
00:15:23.000 That you referred to when you say, you know, the Spirit of God is hovering over the face, the surface of the waters.
00:15:29.000 And that what we see within the aberrations of sex or relationship or...
00:15:38.000 The money, all these things that I think, you know, they have a purpose and they're created good, right?
00:15:44.000 God created humanity to be close to one another in relationship because we worship a God of relationship, right?
00:15:55.000 How does God, when he talks about himself in the Old Testament to the patriarchs and to his people...
00:16:02.000 Outside of the Exodus, describe himself.
00:16:04.000 Well, he doesn't use words like omnipotent or all-knowing, all-powerful.
00:16:07.000 These are...
00:16:09.000 True and needed theological terminology that describe the God that we see within Scripture, but God describes himself as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, that it's fundamentally relational in the way that God communicates with us, and that that carnality,
00:16:25.000 in a good way, right, with something like being fruitful and multiplying in the context of the covenantal relationship of marriage, or within seeing that God himself steps into a physical body, communicating that The physical is not evil.
00:16:40.000 That the world around us is broken.
00:16:44.000 It's marred by sin.
00:16:45.000 But that there's an aspect of the fact that God created it to be good, which was fundamentally countercultural in the ancient world, where a lot of the origin stories, they didn't communicate that the world was good.
00:16:58.000 They communicated that it was a mistake.
00:17:00.000 It was an end result of the wars of the gods.
00:17:02.000 And I think this kind of relational aspect you're touching on, you know, Going right back to Genesis, right?
00:17:08.000 The earth was formless and void, and the darkness was hovering over the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the surface of the waters.
00:17:14.000 And then God speaks creation into existence.
00:17:17.000 Let there be light.
00:17:18.000 And what happens?
00:17:19.000 There's light.
00:17:19.000 But when it comes to living things, we see that God speaks to the earth, and it sprouts vegetation and plants, and it brings forth life.
00:17:28.000 And God speaks to the waters, and it swarms with living creatures, and it brings forth life.
00:17:32.000 But notice, Russell, when God I think it's verse 26 of Genesis chapter 1. When he speaks and talks about the creation of humanity, he speaks to himself.
00:17:44.000 Let us make man in our image according to the likeness, our likeness, so that they will have dominion. 0.99
00:17:50.000 Now, what happens when you remove a fish from the water?
00:17:53.000 It dies, right?
00:17:55.000 What happens when you remove a tree from the earth?
00:17:57.000 It dies.
00:17:58.000 And what we see is that this part of creation bit...
00:18:03.000 A humanity who bears God's image, who chose cosmic rebellion by eating the tree of knowledge of good and evil, the only thing God told them not to do, it creates a rift between the creator and the creation.
00:18:15.000 And just as when you remove a fish from the sea or a tree from the earth, when you remove humanity from God, we die.
00:18:21.000 And so the perversion that we see within something like sex or possessions or, you know, even something like...
00:18:33.000 The Bible talks a lot about wine and how good that can be, but there's a danger to it when we exist in this beautifully broken world and that gets perverted.
00:18:43.000 And so it's not that these things in and of themselves are bad, right?
00:18:46.000 God is not against sex.
00:18:48.000 He's not against money.
00:18:49.000 He's not against a good time.
00:18:51.000 He's not against relationships, but all of those things.
00:18:53.000 Can be broken and twisted and warped.
00:18:56.000 And so I think it's fundamental that when we have these conversations about the spiritual and the physical and that we're trying to root that in the objectivity, right?
00:19:06.000 I think you accurately said there is a subjectivity of it in that you wrestle our subject, Wes, I'm a subject, and we have these subjective experiences.
00:19:14.000 But my old systematic theology professor would always say that things like tradition and experience have a voice and they have a vote.
00:19:23.000 But it's God's word that has the veto.
00:19:25.000 And so there's a framework by which we come to these things and make sure that they're grounded in something that's objective and that's actually, as Paul says, is spoken out by God.
00:19:36.000 Where it appears, Wes, you've had an incredible impact is being able to provide connective tissue between the extraordinary claims that we've touched upon somewhat.
00:19:51.000 Not the legalistic, the pragmatic application of these ideas and principles, for which a lot of people seem to require, understandably, verification.
00:19:59.000 And I feel like some of the people that have been affected by you have been so, because when you talk about Christ, they believe that you're talking about something that happened, that is demonstrable and empirical.
00:20:17.000 And I'm a Christian, so I've...
00:20:20.000 Follow Jesus and I believe that I am redeemed because I accept Jesus Christ as my saviour and I turn away from sin and know eternal life.
00:20:28.000 You know what I mean?
00:20:28.000 That's what I believe.
00:20:29.000 How are you...
00:20:31.000 What is it, Wes, that you're doing that's convincing people that this is not, you know, any kind of variation or reduction of Christ but actual Christ?
00:20:41.000 What tissue are you providing?
00:20:44.000 You're making people believe that this actually happened.
00:20:46.000 What are you telling people?
00:20:49.000 Well, I think it's the, and I appreciate you saying that, that ultimately is my desire.
00:20:54.000 If nothing else, I want to point people to Jesus.
00:20:57.000 One of my favorite quotes is by this Moravian reformer, Count Zinzendorf, who said, preach the gospel, die and be forgotten.
00:21:04.000 You know, when Jesus, when he says that we're going to stand before the Father on the final day, the encouragement is that we want to hear the words, well done, good and faithful servant.
00:21:18.000 And that's always been a conviction and an encouragement to me personally, is that it's not good and influential servant.
00:21:25.000 It's not good and profound servant or good and well-spoken servant.
00:21:30.000 It's just a calling to be faithful.
00:21:33.000 And when we come to the pages of Scripture, they're very approachable.
00:21:37.000 That doesn't mean everything is easy to understand.
00:21:38.000 But ultimately, I am a very simple person.
00:21:43.000 And a lot of the things that I hope I... Am able to communicate to others is because of my simplicity in that I am first and foremost teaching myself.
00:21:52.000 And if I can communicate these, sometimes very complicated and esoteric, and you know, especially when we're looking at Greek and Hebrew and Aramaic and Coptic and Akkadian, these other languages, if I can break them down into their simplest terms for myself, then hopefully I can do that for others in terms of the translating and communicating.
00:22:14.000 I think a lot of people have a misunderstanding of Christianity that it's about the rules and it's about coming to God and doing things well.
00:22:26.000 And you are saved not by your works but for the works.
00:22:31.000 So the works are not secondary.
00:22:34.000 You will know them by their fruit, Jesus says about his followers.
00:22:37.000 And so I think, you know, I was reading this morning in the Gospel of Matthew, In my own devotions, and it really stood out to me, I'll share this with you, because the rich young ruler, he comes to Jesus and he says, Teacher, behold, someone came to him and said, Teacher, what good thing shall I do that I may have eternal life?
00:23:00.000 And Jesus' response to him is, first, he recognizes that this individual sees that he's good, and he says, you know, who is good but God alone?
00:23:10.000 And he's saying, actually, you recognize that I'm good.
00:23:13.000 We know that only God is good, so what does that mean about what you're actually recognizing in me?
00:23:17.000 So it's kind of this secondary tacit admission that Jesus is claiming to be God.
00:23:21.000 But he said, then he said to him, obey the laws, obey the commandments, keep them.
00:23:27.000 Then he said, which ones?
00:23:29.000 And Jesus said, you shall not murder, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not steal, you shall not bear false witness, honor your father and mother, and you shall love your neighbor as yourself.
00:23:36.000 And the young man said to him, all these things I have kept, what am I still lacking?
00:23:40.000 You know, if it was just about the rules?
00:23:42.000 Jesus at that point, he could have very well said, you got it.
00:23:45.000 You punched your ticket.
00:23:46.000 You've done all the right things, right?
00:23:49.000 And I think that's what the world often thinks Christianity is.
00:23:53.000 I need to fix my car up before I take it to the mechanic.
00:23:58.000 Because I don't want to be embarrassed by the mechanic thinking my car is making a funny sound.
00:24:02.000 But that's not why you take your car to the mechanic, right?
00:24:05.000 Jesus says, If you wish to be complete, go and sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven.
00:24:15.000 Come and follow me.
00:24:17.000 But when the young man heard this statement, he went away grieving, for he was the one who owned much property.
00:24:22.000 You know, Jesus knew what his heart was.
00:24:25.000 It wasn't about the commandments.
00:24:26.000 It was about what was really going on in here.
00:24:29.000 And that's ultimately what God wants.
00:24:33.000 What people often miss is they feel like they need to fix themselves and they need to, you know, be more spiritual or do more good things or have some sort of intellectual ascent.
00:24:42.000 And the very simple story of Christianity is that, you know, none of those things are going to work because it's not about that.
00:24:50.000 You can never think or feel or know enough to actually live up to God's standard.
00:24:56.000 But it's not about what you've done.
00:24:58.000 It's about what God did in the person of Jesus Christ.
00:25:02.000 That's a brilliant example.
00:25:03.000 That's a brilliant example.
00:25:05.000 Like the young man actually at the beginning of the discourse already knew Christ laid before him these are the commandments.
00:25:12.000 Yeah, I'm doing that.
00:25:13.000 Well, you know that thing where you're obsessed with money and you wouldn't want to actually give it up because you prefer that and that's really your God?
00:25:20.000 Yeah, that.
00:25:20.000 You've got to get rid of that.
00:25:21.000 And I was thinking, what's my one?
00:25:23.000 Mine is like some sort of version of that.
00:25:26.000 I still sort of see myself as central.
00:25:28.000 But I will say too that that was the pivotal and radical transition that occurred at the commencement of my still new and young walk with Christ.
00:25:39.000 If you're watching us on X or YouTube or anywhere other...