Speaker 1: As you say, those are patterns that are there in
life as well as in the text. And part of
the value of recognizing the Bible is it illumines those
life patterns. We can we can begin to see the
movement of our lives through these Bible eyes.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I think that that, to me has
been the most crucial thing. You know, a lot of
the things that I do is to help people see
how the Bible, in some ways is the truest version
of a pattern that fills everything. You know, it's not
it's you know, it's actually the pattern of creation itself.
It's the pattern that God created the world with, and
therefore it can be found in all things, but in
scripture definitely it appears in this most pristine form. So
in some ways it's a it's like a tuning fork,
even beyond even just the morality, because we often think
of the Bible as just offering us moral codes. But
beyond the morality, it's a structural tuning fork for for
our lives.
Speaker 3: This is Jonathan Pejol Welcome to the symbolic World.
Speaker 2: Hello everyone, I am here with Peter Lightheart. I think
most of you who are watching this will know who
he is. Peter is the president of the Theopolis Institute.
He's also written number amounts of books. You know, he's
been in ministry also for most of his life. And
so those of you have seen that I've already interviewed
someone from Theopolis. And what you don't know is that
one of the very first public discussions that I had,
I went to the University of Toronto. Someone came right
up to me. His name is Berl Herniachek, great, great guy.
He gave me a book by James Jordan called Through
New Eyes and I never heard of this whole strain
in kind of Protestant thinking.
Speaker 3: And I explored some.
Speaker 2: Of the images, and I thought it was very beautiful
to see this powerful plunging into the worldview of the
Bible and kind of taking very seriously all the analogy
and the typology. And it was similar to the things
that I cared about. And so I thought it'd be
a great, great way to continue the discussion with Peter.
And so thanks thanks for talking to me.
Speaker 1: Yeah, thanks for having me. Jonathan. It's a pleasure to
meet you and to have a chance to talk to you.
Speaker 2: So tell me a bit about the origin of Theopolis
and kind of what the mission of your institution is.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well you pinpointed a key origin, and that's James Jordan.
Jim ran a ministry called Biblical Horizons in the Panhandle,
Florida for many years. I was part of a group
that did an annual conference for about twenty five years
down in the Panhandle of Florida, and we explored the Bible.
We did a lot of work on obscure passages of
the Bible. We did a lot of work on the
levitical sacrifices, and on the Temple and Tabernacle. Jim was
very fascinated by the temple visions of Ezekiel, and so
he gave lectures on that. Worked together for twenty five years.
It dawned on me in my mid fifties that we
were all getting old and we had no institutional setup
to enable our work to last beyond our lifetimes. Biblical Horizons,
Jim's organization, was set up as a way for him
to do his writing and teaching, but theopolos was set
up in order to capture and then expand on and
perpetuate what we had done in biblic Horizons. And that's
a key theme of Theopolis, and that is the trying
to deepen a Christian's understanding of Scripture. We have various programs.
Our key program is a fellowship program where pastors and
seminary students, people who aspired to church leadership go through
the program, and it's a largely a Bible program. The
other aspect of it has been a liturgical effort. Jim
Jordan again is the inspiration for this. When he was
in Texas many years ago, he started reading writers outside
of our Reformed Protestant tradition, like Alexander Schmmann, Russian Orthodox writer,
Jean Donielou Roman Catholic, on Rey de lou Back another
Roman Catholic, and we started thinking through liturgical issues, still
within the framework of a Reform Protestant understanding of worship,
but with these other more Catholic influences. So the one
part of Theopolis's liturgical theology, so Biblical liturgical theology are
the two primary things. And our conviction is that the
Church exists to be to provide living waters for the world.
The image of Eden, where you've got the garden of
Eden with waters flowing from it, that image of a
place of God's presence with waters flowing out that's picked
up in the temple, it's picked up in Ezekiel's vision
of the temple. That's the vision that we have for mission.
But it starts with what happens in the sanctuary. It
starts with worship. It starts with our understanding of scripture.
And when we are deeply grounded in scripture, and when
we're embracing the beauty and the richness of the Bible,
of worshiping faithfully gathering around the Lord's table, then churches
of that sort provide living waters that renew the world.
So that's the basic vision of the Outlus.
Speaker 2: I like you to take me back to the first moments,
these first discussions we were having with James Jordan and
yourself and kind of discovering. Maybe take me back to
how I don't know how it felt or what it
is that you were experiencing discovering all of this, Like
was it a kind of archaeology where you were finding
it from the text themselves or was there reading you know,
church fathers or rabbinical writers.
Speaker 3: Like this, What was the bubbling?
Speaker 1: Yeah, there were a lot of different influences, some from
the church fathers, not primarily I don't think, and there
were some for mother contemporary scholars. I would say again
that Jim was the main inspiration. He has a has
a as a biblical imagination that I think is unparalleled,
and so he was inspiring a lot of our interest
in it, and we got we got attached to him,
and we started kind of looking over his shoulder as
he was reading the Bible, trying to figure out how
he was doing it, uh, and trying to imitate what
he was doing.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 1: And then you know, over the over the course of
a couple of decades, you have a small group of
teachers that are working together, and we almost developed a
single mind. We're thinking about the Bible in similar ways.
We can almost finish each other's sentences. When we, you know,
make a little, a little passing comment about a passage,
then we know where it's going to run after that,
because we're all been working together for so long. But yeah,
it was it was really more what you called archaeological.
We're trying to figure out what the text means. Our
premise are, our beginning, Our beginning premise was, as Jim
Jim likes to say, the spirit does not waste his breath.
The scriptures are inspired by the Holy Spirit of God,
and there's nothing in there that's extraneous. So even the
things that seem like you could just dispense with them
are therefore reason. And so coming to the text with
that conviction, I think that was that's really the basic
premise of what we were trying to do.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you mentioned going into the difficult texts, you know,
and that really is in some ways the tests. And
I understand that like some of the texts in Leviticus,
you know, some of the stories and Judges, all of
these maybe tell us one of the moments where you've
had an insight where you just a story that just
made no sense, or something that looked completely random or arbitrary,
and then suddenly that connection. You know you I've experienced
it too, But I love.
Speaker 3: Hearing about that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, I think probably in the Book of Judges
would be a good place to think about, because one
of Jim's early works was a commentary in the Book
of Judges, and so he's a he's favorable to the Judges.
He thinks of them as Christian heroes, not flawless heroes.
But Hebrews eleven, the Great List of the Faithful from
the Old Covenant that includes a number of the Judges.
So even people like Jeff, whom we think of his
primarily think of somebody who made a rash vow and
perhaps sacrificed his daughter. Yeah, he's listed in Hebrews eleven
as one of the heroes of the faith. So it
was a there's things in the Judges and one of
the one of the things that really more of a
pattern than something that's a single episode, but it's a
recurring pattern that occurs not only in Judges, but in
other parts of the Old Testament. You have people who
are killed by massive head trauma. You have Sisera who
goes into the tent of jail. She puts him to
sleep and then pounds a tent bake through his head.
A couple chapters later, you have a Bimlak who is
the son of Gideon, and he's attacking a tower and
a woman tosses a millstone from the top of the
tower and it crushes his head. You move into First
Samuel and you have David doing the same thing to Goliath.
You have these head crushing moments that once you see
a few of them line up, then you think this,
this is this is deliberate. There's something going on here.
And the obvious thing is that that goes back to
the promise of Genesis three that the Lord is going
to give to the woman the seed of the woman
who's going to crush the serpent's head. And so you
have this recurring theme of head crushing events that that
was that that's that's a theme where you have, you know,
an odd way to die that doesn't happen a lot,
but it seemed to happen awful lot in Bible times
that people died by massive head trauma. I guess you know,
something like Leviticus. The things that the things that have
come home to me are things like, uh, just the
structure of sacrifice. I puzzled over that. I'm currently writing
a commentary on Leviticus, and I puzzled over sacrifice for
a long time. And I suspect it's true generally in Christianity,
certainly among Protestants, that what we reckon, what we notice
in the sacrifices is the is the violence of killing.
You have an animal that's alive in the slice its
throat and drain out its blood, and then you put
it on the altar and it looks like a straightforward
enactment of the cross or prefiguration of the Cross, where
you have some substitute, some representative dying on behalf of
the sin. But the recognizing that there's a that's just
one moment of sacrifice, and recognizing that sacrifice is both
death and transfiguration, and that the movement is through death
to transfiguration and glorification. Recognizing that movement of sacrifice was
what has been a key moment. And if I could
mention one other thing, one other maybe a good example.
What Jim I think taught us to do was to
recognize that the odd details fit into sequences and patterns
and storylines. So there's this really strange moment after Jacob
has left Laban's house, Laban's caught up to him. Laban
didn't want him, Laban has been abusing him for years,
but now once she's left, Laban doesn't want him to
leave because he knows he's Laban's been prospering because Jacob's
been there, and so he catches up with them and
he says, my household gods, You've got my household gods.
And they are there, but they're under saddle, and rage
is sitting on them, and she claims to be having
her period. Odd little moments says something about the power
of those gods that they can't even you know, push
a woman off of them. They can't make any noise,
they can't say help, help, I'm you know, Rachel sitting
on me. I'm over here, I'm over here, Laban. But
it's also an act of humiliation of the gods. And
once you put it in that context, then you see
it's part of an Exodus storyline that runs constantly through
the Bible. You have it in that story where you
have David Jacob Rother departing from a land of oppression.
The oppressor chases him down and tries to capture him.
The gods of the gods of the oppressor are being humiliated,
and then Jacob goes on and re enters the land,
and there's a conclusion to that as a re entry
in the land. The same thing happens in the Big Exodus.
In the Book of Exodus, a lot of the plagues
are directed against gods of Egypt. Isaiah is full of
this when it talks about the great Second Exodus out
of Babylon and all of the humiliation of the gods.
He's mocking the gods. Israel still worships idols, and they
don't realize that they're carving an image out of wood,
and then they're burning the rest of the wood for
their to warm themselves and to cook their food. So
the humiliation of the humiliation of the idols is a
recurrent theme, but it seems like an odd little detail
until you see it in that kind of sequence.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I've definitely thought a lot about that story.
But I am kind of like you when I see
stories look completely crazy in the Bible, Like I just
get fixated on them, and I'm just trying to like,
why is this year, Like why do they mention it?
You know what, why is this detail worthy of mention
in the story?
Speaker 1: You know?
Speaker 2: And I definitely also in terms of this particular story,
there seems to be a relationship also with the idea
that Rachel is bringing back the residues of this world
into into Israel, and that this is actually related to
menstruation as well, like it's kind of residue of the
cycle that it's being carried into the into the land,
and that will in some ways have repercussions later in
the story. Of Israel in terms of not destroying the
old gods and kind of keeping the you know, keeping
the old things that you should have left behind, you know, right.
Speaker 1: That's that's a great point once they get into the
land Jacob Pilsen to put away the gods that they
brought out of Heron. So there is a moment of repentance,
but that's that is a recurring thing. Of course, you
get all the way to the end of Joshua, and
Joshua in his in his farewell speech to Israel tells them,
reminds them that they worshiped idols not only in Er
where Abraham came from, but they also worshiped hotels in Egypt.
And I think that's the first time we have an
explicit statement about Israel had succumbed to the Egyptian idols.
But it's all the way until you know, the conquest
is over now and they're still clinging to those old gods.
So yeah, that is definitely a part of the story
of Rachel.
Speaker 2: And so I think one of the interesting things, and
maybe you can comment on this and tell me what
you think, is that there's a strange moment where, you know,
if we look at some of the more materialistic approaches
to reading scripture, like nineteenth century type academics, you know
that had a very historical minded and very you know.
There it seems to be that as you take the
more you take the Bible seriously, like, the more you
actually want to understand this completely in every detail, in
every aspect, that you cannot avoid analogy, like you cannot
avoid using modes of interpretation that use this noticing of repeating,
repeating patterns. And I'm curious if how you see that
in relationship to believing that these things happened. You know,
this is one of the criticism people have about scripture.
How do you see the relationship between the event aspect
of the story and this patterning of the of the
of the stories.
Speaker 1: Yeah, on the point about analogies within different stories of
the accounts of the Bible, obviously that's there, and that's
in some sense that's recognized by the critical scholars that
you mentioned. What they do with that though, is uh
dull and unimaginative, not not to mention, just plain wrong.
You know, if you've got two stories of of you know,
Abraham deceiving a king, he goes down into Egypt and
he tells Pharaoh that Sarah is his Sarah is his sister.
He goes to Garar and he tells a Bimlin the
same thing. You have those two stories, that must be
two traditions. They must be competing traditions. And the the
the editor who put those two together a few chapters apart,
apparently didn't notice that they're there.
Speaker 3: Idiots, all these idiots in the past.
Speaker 2: Yeah, these morons that spend their entire lives reading these
texts from there since there were babies until their death,
and they're so stupid that they just stuck these things
together randomly.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So, yeah, it's it's a it's a very it's
a it's a bad way to read it. There's structural
things going on there, the parallels between Abram sojourn in
Egypt and Abraham Sojourn and Garar. Within the text, there
are structural parallels, and then there are nuances of difference
between the two. I mean, Pharaoh Pharaoh is not. Pharaoh
is not favorable to Abram. He just chases him out
in Genesis twelve, get out of here. You brought plagues
in my house. When you get to Gharar, Interestingly, when
Beim like, finds out what's happened and why his the
wives in his household have been their wombs have been
shut up. He asked Abraham to pray for him, and
Abraham there first the first time anybody in the Bible
is explicitly described as a prophet, and it's Abraham who's
praying for a bimelec. So you have this shift in
the attitude of the gentiles to Abraham between the time
in Egypt and the time you get to Garar. And
if you're just thinking these are two variations of the
same story, you miss a crucial part of the progress
of the Abraham story where he's actually having an effect
and you know, finding a more favorable reception among the
gentiles later on in the story than he did at
the beginning of the story. So that was can you
repeat the second part of your question, because I think
I've lost it.
Speaker 2: You mentioned an analogyo, I mean I think that I think
you did answer the question. The second part was about,
you know, how people will criticize the event aspect of
it rightly in the way that you did, where they'll
say they'll say, well, you know, one of these is
a version of the other, and stuck them together, you know.
And you know, I think you definitely answered what you're saying.
And there's even more to that, which is that it's
like our lives are made of repeating stories all Like
our entire lives are constantly like every every wedding, every
you know, it's like you just every Sunday, every Saturday,
like every week, every day you go to bed, you
cover in the morning. And the weird idea that the
world doesn't rhyme that way, even though your entire life
rhinds that way. It's such a strange way of seeing reality.
Speaker 1: Right, Yeah, that's rhyming. Was exactly the word that popped
into my mind when you first asked the question that
it's not just the stories that are in the text
that rhyme, because you could explain that by saying, well,
you've got the scribal tradition, and you've got scribes who
know the old stories, and so they're making up news
stories about people who never existed, about events that never happened,
but they're using the materials of the old stories just
to connect them with that tradition. I think, in fact,
I mean recognizing those kind of relationships. One aspect of
typological interpretation. I think typology is not merely a way
of reading scripture, but it's a theory of history. And
the theory is that history rhymes because God is a
god of consistent action. God does the same thing over
and over again. That's on the face of it. In
the Bible, I mean, when Israel's in exile, when they're
being oppressed, all they want is another exodus, and they
keep reminding him of the old Exodus. Do it again
the way you did it in the past. The other
thing too. This is another example of that that we
talk a lot about. Chiasms at theopolis, a particularly literary
structure where you have corresponding sections within a text. The
first part of the first part of the text corresponds
to the second part, to the last part, the second
part corresponds to the next to the last part, and
you kind of move into a center. That seems like
a really kind of weird way to organize a story
or an argument, it's actually very common in the ancient world.
It's not just in the Biblical world. You can find that.
You can find chiasms all over Homer and other ancient texts,
but it's also, as you say, it's just the pattern
of human life, the daily pattern of human life. We
wake up, we have a meal, We work for a bit.
The center of the whole day is the midday meal.
We work a little bit more, we have another meal,
we go to bed, and we sleep, and then we
start over. Every day is structured like that. Lives are
structured like that. We begin as helpless infants. If we
live long enough, we end as helpless virtual infants. And
you know, those are as you say, those are patterns
that are there in life as well as in the text.
And part of what the value, part of the value
of recognizing the Bible is it illumines those life patterns.
We can begin to see the movement of our lives
through these Bible eyes.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I think that that, to me has
been the most crucial thing. You know, a lot of
the things that I do is to help people see
how the Bible, in some ways is the truest version
of a pattern that fills everything. You know, it's not
it's you know, it's actually the pattern.
Speaker 3: Of creation itself.
Speaker 2: It's the pattern that God created the world with, and
therefore it can be found in all things, but in
scripture definitely it appears in this most pristine form. So
in some ways it's a it's like a tuning fork,
even beyond even just the morality, because we often think
of the Bible as just offering us moral codes, but
beyond the morality, it's a structural tuning fork for for
our lives, you know.
Speaker 3: So, I don't know if you thought about that a
little bit.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's that's the uh. I think that's analogous to
what John Calvin says early on in his Institutes of
the Christian Religion, which was his major work of theology.
He's talking about the relationship between the created, natural knowledge
of God that we have and special revelation in scripture,
and the image he uses is lenses spectacles. So because
of sin, because of our lethargy for various reasons, that
we don't see the world clearly, and we need scripture
in order to in order to recognize what's actually there.
So it's not that the Bible puts us in an
imaginary world that's separated from the real world. It's it's
a gives us a gives us access to the world
as it actually is.
Speaker 2: That's a real That's a huge shift because there's a
there's a kind of unconscious bias that we saw in
a lot of modern I think, uh textual criticism and
a lot of modern modern even biblical scholars is in
some ways the lens they have is actually kind of
modern rationalism.
Speaker 3: That's their lens.
Speaker 2: And then they look at scripture with that lens, and
then they break it down and they cut it up,
and they.
Speaker 3: Do all these things.
Speaker 2: But there is something about the way the Bible is
written and the way the Bible is functioned in the
Christian in Christianity from the very beginning, which is closer
to what you're saying, which is you have to have
to step into the world and then take the Bible
on as a set of lenses to look at the
rest of the world with. And that changes completely the
perspective in which even you the way you approach the text,
the way you interpret them, the way that you also
act with a kind of reverence towards the aspect that
you don't understand, because that's something that you see all
the time in biblical scholarship, but kind of arrogance towards
things that they don't that they don't understand. And maybe
you can take us down this line, because you said
that this way of seeing has also affected the your
vision of liturgy. So I like to hear a little
bit about that, like what are the things that that
what kind of changes as it's brought you to your liturgy?
Speaker 1: Yeah, uh uh, this is this is related to that question,
but it's a part of a response to what your
previous comment, and that is you know, I'm a Protestant.
We put a heavy emphasis on word teaching, the preaching
of the Word, and I think in a lot of
Protestant circles what that means is you're using the Bible
in order to extract doctrinal content, or using the Bible,
especially in post Reformation. There's certain strands of post Reformation
product satism where the primary goal is to extract some
applicable moral exhortation in the medieval terms, where you're trying
to get out of the Bible's tropology and trying to
give moral direction. And I'm certainly not opposed to moral direction.
I think the Bible does give a small direction. But
when I teach, when I teach pastors, when I talk
about preaching, I encourage people to think of what they're doing,
not only in terms of telling the truth, trying to
trying to encourage people and loving good works, but also
to target the imagination and enable people to see the
world rightly, that is, to see the world through the
lenses of scripture. So part of the answer to the
question liturgy is the way that preaching has done, and
that preaching is I think rightly targeted not just at
the will or at the understanding, but also at the
imagination the other side of it. I mean, we we
at theopolists, we use and advocate for fairly traditional forms
of liturgy. There if you were to come to a
theopolist event, what we're doing is looks like a prayerbook liturgy,
similar to a prayer brook liturgy in the Anglican Church,
similar to a Lutheran liturgy that's not been the primary
that's meant not been the primary mode of liturgy in
the Reform tradition. So we're something of outliers within our
own with our own tradition. But there are a number
of things I think that that that the typology has affected.
I mean, you just think in terms of uh the
events of baptism, of the Word's Supper, the two sacraments
that Protestants tended most most all Protestants would acknowledge. Some
Protestants would add, would have several others. Uh, but you
have those are those are biblical rituals. They are biblical
rituals that have this incredibly rich setting around in the Bible.
I mean, you think Alistair Roberts was just here teaching
at our Fellows program and he did a e lecture
on baptism. And if you're going to start talk about baptists,
you're going to start in Genesis one, when the world
is formless and void in darkness over the face of
the deep.
Speaker 3: But the world is above the water right there.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the world starts in water. And then you try
to trace the themes of water throughout the entire Bible.
It's you know, everything is there, that's all part of
our understanding of baptism. But then that all comes to
a focus, all that biblical symbolism and all that biblical
all those biblical patterns, all those Biblical stories are taking concrete,
real form within the church when somebody is baptized or
same thing is true with the Eucharist. When you celebrate
the Eucharist, you're having a meal, but again you're othering
together all these countless meal events that are in the scriptures.
It's you can say, the liturgy is where those where
those types become concrete and real for the Church, those
types of water rescues by water, destruction and renewal by water,
those types of covenant meals, communion with God, all those
all those events of the Bible, they become concrete and
real for the Church. And the liturgy.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And this is something you know, you talk about
Father Alexander Schmaman. You know, this is something that for
modern people it's kind of hard to understand that the sacraments,
you know, they say the sacrament of communion, it grounds
reality for us, right, that it becomes in some ways
the model for all our other little communions, for all
our family meals, for all our celebrations, all.
Speaker 3: Of these things. They need a peak.
Speaker 2: They need something that holds the meaning of all these
other aspects together.
Speaker 3: And that isn't something that just has weapons in your head.
Speaker 2: Right, It's it's not just like a theory, something that
you have to actively engage in. Uh. And then so
that's all that's true for that. It's true for baptism
as well. Baptism grounds so many aspects of the the
you know, the cyclical aspect of our life, you know,
the waking and the sleeping, the you know, the all
the aspects of our life that are related to death
are are bound in the baptism of.
Speaker 3: Christ and our participation of that.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: St.
Speaker 2: Paul says, he literally tells us that we are dying
with Christ and resurrecting with him. You know, it's like
it's related to the Cross. It's related not just even
to the baptism of Christ. It's it's a little image
of what's going to happen later in his life. And
so it's a grounding of our of our reality, and
it's it's not us not just the flight of fancy.
Speaker 3: We actually have to do these things.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm schmimen Is has been hugely influential on our
when I say our, our theopolis understanding of liturgy. Uh again,
Jim Jordan first introduced me to Shremen's work, and that
will cluster people that were around Jim all read and
devoured it. And when I taught for a number of
years at New Saint Andrews College, I always assigned for
the Life of the World, and very frequently is that
it was a favorite book that the students read all
year because it didn't read like theology. It read more
like poetry than theology. But it's it's yeah, I can't.
It's it's been really formative, not just because it's so
compelling and beautiful, but for the reason you said, you
take these most ordinary things of life. Bread is the
staple food of every society, and that becomes that staple
food of society, of every society, becomes a means of
commune with God. You take wine, which is a more
sophisticated kind of drink of celebration, but still you know,
it's it's universal in some form as a as a festive,
festive drink across across the cultures. And God has assigned
these two very simple things as means for communion with
Him in the liturgy, which is not Uh. This is
Memon's great point. As you know, it's not this little
island of communion in a world where we never commune
with God outside. Rather, what's happening in the in the Eucharist,
inside the liturgy is the concentrated uh form of what's
happening constantly. So in our meals, as you say, we're
communing with God. But then Schmemn says, you know, you
come across the daffodil uh and you're seeing the glory
of God that's displayed, and so everything becomes because the
euchreus is at the center, everything becomes a moment of
possible Eucharist, the possible communion with God, of thanksgiving, of
delight in his beauty and glory. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And I think for people to understand this, it's
it's something that is part of reality just all around.
You know, you can take simpler example that oh, don't
go all the way up into communion, you know, into
the to the Eucharus or into the sacraments. But if
you take the idea of a like a contract for example,
like a formal contract.
Speaker 3: So you have these moments where you have a formal.
Speaker 2: Contract where you you know, you two people stand together
and sign a piece of paper or shake hands in
a very formal way.
Speaker 3: You know that.
Speaker 2: These types of kind of almost ritualistic moments, they are
the peak of just every day promises that you make,
that you keep, every day moments that you are you
have to promise something to someone or you have to
say you're gonna do something and then you do it,
they normally culminate into these these kind of shiny moments
that become examples of all the daily things that we do.
Speaker 3: So and it's the same for everything.
Speaker 2: Like you imagine, we just had the presidential inauguration. You
have someone who stands and promises and does this really
formal thing, but this becomes a shining example of things
you do every day in your life.
Speaker 1: Right, yeah, yeah, so you have those again in the
reform tradition, we would call them covenant moments or covenant memorials,
covenant experiences that are formative for everything. You go down
to the other level. This is a this is a
pattern that Jim Jordan talks about in Three New Eves.
He goes through the Creation account, and the Creation Account
repeats this same series of actions virtually every day, not
without not without variation, but virtually every day. God takes
the world as it is, God tears the world into
into pieces, changes it, He assigns, assigns new names, or
he assigns, he gives new assignments to things. He puts
it back together in a new form, and then he
says it's good. He enjoys it. And Jordan points out
that that pattern of taking hold, tearing things apart, giving
things new name, reassigning things, and then sitting back and
enjoying is just the pattern of human actions. That's what
we're doing all the time. You're baking a cake, or
if you're writing a book, or if you're mowing the grass,
you're doing you're doing that kind of creative action in
the world constantly. And the Bible gives us what it
did for me. When when I first read through New
Eyes was I just I think I went for months
in this kind of state of elevated awareness that everything
I was doing was replicating the actions of God in
creating the world, and everything I was doing because of
that was altering the world in some fashion, contributing to
the ongoing glorification and ongoing, ongoing fulfillment of the world.
Even the smallest, even the smallest human action are participating
in that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I often say that the text in
Genesis one is not a scientific text. It actually contains
the scientific theory within it.
Speaker 3: It actually the structure of.
Speaker 2: How God creates the world is the macro version of
how the scientist looks at a phenomenon, identifies it, evaluates it.
Speaker 3: You know, and declares whether or not it's good.
Speaker 2: It's like that's how everything we do basically is even
every act of perception. When we're grabbing some a glass
to drink, you know, we're seeing it, we're evaluating it,
we're deciding if it's good, and then we bring it,
you know, we use it in that context.
Speaker 3: Of course, God everything he does is good at the outset.
Speaker 2: But you can see if you take that image in
the beginning and you make match it with what happens
at the end, you can see that there are reflections
of each other. Like God evaluating the world is what
he does in creation. Anybody does at the end as well.
It's just part of how we exist as humans.
Speaker 3: It's wild yea.
Speaker 2: And so I guess my next question is how is
this being how what is your perception of how this
is being received, you know, by the people, by the
people in your tradition, by the people around you. Is
what has been the because now it's been how long
has theopolis existed?
Speaker 1: Now theopolist is eleven years old?
Speaker 3: Eleven years Yeah, But.
Speaker 1: As I said, we had a couple of decades of
prior work that were along very similar lines. That was
that was on a very small scale. The conferences that
we had for those twenty five years were maybe attended
by fifty people if we had a good turnout. So
it was almost like a working group, which was a
It was a It was a very fruitful thing because
the same virtually the same people were there every year.
We were thinking together over these things. Theopolis has a
bit bigger spread. It's it's hard for me to it's
hard for me to judge what kind of effect it's having.
I mean, you could, you could summarize it as some
people are very entranced and energized. There's a this kind
of electric jolt when they start recognizing things in the
Bible and in the world that they hadn't recognized before.
This was the experience I largely had teaching. I had
students who had been going to Sunday School all their lives.
They had all the bits and pieces of the Bible,
many of the bits and pieces of the Bible in
their minds, but nobody had ever put it together for them.
And so showing how parts were formed into coherent storylines
and recurring storylines, and seeing analogies between different parts of
the Bible, just I see light bulbs popping up, going
off constantly in my in my student's head. So there's
that's that's the reaction of some Uh. There's a fair
bit of hostility, as you might expect in certain quadrants
of the maybe maybe especially Protestantism. I don't know if
that's the case or not, but there's a certain hostility.
It's it seems, uh we look Catholic because of our
liturgical our liturgical life. We look irrational and uh and
uh we're playing fast and loose with the Bible because
we're interested in all these uh and digging into the
details and looking at the weird parts of the Bible.
So uh, there's you know, obviously it's a mixed reaction.
I do think that, Uh. I imagine that you've had
this experience and stepping back and just looking at then
the feel of the culture more gently, I'm gonna have
very little sense of no finger on the pulse here. Uh.
But given given the given by total ignorance of of
what's going on in the world, it does seem like
there's a hunger for what's been missing. I know that
you've had, you've had a good response to the kinds
of things you do. I'm thinking. I'm reading through I
McGilchrist's massive book, The Matter with Things Right Now, and
it's not a it's not a theological or overtly Christian study,
but he's doing a lot of the same kinds of
things that we're talking about in the way that way
that you engage the world and the way you think about
the way reality is organized. Uh. And so I think
there's this, there does seem to be this cultural shift
where there's more openness to this. I think there's only
so far you can go if you're you know, go
back to our discussion of critical scholarship on the Bible.
How far, how far can you go? You're you're divining
versus the Bible into multiple different sources. One word goes here,
a few words go there. I mean you're left with sand.
You got nothing left.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 1: And even with even among Bible scholars who still believe
that you have this shift over to well, let's look
at the let's look at the text as a whole,
as it's actually as it actually presents itself, makes sense
of it. I'm thinking of people like Robert Alter on
Julish Commentator. I think he believes all of the all
of the critical scholarship about how the text came to
be as it is. But what he's interested in is
looking at the text as it as it currently is
and trying to understand. Uh, he's giving a bit of
credit to those editors that they knew what they were doing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, that's that my like I've my default position,
you know, And it's kind of it's a little controversial
because I'm being dismissive, but I just say, Okay, fine,
the editor is the author.
Speaker 3: Just get over it.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: It's like then then just stop stop because you know,
imagine if you took like can you imagine if you
took Marvel's movies like the Marvel Infinity War saga, and
then you started watching it and then saying, oh, well,
this little bit of the story comes from like this
little series in the nineteen seventies that Jack Kirby did
with this, and you start breaking it down like every
reference and saying, well, this doesn't hold up at Oh,
this is not a coherent thing. You know, it's just
a bunch of ragtag, you know, things being pulled from
all these different jinny. It's like, what what are you doing?
Why would anybody care about this? It's like the Bibles,
you know, these Bibles that they have all the they
have the little footnotes with like this is part of
this text and this part of it's like, don't give
that to someone in church who is that for?
Speaker 3: It's not for those people. It's a horrible thing to
do to people.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And I mean then if you did that, I
mean there would be a case to be made for
all of those little connections you're.
Speaker 3: Talking about, but not in church.
Speaker 1: Yeah. But even if you think about the movie and
you're taking you're trying to extract all the little references.
You can disassemble any text into a collection of intertextual
references into that, but that doesn't say anything about what
the text actually means. Because the text is is what
it is, and you have to account for the text
as it is, not merely trace out its different influences.
Speaker 2: Yeah, even simple as saying it doesn't account for the
text existence, like as simple as that, because it exists
because people cared enough about this text to transmit it,
and breaking it down into all its references does not
account for the text really at the first level of
why the text is there in the first place and
not just has not just been forgotten like all, Like
you know, most texts in the history of the world
are most little our most religions and most fancy like
this one is still around and there's a reason for that.
Speaker 1: You know. I mean, I don't think this is extreme
to say that critical scholarship, I'm not I'm not attributing
this to everyone who's worked in the critical vein, but
I think overall it's a Satanic It's a Britanic delusion.
Is the strangest people from the Word of God, and uh,
you know, not not demonizing the particular practitioners, but I
think overall that's that's the effect of it is to
make turn the Bible into something again. It's it's it's dull,
it's uninformative, it doesn't awaken the imagination. It's just so
much fodder for scholarly disassembly. And that's just, uh, that's
ultimately satanic.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I totally agree, But I love that you're willing
to put it so clearly.
Speaker 1: Of that.
Speaker 2: You know what you mentioned earlier about the change that's
happening in culture, and I think you're absolutely right. You know,
what I see in the younger people is in some
ways because the worldview in some ways. I mean, I know,
if it's the Enlightenment worldview or just the modern worldview,
it's kind of breaking apart. And it's breaking apart as
we're noticing, you know, our societies don't hold together anymore.
Speaker 3: We're noticing that things.
Speaker 2: The cohesion of the of our of our world and
of our life is is fragmenting. You know, people are
you know, can I say that it's awakening in them
the desire to be able to perceive the big story
or the bigger stories. And so I think that that
that is happening, and it's happening in almost every single field,
you know, the whole problem of complexity and the problem
of multiplicity and unity. All of these questions are being asked,
whether it's in science, cognitive science, you know, in organizational theories.
Speaker 3: All of these theories.
Speaker 2: Are trying to account for the what we could call
a kind of vertical causality, right, something that brings multiplicity
together into one. And so because of that, I think
people want the story and they can see it when
they look at scripture. And what also with scripture has
done for us if you take it at a meta level,
the way in which scripture has been one of the
thread that has held Western civilization or you know, for
the past the only thread possibly that has held Europe
together for two thousand years that even they can't even
imagine that Europe exists. Is because even though they fought
all the time, they had this thing that held them,
this this this higher peak that held them together.
Speaker 3: And so people are trying to understand what that is.
Speaker 1: I think so right now, I think there is definitely
a generational uh dynamic to that. Uh and uh I've
encountered that a number of the men who associate with
Theopolis have encountered that we in the early two thousands
there was this big hubbub in reformed churches that in
my mind, it was it has gotten very confused because
it you know, it's a theological debate that's that's carried
out on the internet with all with all of the
uh you know, all of the self restraints and care
that you would expect from an internet debate. Zero. But
uh so, and I think there was there was definitely
a divide. So the the more established people from my
generation maybe a little bit older, but more established pastors
and theologians, we were doing it was to my mind,
it was mainly about uh baptism and the efficacy of baptism.
We were trying to take seriously what you just said
a few minutes ago. Paul says, don't you know that
you have been baptized into Christ, You've been baptized into
his death, You've been buried with Him so that you
can rise the illness of life. I want, we wanted
to say, Paul means that that's what's actually happening in baptism.
That's that's a controversial thing to say in certain certain
Protestant circles, and so there was this older generation that
was very hostile to it. But yeah, the people that
gravitated to the position that we were articulating were largely
the younger generation. I do think that that generation dynamic
is there with all the with all the pluses and
minuses that come with a generational divide like that. The
other the other thing I was going to say, just
to go back to our earlier discussion, I think the
about the critical scholarship and all that. Luke twenty four
Jesus teaching on the Road to Mais has been a
main passage for us at Theopolis, and the thing that
It brings together a number of things we've already talked about.
One of the things that strikes me about that is
the fact that these two disciples walking along the road
to Mais are joined by Jesus. Jesus is there speaking
to them, and they don't recognize him until he starts
talking teaching the Bible, but teaching the Bible in a
particular way. Teaching the Bible is the story of the Christ.
And still they don't recognize him until he breaks bread
with them. So I think, well, in my mind, what
we have in a lot of churches. I'm not talking
about churches that have adopted liberal critical views of the Bible,
but churches that neglect this kind of the typological symbolic
dimension the Bible. Jesus is there. I have no doubt
Jesus is there, But I don't know they think they
fully recognize him because they aren't reading the Bible properly
and they aren't breaking bread very frequently. So it's the
combination of a christ centered teaching and a proclamation of
scripture with the sacramento life. Those two things are the
things that make Christ knowable in the church.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's beautiful, that's a beautiful way of seeing. And
you know, related to what you were saying, I wonder
if you think that like one of the things that
I grew up in I grew up a Baptist, and
there was this weird opposition, right, this weird position between
in some ways the liberal Protestants that were dangerous because
they believed all these weird critical ideas and because of
that they basically didn't take the Bible seriously in terms
of their practice. They could relativize all these aspects of
scripture because of this kind of critical method, and then
we had the kind of fundamentalist approach which was like, no,
it's the scripture and everything. But there was this weird,
weird suspicion about allegory, right or analogy. I remember even
my youth pastor, who I love dearly, still love him today,
you know, he said he I found out that in
the Bible says that the serpent was naked. It was
like blowing his mind and he couldn't he couldn't hold
onto it.
Speaker 3: He was like he said, well does it what does
this mean? What does this it mean?
Speaker 2: Like in terms of like Adam and Evening naked and
everything that was like crashing his whole reality.
Speaker 3: But I think that what you're doing. Uh.
Speaker 2: And in some ways, I believe in some ways the older,
more traditional way of actually reading scripture cuts through that,
like right through it because it's saying it both says,
because it's saying. Because we take scripture so seriously, we
have to dive into this type of interpretation because it
is just there in the text. If you don't, you
miss out on some of the beautiful things that God
is doing.
Speaker 3: You know, for us.
Speaker 2: If you if you ignore the imagery that moves from
Genesis to Revelation, you you're missing out.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, a great point on the device that you describe,
if the if you have those choices. I'm a fundamentalist
and I've I like to use that term just to
just to shake people up. I've did a series of
books that kind of introduced Theopolis and I called them
Theopolis Fundamentals, just to just to claim that heritage of
confidence in the scriptures as true. Uh. And without any
kind of qualification or hedging, the Bible is true. That's uh.
I believe that. But yeah, you do have this. The
hermeneutics of the fundamentalist movement was tend to be hostile
to allegory, hostile to symbolism. Uh. And it's the grammatical
historical is what's that's where it's at. And I think again,
the the uh story of Jesus on the Road to MEAs,
I think, shows how that that's how dangerous that is
to limit it to that not recognize the christological dimension.
And then I think too of you know, there's some
pretty overt places in the Bible. I think, Uh, you know,
the Gospels, Jesus tells parables, and you hear from experts
on the parables. The parables are not allegories. Don't try
to find one to one correspondences between what's in the
parable and what Jesus means by it. But then you
watch Jesus interpret the parables, you go, oh, well, Jesus,
Jesus seems to think they're allegories because the sower is
the son of Man, and the seed is the word
of God, and the different soils that it goes on
are different kinds of people. That looks a lot like
an allegory. So that if you're going to be if
you're going to be a fundamentalist and believe, you know,
stick with what the Bible actually says, then allegory has
to be an option because it's actually in the text.
That's the way that Jesus reads is parable.
Speaker 2: But I think that the key to at least the
key that I've seen in helping people through this crisis,
sometimes for them like a kind of Criste's some meaning,
is really that typology is the key, and that it's
not that there are allegories that you can just metaphors
that you can just skip play.
Speaker 3: With, and that you can just This is very serious work.
Speaker 2: This is actually comparing stories with each other, yes, noticing
structural relationships and always asking yourself, how does this reveal
the logos in the story moving towards the incarnation? And
when you do that, then it's actually it's quite serious work.
It's something that you can criticize if someone gets it wrong.
It's it's something that you can say, well, you missed
this aspect. Did you notice this in the story? You
seem to be ignoring some part of the story to
make your case. But if you take this part, this
part seriously, then you see what it does. And I've
actually found that this kind of typological interpretation can be
quite quite rigorous.
Speaker 3: If you take it seriously.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I agree with that the yeah, and I wouldn't
make a distinction. I mean historically, when when medieval Western
theologians talked about allegory, I think they were talking about
something very close to what we mean by typology. But
you also have sometimes have these forms of allegorical interpretation
that take you out from the text. You have something
going on in the text, but what means it means
what it's supposed to mean in some other, some other realm.
I think there's there might be a way to get there,
But I think the kind of cross comparison of different
episodes of the Bible and recognizing, as we said earlier,
that the Biblical history rhymes because history itself rhymes, that
God is doing recurrent kinds of things, never identical, but
there's this kind of repetition and spiral and music. I
think I'd like to use musical metaphors to describe it.
You've got a theme in variations, You've got an Exodus
story early on in the Bible, and then you've got
all kinds of variations on the Exodus story, and learning
to hear those or recognize those when they happen. I
think that I think that is, rather than stepping outside
the text to try to find some meaning meaning outside.
I think one of the things people UH might worry
about there is that you're just working internally to the Bible.
It never hits home with life. I think we've already
we've already a rest that. But I think your point
about what you're looking for in the text. What's being
revealed in the text is the eternal Word of God
that has carnated Jesus, Jesus the Christ.
Speaker 3: So it also happens to be the structure of reality.
Speaker 2: It's actually theructure of your experience, of your every day,
all the time experience. It doesn't it it can be,
it can be different from that, because that's the structure.
I mean that structure. The Word created the world. Folks
like the divine logos, the one that's incarnating Jesus is
the one that created the world, and so the world
has a shape which is akin to the Bible.
Speaker 3: It kind of has to, you know, how.
Speaker 1: Could it not. That's exactly where I was going. So
he's the one in whom all things cohere. He's the
one who is with the Father in creating the world.
So yeah, it's so I think that that worry that
typology just kind of it's inapplicable. It's not the case.
I think the other thing, this is a this is
something I learned very deeply from Jim Is then again
going back to the idea of occurring patterns in the Bible,
which are the recurring patterns of life. When you begin
to recognize that, you can begin to see where in
a story arc you might be. You can kind of anticipate,
you know, if you see these recurring exodus stories, are
we still in slavery? Have been We've been redeemed from slavery? Well,
what happened to Israel when they came out of Egypt?
They started complaining they were afflicted by a malachide. So
if we've been brought out of some kind of Egypt,
then those are the things that are on the horizon
for us. Or if we're in a position where it's
more like a judge's something more analogous through the period
of the Judges than where the Lord is raising up
somebody who's going to lead as people out of slavery.
So you think you begin to see how because the
Church's history has the same kind of shape, the same
kind of recurrent shape. And it's not applicable in the
sense that you know, you can get three points of
application at the end of the sermon, but it's applicable
in the sense that you give people this big picture
of reality in which they can locate their lives and
they can begin to navigate within the world faithfully because
they have they're engaging the world through this through these
biblical patterns.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and often I think that often the some of
the texts, like in the Church of other sometimes you'll
read certain interpretations that at the first level like they
just seem wild because they really are allegorizing the text
will say like this is mercy, this is like they're
attributed to.
Speaker 3: The virtues or to the vices and stuff.
Speaker 2: And usually if you take the time to look at
what they're doing, you realize that there's actually there's actually
a typological reading underneath, and what they're doing in the
allegorizing is really just applying it. It's an it's an
application of the structure now to your everyday life and
to your struggle with the virtues and the vices. And
they're not they're not saying like this is the meaning
of the tech. They're saying, you know, like the simple
like the hardest example, right, the hardest example is the
bashing of.
Speaker 3: The children on the stone.
Speaker 2: You know that that text that all the atheists love
to bring up. You know, the idea like I'll bash
your little ones on the on the stones, and the
the father say that that's the thoughts, right, It's like,
it's the idea that you have to you have to
stop something before it grows and becomes mature so that
it doesn't so that it doesn't have the strength.
Speaker 3: Of all the power infancy exactly.
Speaker 2: And so it's pretty dark because it makes sense in
the text because that's what the text is referring to.
It's saying, we're going to and it's it's like it's
a it's not a moral it's not a Christian moral thing,
but it's saying, if you have enemies and you if
you don't kill their children, then those children are going
to come and.
Speaker 3: Get you back.
Speaker 2: And so the application for us today it's in the
light of Christ and the light of the one that
gave his life and that sacrificed himself, that or that
is willing to take you know, evil onto himself. Then
that becomes an internal struggle to fight the little things
that are growing that if you don't fight them when
they're little, then they'll come back to get you. So
the analogy is completely it's completely coherent, and it's actually
the best. It's the best interpretation for us as Christians,
because no, we don't want to go and bash, you know,
our enemy's children on to rock that that doesn't make
sense in light of Christ anymore.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the paradigm that I've fallen into is the medieval
fourfold method of interpretation. And I realized I had started
kind of using that pattern, not so much because I
learned about it and started applying it, but just in
preparing sermons, preparing for teaching. I mean, the fourfold pattern is,
you have the literal sense, this is what the text says,
what it means, You're looking at all the you're looking
at all the literary tropes and things as part of that.
But then it also is proclaiming Christ. That's what's called
the allegorical sense. But then, because Christ also has a body,
because Christ as members, whatever the text says about Christ
is also somehow applicable to you and to the church.
And that's where you get the kinds of things you're
talking about. You can move from the christological interpretation to
thinking about virtues and vices and dashing the the uh,
the infant evil thoughts that curR in your mind against
the rock of Jesus.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 1: So that that movement I think has been helpful. And yeah,
I think you're right that a lot of what can
be easily dismissed as fanciful in the Church Fathers is
still is operating in something like that vein. It's something
that's downstream from a type of what what we're calling
a typeological reading.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and we I think it's to me has been
important sometimes to trace that for people because, you know,
because it's become too obvious. You know, we just read,
we read the Father. We don't understand just how seeped
in scripture they were and justide was basically the world
that they lived in. So sometimes we have to break
down some of their readings, like I you know, I
love the Saint Gregor Nissa's Life of Moses one of
my favorite texts, you know, but sometimes in that text
he just goes he just cuts right through and says
certain things that if you read about the first Lange,
like where does he get this, you know. Uh, and
it's and it's been my pleasure to say, Okay, let's
take this and let's let's break it down. Let's show
how you can get there from a from a strict
typological reading and then ultimately come to what he's saying,
you know, to help people say that he's not just
he's not just mouthing off like he's not just kind
of making it up as as he goes along. And
you know, and I think I think it's that's especially
important to do today, you know, just because our biblical
literacy in the modern world especially, you know, and and
this is something in the Orthodox Church which is needed,
you know, in our situation, because the Orthodox world.
Speaker 3: Is done like it's over.
Speaker 2: And so even people that because that are orthodoxictsy in
America or in Europe, they have the same problem that
has everybody else. They live in a secular right society
that doesn't have the Bible and Scripture and the Christian
tradition as the basic you know mind a worldview in
which to live, and so they have the same problem
as everybody else. They need to make those connections more
explicit now.
Speaker 1: Right right, Yeah, I think Augusta would be another example,
and particularly I think of the iterations on the psalms,
where I mean he did he did not have an Internet,
an electronic search engine to cross reference the psalms. He
was doing it all for memory. But uh, he you know,
he reads a verse of a psalm and within the
next few paragraphs he is everywhere all over the Bible,
connecting all kinds of things that this particular verse reminded
him of. And el, yeah, I don't endorse everything I
find in Augustine, but a lot of it, a lot
of it works because because he's, uh, he's working within
a framework that's uh, Christ centered, chrystological. Uh, he's working
a framework that really heavily emphasizes the union of Jesus
the head with the members of his body. So every
time he sees something about Jesus, he knows it's also
something about the church. But it's just astonishing that from
his mind, just his knowledge of scripture, he's able to
make all these connections, and it seems almost instantaneous.
Speaker 3: I'm sure it's annoying.
Speaker 2: It's annoying to know that that so many people that
had memorized the psalter, you know, like I have nowhere
near like, I'm it's not even on my horizon.
Speaker 1: I mean, if you're if you're a Benedictine and you
sing through the psalter every week, you know, you do
that for ten years, then uh, you're gonna have all
You're gonna have all memorized.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they're just going to have seeped into your into
your into your existence.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 2: And so what do you hope for, Let's say, for
the future for theopolis, but also for this vision of
scripture and how it integrates into our life.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, at Theaplist, we see ourselves as a service
to the church. We're in a particular quadrant of the church,
but we are we believe that what we have to
say is valuable to Christians of all in all different traditions,
and so we we are have a Catholic spirit. We
want to without We're not giving up on our convictions
as a particular confessional doctrinal convictions, but we want what
we do to have to be edifying to the church
at large. I think that's happening. We have a pretty
wide readership. We get students from a variety of different
variety of different churches. In our programs. We've had one
Orthodox student go through our our fellows program, happy to
have more, but we've just had the one so far,
so we have, you know, as far as our hope
for the churches, we would play some part in reviving
and renewing a what I think is a very ancient
way of reading scripture. I think it's been refreshed and
perfected in some ways in by later developments. But it's rooted,
as you're talking about in the Church. Father's rooted in
the New Testament, the New Testaments. We're reading the old.
But we want to play some role in seeing that
seep into the church and to deepen the deepen the
way people read the scriptures. As you know, that's one
part of one major part of renewal of the church
in general. I wrote a book a number of years
ago called The The End of Protestantism, where I made
the argument the title had a twofold, twofold intention one is, uh,
what is the goal of Protestantism? To my mind, the
goal of Protestantism is to renew the entire church. That
was the That was the goal of the original reformers.
They didn't want to create a new church. They wanted
the Roman Catholic Church to be renewed and UH and
UH reformed by the Word of God. But if that happens,
if we if we see the Word of God embraced
by churches, by all the church, then Protestantism is a
separate body of churches doesn't need to exist anymore. We
just have one church. So that renewing of the of
the of biblical of Biblical typology, and of deep biblical
reading UH is part of an And we're it sounds
I don't want to make it sound pompous. We're not
pretending like we're doing this, we're accomplishing this. We want
to play some some small role in seeing the church
as a whole renewed toward the end of seeing the
church one with one confession, one mind, one lip, and
and that I think that's what Jesus desires for his church,
a church that's drenched and saturated with the Word of
God and confesses with one voice.
Speaker 2: I mean, I think that it's interesting because in some ways,
you there is a symphony of these types of people
coming up in different spheres. You know, you talk about
even people that aren't Christian, like e. Mcgilchris, you know,
and I think Jordan Peterson plays some role in that
as well. There are several It's as if it is
something that's happening right in culture, and the people that
are moving in the same direction are kind of recognizing
each other across the island and saying, Okay, we're not
exactly and we and I think it's also part of
the honesty of this is to recognize the difference, is
to say, Okay, I'm reformed, these are these are my
these are the things that I won't budge on, and
the same with me, I'm orthodox. But we can recognize
the places where we come together, and especially in in
terms of this, this beautiful capacity to see the.
Speaker 3: Images in scripture play with each other.
Speaker 2: In this in this dance that animates the world. So
I'm really excited. I've been I've been excited since I
discovered what Theopolis is doing. And I think you know,
uh And interestingly enough, Dean Arnold, who some of you
may know who watch this channel, he is editing James
Jordan's Revelation Interpretation, right, and.
Speaker 3: I think he I think he published. I think it's published. Yeah,
I think he published it a few months.
Speaker 1: Ago, right, three volumes He's come out with right.
Speaker 2: And so so yeah, so this discussion is happening in
the in the in the back rooms, it's happening everywhere,
and so you know, and we're we're definitely looking forward
to seeing it continue.
Speaker 3: So it's Peter. Thank you for your time and thanks
thanks for engaging with me.
Speaker 1: Yeah, thank you, Johnathan. It's been really fun. Appreciate it.
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