Hello, welcome to this episode of Theology Podcast. I'm C.R. Wiley, I'm a pastor and a senior editor at Touchstone Magazine. Tom, why don't you tell us about yourself? I'm Tom Price, I teach theology and Christian ethics at Gordon Conwell with Theological Seminary and I minister. All right, great. Glenn, go ahead and get us going with the topic of the day after you've introduced yourself. Okay, I'm Glenn Sunshine. I am a writer, freelance teacher, and such publishing on Substack and working on a bunch of books. So topic for the day. I've got a couple of things in mind. We'll see how this goes, but I'm looking, I want to start with a conversation on an old theological debate that has gone on on the relationship of nature and grace. Now, where this shows up most often is really in connection with the human person, with basically, theology, the idea of salvation. The question becomes, what is the relationship between human nature, post fall, and grace? How do these things work together or do they? And within the Catholic world, you have the idea that grace perfects nature. That even though we are fallen, there is something inside us that is still good, that can still do good things, but isn't really capable by itself of attaining salvation or reaching God. That requires grace. So the idea fundamentally is that God gives us grace through baptism, through the sacraments, through other means, which then strengthen our ability to do good. And there's this feedback loop, if you will, the more righteous things we do, the more grace we receive, the more we go to receive the sacraments, all of this kind of thing. And this has the effect of, in a sense, purifying ourselves, making us holy, and that that's really the essence of the process of salvation. Now, justification fits in here as well. We don't get into that, but that's essentially the Catholic idea here. Now, in the Protestant world, the tendency is to go in a very different direction, to argue that sin has so infected us, that at pretty much every level of our life, we are tainted by sin. Our minds are incorrect. Our wills are incorrect. Our understanding morality is incorrect. Our perceptions are incorrect. There's nothing that is not influenced by sin. And from this, it follows, as the Reformers generally had it, at least, it follows that there is nothing that we can do that is good in and of ourselves, because we are so fundamentally flawed. And as a result, we are completely incapable of good. God has to, through a sheer act of grace, operating in our lives through faith, he has to give us the righteousness that we otherwise can ever attain. There's nothing good that we can actually do. There's no work that we can do that actually pleases God. So, we're in the Catholic Church, you have the idea of grace perfecting nature, perfecting what is already present within us. In the Protestant world, you tend to have something closer to grace overruling nature, where our salvation depends entirely on God in any good that we do only do through grace, not through anything that's necessarily in ourselves and so on. So, that's the starting point for where I want to begin. Okay, well, let me think about this a little bit out loud, so I'm thinking out loud. When it comes to what we're referring to by nature, it sounds like what we have in mind from the Protestant point of view is kind of the state of affairs as they exist at the moment, as opposed to the original status of things at creation prior to the fall. That's correct. The whole nature grace, conversation only really occurs, maybe not only, but overwhelmingly occurs in the context of a post-fall world. Right. And so, would it be fair to say though that there is openness to the idea of grace restoring the original nature? In other words, this idea that with particularly the glorification of the body that we've in some sense find ourselves in a better place than we started prior to the fall. Well, in the end, in the next life, that is certainly true. The question is the degree to which it's true here. And in most discussions, it doesn't really head in that direction. There's an idea of sanctification and things like that. But within the Protestant world, they'll tell you that even at our most sanctified, we're still constantly sending. There is one exception to that, and that's the holiness tradition. But it's pretty much dead. I mean, the whole tradition, as it was known in the 19th century, is pretty much dead. And it is a little bit more complex. I mean, on the Catholic side, for example, I mean, the whole new vealth theology and, you know, Unre de luebeck in that whole school, basically said there was never such a thing in Thomas or Augustine as a pure nature that grace adds a super addition to what basically you always have it, a sort of in grace nature. That's what creation is owing itself to the donation of being anyway from God. So there is always a sort of grace going on. That complicates it. But it's interesting because you have a work written by Reformed scholars saying that Calvin and that strand of Catholicism are much closer in their understanding of things. But that's a complicated debate. I don't want to go there. But the other side is you do have strands. I mean, Richard Hooker, for example, in the Anglican line, is reformed. But he also believes he holds two of these tensions together. On the one hand, we'll talk about justification the same way as Calvin and Luther. But you do really have an infusion of the divine life and participation in it sacramentally. So there are complicated strands. And I think some of the continental reformers like Verimigli and some of these figures that owed a lot more to Thomas were more would talk in the same language of nature and grace that you were mentioning before. But I think you're right that there's this tendency, especially in the way Reformed carve it out, that you can get as extreme as a Karl Bart who basically you have to negate the human completely in some sense. And it is complicated because do they mean putting to death the old Adam in that sense. But the flip side is the putting to death the old Adam, what nature is, or is it Adam which nature is, and the old Adam is a cancer that has entered it. So the language, it gets very complicated in the way they are, you articulate that issue there. But you will run into problems when you get to your next topic if you don't straighten that out. Well, and actually I realized that my summary was really terse and unnewanced. And to be honest with you, I was counting on you, Tom. We can even get it more complicated, but I won't. But another wrinkle to this, and this is something that actually a number of younger Reformed guys are kind of responding to is a way of thinking about nature that in the course of our lives, there's a kind of hostility to just human nature per se, or particularly as it is expressed through the two sexes. This idea that grace against nature or kind of overcoming nature isn't working with anything kind of that is worth redeeming. It's more or less just, this is kind of an anabaptist kind of take on things where what we have in mind is a kind of utopia and the body and its tendencies or its precludes or its even its design is in some sense in the way of achieving that kind of heaven on earth that they want to they want to realize. Yeah, well, let's just talk for a moment about about sex here, biological sex. God creates man, male and female. Each of them is they're different from each other, but they are complementary to each other. And as a result, they really perform different primary functions within the the dominion mandate. So the woman bears the greater share of the labor in child bearing, obviously, but men then bear the greater share of the labor in the earth, which is why when you have the the judgment that's pronounced on them, Eve, it basically the judgment says your job as people who are carrying out the dominion mandate is going to turn into a real pain. Eve, you're going to have pain in childbirth. Adam, you're going to have pain in subduing the earth. The same word is used in both cases. So the point is that there is a complementarity not only biologically, but also a kind of complementarity in terms of their primary functions in the world. Now, men are obviously involved in children coming into the world and women are obviously involved in subduing the earth, but there's there are primary roles are distinguished there. Now, when you have an idea that grace completely over rules or overrides nature, one of the places where that can go is an elimination of distinctions between the sexes. Yeah, that's what I was getting at in part. So when you think about say the shakers, which are kind of an extreme example of this, there's still a acquiesces to the idea that there are different sexes. When you visit a shaker village, you discover that, well, there are men's quarters or women's quarters. There are doors of men go through, doors of women go through clothing that men wear, clothing that women wear, all that, but they don't enter, they don't become one flesh. There is no sex because mother Anne, she's the founder of the of the of the of the sect and she, you know, there's what she taught and then there's kind of like what was going on with the scout. She lost all of her children, either in childbirth or very young. So there was a you just can't help but wonder if she was struggling with some of that, but there's also the kind of the natural hierarchy that exists between men and women in household and that was really a nathmuck to her. She didn't want anything to do with it. She was kind of proto-feminist in that respect. Right. Yeah. So if grace completely overrides nature, there's no reason not to be in a galloterian. Right. Or to have sex, which was forbidden in. So it works out in weird way. So in some of these anabaptistic kind of ratic where from where Macyn circles you end up with a kind of a kind of free sex setting where you've got plural marriage and all this weird stuff going on with kind of like, you know, the the men who or the man who's founded the the the sacked the the cult gets whoever he pleases and then you have in this case of mother Anne nobody gets anything. But in each case there's no real room for nature to have its you know, it's due. It's something that has to be overcome. Yeah. Now within Protestantism beyond the anabaptists and some of these radicals there are attempts to to work within this. So for example, in chaperianism you can make a good argument that his ideas of sphere sovereignty and things like that are ways of reintroducing the sacred into secular life just like the the Protestant concept of occasion is. But fundamentally, you know, again, when you're dealing with this at the level of satireology you end up with a frankly a counterintuitive stance that I think well, let's just put this way. If in fact it is impossible for people to do good apart from Christ, why is it that we find non-Christians who lay down their lives to save other people? It's hard to argue that that isn't a good thing to do. Yeah, I think I think what's happening is it it kind of I think that whole conversation and even what Kyke's chaperians are trying to deal with and Protestants for that matter and many Christians are dealing with a depleted view of creation period. It is nothing similar to what historic the father's held, not what Augustine held, it's not what I mean Augustine would not talk about. I mean he he he will have a pure place for the humanities and he will understand pure place for the sacraments, he will understand that there there is always this kind of complicated relationship one understanding the complexity of something that we call today nature but creation was the way of referencing it prior created natures but call it nature if you want. But I think one of the things they're talking about is there is always on the one side the goodness of creation that never goes away that's the good gift of creation and the good gift of its kinds, its purposes, its endowments. They're sharing in something of the divine perfection in differing ways and so because of that the created natures and purposes are good flat out. What has happened is they have been impacted by the fall which does not make the goodness of created gift bad, it problematizes the gift and it needs it needs basically to be fixed and the strong language is it needs to put to death the the bad the bad so that the the good can be resurrected, renewed and and and transfigured. So all of those elements are there. So the question when we talk about grace it does bring to completion the purposes of God for each creature but there is an element in which those are made to be open to the creator so they can also be transfigured they can actually be more than what they are and that's what a sacrament is appealing to. So every created thing can be open to the creator in deeper ways because it's his creation and that is kind of what grace allows it to do but that does not negate or get rid of the goodness of distinctions and kinds and purposes. It fulfills them and then transfigures them but I think these notions of grace you negate them with the fall and then you come up with something that flattens them out and they describe that as you know I guess being of a higher nature. Now this is why I started off with saying that the entire nature versus grace or nature and grace discussion really centers on satireology on what has happened to human nature as a result of the fall. But I'm glad you went where you did because it seems to me that this is a topic that that needs to be expanded beyond just the issue of satireology and we need to talk about well let's drop the word nature for the moment and talk about the physical world. Usually when we use the word nature in common English not in theological discussion or philosophical discussion what we're referring to is the physical environment, the world around us and so on. So I think that raising the question of nature and grace with nature in that sense is really an interesting one. So is it possible for example for a physical object to convey grace? Now what you find in the Protestant Reformation is a movement away from that idea not completely but they're really moving away from it because they're looking at superstitious practices within Catholicism, they're looking at relics, they're looking at holy water, blessed items, things like that that are believed to have frankly magical powers. Well technically not magical but miraculous powers as vehicles through which God works in the world and works grace into the world. Now whatever you may think about that and by the way we can add for the Orthodox world out there we can also add an opposition to icons here but that shows up for a couple of different reasons but the notion of that you see commonly in the Orthodox world that there are miraculous icons would have been rejected out of hand by the Protestant reformers. The one place where you have a possible exception here is in particularly the Lord's Supper. I haven't seen much discussion of the idea of the waters of baptism, the water itself being a vehicle of grace that's probably there somewhere but with the Lord's Supper with the bread and wine you've definitely got that question that comes up. What is going on in communion? Do we actually have a sacrament here or do we have an ordinance? Do we have a sacrament that conveys grace or is this simply a memorial? And there's a range of views within Protestantism on that but it's worth noting Luther is going to reject transubstantiation but he's going to insist that Christ is not physically present but is bodily present. And when asked to explain that he said, well look the word sacrament translates to Greek word, Mysterion and so it's a mystery we don't know other things. He insisted that Christ's body is in with and under the blood bread and his blood is in with and under the wine meaning you are getting both bread and wine and Jesus's body and blood at the same time. So and again there are all kinds of arguments that show up around that but when you get to Zwingli Zwingli is going to be arguing for that there really isn't any kind of special presence of Christ at the Lord's Supper that it is nothing more than a memorial. After all, Jesus said do this and remember it's me and his body can't be there because as we say in the creed he has seated at the right hand of the Father and if that's where his body is it can't be everywhere else at the same time. So there are a couple of things that come to mind as you know you're describing the kind of the lay of the land. Well the first is something that we've talked about in kind of a different way and that has to do with disenchantment. I can't help but think that the sort of the reduction of the sacraments to kind of just ordinances doesn't kind of parallel the larger development of a sort of disenchantment of the world. Max, David and Charles Taylor agree with you. Yeah they're going on at the same time and I think I guess what I'm getting at is that if we have this mindset that not even in this very sacred thing is there anything really going on? Why should we believe there's anything going on anywhere else including inside of me? Of course there is the the patristic emphasis that in the assumption of humanity was the assumption of created matter and what was assumed was also healed. The relationship of the material world has changed also in relationship to Christ. So there's a very these conversations are very thick and I don't think the the reformers weren't on we're talking under a different metaphysical set of problems that I think still are with us but I think the real real good conversation will definitely be between those conversations and the ones patristic thinkers were having because they were definitely working with a different relationship to Christ's assumption of creation and humanity and how all things are connected to that and so it definitely changes the the creation's nature. This is why you have like in Colossus very cosmic language when you're talking about Christ the Alpha and the Omega and the first fruits of you know for which all of creation groans so this incarnation has to do there but anyway I don't I don't want to think. Well for me you know the I didn't begin with incarnation I took and karnation regretted I began with resurrection and worked it backward. So if you really believe that the body for all of its problems and shortcomings and and more time it's mortal character is redeemable. In other words can be raised then it that bleeds into everything else. You suddenly have a hard time thinking of other things as being redeemable too. I do think there's a tendency particularly with certain strands of Protestantism that that the body is almost believed to be kind of refuse that what we see with the resurrection is a brand new body that's somehow completely unconnected to the one that we had and so it says though you're you're just throwing your flesh away and you're given some you're given a spiritual body that has no kind of continuity with the old. Whereas I mean the resurrection itself you know see the scars you know for flesh and blood there is a continuity amongst the the transfiguring elements and that's key I think that's what that's the fundamental thing Christianity offers in comparison to all the Greek philosophies that would be happy to get rid of the old's body and everything else. And yeah which is kind of ironic because there's a kind of strain of anti-Greek kind of bias in certain Protestant circles and these are the same people who have a hard time reconciling themselves to the sacraments or even bodily resurrection there's there very much kind of a spiritual you know kind of the kind of their soul rescue kind of approached with angelism. And I think oh sorry I was gonna say one last point and I because it is related because I think they're working with a competitive relationship in order to glorify God you got to turn you got to make creation nothing it is nothing where that isn't what happens I'm God is when it talks about he must say you know we must decrease it that he increases it's talking about the negation of that which is wrong about our created natures in the fall it is not talking about God is in competition with the good creation he created that's a problem anyway. Well I would add that I really think scripture doesn't speak exactly in these terms but I think that what scripture tells us is that Christ's resurrection is a a paradigm for the resurrection of the cosmos. Right. That that in fact just like we die and then receive a a resurrected body that has continuity with the old one so the cosmos itself is going to die but it's going to then be transformed into a new heaven and new earth when Jesus says behold I make all things new that doesn't just mean human beings that means all things. Right. Yeah and and that's that's that's concept I really don't see many people talking about. We don't come to fill all things and that he be all in all I mean this is a way in which the creation becomes the life giving manifestation of his glory which is it's gift to share in and this is why and this is what you're saying when you're talking about can it be a kind of conveyer grace another way of putting is it is is can his life giving presence be manifest through the creaturely and the the answer is absolutely yes and the analogy of that is the fruitfulness of creation when it works together like male female husband wife producing in their fittingness together life well you also see it in you know in all of the scriptures that talk about the creation glorifying God you know the heavens declare the glory of the Lord you're speaking you know so so spiritual truth it seems to me is scripture clearly teaches spiritual truth is conveyed through creation I think we have to take it one step further though when we're taking a look at the sacraments now by the way just to just to complete our third option there's Calvin Calvin says well this winglies right Jesus's body is at the right hand of the father but Paul also tells us that we have fellowship with Jesus's body and blood or participation and the Greek word is going to need it so since that's where Jesus's body is we must in communion our souls must be lifted up to have in there to commune with him with his body and blood momentarily during during communion and Calvin had a really very strongly mystical streak when it came to when it came to to communion he said you know I experience far more than I can explain all right you're moving on there related related to that you know I think this is a an underdeveloped truth that the reformed should find ways to express in their architecture so if this is what's really going on and I think it is then there's something about our churches that ought to say that now you can say that well we do have a table you know and then and then you know there's a sense in which because the table is present we're with the Lord but I think that we can do a whole lot more and to just really bring that home and then then this is something you talk about all the time Tom that we have a very inadequate understanding of transcendence and if we understand it properly the spatial categories that Swingley is using to object to participation in the body of Christ just fall away you know if you have the correct understanding yeah that's right it isn't I mean they're thinking of of it in spatial distance right and and classically in Christian understanding it's it's ontological presence that is divine that's a very that's a very dig and so even the resurrected body which spiritualized in some sense life of God living up it there there is a way of relating those things that that vocabulary of of distance and up there down here prior to time don't those are metaphors well you you actually have to read the Marburet Colloquy on this one this is where Lutheran Swingley are debating the nature of the Lord's Supper in in my armchair reformation for armchair theologian the cartoonist that we had doing it had the two of them arguing there with the caption tastes great less filling but but what what what Swingley said is look Jesus is seated at the right hand of God it violates the nature of bodies to be in more than one spot at once so his body cannot be everywhere Luther Luther replied he's God you know you you by making that argument you are rejecting the divinity of Christ to which Swingley replied by making your argument you're denying the humanity of Christ well yes and no because we have scriptural data to work with it talks about the Lord is the spirit but there's something else to consider when we when we think about this this idea of transcendence means both infinite distance and nearer being nearer to you than you are to yourself that's right this is something at Hunts Hunts Boersma talked with us about when he was with us and he really did a great job at the recent touchstone where he gets into that I think maybe a couple years ago now I'm thinking about but where he would let's talk about kind of the hierarchy of being and the idea that if you are lower in the hierarchy or further away from God because he's at the top obviously in Hunts and what yes and no because immediately present to every every level yeah yeah you actually see this in the him's at the end of Parallandra who is really does a marvelous job at at you know everything is saying I am I am close I'm closer to God I reflect God more than anything else because and this goes all the way down to the dust yeah yeah so right but I have to go back and read that one again yeah but the the the the interesting thing the the question that this leads me now very few people I think actually understand or really hold to Calvin's view of communion this is not one that I mean it's in Calvin it's it's you know if you read his treatise on the Lord's upper it's clearly there but it's not intuitively obvious that that's what's going on it's not the experience that most people have so I think most people don't don't really go with it but the question that still remains in my mind is if we are actually communing with Christ's body and blood in heaven spiritually what's going on with the bread and wine are they conveyors of grace or aren't they and that is one of these things that I am uncertain about I don't really know where to go with that because it is in the process of of consuming the bread and wine where we have that fellowship but that fellowship is not localized in the bread and wine so exactly how does how do those things relate I don't have an answer to that one yeah my my gut level response is yes they are conveyors of grace but when it comes to being able to explain it in human terms and human terms what I mean by that you know all the you know just if you think about prepositions prepositions are all about time and space you know orienting ideas relationship to each other especially or you know sort of linearly we've kind of had a loss because we're talking about God who transcends all things so we can affirm things without being able to fully explain them if you get my drift yeah that's what that's what creeds do these things are true and there's a kind of openness that the that you know this is this is what kind of creations openness to the creator by grace does that allows them to become more than merely if there is no mere with a creature anyway but that there there is a sense in which when fulfilling their rightful role in relationship to the creation they're refracting something of the life manifesting presence so they are how you describe that though is it is it is it happening as a part of the creatures creaturely resource no it's happening because all of the creaturely resource owes itself to divine donation so so it is what God's doing with his creation in that point not what the creature's doing with the divine and I think that's I think that's at least the it may not answer anything but it's a way of focusing on on how how to look at it there this brings up something I'm using in my memory I read a series of short stories about the about the night's temple are years ago and one of the stories was about the grail and in the story kind of the thing that kind of everybody was looking for you know the cop wasn't where the where the presence was located because the presence was able to transfer itself from thing to thing yeah so he just never knew where it was but it still was kind of locatable yeah it was like in this spot or that spot or you know whatever it was sort of like I don't know like like that laser dot that you tease your cat with you know it's just like kind of going around all those things and you're trying to get it it was a fun story and they were it was the author was obviously playing with this very thing and you know in terms of the ability of you know for the physical objects to communicate grace but the fact that the objects couldn't contain it yeah that was the kind of the gist of the story that made it humorous yeah incidentally in Volfram Von Eschenbach's parts of all the grail is not a cop it's a stone hmm the cup the cup the cup shows up later apparently um but in any event uh that that's kind of an aside yeah so yeah the the I think well I mentioned Charles Taylor and before him uh Max Weber both argued that the um the Protestant and particularly the reformed push toward memorial views of the supper things like that and I would add along with that the elimination of relics holy wells holy sites things like that all of these things had the effect of desacralizing the world the world no longer was seen as shot through with with divine presence um and as a result this was one of the sources of disengagement you know which is what you pointed out earlier Chris um I really think that if we are serious about trying to recover a properly enchanted view of the world we really do need to recover above all a higher view of the sacrament that that that's got to be central to it because from there you move to sacramentals the ways that the world um the world around us uh also points beyond itself to god yeah I think the thing that the reformed are afraid of is not just superstition but a dilatry so just because you recognize kind of the sacred character or something doesn't mean you buy down and worship the thing yeah that you can respect and space you find yourself in so for example when you say this this space has been set apart for a particular purpose you know it's just a holy place you are not necessarily saying worship the place you're you're saying that there there is something special about this it's qualitatively different yeah but not the same thing as you know uh god seated on his throne right this is what you get with say the tendency that people have to bow down on worship angels right you have this the spiritual reality that's so much grander and larger than you are and it's real you immediate your immediate response is to bow down on worship and you see again and again in scripture people being corrected don't do that that's not a good thing to do right so yet and yet you do get these you know like the burning bush right take your scandals off this is holy ground you know there is the you know the place in which these manifestations take place and the presence is is and it but it is something very um like I said I think when you notice like like if we're to read as kind of kind of Protestants this end of things in modernity are to read certain things from you know early fathers and different things like this or see some of the Orthodox practices go that do go way back you look at them and you'll think oh well they're bowing to this they're doing this and those those nuances aren't in our vocabulary so we see them kind of all the same thing just during honoring um you know bowing when you go in a household those things and and they're clearly places in scripture where that stuff can be corrected for example when they you know they they bowed before angels they know no I'm just an angel don't don't go doing that you know only you know only certain things are for the divine but I I think um that that kind of fear driven leads also to create its own set as we've talked about of unintended consequences right and and I think rather than you know I think the way a gustan would put it you know just like with religion true and false religion I mean what you have here is the kinds of justice you owe to the different kinds of things because all creatures I mean me this is this is what I think science doesn't respect is the fact that we owe creation certain kind of justice there's a certain do for the kinds of things and limits that that are our sacred that we honor and we've lost that so we just go steamrolling anything that is material and creaturely not asking whether or not we are we are stepping into sacred elements of what these creaturely things are anyway I've said enough there but I think yeah I think that's great and and certainly the reform to with their you know advocacy of the God's law particularly the Deca log right there in the fifth commandment you have some some people who are explicitly commanded to be honored you're commanded to honor them father and mother that's right so this is God telling you to honor someone else yeah right yeah now the other things since we brought up a gust in there the the reformed have almost almost have an anaphylactic shock when it comes to things like iconography symbolism and things like that they you know it is it is a I think a often a severe overreaction to a particular way of understanding the regularity principle and that that again is one of these things that has the effect of desacralizing the world you don't look at the world and see in the world symbols of something larger something bigger and I'm using the word symbol in a somewhat technical sense here a gust and described it as signs and the thing signified that language has now been superseded sign and symbol are distinguished and what we're really talking here are symbols but I don't want to get into that any further but but I think that that the allergy iconography out of fear of idolatry leads them to reject the symbolic elements that God has already told us he's put into creation right which leads to the kind of kind of literary absolutism so there's this tendency in the reform world to to think that the only way God communicates is through written words on pages and stuff like that right and and even that in and of itself is kind of a kind of a there's an irony to do that because ink is physical and pages are physical letters are signs that's right well I'll take it further in in the modern conservative Christian world when we talked about this before there's this obsession with the historical grammatical interpretation of the text as if that's the only one that's there and this is actually I would argue a product of modernity you know this is the way the modern world looks at the world and we are products of modernity so we bring that into the text with us and so I don't remember whether we talked about this on a previous episode but I heard about a book in which they took the parable of the Good Samaritan and did an exegetical history of it and in different eras they all recognized the moral component of it which is the only one we recognize but in different eras they also saw other things in it and what they saw in it depended very much on the era that they were in now none of them were wrong I would argue they were all pulling out different implications of the story different dimensions of the story whereas we just look at the the circumstance it said well this is about telling you who your neighbor is and that you've got to go out and love them well that's true but is that does that exhaust the parable and I would yeah and it goes to show why generally Protestants are such poor writers of fiction because they can't imagine anything that's not Pilgrim's progress having any value and what I mean by that is with Pilgrim's progress it's a pretty flat one-dimensional kind of thing it's well done I'm not saying it isn't well done and doesn't then it has its charm but Christian is what a Christian you know there's no ambiguity there's no layering there's there's nothing like that going on that's right and and they bracket out some of the most significant aspects that are going on there other than just trying to explain what that would have meant in a kind of again contextual historical reading I mean when you look at the metaphysical implications of a text which were earlier Christians would have been very attuned to because this helped them revise reality assumptions now they get sort of bracketed out as well this you know you know phylo was around at that time and you basically can reduce it to whatever ideas were floating around rather than these were used because they are actually communicating something about reality that is assumed throughout the scripture it it isn't just that they were borrowing even though that was an at hand thing to borrow because it communicated the point they were trying to make right yeah I think that's right I think we live in a world today where we don't even think text communicate anything except that's right that we want them to communicate that's right yeah I want to push this into one other direction here and we've already sort of touched on it when when Chris was talking about places being dedicated for particular purposes um and if we accept the idea that the physical world um physical objects in the world can be vehicles of grace can be vehicles of revelation those sorts of things then is it possible also to have places that are particularly sacred so you know if now the problem that we run into here is that you can't get to that conclusion from solar scriptura I mean the only examples we have are Moses at the burning bush in the temple but is it possible well you know as an example I have been in monasteries where people prayed for a thousand years or more right those places frequently have a very very different feel from the world around them even if nothing is going on when I'm there yeah well let's let's go a little bit to kind of a kind of a lateral move because I agree with you but there will be people who listen to us to say well you know you're just been diluted Glenn because you're in a catholic setting and you're thinking like a catholic when you're in those settings here's another example so the tomb of the unknown soldier people go to that and with a kind of reverence and there's a kind of real real real real moral outrage when people don't behave themselves in a way that people think that you should behave in the in the in the in that place another example would be you know in New York where the world trade centers the twins towers you know that memorial that that is there you know it's just you cannot go there and it's not just because of the things that they've done to sort of in you know sort of remind you of what occurred there there's just something about the place that you know that is different and set apart for this purpose it's set apart to memorialize but also to in a more deep way deal with something awful at a spiritual level it's not just oh isn't this a place we remember people who died I didn't know anybody who was in the the towers but I was affected by what would I well experienced when I was there um if you have questions about I find this interesting a lot of people will have arguments against holy sites I think your point about the atmosphere of places is really good I would add by the way the cove has a similar sort of effect on me the Billy Graham Center in North Carolina but consider the opposite um there are places I've been that had a tangible feeling of evil or spiritual darkness I can think particularly of a large Tibetan Buddhist temple in Mongolia where I just had a very very strong feeling of spiritual darkness and ignorance there other people described it as evil for me it was more darkness and ignorance yeah that I somehow it seems to me a lot of people will believe well yeah of course you can run into that there but they don't think the same thing can happen in Christian sites that you can that you can have the opposite thing I know a lot of people can accept the idea that there are places that have just been given over over to evil and they need to be exercised or something like that but they don't seem to think that the opposite can be true that there are there are sites that could be actually sanctified right well and I think I mean on one hand I mean we know omnipresence is such that it works that that divine presence and its life manifesting nature are available at every place in one sense now that does not take away from the fact that certain places can eclipse that presence because of evil and things like that but why wouldn't it be that some places can't also be likewise more open due to whatever set of factors make that place open more to the life manifesting presence of God and I think one of the things being a Christian people gathered together that definitely becomes one place at which there should be something of the life manifesting presence of God and in community where there can definitely be like you said something else going on but why not other places and things as well I like I said you're not turning them into shrines but recognizing that the creation creation is open to its creator and there's no good reason to think the creator cannot in certain places and modes be present in different life manifesting modes than others yeah this was incidentally in a debate with Injudism about the temple yeah if God is in fact omnipresence what does it mean for us to say that he is present in the temple how is that different and there was there was a lot of discussion on that how does how do these two things work together and as King David said that he would dwell in the house of the Lord forever and gaze upon the beauty which he didn't find quite everywhere else either anyway sorry Chris no no it's and we'll keep him with us but to ask so do you remember how they tried to explain it Glenn these are rabbis yeah actually I would have to talk to my daughter about that she's the she's the OT prop but she told me about about these these debates which actually related to her doctoral work as well so this reminds me of the 30th letter in the screw tape letters and either reason that's so fresh my mind as I just read it yesterday so in that letter Lewis is actually thinking about this sort of thing but he's putting it in a different way he's saying he talked about the word real so when people use the word real they tend to use it in a contradictory way so if something is endearing or uplifting it's merely the impression that's being made it's not real but if something is dark if something is disillusioning if something is sort of gives you a sense that we live in a purposeless universe then that's real so what so the people play this game so it's not a in one case it's about the sort of the psychological state and in another case it's about the larger reality that surrounds us but but what we're talking about here is a fallen and disenchanted outlook on the world of dark magic dark enchantment yeah that I think that's exactly it and again you know the the problem for Protestants on this in discussing these ideas is if we're going with Solus Cryptura in a very strict sense of the word we can't support the idea of sacred places or infested places or anything like that there's really no discussion of that that I can think of in scripture and yet I don't think scripture tells us everything about the unseen world and I think that sort of experience discernment intuition even have place have a place in understanding or in thinking about some of these things and okay I just got myself in trouble with a whole lot of error all right but this whole idea of intuition though we we have a tendency to think that if we can't frame a matter in a way that has some kind of logical universal Lee kind of rusex you know sort of accessibility then it can't be real I don't think we actually live that way and I think too that there are just a range of experiences that don't necessarily fit into the sacred profane categories but just a sense of significance so here here's here's a weird thing and I don't know entirely what to make of it but in the course of my research on my family history I've gone all the way back to the 17th century I know that my ancestors in the United States first arrived in 1640 both in Virginia and in the Massachusetts Bay Conley fleeing something obviously you know the English Civil War but in terms of their trek across the United States they went to the places I ended up going later in my own life so the places where they lived I've lived which is really weird in fact I just discovered a branch of the family tree that goes back to the Massachusetts Bay Conley and I have ancestors whose graves are 20 miles from my house in Thailand I intend to check them out but I mean they are from like the 16th century late 17th century and the particular location that these graves are in I've always had affection for I don't know why but it was this strange sort of intuition you know now people are thinking I'm spooky and believe and go and stuff like that okay but I'll take the accusations but it's it's now maybe there's mysteries like you said that you know I mean I'm willing I'm willing to entertain that I'm subject to the suggestion you know but the problem is is the order of things as in other words when I discovered that that's where my ancestors were buried that was after I had these positive feelings about the place yeah well it's I mean there there are mister they're just sometimes puzzles I mean how many people do you know I know I can count myself my children others who one person is born a day or two after an uncle or in every one I mean I and no one's planning this it starts to get to where it's statistically bizarre to one point I had a friend of mine a church I used to go to he and his sister were twins not planning he and his wife had their first child set of brother and sister twins born on their same birth date I mean they were you know this happens this is where the old wives start to you know sort of like you know do this with their hands and like oh does it so good yeah but it but it is it is fascinating that again on the one hand there you talk about things that line up almost and you know what we talk about the balancing of determination and freedom the way in which you're just enacting your life normally on your own thing and yet you're fitting into a pattern that is sitting here and I think similar I creation is profound it's it's much more profound than our narrow ways of reading it and you don't have to be reading all kinds of superstition into reality to affirm that we can just admit that we don't have a vocabulary for it because it's been weakened because of our scientism and and some of the other things anyway we should wrap wrap things up it's your show Glenn how would you like to wrap it up we haven't even gotten into miraculous icons another shank there are some stink and strange things surrounding some icons yeah you know which I don't know what to do with but actually you know we've gone through a lot of different things I hope this sort of hung together anyway but I would like to add a personal note a actually a prayer request for those of you who pray I believe this episode is going to come out somewhere around February 9th I think it would be on Monday on February 12th I am going in for what it technically qualifies as neurosurgery it in my brain now it it's not done by drilling holes in my head or anything like that it's done with ultrasounds but if you feel inspired to pray I would appreciate it yeah well that's good that's great yeah we should we all should all pray for you we'll go on yeah for sure successful surgery and no side effects right right okay well on that note let's wrap it up thank you for listening to the theology podcast we really appreciate your interest in our show and congratulations for getting all the way to the end and if you'd like to pray for Glenn please do it and put that on your calendar right now circle it in red at so February 12th right yep and do pray for him if you'd like to help out the show and help us pay the bills that's great too and there's a link in the show notes for our patreon page for those who liked it to do that anyway that's enough for now thanks a lot and bye bye bye oh theology podcast is a ministry of Westminster Presbyterian Church and Battleground, Washington the theology podcast is produced and edited by a widely craft productions of Nashville Tennessee