Hello, welcome to the Theology Bugcast. It's great to have you with us for this episode. We've got a special guest today and we look forward to a conversation with him. But before we have him introduce himself, we're going to introduce ourselves just to remind you of who we are if you are an ongoing listener and you're first time listener. It's worthwhile just to know a little bit about us. So I'm Sierra Wiley, I'm a pastor and I serve a church in the Silicon West. I'm actually in Connecticut today at my house here. So I've got two homes and get back and forth a lot. So I'm here today and I'm a writer and I've been a real estate investor and a professor philosophy taught for about a decade and I've written books and I guess the best known book is The Household of War for the Casuals. Anyway enough about me, how about you Glenn? I'm Glenn Sunshine. I am a professor emeritus of European history at Central Connecticut State University specializing in Renaissance and Reformation Europe. I am a senior fellow at the Goldson Center for Christian Worldview. I've got my own ministry every scratch ministry is at escrunch.org. I'm working on several books. I've got a bunch out already but I'm working on several other books and I'm writing a lot on Substack. Great, great. Tom. Tom Price. I teach theology Christian ethics, the Gordon Conwell theological seminary, teach philosophy and a bunch of other things and a bunch of other places. I'm a minister writer and speaker and I'm in Connecticut too. Well, we're pleased to welcome a friend that I've known for a few years. Scott's great to have you. Tell us a little bit about yourself. You know, you're calling in from the Great White North there in. Great White North. So I'm Scott Masson. I teach English literature up in Toronto. And I've started a classical school up here. I have served as a pastor as well and been involved in the culture wars as it were just because the humanities bear directly on a lot of the stuff that we're seeing all around us. And I've found that some of my colleagues in the theology, faculty, Bible studies departments think that it's outside their area to comment on it and maybe they don't feel equipped prepared to discuss the things that I think I'm reasonably able to speak to. So we've known each other a little while but we've actually only been with each other in person once. You were with us at the Academy of Philosophy and Letters and you spoke there and enjoyed it. The opportunity here you speak there. But we were on the phone yesterday and you mentioned some things that you were working on and in particular you mentioned a lecture that you gave. And I asked you to give me a link to it and listen to it if that was great. And so I pass it along to the other guys and we'd like to talk to you about some of the themes that are brought up in the lecture but we're happy to go wherever you want to go. Now that we can start there, while I'm working on books as well and I have other endeavors but we can talk about those as we go along. Yeah. So the thing that really struck me and when you mentioned it in our phone conversation I thought we got to get Scott on the show is your observations concerning the divorce that occurred between theology and the humanities. So if you want to go into that a little bit maybe revisit some of the things you talked about in your lecture. Absolutely. So in terms of, I said I was an English lit professor, I'm a specifically an 18th-century romantic literature specialist. So the area concerned is the enlightenment, the long enlightenment or the romantic period whenever you want that to begin. I see aspects of the romantic period beginning in Russo on the continent long before the French revolution and the English romantics become part of the English-speaking world's consciousness. And so I teach literary theory as well. That's another area of expertise, academic expertise. And I observed a long time ago, so I'm an adult convert and between my masters and PhD under Britain's leading deconstructionist came to faith. That'll drive you to Christianity right there. He's actually a good guy. But what I mean, but I realized that I needed to rethink a lot of things and really from the ground up. And it wasn't only a matter of a few things, everything was turned around. And I needed to figure that out. And so I sat under an expository ministry for many years and had to work through this on my own though because I didn't have any mentors. I didn't really have any theologians that were engaging with what happened per se. So I found that CS Lewis was particularly helpful, although I think he's a medievalist. So some of the things he says, the timelines and so forth, he gets wrong in my view. He's friendlier to the romantics than I am in terms of many things, although people call him a Christian romantic and I understand why they do. Because he wants to recover the sanctity of the cosmos in some sense. So he recognizes the danger and that. So yeah, I observed that in the mid 18th century, the higher, you know, the higher critical methodology began and it became very influential very quickly. Even before it formally came across the Atlantic in the mid 19th century, I mean, Coleridge is the one they were introduced to too. And largely, and he was ridiculed for it, but you can already see in the Oxford professor of poetry at the time that he is reading the sacred lectures. His name was Robert Lauth, sacred lectures on the Hebrews. I think it was a study in the Psalms and so forth. And he was talking about the sublime in relation to Hebrew poetry and how it observed no particular poetic character. It had no features. It was sublime. It was spontaneous and therefore it could be easily translated and therefore it was continued to be powerful, etc. So this concept of the sublime, which was really central to my own studies as well in the period and it becomes a huge category in the 18th century. And it flips around the understanding of the sublime, but I don't want to get down that rabbit trail because it's just you'll take the whole podcast and get on a technical subject and you don't want to do that. So there's this terrific shift in the early 18th century. Louis describes the change and puts it in the mid 19th century. If you read a, there's a, his inaugural lecturer is the Cambridge professor of medieval and Renaissance literature, data scription, he told me puts it in the mid 19th century. That's a century too late. That's the shift happens before that. And he hints at that himself, but again, that's not his area. So and it's mine. I think this is one of the few instances where I think I can correct Louis on this. But the beginnings of Darwinism and the beginnings of the psych, you know, shift towards psychology and the shift, you know, the machine age begins in the mechanistic philosophies of the 18th century. And the shift towards feeling and the understanding of human nature as a spiritual being, the Cartesian self is, is there already long before it becomes so dominant that the other, that is the humanities get trampled under the feet of the geist is viscenshaft in the spiritual sciences of the German Academy. And when it does that, the human, the human sciences replace the humanities is my argument. And in the process, they throw out theology as the queen of the sciences from the university literally throw it out. And there's the great divorce, not the one that Louis talks about, but the divorce theology from the humanities and the humanities get transformed into the human sciences. That was a subject of my doctorate. I know in Germany, in particular, the big name that took, you know, the the feeling emphasis and ran with it was Schliamacher and definitely brought almost to a systematic form of theology that understanding of the human being and their religious relationship to God translated that way. Yep, absolutely. And he brings in this new approach to the text which he calls hermeneutics. I mean, the terms coined a few years decades earlier, but what is called romantic hermeneutics or modern hermeneutics, that's his approach and he tries to get inside the feelings, the head of the author. That's how you read, you know, you, you through empathy. And it's so it's not a it's not dealing with the word, it's dealing with the spirit. And so it drives a wedge between the spirit and the word, just like it drives a wedge between the man and God. Those things happen in this period. Yeah, one of the things people tend to mess when they're talking about the enlightenment, they always refer to it as the age of reason. But I had no idea what that was. I wish Schliamacher. That was Schliamacher. That was Schliamacher, yeah, I'm pointing his jeans. But you also have the age of sensibility. Yep. Which we see with Rousseau who is my personal enemy. And... Yeah. But it develops from there. You know, this age of sensibility, which is what feeds right into romanticism. It does. Yeah. And Jane Austen writes that book sense and sensibility based on that as well, right? Right. Yep. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. So this is this is really helpful in so many ways. So one of the things you know in the lecture is that this is when the seminaries get established. So before that, we didn't have these things sort of set apart from the larger enterprise of higher education. Yeah. Yeah. So it's an existential crisis really when Christianity effectively gets tossed out of the universities that have founded. I mean, the University is a Christian institution of the medieval period. And theology is expelled from it. And Christians say, well, you can't have that. We have to study God as we always have. How are we going to do this? And they start the seminary movement to train pastors and so forth. But they don't start new universities. And as a result, they leave the humanities to the universities. And that's a serious problem because in Christian theology, we understand that Jesus is both God and man. And if you're going to destroy part of him, namely the human part of him, you're not going to save it by studying theology, divorced from anthropology. And so that's part, that's what I talked about. And the Andral moment is taking the broken sword of, right, of his seal, and reforging. And that's my understanding that the God man needs to be re, this, so we need to put those things back together as a way of dealing with cultural, political, educational issues. Okay. That's helpful for the imagery there with the Andral moment. So we have a broken sword. And what you're saying is that this corresponds to the breaking up of the higher, the world of higher education or learning. And Christ, divine in human nature. Yes. Right. And so bringing them back together is what we need to do. Yes. And it's, it's interesting how you're putting this is in, in one way, I kind of studied similar period into just in terms of theology, especially what led up to the formation of Carl Bart. And I think Bart was in that situation where he was trying to correct a problem that went wrong. And he saw that Christology should do it. But his Christology was, I think, done in such a way that he had such a negative view of the humane and the humanity that you couldn't get a proper Christian humanism out of what Bart was up to. To get theology placed as the queen, but almost in a way that made, made all the humanities have to, not just take a back seat, but almost get out of the, get out of the room completely. So you would have a, he would establish theology, but not the humanities. And so what you're saying is a much something closer to what the patristics were up to and the church across time. That's my understanding and that's my understanding what Lewis and Tolkien believed as well. And so we had a queen with no subjects. Yeah. That's a great way to put it. But so what you're saying with Bart though, Tom, and this rings true for me is that he doubles down on the divinity of Christ without thinking anything, giving any consideration. But it reminds me of the, what was the book that he wrote near the end with the humanity of God, if I remember right, set, ring a bell, that title. He has, trying to think of one, a God and man. He has one similar title like that. I know Bonhoeffer runs with one, I think, a little bit closer. That Bonhoeffer kind of tried to make up for that. That's why you get like Jen Zimmerman and someone like that who's very indebted to Bonhoeffer's work. I know, yeah. I know that move. I think he's trying to kind of correct. And I think, again, Bart's intuition probably was, he was carving out a territory that had been split and he wanted to do it in a way, but he hadn't worked himself out of that split in my opinion. Yeah. Actually, I think we have to go back before Bart, because I think Bart himself is reacting to the tendency and liberal theology to reduce Jesus to human and to allow the vinyl together. Yes. So we have to remember that as we're looking at Bart, the tendency is always to hyper correct. Yes. Yeah. And there's never an attempt to recover the tradition. There's always, we're going to redo it and do it right. And everyone else before us has done it wrong. So further in the lecture, I talked about this phenomena that we see in literature from the romantic period onward, which is the idea of the orphan as the hero of a, yeah, that was fascinating. And you can find that is a ubiquitous feature of modern literature. It is almost in every novel. It's there in superhero fantasy novels. It's in pretty much everything that you could name. And after a while, you think this is not accidental. And they're not just, you know, flattery in terms of imitation. There's something other else going on here. And again, this is part of the divorce of humanity from, and then the idea of the autonomous self, which is only really possible if you don't have a family that you're a part of in a community that you're embedded in. And you really are this isolated individual that has to, you know, so the build on the idea of the development of the character, he educates himself. The Germans come up with a word for it. It's called build on BILD, UNG. Yeah. Very different than Pidea. So let's think about this because as our listeners are kind of digesting this, it'd be good to maybe give them some examples. So obviously Superman, you know, sticking with the comic books, you know, he's put into a rocket ship for goodness sake and sent to earth as parents die back in Krypton, right? So Batman, you know, he sees his parents, if I remember right, these his origin story killed by a criminal. Yes. You know, and so he's again, we think about say Harry Potter, you know, right? So raised by a bunch of what are the relatives? Some sort of relatives, but not his parents. His parents have been killed. Right. Right. But, you know, so leave that. But even with say somebody like Luke Skywalker, you know, Luke again, you know, we've got another character. Disney jumps out. Yep. They think about something even like and you brought this up. Frodo. You know, Frodo's parents are gone. He's raised, you know, and he's finds himself with Bilbo, who again is this bachelor. We don't know much about his childhood or anything like that. But again, he's sort of on his own, just kind of living by himself and he's sort of coaxed into an adventure by Gandalf against as well. But you have all these things. Now related to this, you know, so I'm an orphan. So it's a story of abandonment when I was a little older. I was 11 years old. Okay. I spent time in foster care and was a warded state and bad period of life. But, you know, there are lots of things that, you know, as a person like myself, as I reflect upon these literary characters, just hadn't thought about how my own kind of story related. But you're placing this into a larger sort of social sort of cultural context in which we are thinking about this more as a almost kind of as like the kind of the form of literature that needs to be kind of used to pursue the modern project. Yes. Right. Yes, I do. And I think so. I don't think it's accidental. And then I start to think that there not only is there a pattern, I'm not crazy. It's everywhere. And that there's a purpose to the pattern. And the purpose to the pattern is so that we regard ourselves as the only person who can guide ourselves. We have to look within for not look above, not look to the past, not look to our parents, not look to the church, not look to any institution. So we're almost, you know, we're conditioned to be anti-institutional and anti-authority. That's conditioned into us. And that's a trope of the French enlightenment as well, of course. Yeah. Yeah. So interesting. There's an irony there, of course, right? They're cultivating us to be a particular kind of people that self-cultivate. Yes. And have no choice but to do that. That's right. They presented as a an emancipatory act. So a manial content is treat us what, you know, what is enlightenment talks about the state from the self and post to the lich of the past to the past. By daring to know, and you remember the dead poets society where he gets them to jump up on the table and so forth to the tune of the William Tal over turn and so forth and rip out the page of the book and, you know, liberate yourself from culture. Right. And it's, it's so telling, sorry, Glenn, you could go ahead, Glenn. Yeah. Well, I think, I think though there's another side to this, I think that we're dealing with the ghost of Joseph Campbell as well. Sure. With his hero of a thousand faces, you get the thing everybody knows about is the hero's journey. But along with that, one of the characteristics of the hero that he identified was some sort of mysterious birth. Mm-hmm. You know, mysterious background, you know, that sort of thing. I think that that that factors in as well, particularly in more recent years as people are self-consciously patterning stories after the hero's journey. Yes. That's a good point. And that becomes a feature as well of romantic ideas of origins. They don't speak of creation. They speak of, and they speak of spontaneity and they speak of mystery. And they, they replace the idea of human personhood with the idea of, of an organic self, to the reference point and the connection we have to the rest of life is that we are all organic forms of life. And so, an environmentalist approach to our understanding of ourselves were influenced by our environments, but not in a way that an agent would, but rather as somebody who's worked upon and constantly involved and interacting, we don't have any sense of responsibility for ourselves as a consequence of that. But yeah. And then life becomes a mystery. And so then we become very much open to Eastern types of philosophies and religion. Yeah. This reminds me too of, in terms of a contrast with the need, for example. So in the need, of course, abuse, you know, piety is an acknowledgement of your debt to those who came before you. So there's kind of a real sense of connection to, and to, and a need to express your regard to your parents in particular, but even more broadly, to the city fathers, to divine authority and so forth. And so, you know, this modern approach of striking at the root of that by making an orphan, you know, think about how different that is than Nias, you know, being told to flee the city and first, first, you know, sort of act is I gotta go get my dad. Yeah. You know, I gotta, I gotta get my wife and my son, you know. And my household gods. Right. And that too. Right. And how that, that's no longer a starting point. I've sometimes wondered why the need has not been turned into a major film, but maybe that's why. Because it is not a modern story. It's not a modern story at all. Buildings, it doesn't fit. Well, it's, it's also similar. I mean, I, I get me, I need to do it. Ethics class again. And I always have people read excerpts or try to from Augustine's confessions. And I think they have a hard time not reading it as an autobiography that someone would write today. And they always have this almost Cartesian approach that when he's talking about and there is not, you know, it's what Charles Matthews calls an anti-auto biography in many ways. It's anything but the self making itself and reflecting on it. So it starts with praise, worship, created this reception of the gift of language prior to being even a self. I mean, the way in which you're connected to all these things. And this radically is different than what you're talking about. The, you know, especially the building, ramen and the whole tradition. It's a different kind of approach to the self altogether. But it really was this enlightenment period that was, became quite deliberate about reinterpreting the self this way. It was intentional. It wasn't something that was just spilling over from, you know, historical accident. People were wanting to sever themselves from these older ways, a conceiving of the human being related to theology and creation and come up with something else. Absolutely. And if you just to build on what you just said, Russo writes his work Confessions, Echoing Augustine's Confessions. And yet the self that he has is a self-interpreting self and a self-creating self, whereas a person asks the anthropological question the first time, Lord, who am I? Yeah. And he doesn't know. He doesn't know. And he said, Lord, you know me. You made me. Yes. I'm a question to myself. You are going to have to interpret me for me because you're my maker. You're my author. I don't know my end from my beginning. So it's, and then he, when he writes his Confessions, it's the Holy Spirit working through him and he's looking. It's a very, it's often said to be the first autobiography. We have to understand what's going on with Augustine as compared to Russo. I mean, it's really useful to compare and contrast there. And it is very interesting because in the same period when we have empirical science developed, it has a notion of the self-almost in some strands standing over against almost interpreting a valueless world or imposing a meaning on it, depending on which line you come from. And this is so different from, say, Augustine's Confessions as well because we don't even know how fully to see things and read them until we do get to share in something of the perspective of God, that mind of God. It is a deeply participatory understanding of the human being in relation to God and everything else so that we can do justice as Chris was saying with the Aeneid to other things in the rest of creation, to receive them the right way, to relate to them the right way, to interpret them the right way. And this is so different when you start to get into the period you're talking about because the self becomes almost the one who gets to define and make and create on their own terms from their own reference point. And then you could even pull Mr. Locke in on this who conceives of the mind as a blank slate, which is not as I was taught when I did ancient philosophy in the University for the first time is not Aristotle's position, despite what I was told. That's not Aristotle's position. But effectively that's how it was taught because modernists see themselves in the past and read it that way. Right. Right. There's so many things that kind of come from these observations in terms of questions for me or maybe associations. For example, the fascination with genealogy in the United States, perhaps it has something to do with this sense of being forlorn and sort of band and or a sense of isolation that you want to reconnect and maybe that has something to do with our obsession with it. Because it just seems to me that at least in terms of my limited range of experience, the interesting genealogy is maybe kind of stronger in the United States than it seems to be in other places because perhaps there's a sense of a need for it. I think this is just a... No, I think you're right. I observed many years ago that the mythology of the self-made man in the US was so strong. And so incentivized that it became a myth that extinguished all other understandings of yourself. Right. And it allowed... There are benefits to it, but there are also great harms. And one of the great harms is that people will move away from Kith and Ken at the earliest possible moment in order to find themselves and be themselves as if they weren't themselves before they did that. Right. Right. Right. And psychologically and sociologically and culturally devastating. Yeah. And it results in breakups, divorces, etc. Yeah. And it requires you to define yourself without... Without recourse to family, to tradition, to anything, which is really the thing that feeds directly into critical theory. Yes. You define yourself by yourself with no outside input except of course from critical theorists. Right. Right. At first part of your lecture deals with cultural Marxism. I know that was sort of something you needed to address to get out of the way because they asked you to do it. Well, it hurts me to do a lecture on cultural Marxism from 11 years before and they said, we really like that. Can you do the Gannon? I thought, oh my goodness. I've... It's very good, by the way. Oh, thank you. We're going to put your lecture in the show notes so people can go check it out. Okay. I know you were trying to get that behind you before you got into the things that you wanted to talk about, which is the... You know, the Andrew Will moment that we find ourselves in. So pulling these things together though, so how do we do that? What are your thoughts on how do we mend the breach, reforge the sword, you know, whatever we want to say? Well I think that Lewis and Tolkien who were both orphans of a sport, I mean, Tolkien was literally an orphan. Yeah. Lewis was effectively an orphan. And I think that they have... And yet they don't lie in eyes orphanage. They don't promote it as a desired outcome. They have a different understanding of heroism and they don't interpret themselves, the orphans. They require somebody to help them along the way. And that is a figure who will guide them. Another figure, a teacher, a Gandalf, whatever. And Aslan that will lead them and instruct them. So I think they understand the experientially, culturally. They're both men who are in the first world war and while in the second world war, and there were a lot of people who lost parents, friends, fathers, children. And so they knew that from the inside sort of like you described Chris. And you're not the only one. I mean, how many people grew up without fathers now? Sure. I guess it's just an extraordinary phenomenon which is a self-fulfilling prophecy, of course. So that's it. What they did, Lewis and Tolkien in their fiction is I think that they tried to provide and reconnect to an Augustinian way of looking at life. That's what they're both doing is my sense. And in that process, they are recovering a sense of the relation of God and man. But and also the theology to anthropology. That's what I'm going to try and argue in my book. I am going to argue in my book is what they have both done. And now they've done it through science fiction, interestingly, or in the case of Tolkien fantasy, which is not an obvious choice for writing about theology. Except that they're going into enemy territory there and reframing it in different ways. So if you read the sci-fi trilogy of Lewis, he's writing science fiction except he is basically the anti-HG wells. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. Right. It's very interesting because you kind of had a, you know, what I would call, you know, if we were using an analogy today, and I would put it in a different way, you know, I would put it as a better group. But you had a kind of form of what you would call their own school of thought, like a radical orthodoxy with the Christopher Dawson's movement and the Burns group in Chelsea, which were very impactful. Yep. A Catholic, Augustinian Catholic, specifically, even you have, you have figures from like the continental Thomas who were starting to read Augustin because of this because they saw the, the cultural value and this really did spill over into Tolkien and the Inkling group through friendships. But they really did see Augustin even more than Thomas as very much the figure that both Protestants and Catholics, of course, could get behind, but also dealt with both the brokenness of a world after, you know, after modernity fell apart in that, their conception of the human being. But, but I think your, your attunement to, to Augustin being very much a way forward here, I don't know if, if people quite realize how profoundly a, a, a Lewis himself was influenced by that Augustinian movement. I don't think they are either. And I'm going to try and emphasize it and, and make the connections clear. I mean, he does talk in the abolition of man about the Ordo or Morris. Yeah. He does, he does talk about that. But he just, it's a throwaway line. I think most people who read it, they throw their hands up like what does that mean? And he talks about man without chess and he talks about man without virtue without the, you know, and he talks about the law of human nature or natural law. And he speaks of that in mere Christianity and so forth as well. And he, he's writing the preface to Paradise Laws the same time as he's writing, uh, Parallandra and, and engaging with it in Presennium. If you read the preface to Paradise Laws, he talks about the Augustinian view of human nature, which we need to understand, to understand Milton. All these things are going on simultaneously. And I think, and it's writing, his writings on love were, were very much paralleling DRC's work, which is the Catholic involved with the Augustinian movement who wrote aeroos, allegor, something, something similar to what he did on allegory of love. Right. Which was the first work I ever read by him, by the way. Oh, me. Yeah. Back when I was a non-Christian, I was reading as a medieval scholar. That's my first, that was my entry point for Lewis. Right. Interesting work. Um, but the, but the motif of love, the importance of love in all Lewis's work is, is, obvious, and it is Augustinian. Yeah. No doubt in my mind. And even in his last work, the discarded image, which is dealing with the medieval synthesis, which is sort of tomestic, I guess you would say. Yeah. Even so, I still think his dominant key is Augustin. Yeah. Right. So, in terms of, you know, reforging the sword, you've talked about the inklings a little bit, talked about Augustin is, is it a retrieval thing that we need to do? Is, is that the emphasis that you are making? It is a retrieval. So, it's a recovery and the right ordering and a recovery. So the, in the fourth century, we get discussions of the two natures of God, his divine human nature. And then we get in Trinitarian, the personhood. Those both are important. You need to recover what a person is. Yeah. Because the person, the idea of personhood has collapsed, which is results in sorts of all sorts of bioethical issues, problems of transhumanism and post-humanism come with that because what does it mean to be a human being? Those things are, the reason why crazy things are happening around us is because we don't have a very clear sense of what a human being is and why we need to hold on to that and defend it. And if my thesis is correct, that's because the theologians and the humanity scholars don't work together and they don't, you know, they're talking past one another to some degree. Right. Right. So, yes, that's what the reforging of the sword needs to happen. The sword is Christ. He is the sword. Not just the word of God, but the person word of God. Remember Jesus, the word of God? Well, the word, it's sharper than any two-edited sword. Well, that's not just speaking to preaching, which it normally is in my circles. Oh, yeah, my circles too. Yeah, so that's a marvelous kind of way to draw it all together. So where does this begin? I mean, is it the theologians who reach out? Is the professors or the humanities reach out? Do we need like some kind of crisis? I mean, I can't imagine a worse crisis than we'll be facing right now. Just wait a tiny bit. Wait a tiny bit. There you go. Yeah, you know, they can't get worse, that's true. But I guess that's the thing. Do we just, does it have to get so bad that people just are forced to do it? Or is there something else that you think that we can do in the meantime? So I've in the last year or so year and a half, two years, I've had a number of organizations reach out to me, maybe because of my YouTube channel, I'm guessing the Discovery Institute, Christian Hall's International, because I think there's an awareness that there's a need for. Yeah. And to some degree, people best understand theology through Lewis and Tolkien. Right. And maybe it's not just because they're good storytellers, but because they're making an emphasis that isn't there amongst the theologians. And it's partly just they have a bigger, you know, they have a view of the cosmos like you talk about, Chris, in your work. And the household at the center of that, I think that's there as well. Like even though they're orphans, they are talking about the importance of the household. And that is in the genealogies and Tolkien and so forth. There's a long view of history and the interconnectedness of all things and all peoples, which is very contrary to this spirit of orphan. Yeah. Right. I don't think you can underestimate the importance of them as storytellers. No. And that's not just on the level of a stunning, leo-effective way of communicating. I think I've talked about this before in the podcast. I'm not sure. But when you look at the book of Acts, when Paul is preaching, when Peter is preaching, they're telling stories. Yep. The gospel is fundamentally a story. And when you get people who have as deep an understanding of story as they do, combined with a deep orthodoxy and deep reading, it's no wonder that they're so effective at the kind of thing you're talking about, that they're the way people would understand theology better. That's correct. And I don't think that you can overstate the significance of that. I don't think you can overstate the significance of telling stories and understanding meaning and purpose and stories. And that's what Stephen does. You know, who's a decanee? He's got the longest sermon that was dealing with him. And he gets martyred. And he gets martyred for it, so he's from how good it was. Don't underestimate the decans. So, let's just dig into this a little bit more. So if we think about stories, and particularly Tolkien and Lewis, I've observed many, many, many people who long to do what they did and fail. The question is, is it just because Tolkien and Lewis were so much more technically competent, or is there something in what they were doing that's missing in many of their kind of admirers and emulators? I suspect it's both, but maybe more emphasis needs to be made on the second point. I think you're right. First of all, they're obviously prodigiously gifted. That's you can't deny that. You know, they are unique men. However, the story, the more you know about Lewis and Tolkien, and I know a fair bit, I read a fair bit of them. Their work, I mean, almost all their work, but even the critical material and so forth around it and what they read. But also what they read. So there's the, there's the, the size of thing, not them, but what they read, what forms them. Are you reading what they read? Because if you did, you would know that they're just actually, they're not creating, and this is an idea of creativity that emerges in the romantic period, that we are going to innovate. We're going to do original things, the original genius, originality is the thing we prize above all things in creativity. Well, the medievalists, nobody up until the romantic's prizes originality, nobody, not one person prizes originality because all the best stories have already been told. And you will refer to those stories. They will form your stories. They'll be part of your stories. And there's a great tradition of storytelling that, and it's even there in Scripture. When you read the New Testament, they're talking about what God said, what God said, and you will see constant references, back references, the Old Testament, the most backward referential book of the entire Bible is the book of Revelation. It's just one quotation after the next, strung together almost in an extraordinary way. That type of deep reading and interconnected historical reading is what we need to recover. That's what my organization, Pidea, today is going to try and do. It's to model that and do, present the reader. And it's not just that you read the works. They have to be a part of the teacher and they're disseminating that through instruction. It's a slow process, but it is how civilizations are forged and formed and how they stick together. Yeah, and Annie Crawford, whom we've had on a few times, a classical educator, a cultural apologist, a point that she made really strongly some time ago is the reason why we don't have another Tolkien or another Lewis is that nobody reads what they read. Right. Yeah. And yeah, and I think it's also interesting too. I mean, they do, but they do, you know, they also are peculiar as a group because of the way they integrated things at a time when so many people had allergies to integrating things that way. I mean, for example, it's a bold move to do what they did in relationship in an Augustinian view because Augustin, in my opinion, was read very badly often in the academic world at that time, almost in a barbie in or a kind of hyper reformed way where the created order was looked at so negatively. And they didn't fall into that trap at all. They understood a very strong Augustinian sense that when seed and receive the right, when love the right way, these are gifts to be enjoyed like friendship and in relation. All these things are delights, four tastes of something divine almost. And so they have a place for the creaturely and the enjoyment of it. And this is not something you either had the kind of the Karl Barth, you know, commentary on Romans, which basically, you know, there's a bombshell that has entered with the gospel that just basically levels everything of the old order. That comes out somewhere completely different than where you get Lewis in them. So there was a very bold, integrated vision these guys had. I could not agree more strongly. And so the reason why I am who I am is because I have swam against the stream of academic specialization my entire life. And it's one of the only it's a lonely lonely pool that you find yourself swimming in. It really is. And everybody knows what I've just said and understood and has done it knows exactly what I'm talking about. But that is that that's real scholarship. And to some degrees affected my productivity. I don't have a huge list of books behind me. I didn't want to write a multitude of books. I wanted to write a good book. I want to write one. It would be worth it. Now this is a very, I mean, and it's heavily disincentivized. What I've just said by the academy you have to publish a parish, right? Right. And the formation is long as I think it's horse. This is our longer Vida brevis. That's sure. Life is short of light. And the way the way is long. And talking is a great example as well. Yeah. The very same thing. It's a long path. And moving slowly in the same direction. And I think you can see that that's the story tells in the Lord of the Rings almost. Yeah. Yeah. There's a courage to undertake the large and important but undervalued project. Right. And then there's also the courage required to take the bold kind of step of maybe incorporating something that is just off the beaten path so far that people would wonder why you should try that. I think Lewis is an example of that. So I'm reading right now. Voice to our tourists, which is something that I, as I'm reading it, I'm thinking, ah. I can see that the great divorce has. And then also out of the silent planet. That's something of the voice director. And he never, never tried to cover that up or anything. But it's just, it's such an off the beaten path. You know, a story that a person might be embarrassed to try to do what he did. It didn't have the. But it gets you for plagiarism. Yeah. That's right. That's right. But it takes, you know, it takes that kind of courage and that kind of audacity. And, you know, as I noted, Lewis was willing to give credit what credit was to him. And he was willing to, you know, own his debt to McDonald. You know, so he was, but it's, it's a rent. It's interesting. You know, your comments about originality, even though Lewis says all these things about his debts, no one takes them seriously. No, they don't, but he's both serious. Yeah, they don't, you know, because they want to make him the genius. They want to make an idol of him. Right. Yeah. Yeah. He had a, he had a much lower opinion of himself than other people do. Yeah. What did he say? He said, be surprised if any of my works last a decade after him gone or something like that. Yeah. Well, again, I think he was placed, you know, it's providentially. It was the timing of it. He, you know, a lot of this stuff was out of a lot of people's reach. And it's so rich and it's not being talked about other than maybe small circles and universities with some rare people. And then they have the boldness to actually develop, you know, use their imagination not in the kind of romantic sense, but in a way to say, I mean, you can't just say, I mean, you could almost look at it from a different angle. We used to talk about how rich the, the, you know, the scriptures have rich layers. And of course, sometimes they would develop these, you know, different levels of reading. And of course, you know, when the reformation came, they wanted to put the primacy on, on kind of the natural sense or the step incense. But they still had the other meanings tucked underneath. Well, the modern world when historic criticism came in, the historical became very flat. It became, it didn't have the ability to deal with metaphysical issues, you know, personal and a relational moral so much. And so something like Lewis and Tolkien are doing are almost in a literary way doing what old hermeneutics and interpretation used to do. Deal with these different rigorous levels of meaning, but in such a more realist format like a story, because as one thing Christianity has given us a sense of time, is, is a part of that reality package for the human being. And that too helps explain why, you know, that what they did was so forceful. But I'm going to make heavy weather of August, Augustine's discussion of time. And what time means? Yeah. Yeah, probably too much to get into here right now. But I think this discussion of what time is and what it means is very important come the same period. Yeah. So we're kind of in the last quarter of the show here and we want to make sure that we get to anything that you maybe want to get into that we haven't had a chance to get to yet. So as we're thinking about these things, this is such a rich topic, you know, we could just kind of go on as we are. But is there anything that maybe it comes to mind? Scott, you think, boy, I really want people out there and podcasts, let them know about this or this particular organization, this particular project or anything like that. So as I say, my own organizations, PiDea today, I'm just going to start it up. Although I had a series of podcasts several years ago called PiDea today with a colleague, friend of mine, Dr. Bill, freezing in which we looked at the great books going from Homer up to the present. Four seasons that lasted and never really went anywhere, but they're still available. But I'm just convinced that there's a need for me to do what I'm doing and to make it more widely known. My YouTube channel's grown organically over the course of time. It's reasonably sized now, but I think it can be the need for it is greater than the audience is currently reaching. I'm going to be trying to do that. And I'm partnering with Nick Ellis, a Christian Hall's international, who's I think involved in a project of civilizational renewal. That's what's going on there. And can you dig into that a little bit and help people understand what that is? Sure. I can try. So I think there's an awareness here that education does not do what it's supposed to do. There's a high cost to it. There's a big debt load. There's a loss of family integrity. There's a loss of faith that comes with higher education. The great pride of most parents is that their children have gone away to university to some great named university. They've arrived. They've made it. You've gone to Harvard. Isn't that great? I grew up in that generation. You guys would have as well. You went to Oxford. You went to Harvard. I went Durham. We've gone away to overseas. I studied in Germany. I lived the Lawanderer life in some way. I was that orphan finding himself in that sense. I'm referred to think of you in Helen Wattell's terms, the wandering scholars. Well, I did go there to study. I did actually to learn classical languages. That's why I went to Germany. And I did learn them. But in Germany and all that. Fair enough. But still as a trope, it's not really a good thing to leave your parents and leave your family for any purpose other than marriage. And yet it's the paradigm. And at the moment, it's breaking apart families. And the idea of Christian halls is to do higher education. Look at people at homeschool, look after their children and their education up at the point where they just can't. They have to tap out. I can't do this anymore. I've reached my knowledge base. I can bring them up to high school. But now I have to pass them on to university. And at that point, universities rub their hands and say, sure. And now we can make them think for themselves. And what that means is that they are going to have to, and you get it right in first year, you're going to have to think to yourself, you know, reject those ideas that you've been taught by your parents. And they'll ridicule you. You know that Christian halls is going to say you do local form, you do your formation locally. And you can do this. We can provide degrees at a lower cost with accredited, you know, very carefully chosen institutions. But we keep formation in the realm of the family and the church and the community. And you build thicker, richer communities. And so the goods that come from higher education and they are real, don't go to the big cities. You know, you're not being plundered by the Egyptians. You're plundering the Egyptians on the plundered late to use Augustine's metaphor and they're trying to Christiana. You are taking the goal of the Egyptians and you're repurposing it for the glory of God rather than building the lightles. What strikes me about this is it's very, very similar to what Vishal Manglewadi is doing, which I will whom I work with as well. Yes, the third educational revolution. It's exactly what he's talking about. It is exactly what he's talking about. You're right. Sorry, I didn't the gun. No, no, no, I hadn't mentioned him yet. So yeah, so I worked and collaborated and spoke with Vishal for several years now. And the very year when I first met you at the APL Chris, I went then from there to Vishal's conference in Philadelphia. For the third education revolution. So met this and they're very similarly minded people. What what I'm I find encouraging is there are a lot of people that seem to have been thinking about the same things around the same times and are gathering together and they're not looking to lament what's happened. They're looking to solve problems. And I so I'm a problem solver. I can spend all my days screaming at the darkness. The older I get the more inclined I am to do that. You're a true laugh of recognition. But I realized that I need to invest in what's good and true and beautiful and lovely and that's what I need to spend my time doing. And that's what Christian halls is doing. That's what Vishal's organized it. Let's build on let's stop fighting the culture wars trying to hold back the darkness. Although we still need to do that. And let's put our primary efforts into building. Yeah. Right. So that I that I really am hopeful about. This is great stuff. So we've talked about reforging the sore. We've talked about some of the things that are going on to be that encourage us. Is there anything else you want to kind of leave with us as we kind of bring it to the conclusion? I believe in the university as an institution. I think that it is the place where you think theologically and you think. And you tap into the wisdom of ages. And I just don't think it has to be done the way the modern research university does the big entities with the billion dollar budgets and so forth. I don't think that universities didn't begin that way. They began little halls. We were the couple scholars. That's right. And a dedication to a type of lifestyle and commitment to certain things that that doesn't need to be done on the mass scale. And it is that we might find ourselves in a moment where the research university is losing credibility. I just the COVID phenomenon, but also just the scandals that we see even in the sciences, maybe particularly in the sciences. Particularly in the sciences they're coming to light. Yeah. There were research has been fabricated just and everything seems to be oriented toward sort of the money machine getting the grants and kind of making sure that people. I don't know keep the money flowing. And that's not what the way the sciences worked in their infancy. It was a bunch of crazy people and basements do one stuff with lots of burners. So yeah, yeah, I mean, John Lennox who I met this October mentioned that very thing. He could see that going on and he was, you know, scandalized by that. I think that we don't have universities anymore. Let me just put it that way. We don't have universities. We don't unite all things. Right. There's nothing that unites them. Yeah, you can't bring in people from other disciplines and ask them to look at your stuff. For one thing they don't know what you're doing, but the other thing is you're not really interested in what they say. You know, you're basically just, you know, you got your silo. I've got my silo. Let's not bother each other. You know, a quick story from when I was at Central, I brought in a guy who was a medieval musician. And, you know, he did a concert. And then I set up another concert with a friend of mine who is a world class cellist. Okay. And a really good accompanist. And the music department got their nose out of joint because even though, even though Jim was a specialist, in this particular thing, he's got a PhD in historic performance in this period. And they didn't have anybody who was doing that period. They got their nose out of joint because I was bringing in an outside musician, which struck me as bizarre because, you know, I wouldn't you want a concert from people. And they said to me, well, how would you feel if we brought in somebody to do a lecture on the Renaissance? I said, I'd send all my students to it. And they could not understand this. Yeah. That may have been the music department, but yeah, I mean, it's... Well, you know what they say about, you know, the fighting is so intense because the stakes are so low. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But that's that idea of cross-cultural or cross-disciplinary things. I brought them in because they fit what I was doing in my classes. And it was a way of broadening their understanding of that, but they just didn't understand this. So I like what I do at Tindill. I think I form good kids. They think, well, they live well. They understand what I just need. I think it needs to be done in a scale that's not happening. That's what needs to happen. And I think that there are efforts to move in that direction, although all around is Christian universities institutions, they're collapsing at, you know, one or two a week. Yeah. Yeah. That's what it seems like. Anyway, well, we're glad that things are cross-mortarious, Scott. And we're glad to hear about things that you're working on. And we're hopeful that that book will get out here before too long. So is it going to be the title of what you've been... Okay. So yeah, yeah, I should mention the title. I think the title, it's a provisional title, but it will be CS Lewis and JR are talking the defenders of freedom and dignity. And it took takeoff on BF Skinner, who worked on freedom and dignity. And he saw CS Lewis as the foremost defender of this and the source of everything wrong. I didn't know that he picked out Lewis, but... He did. I didn't know that he picked out Lewis, but I was familiar with the book. Yeah, but Lewis was the foremost exponent of the literature of freedom and dignity. He sites them specifically. And the reason he does, and he could have mentioned Tolkien, Tolkien, but because they're doing the same thing, well, these things flow out of an Augustinian worldview. And that's again, I'm going to and I'm going to juxtapose that with the conditioners of which Skinner is one. That's right. The reason Skinner hated Lewis, because we all very much Yeah, yeah, he was in view. And our few minutes are those, right? Yeah, that's exactly right. That's exactly right. Well, thanks a lot Scott. This has been a fun talk. Yeah, and if you would, please send along some links that you want us to share in the show notes. Of course, we have the lecture that you share with us, but anything else that you think would be good for our listeners to be able to access so that they can learn a little more about these different things. I absolutely will. Thank you. Okay, great. All right. 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