New Persuasive Words

In this episode we consider an essay T.S. Eliot wrote as an introduction on the topic of revelation in the modern world in a volume that listed among its contributors renowned theologians like Karl Barth and Gustav Aulen. Show Notes: You can find the essay we reference here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/u7p24zxr9v7k5uy/eliot_essay.pdf?dl=0.

We read a weird article. It looks like the atheist left is getting as crazy as the evangelical right. We're nervous.

We don't talk hermeneutics very often on this podcast. At least explicitly. But Jace Broadhurst got us talking about it. It's Bullgeschichte and Friday Night Lights rolled into one! God help us all. Special Guest: Jace Broadhurst.

In this episode we discuss a 1969 radio address about the future of the church in a secular age. It was delivered by a young priest known as Joseph Ratzinger, the man who would become Pope Benedict XVI. His insights are certainly provocative and worth pondering. The piece comes to via www.ucatholic.com. You can find the post which contains the entirety of Ratzinger's address here: http://www.ucatholic.com/blog/the-lost-prophecy-of-father-joseph-ratzinger-on-the-future-of-the-church/.

We celebrate the milestone of our 150th episode with listener and friend Josh Retterer. We reflect on where we've been and where we're going. Special Guest: Josh Retterer.

We revisit one of the themes of our earliest podcasts, friendship.

In this episode we talk about the powerful temptation to judge other people, which most of us give in to all the time. Our launching point was one of Bill's blog posts: https://www.residentexile.com/single-post/2017/07/08/As-You-Judge. We also quote Jason Micheli: http://tamedcynic.org/the-worm-at-the-core-of-the-apple/. This is the full context for the Karl Barth quote we reference: This fact that God has here come amongst us in the person of His Son, and that as a man with us He exercises judgment, reveals the full seriousness of the human situation. In this judgment God obviously has something to say to man which apart from this direct confrontation with God he is unwilling to say to himself, and caught in this unwillingness he cannot say to himself. Man has obviously given himself quite a different account of himself than that which he is now given by God. It obviously was and is something strange to him that he, for his part, can be in the right and do right only in subjection to the judgment of God. Obviously the righteousness of God is something strange to him as the measure of all righteousness, and therefore God Himself is a stranger. Obviously he for his part is estranged from God; although as the creature, the human creature of God, he is V 4, p 220 p 220 appointed to know God, although he is as near, no, nearer to God, than he is to himself, and therefore can and must be truly acquainted with Him. Obviously he does that which in the knowledge of God he could never do: he sets up his own right against God; he measures himself by this right; he thinks that measuring himself by this right he can pronounce himself free and righteous. He wants to be his own judge, and he makes himself his own judge. All sin has its being and origin in the fact that man wants to be his own judge. And in wanting to be that, and thinking and acting accordingly, he and his whole world is in conflict with God. It is an unreconciled world, and therefore a suffering world, a world given up to destruction. It is for this reason—the fault and evil are evidently great and deep enough to make it necessary—it is for this reason that God Himself encounters man in the flesh and therefore face to face in the person of His Son, in order that He may pass on the one who feels and accepts himself as his own judge the real judgment which he has merited. This judgment sets him in the wrong as the one who maintains his own right against God instead of bowing to God’s right. We will have to explain this when we come to speak of sin as such. For the moment it is enough to maintain that because it is a matter of the appearance and work of the true Judge amongst those who think they can and should judge and therefore exalt themselves, therefore the abasement of the Son to our status, the obedience which He rendered in humility as our Brother, is the divine accusation against every man and the divine condemnation of every man. The whole world finds its supreme unity and determination against God in looking for justification from itself and not from God. And as a world hostile to God it is distinguished by the fact that in this way it repeats the very sin of which it acquits itself. In this way that which is flesh is flesh. And for this reason the incarnation of the Word means the judgment, the judgment of rejection and condemnation, which is passed on all flesh. Not all men commit all sins, but all men commit this sin which is the essence and root of all other sins. There is not one who can boast that he does not commit it. And this is what is revealed and rejected and condemned as an act of wrong-doing by the coming of the Son of God. This is what makes His coming a coming to judgment, and His office as Saviour His office as our Judge. Barth, K., Bromiley, G. W., & Torrance, T. F. (2004). Church dogmatics: The doctrine of God, Part 1 (Vol. 4, pp. 219–220). London; New York: T&T Clark.

As we approach our 150th episode, we're revisiting some topics we did early on at the beginning of the podcast. This episode is about the human tendency to go into fight or flight mode in response to anxiety provoking realities. We quote from the book "Failure of Nerve" by Edwin Friedman a few times. Below are the excerpts cited: the possible exception of the first half of the twentieth century, since. While there have been other half-centuries of extraordinary progress, few have involved such fundamental change of direction all across the board. A person born in 1492 could have witnessed in their lifetime: an extraordinary flowering of artistic imagination concerning form and perspective in painting, sculpture, literature, architecture; the Reformation led by Luther and Calvin, ramifying out into almost every subculture and presaging the way religious differences would be formulated for centuries thereafter; the invention of the watch, enabling an unheralded fine-tuning in the measurement and coordination of daily time periods; observations of space and experimentation with lenses that would lead to the creation of the telescope; and the dissemination of the first newspaper, initiating the effects of widespread information-sharing within a community. Underlying all of this artistic, philosophical, and scientific upheaval was an even more basic, all-embracing change: the two worldviews by which European civilization had oriented itself for almost fifteen hundred years (based largely on the scholarship of the second-century Greek thinker and mapmaker, Ptolemy) were turned on their heads. One misperception was the view that the land mass on our planet was situated entirely above the equator, extending contiguously from western Europe to eastern Asia, with the Indian Ocean a land-locked lake. The other was the notion that our planet’s relationship to the rest of the planets and other heavenly bodies was “geocentric”— that is, the other planets and stars revolved around the Earth, which according to this orientation was situated at the center of the universe. Friedman, Edwin H.. A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix (Kindle Locations 596-613). Church Publishing Inc.. Kindle Edition. Anyone who has ever been part of an imaginatively gridlocked relationship system knows that more learning will not, on its own, automatically change the way people see things or think. There must first be a shift in the emotional processes of that institution. Imagination and indeed even curiosity are at root emotional, not cognitive, phenomena. In order to imagine the unimaginable, people must be able to separate themselves from surrounding emotional processes before they can even begin to see (or hear) things differently. Without this understanding, it becomes impossible to realize how our learning can prevent us from learning more. After all, when Galileo, a century later, tried to reorient the cosmic perspective of his world, he offered in rebuttal to those who were unwilling to learn what he had learned a look for themselves through his telescope. And there were people who not only disagreed with his views but, when offered the opportunity, even refused to peek. Friedman, Edwin H.. A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix (Kindle Locations 617-624). Church Publishing Inc.. Kindle Edition.

In this episode we reflect on a 2008 article by the recently deceased Peter Berger which originally appeared in First Things. In it Berger argues that while modernity pluralizes it doesn't really secularize or make culture anti-religious, whether it tries to or not. The Berger article can be found here: https://www.firstthings.com/article/2008/02/secularization-falsified. The article from Sean Kelly can be found here: https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/05/navigating-past-nihilism/. Here's the Halik quote we reference: "Were Christianity to turn its back on modernity it would sink into bigotry and fundamentalist religion; and conversely, were modernity to turnaway completely from Christianity it would itself become an intolerant pseudoreligion." Halík, Tomáš. I Want You to Be: On the God of Love (p. 150). University of Notre Dame Press. Kindle Edition.

In this episode, in light of the upcoming Fourth of July celebration, we reflect on the nature of freedom and life together in the United States.