September 13, 2017 Show with Thaddeus Williams on “Create: Mirroring the Artistic Genius of Jesus”

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Live from the historic parsonage of 19th century gospel minister George Norcross in downtown

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Carlisle, Pennsylvania, it's Iron Sharpens Iron, a radio platform on which pastors,

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Christian scholars and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.

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Proverbs 27 verse 17 tells us, Iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

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Matthew Henry said that in this passage, we are cautioned to take heed whom we converse with and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better.

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It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next hour, and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

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Now here's our host, Chris Arnton. Good afternoon,

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Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com.

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This is Chris Arnton, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Wednesday on this 13th day of September 2017.

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I'm delighted to have a returning guest who always impresses me beyond words every time we've had him on the program with his biblical knowledge and his very powerful gift to communicate that knowledge.

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His name is Thaddeus Williams, and he is Assistant Professor of Theology at Biola University in La Mirada, California.

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He's a former teacher of literature at Saddleback College, jurisprudence at Trinity Law School, philosophy at Labrie Fellowship in Switzerland and Holland, and ethics for Blackstone Legal Fellowship and Federalist Society in Washington, D .C.

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He's also the author of Love, Freedom, and Evil, Does Authentic Love Require Free Will?,

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and Reflect, Becoming Yourself by Mirroring the in History. He's also a frequent speaker at churches and conferences.

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Today we are going to be expanding on a chapter from the book I just mentioned, Reflect, Becoming Yourself by Mirroring the

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Greatest Person in History. And that chapter, which we touched on last time, I believe, but we are now expanding it into a full -blown interview on its own, and that's

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Create, Mirroring the Artistic Genius of Jesus. And it's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron, Thaddeus Williams.

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It is a joy to be back with you, Chris. How are you? I'm always doing better than I deserve, that's for sure.

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There you go. And in the studio with me is my co -host, the Reverend Buzz Taylor. And it's good to meet you.

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And if anybody would like to join us on the air with a question, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com,

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chrisarnson at gmail .com, c -h -r -i -s -a -r -n -z -e -n at gmail .com.

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Please give us your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside of the USA, and only remain anonymous if it's about a personal and private matter over which you are asking.

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And already in our programs past, at least one of them had you give your personal testimony of salvation.

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Let's just have you give a summary now for those of our listeners who have missed our previous interviews.

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Tell us something about Biola University in La Mirada, California, and the specific theology class that you are, where you are the professor.

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Sure. So I've been at Biola University. I was an undergraduate there back in the early 1940s.

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Uh, just kidding. How old is this guy?

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Not in the late 90s. And I got my undergraduate in biblical studies, went on to Talbot School of Theology, Biola's School of Theology, and got a master's in philosophy of religion and ethics, studying under now colleagues like William Lane Craig and J .P.

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Moreland. We had a lot of lively conversations and disagreements about things like free will and divine sovereignty.

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And Molinism? Yeah, Molinism, all those long, long conversations.

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And it was a great place to learn how to exegete scripture, and also be schooled in the ways of analytical philosophy and know what's going on in some of those conversations, so that you can actually bring them together in meaningful ways without budging an inch on biblical orthodoxy.

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And so that's a legacy that my Biola undergraduate and master's education left me.

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And it was a joy about seven years ago to start teaching in an adjunct capacity, systematic theology classes, a class called

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Foundations of Christian Thought, which is kind of an introduction to worldview, what are the big questions of metaphysics and epistemology and ethics, and how do we think in God -centered ways about all those big questions.

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So three and a half years ago, they brought me on as a full -timer, so I am now an associate professor of systematic theology teaching.

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Those are my primary classes, Foundations of Christian Thought, an Introduction to a God -Centered Worldview, and Theology I, Theology II, which are our go -to required systematic theology classes for all 6 ,000

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Biola students, and then an evangelism class on the side. How do we fulfill the

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Great Commission and do so winsomely without compromising the historic gospel once we're all entrusted with the saints?

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You just said our next topic. That's what our topic will be. That's a perfect topic. Well, there you go.

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Perfect transition. Look at that. And I'm sorry I interrupted you, but I had to make sure before that left my mind,

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I wanted to say that that sounded like a perfect topic to address. Yeah, yeah. I'm happy to.

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And the only other class I teach there is a theology of Abraham Kuyper. It's kind of an upper -division elective looking at the great

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Calvinist statesman, theologian, philosopher, Kuyper, and how he, you know, his most famous statement, that there's not a single square inch in the whole terrain of human existence over which

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Jesus, who is sovereign over all, doesn't declare mine. It's all his.

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And so I have a whole class exploring how the sovereignty of Jesus relates to art and politics and science and you name it.

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And let's, for our second interview after this, talk about Abraham Kuyper. Very important figure in history.

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And a controversial figure because there are elements of his belief that many Reformed people have a disagreement with him on.

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So it would be interesting and also fascinating testimony of him becoming a born -again believer after he was already a pastor and having been evangelized by an elderly woman,

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I believe, in his congregation. Yeah. And the Reverend Buzz Taylor has something to say. Yeah, did I hear somewhere in that bio mentioned, was it

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Lebray or... Lebray in Switzerland. In Switzerland, yes. When were you there? I was there just a couple weeks ago, actually, for a lecture on exactly what we're going to be talking about today, the creativity of Jesus, how to mirror his artistic genius.

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I was at the Dutch branch, which was great. It was the first time I was able to bring the whole family out and give them an experience of Schaeffer's legacy firsthand.

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I went as a student of Lebray in 2001. I came back to a lecture in 2002 and completely tanked, probably the worst lecture of my career.

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And so they had me back a year later, I guess, to redeem myself. And yeah,

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I came back 2003 as a lecturer, again, 2005, 2010, and just recently last month.

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Well, yeah, since you were totally leaving it up to our imagination about your age, I wasn't sure if you were there with Francis Schaeffer or not.

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The sound of his voice, can't you easily tell he's a young person? I mean, when you speak, you could be 100 or so.

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It's the same 40s, you know, just threw me way off. That was a joke. That was, I know, but he left no indication where he actually was.

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Well, put it this way, I used to hang out with Abraham Kuyper. Yeah.

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A totally different Abraham Kuyper. It's a guy that runs a dry cleaning business, right? Yeah. Great guy, great guy, great name.

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Um, and it might also interest our listeners to know that you have a connection with a very dear friend of mine, going back to 1995,

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Dr. James R. White of Alpha Omega Ministries, and it has something to do with your former employment with the

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Christian Research Institute. Yeah, I used to be a researcher, that was my first real full -time job, back in the late 90s as a researcher for the

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Christian Research Institute. James would show up to our campus here in Southern California, maybe once or twice a year, and we struck up a friendship there.

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I had just written a tiny book called Is Your God Too Small? That was an introduction to the doctrines of grace.

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And here I am, this, you know, 19, 20 -year -old punk, handing James White this little booklet, would you give it a read, and maybe endorse it?

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And he fired right back, I think a day later, he emailed me an endorsement.

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The original version was, and I quote, this book made Norman Geisler spit his milk.

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Did you say that James wrote that? Yes. I'm not sure how he'd feel about me sharing that on the air.

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Oh, he's, I'm sure. It was a joke endorsement, and then he came back with a real endorsement a day later.

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Well, I hope that you realize that James White, before he met me, and he actually will say this very often in public, he was devoid of all humor until he met me.

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There you go. He was just a dry, dusty, nerdy theologian before he met me.

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Then I began to corrupt his morals and all that. But he, yeah, that's always a shame when brilliant men like Norman Geisler can be so far off on an important issue like the doctrines of grace, and even on ecumenism with Rome, which he is very much a part of, famously saying that the

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Church of Rome is not a false church with some truth, it's a true church with some falsehood.

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And that is, I don't think he could be farther from the truth on that. Yeah, I think Norm, I met him as a maybe 14 -year -old, brand -new, just -regenerate

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Christian, and the Lord used him to turn me on to apologetics and theology.

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He gave a lecture on the problem of evil, and now I disagree with probably 80 % of his conclusions about the problem of evil and how to solve it.

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But he was used, through Providence, to really turn me on to studying deeper, taking my faith more seriously, and loving

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God with my mind. But I have noticed, you know, his book Chosen but Free from,

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I guess that was over 10 years ago now, is a fascinating case study in what happens when, instead of starting with Scripture and letting

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Scripture be our presupposition that shapes our whole worldview, what happens if you approach

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Scripture with a set of goggles on, that you already have some presuppositions that you bring to the text?

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And in Norm's case, and again I have great respect for the man, but he presupposes a libertarian account of free will, and then wears that like colored shade as he approaches

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Scripture. And I'm convinced that what that leads to is a drastically diminished

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God, undermines his sovereignty. And so I interact in my first full book,

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Love, Freedom, and Evil, I interact with Geisler's theology quite a bit, and exploring it as a case study in what happens when you bring some presupposition foreign to the text of Scripture to the

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Scripture, how that can have an effect in warping your theology in all sorts of ways.

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Yeah, some of the folks who are non -reformed and anti -reformed, and obviously

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Dr. Geisler would be in the anti -reformed category even though he has categorized himself as a moderate

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Calvinist, which most, I think, non - and anti -reformed people do, unless you're a real extremist who attempts to condemn all of it.

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But there seems to be a lopsidedness between philosophy and theology where, for some reason, the philosophical approach to understanding the

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Bible far outweighs the theological approach. Am I off base there? I think you're spot on, and let me take it just beyond the free will debate for a second.

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You know, in the free will debate, if you assume, if you make all kinds of assumptions philosophically, like one case in point would be if you erase a creator -creature distinction, we talked about this a little bit last time when

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I was on the air, that if I tried to guarantee your love for me and I snuck into your house and installed a computer chip that forced you to love me, so you wake up and like a robot, you know,

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I love Thaddeus, I love Thaddeus, it wouldn't be authentic love. And so we project that same creaturely limitation into the sky and say, well

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God, if he was going to guarantee our love response, he's confined like we are.

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The only way he could conceivably do that is by short -circuiting or bypassing our willpower, our humanness.

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He can only reduce us to a robot if he's going to evoke a genuine love response. And it's that kind of philosophical presupposition of projecting our limitations as creatures onto the creator that makes

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Arminianism seem plausible. So there, philosophically, it's very subtle the way it happens.

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You start with all kinds of unquestioned, unbiblical presuppositions and those get projected into the sky.

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Well, a more contemporary example that I was just thinking about this morning, I've been working on an article for the

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Journal of Christian Legal Thought, and the article I've been working on all morning is exploring some of the controversies swirling around our culture regarding the redefinition of marriage, just this strange political moment we find ourselves in.

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And one of the articles that I'm interacting with was just recently published in the

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Washington Post by someone speaking about Biola University, saying, look, they're claiming to love the

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LGBTQ community, but it's not love, because they're still holding to essentially what has been the historic position of the

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Christian Church since its inception. Now if you take just the headline there, you know,

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Christians are claiming to love, but they're actually being hateful bigots. And you just peel away the layers of what's going on.

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And by the way, the author for the Washington Post article is claiming to be a

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Christian, claiming fidelity to the scriptures. But here's how subtle this happens. If you assume that love means accepting people just as they are, accepting their desires, their self -professed identity, taking that at face value, then it is unloving on that worldview foundation to call homosexuality a sin.

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If, on the other hand, you are starting with biblical presuppositions where love doesn't just say, the way you are, don't change, biblical love that says, we're broken, we need help, we need redemption, we need grace, then love becomes something else altogether.

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It's not, I'm content with you having, being who you are right now. It says,

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I love you, and because I love you so much, I am relentlessly committed to your flourishing, your development, the maximization of your deepest joy.

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And so, in other words, love isn't a neutral term. We're going to dump all kinds of worldview baggage into that word, and it comes down to, you know, bringing

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Kuyper back into the conversation. Abraham Kuyper, in his lectures on Calvinism, has a very helpful and relevant distinction between what he calls a normalist view of reality, which is to say, the way we find ourselves now with all of our desires is normal, it's intended, it's the way it should be, so all of our desires should be celebrated and accepted.

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He says that is a core dogma of modernism. But then he says, in a biblical worldview, a biblical worldview is an abnormalist worldview.

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It would say, our desires are fallen, our emotions aren't sacred, unquestionable, and sacrosanct, we're in need of redemption.

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And so that deeper worldview question, are we normalists or abnormalists about human nature?

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Do we think we're perfect just the way we are, or we're broken and need grace? How you answer that fundamental question is now going to shape how you define love and what it means to actually love the

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LGBTQ community. And I'm all for that community getting radical expressions of love from the

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Christian community, but how we define love is going to have everything to do with how much credence we give to the authoritative

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Word of God. Yes, our modern society has turned a song by Mr.

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Rogers into their gospel, which is, I like you as you are, I wouldn't want to change you or even rearrange you.

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I like you as you are, I like you as you are, I like you like you as you are.

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And is that a love? It's a little pitchy the way you sing it, but yeah, you're right on point.

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And of course, when you find out that a precious loved one is a heroin addict, or a methamphetamine addict, or a drunkard, or doing something else like that, that hey, they think that that gives them pleasure.

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If they're not hurting anybody else, why not just love them like that and let them make their own choices?

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Because to violate or try to redirect their choices or get them to totally reverse their choices and their actions is, oh, that's unloving.

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And of course, nobody brings up the fact, or very few people, at least very few of the liberals or leftists bring up the fact, why doesn't that also go for the reverse as far as the homosexual's view of evangelical

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Christianity? Why is that not hate, that they disagree with our theology and philosophy and might even equate it to the

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Nazis or something horrific, which is absolutely absurd and ridiculous? But they really are playing a double standard there.

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Yeah, I mean, take Rosaria Butterfield. She has a very powerful story of realizing that she had been convinced by culture and the subculture that she was living in that her sexual attraction, her same -sex attraction, defined her core identity.

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And it was through a neighbor who loved Jesus and his wife, loving her, opening their home to her, having her around their dinner table, and clarifying the gospel to her that it became apparent she had bought into a fundamental lie about who she was, which is a lie that's just rampant in our culture, that the lie that says who

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I want to have sex with is a fundamental, core, immutable characteristic of my identity.

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And once Butterfield came to realize, I have a deeper identity, I am loved by, redeemed by, was died for by Jesus, that was a game -changer for her.

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Now her story, and now she's happily married and has children and is thriving and flourishing, that story is heresy by today's dominant narrative.

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It's strictly verboten. It's hateful and bigoted by definition. And so you're right, to be consistent, we'd have to celebrate that narrative too, but because it doesn't fit the mainstream narrative, she's, you know, branded as a heretic, you know, the same way a

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Salem witch would have been hunted back in the day. It's similar now under the new dominant ideology.

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If anybody would like to listen to the interviews that I conducted with Rosaria Butterfield, you could go to the

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Iron Trip and Zion Radio website. I'm starting to talk like Elmer Fudd. I don't understand what's happening to me.

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The Iron Sharpens Iron Radio website, ironsharpensironradio .com, ironsharpensironradio .com,

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and go to the archive in the top right corner of the page and you can type in Butterfield, it's spelt just like it sounds,

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Butterfield into this search engine and you will come up with, I believe I interviewed her twice.

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I definitely at least interviewed her twice. I can't remember right now if I interviewed her three times or not. But excellent interviews and the

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Reverend Buzz Taylor has something to say. Well, yeah, I just wanted to give a little verbal underscore because I believe that what we heard in the last five minutes was probably worth the price of the entire program, if I can put it that way, that we go from scripture...

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All right, you can leave now, Buzz. Well, Chris, I didn't get to the second part of it yet.

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Okay. But we go from scripture to life and not the reverse. And I was going to say, everything in the last five minutes was perfect until Chris started singing.

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I think I made a valid point, though, didn't I? But, you know... You can get auto -tune technology for relatively cheap these days.

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But, you know, you were mentioning just before that about, you know, how, I mean, I have really,

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I've talked to a lot of people about the doctrines of grace, as you can imagine, and that excuse that they give about, well, that would make me a robot, has been, like, the number one way out ahead of all its rivals.

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Going back to Norman Geisler, you mean? Was that his saying? I believe he had said a very similar thing.

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Everybody says that, so, you know, I don't know who got originally credited for it, but here, see, this is the way my mind works.

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What did they say before robots were invented? That's a good question.

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I had a Roman Catholic friend of mine tell me during a, this, my friend, and perhaps he's listening,

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I hope he is, Robert Posch, who actually can be credited for being the spark that created the annual great debates that I conducted with James R.

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White of Alpha Omega Ministries on Long Island between Protestants and Catholics, because Robert Posch, a

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Roman Catholic, used to invite people over his home, both Catholic and Protestant, purposely so that they would sit around, eat, drink, and argue.

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He just really got off on that very much, and it was, I thought it was invigorating.

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I had a great time, and Bob and I were usually the only two left still going back and forth arguing over our religion, and Bob said to me, your religion, your

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Calvinistic religion turns men into robots. And I said, how?

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He said, well, if you don't have the freedom to either accept or reject

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Christ, you are a robot. So I said, okay, what is your greatest goal in life?

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He said, well, eventually to be in heaven. I said, okay, can you reject

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Christ in heaven? Of course not. So your greatest goal in life is to be a robot? And after pausing for a few moments, he actually said, maybe you can reject

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Christ in heaven, rather than admit that he was in a corner. But even more proving or telling that that definition is false, what about God himself?

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Is God just a cosmic robot because he cannot sin? Because he cannot violate his nature and character?

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Does that make him a robot? Yeah. But anyway, we're going to the first break of the day, and when we come back, we will start launching into Create, Mirroring the

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Artistic Genius of Jesus. If anybody would like to join us on the air, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com.

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C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com. Please give us your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence, if you live outside of the good old

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USA. Don't go away. God willing, we will be right back right after these messages with Thaddeus J.

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Iron Sharpens Iron Radio Welcome back.

33:16

This is Chris Sorensen. If you just tuned us in, our guest today for the full two hours with a little less than 90 minutes to go is

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Thaddeus Williams. We are discussing the theme Create, Mirroring the Artistic Genius of Jesus, which happens to be a chapter out of his book,

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Reflect, Becoming Yourself by Mirroring the Greatest Person in History. If you would like to join us on the air with a question of your own, our email address is chrissorensen at gmail .com,

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chrissorensen at gmail .com. And if you could give our listeners, who missed the first two interviews we did on that book,

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Reflect, just so we could get a summary and an overview of that book, so we know the context from which this chapter is being extracted for our discussion today.

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Tell us about Reflect. Sure. So the premise is the idea that everybody worships.

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You know, we tend to think, we build these categories. You have the theists versus the atheists, people who believe in God and people who don't.

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And I begin the whole book questioning that and saying, well, when I look at Stalin's Russia, which started what they called the

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League of Militant Atheists, when you actually study that, they weren't really that atheistic because they just moved their ultimate devotion from God to Lord Stalin.

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Stalin became their new supreme deity, the one who demanded unquestioning obedience.

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When you look at the French revolutionaries who were trying to make a clean break with religion, these are the same guys who hired a 14 -year -old actress named

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Mademoiselle Candé to dress up as the goddess of reason. And they marched her down the

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Seine River into Notre Dame Cathedral and sang hymns to their new goddess of reason. And so there's this idea that we are religious to our core.

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It's part of human nature to worship something bigger than yourself. And so I go beyond that to say not only are we all worshipers, not only are we all on our knees to something, you know,

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G .K. Chesterton said it well when he said, if you abolish God, the government becomes

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God. You know, he's picking up on this theme that's very relevant today, that if you refuse the gospel of Jesus Christ, you don't end up in some nebulous secular space, you deify the government, you deify your own emotions, you deify science with a capital

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S. We're all on our knees to something. And so in Reflect, I'm exploring how those different deities shape us for better or worse.

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Because if you look at Psalm 115 is a good case in point where it talks about ancient idolatry, and it says that those who worship idols become just as dumb as their idols, they become just as senseless, just as soulless as their idols.

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And so it's this biblical idea that not only are we all worshiping, we're all slowly in the process of becoming like what or who we worship.

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So parents who worship their kids, their whole identity is wrapped up in their kids, they tend to become more childish, they slowly lack the authority and wisdom that goes with being a grown -up and a parent.

36:58

Lovers who worship their romantic partner lose themselves and become their romantic partner's unimaginative clone.

37:06

They lose their own identity in the relationship. Consumers who worship products become more plastic and manufactured.

37:13

And so I'm asking the question, if we don't just claim to worship Jesus, but we're actually worshiping

37:20

Jesus, we should be becoming more like him. We should resemble

37:25

Christ in meaningful ways. And so the whole book is structured around that. If we're really worshiping

37:31

Jesus and not just claiming to, how will that affect our intellectual lives? How will we start to cultivate the intellectual virtues of Jesus?

37:40

If we're really worshiping Jesus and not just claiming to, how will that reshape our emotional lives, the stuff that gets our blood boiling, the stuff that we enjoy, the stuff that breaks our hearts?

37:51

If we're really worshiping Jesus, how is that going to reshape our actions? How is it going to impact our relationships?

37:58

And in the chapter we're talking about today, how is it going to affect our imaginations?

38:03

How is it going to impact our creative lives? And so that's really the premise of the book.

38:09

If we're worshiping Jesus, we'll become like him. What does that mean for our intellects, our emotions, our imaginations, and everything else?

38:17

Well, thank you for that summary. And I am going to a question from a listener that is off our specific topic, but I will ask it nonetheless before we get into the heart of what we really intended to talk about.

38:35

Sure. Gordy in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania says, how would you respond to noted open theist author

38:42

Greg Boyd's assertion that if God knows what a particular person is going to do in the future, then that person is not truly free to make self -determining choices?

38:52

God's foreknowledge is held to be at odds with human freedom.

38:58

Yeah, great question. I interact quite a bit with Greg Boyd in my first book,

39:07

Love, Freedom, and Evil. And one of the things I highlight in Boyd's work is he commits exactly the same fallacy we were describing before the brick.

39:20

He takes creaturely limitations and then projects them into the sky on God.

39:27

And so an example of that when he's describing Calvinism, the caricature that he draws is if God were to exercise sovereign grace and evoke our love response, guarantee our love response by altering the core of our being in the language of Ezekiel 36 to pull the stone out of our chest and replace it with a heart that beats for him.

40:00

If God were to do that, according to Boyd, he gives the example of what it would be like for him,

40:06

Greg Boyd, a creature, a finite creature, a creation, for him to sneak into his bedroom and implant that love software in his wife's brain.

40:19

And he says, look, if I were to do that so that, you know, Mrs. Boyd woke up and had an automatic, technologically guaranteed love response to me,

40:29

I would have nullified the relationship. It wouldn't be real love anymore.

40:37

And so the way Boyd compares himself to God in a scenario like that is very telling.

40:45

It tells us a lot about his theology and his epistemology, his view of knowledge.

40:51

He's defining the scope of what God can do based on the scope of what Greg Boyd can do.

40:57

Since Greg Boyd can't guarantee the love response of his wife without dehumanizing his wife, therefore

41:03

God can't guarantee our love response without reducing us to robots or chatty

41:10

Cathy dolls. And so I think that's one of the core problems in Boyd's entire open theist system is his starting point.

41:20

He's starting again, not with scripture, with the creator -creature distinction. He's blurring that distinction and then projecting his limitations upward onto God.

41:32

So in a human context, if I could guarantee what you would do tomorrow, the only way

41:40

I can guarantee what you do tomorrow is by short -circuiting your free will somehow, by overriding that, by becoming some kind of tyrant and controlling you.

41:52

And so if you start again with the creature defines limitations and then project that into the sky, then the only way

42:01

God could know the future is if he reduces us to robots. And so my core objection to that is

42:08

Boyd isn't starting with scripture. He's projecting himself up into the sky in a way that erases the creator -creature distinction.

42:18

Well, thank you, Gordy. And guess what? You have won a free copy of the book

42:24

Reflect, Becoming Yourself by Mirroring the Greatest Person in History by our guest

42:29

Thaddeus Williams. And I know you live close by to Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service.

42:34

So you could pick that up at any time since Mechanicsburg is only about 10 minutes away, saving our friends

42:41

Todd and Patty Jennings of Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service the shipping cost. So thanks a lot for contributing to today's program with your question.

42:51

And someone not so close to Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, all the way in Slovenia, we have

42:59

Joe in Slovenia who says, thanks for having the brilliant brother Thaddeus... I almost lost my track here.

43:08

Thanks for having the brilliant brother Thaddeus back for this great topic. My question is, what, if any, relationship is there between the regulative principle of worship and mirroring

43:20

Jesus's creative genius? Would adherence to the regulative principle stifle legitimate creativity in worship?

43:29

Should we even consider attempting creativity in worship? If so, what would be the proper limits of our creativity in worship?

43:36

In general, how would mirroring Jesus's creative genius relate to worship? That's a very good question, because you're going to get different answers, even from people who claim to all agree on the regulative principle.

43:50

But anyway, if you could, and perhaps you could define the regulative principle first and then respond to Joe in Slovenia's question.

43:58

Sure. So the regulative principle, as I understand it, as articulated by some of my theological heroes like J .I.

44:06

Packer, is the idea that scripture, because it's authoritative, defines the proper scope of not only that we should worship, but how we should worship.

44:21

So if I want to... let's see, what would be a good example? Liturgical dance.

44:28

Flag dance in the local congregation, or some interpretive dance that is going to be an act of worship, then it raises the question, well, is my flag dancing and interpretive dancing, is that consistent with how scripture clarifies the ways in which

44:51

God wants to be worshipped, the way God commands us to worship him? So Chris, help me out.

44:57

Is that pretty close? Am I approximating the idea of the regulative principle? Don't go above and beyond scripture in your forms of worship, because scripture is the standard.

45:07

You want to stick to the forms spelled out explicitly in scripture. Is there anything you would add to that? Yes, that the

45:14

Christians that would adhere to the regulative principle of worship would say that the

45:21

New Testament typically is the blueprint for how we worship, because obviously we are not to import things that were unique to the worship of the

45:36

Israelites in the temple and so forth that are now to be done away with.

45:42

In fact, you would have many Reformed people who adhere to the regulative principle of denouncing as heresy if someone were to incorporate some of those items that are clearly fulfilled completely in Christ and not to be repeated in the

45:59

New Testament. So this would be strictly a New Testament use of the scripture, or the application of only the

46:11

New Testament, not really the Old. Yeah, I think that's a helpful qualifier there.

46:18

So what I would say is within the boundaries of the regulative principle, let's say that that includes singing,

46:32

How Great Thou Art. Let's say that that includes singing, Be Thou My Vision. Let's say that includes singing,

46:39

Fairest Lord Jesus. And I think any Reformed thinker, any

46:44

Christian for that matter, would say that's in bounds. Singing hymns to the

46:50

Lord and spiritual songs is commanded by Paul and Ephesians. It fits with the regulative principle.

46:57

Actually, the exclusive psalmists would disagree with you on that. Okay. Those who agree, those who believe in the exclusive...

47:04

We can have on another show. ...exclusive psalms. I'm not sure how much of your listenership falls into that category.

47:11

We definitely have some. We definitely have some. ...modest point that you could sing

47:16

Amazing Grace without being a damnable heretic. Let's start there.

47:26

There's the question of the quality with which you're bringing that praise unto the

47:33

Lord. And so part of what I'm arguing in Reflect, in the chapter on creativity, is if you look at the resurrection of Jesus, one of the many things that the resurrection teaches us is that matter matters to God.

47:54

Matter matters to God. If matter didn't matter, if we were gnostics, then

47:59

Jesus could have died. He could have been crucified physically. And then just stayed dead.

48:05

His body could have decomposed in the tomb. And his spirit could have just floated off through a portal in the sky.

48:14

He could have gone off to some spiritual dimension. But the fact that, if you read

48:19

Luke's account, they go to the tomb, and the tomb is empty, tells us that if we're thinking in line with the history of the

48:29

Christian church on this, Jesus resurrected not as an idea, not as a hologram that you could wave your hand through, not as an inspirational ethic, but Jesus resurrected physically.

48:42

He resurrected bodily. The tomb was empty. Now one of the implications I draw from that in the book is that, because Jesus resurrected not as a ghost, but physically, it's

48:53

God's confirmation of what he said at the very beginning of Scripture.

48:59

After making matter, after forming the material world out of his creative genius, God says, it is good, it is good, it is good, you know, six times at the end of every creation day.

49:11

And the resurrection just reinforces that fact, that it is good. The material world matters to God.

49:19

So to get back to the question from Joe in Slovenia, because matter matters to God in a

49:27

Christian worldview, that ought to be reflected in how we abide by the regulative principle.

49:32

So if I'm up there with a hunk of wood and six steel strings against an acoustic guitar, and I don't care if they're in tune,

49:46

I don't care if they sound good, I start singing off -key, like Chris did earlier in his rendition of Mr.

49:54

Budden, I'm sorry, I couldn't resist, I couldn't resist. You know, the physical components of worship, whether you're pounding on a pipe organ, or strumming a guitar, or just vocalizing, it matters that all the material components of worship matter, because matter matters to God, as proven not only by Genesis 1, but by the resurrection accounts.

50:22

And so more of what I'm arguing in the chapter is, if we're really worshiping and becoming like Jesus, matter will matter to us.

50:30

It means there will be a higher quality of our arts, there will be a higher quality of our music, because we aren't just singing some pop tune, some top 40 hits, we're singing to the creator, maker, and redeemer of the universe, and you trivialize that God to the extent that you don't make matter matter, you don't make the material components of your music, of your worship, meaningful.

51:00

And so in that sense, I'm just going straight back to Bach, Johann Sebastian Bach, the great

51:06

German composer who loved Jesus, and at the bottom of every score, he wrote

51:13

SDG, which many of your listeners will immediately recognize as shorthand for Soli Deo Gloria.

51:21

This is the same Bach who said, and I quote, the aim and final end of all music is the glory of God.

51:29

And so what I'm arguing in the book is that if we're really doing it for the glory of God, that'll be reflected in the quality of art coming out of our worship.

51:40

So all that to say, I think my case in the book is very consistent with the regulative principle.

51:46

It's not so much a question of whether we apply the regulative principle as much as a question of how we apply it in a way that reflects the glory of God.

51:55

Yes, and one other thing that I failed to add, I guess, to the definition, is that those who adhere to the regulative principle typically believe that silence in the

52:08

New Testament marks a prohibition, whereas many other Christians who do not adhere to the regulative principle view silence as a liberty or as an open door for liberty and more creativity and personal opinion in regard to what is going on in the worship service, as long as the things that are commanded aren't absent or violated, they would view the silence in the

52:35

New Testament as giving more of a wide spectrum of possibilities.

52:43

Yeah, yeah, that's part of the debate. And we are going to our midway break right now. If you'd like to join us on the air, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com,

52:52

chrisarnsen at gmail .com, c -h -r -i -s -a -r -n -z -e -n at gmail .com.

52:58

Please give us your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside of the USA.

53:05

And please only remain anonymous if it makes you feel more comfortable. Don't go away. We're going to be right back at bowling right after these messages with Thaddeus J.

53:13

Williams and our subject at hand, creativity. One sure way all

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Paul wrote to the church at Galatia, For am I now seeking the approval of man, or of God? Or am

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I trying to please man? If I were still trying to please man, I would not be a servant of Christ. Hi, I'm Mark Lukens, Pastor of Providence Baptist Church.

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We strive to reflect Paul's mindset to be much more concerned with how God views what we say and what we do than how men view these things.

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That's not the best recipe for popularity, but since that wasn't the Apostle's priority, it must not be ours either.

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We believe by God's grace that we are called to demonstrate love and compassion to our fellow man, and to be vessels of Christ's mercy to a lost and hurting community around us, and to build up the body of Christ in truth and love.

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If you live near Norfolk, Massachusetts, or plan to visit our area, please come and join us for worship and fellowship.

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You can call us at 508 -528 -5750. That's 508 -528 -5750.

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Or go to our website to email us, listen to past sermons, worship songs, or watch our

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01:01:35

Welcome back. This is Chris Arns. If you just tuned us in, our guest today for the full two hours, with about an hour to go, is

01:01:41

Thaddeus Williams. And we are discussing the theme, Create, Mirroring the

01:01:46

Artistic Genius of Jesus. If you'd like to join us on the air with a question of your own, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com.

01:01:54

C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com. And please give us at least your first name, your city and state and country of residence if you live outside the

01:02:01

USA and only remain anonymous if it's about a personal and private matter over which you are asking.

01:02:07

And by the way, Joe in Slovenia, you already won the copy of Reflect, Becoming Yourself by Mirroring the

01:02:16

Greatest Person in History when we first interviewed Thaddeus a number of months ago.

01:02:24

So these books today are only for people who have not yet won the book, but I really appreciate your submitting a question anyway.

01:02:33

And always keep listening to Spreading the Word About and praying for Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. And please continue to introduce the program to your

01:02:42

Slovenian friends, neighbors, and loved ones. And before we return to our topic at hand, we do have some important announcements to make.

01:02:53

The Word of Truth Church in Farmingville, Long Island, New York, in cooperation with Long Island Spurgeon Fellowship, present the

01:03:00

Gospel of the Reformation, a 500th anniversary at the Word of Truth Church in Farmingville.

01:03:06

And the speakers include my dear friend Dr. Tony Costa, who is Professor of Apologetics and Islam at Toronto Baptist Seminary, and also some local pastors there on Long Island, including

01:03:20

Pastor Caleb Bunch, Pastor Bruce Bennett, and Pastor Dave Corson. If you would like to register for this, it's free of charge, and there will be an offering taken, but they would like to know how many people approximately intend to go to this event beforehand.

01:03:38

So if you'd like to register, go to wotchurch .com, wotchurch .com, that's

01:03:44

W -O -T standing for Word of Truth, church .com, or you could call 631 -806 -0614, 631 -806 -0614.

01:03:55

The very following day, my friend Dr. Tony Costa, who I just mentioned from Toronto Baptist Seminary, will also be speaking at the

01:04:02

Sunday morning worship service. That's October 1st at 11 a .m.

01:04:07

at Hope Reformed Baptist Church of Medford, Long Island, New York. And for more details on Hope Reformed Baptist Church of Medford, you can go to hopereformedli .net.

01:04:18

That's hopereformedli standing for longisland .net. And then after that, coming up in November from the 17th through the 18th, the

01:04:26

Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals is conducting their annual Quaker Town Conference on Reform Theology on the theme,

01:04:35

For Still Our Ancient Foe, a reference to Satan from that classic

01:04:40

Reformation hymn by Martin Luther, A Mighty Fortress. And I don't know if anybody of you saw the excellent documentary last night on PBS, amazing that PBS aired it, known for their liberal slant, very leftist slant, but it was a very accurate and wonderful documentary on Martin Luther.

01:05:01

I highly urge you to look for that perhaps on YouTube or somewhere else where it might be available. But even though there was a

01:05:08

Roman Catholic Archbishop Timothy Dolan and others that were not quite theologically

01:05:15

Orthodox participating, and one phenomenally Orthodox and wonderful brother who participated was

01:05:23

Dr. Carl Truman of Westminster Seminary, but all of the participants, even

01:05:28

Archbishop Timothy Dolan, stuck to the actual documentable facts of history.

01:05:36

So it was really an excellent documentary, but I digress. If you would like to register for the

01:05:43

For Still Our Ancient Foe conference, November 17th through the 18th at the Grace Bible Fellowship Church in Quakertown, Pennsylvania, go to alliancenet .org,

01:05:53

alliancenet .org, click on events, and then click on Quakertown Conference on Reform Theology.

01:05:59

And just to let you know, speakers include Kent Hughes, Peter Jones, Tom Nettles, Dennis Cahill, and Scott Oliphant. That's the

01:06:05

Quakertown Conference on Reform Theology. Go to alliancenet .org for more details.

01:06:10

And then coming up in January from the 17th through the 20th, the G3 Conference returns to Atlanta, Georgia, the

01:06:16

G3 standing for Grace, Gospel, and Glory. And the theme is Knowing God, a

01:06:22

Biblical Understanding of Discipleship. Speakers include Stephen Lawson, Votie Baucom, Phil Johnson, Keith Getty, H .B.

01:06:29

Charles Jr., Tim Challies, Josh Bice, James R. White, Tom Askell, Anthony Methenia, Michael Kruger, David Miller, Paul Tripp, Todd Friel, Derek Thomas, Martha Peace, and Justin Peters.

01:06:41

If you would like to register for that event, go to g3conference .com. g3conference .com.

01:06:47

And please, if you go to any of these websites or contact these organizations, please let them know that you heard about their events from Chris Arnzen on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.

01:06:57

And now comes that discomforting time of my show where I have to rattle my tin cup and beg you for money.

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I thank God that after a dry spell of a couple of weeks, there are some checks that have begun to come our way just recently once again.

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01:09:19

Getting distracted here because I'm starting to get questions coming in. And we would love to speak to you about that very soon.

01:09:28

And that's the same address or email address, I should say, where you can send in a question to Thaddeus Williams regarding our topic today, which is

01:09:36

Create Mirroring the Artistic Genius of Jesus. Our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com.

01:09:41

chrisarnsen at gmail .com. Thaddeus, we just completed a brief discussion due to the question of our listener in Slovenia about the regulative principle.

01:10:01

This issue of creativity is one where we would be in sin if God did not, or should

01:10:11

I say, if we did not use the gifts that God has given us.

01:10:17

If we were to let the gifts and the creativity that God has given us lie dormant and do nothing with it, that would be a sin.

01:10:28

You would be squandering a gift that God has given you, and you would be depriving others of the blessing that you would otherwise be giving them through your creativity.

01:10:39

And at the same time, there is that two -edged sword that to be overly creative, and people are overly creative very often, not only in regards to the way they worship, but even if it's according to their theology and their philosophy of the

01:10:53

Christian life and of what the Scriptures teach, they can become very creative.

01:10:59

Tell us about that two -edged sword, about not going to either of those extremes.

01:11:06

Sure. I think it all comes back to the image of God. In the opening chapters of the entire

01:11:14

Bible, the first time we meet God in Scripture, the first line of the

01:11:21

Bible is, in the beginning, God created. And so our first exposure to who

01:11:30

God is, is God as creative in Genesis 1 .1. And then by the time you move through the first two chapters of Scripture, this creative God, the

01:11:42

God who thinks up sunsets, the God who thinks up rainbows, the God who thinks up ladybugs, the

01:11:48

God who thinks up supernovas in space and space nebula and the iris of the moon, the

01:11:55

God who could have made everything just as an engineer.

01:12:02

You know, God could have made everything from a purely functional vantage point of how do

01:12:09

I make this efficient. He decides to add things into the universe that seemingly have no functional value.

01:12:20

And the way I explain it in the book is God could have created a brown topia where the entire universe is brown.

01:12:29

Rainbows are just brown on brown on brown on brown. Oranges would be called browns in that universe.

01:12:36

Everything is just monochrome. But God decides to add beauty for beauty's sake.

01:12:43

He decides to create a color spectrum for beauty's sake. He decides to create sunsets for beauty's sake.

01:12:51

Things that don't have any efficiency in the calculations of an engineer, they don't seem to pay off.

01:13:00

And so God cares about beauty. He always has. In the book,

01:13:06

I talk about James Spiegel, who's a scholar who's trying to exegete the benedictions of Genesis 1 and 2.

01:13:17

When God is saying it is good, he's not making a moral statement. It's not good in the way that, you know, little

01:13:25

Johnny ate his green beans and listened to mommy, so Johnny's a good boy. It's not a moral statement.

01:13:31

It's not a prudential statement. When God is saying it is good at the end of every creation day, he's making an aesthetic declaration.

01:13:40

It is good. It's like being in a symphony. It's like going to a great concert.

01:13:47

It's like walking through an astounding museum, and somebody asks you, how was it?

01:13:52

And you say, it is good. It was good. It's more of an aesthetic declaration like that.

01:13:59

And so I think that's the starting point of what I'm up to in the book, is this biblical idea that God cares about beauty for beauty's sake.

01:14:09

And so if we worship that God, if we take his culture mandate seriously, you know, in Genesis 1 and 2, after God has made all this stuff, and he passes the mantle to humanity and says, okay,

01:14:24

I made this stuff, now go make stuff. Now go have dominion over creation. Then creativity isn't some tertiary or peripheral point in a

01:14:35

Christian worldview. It's part of what it means to be an image bearer. So in the chapter, I'm really unpacking what that means.

01:14:42

How do we make beauty as worshipers of a God who makes beauty?

01:14:49

And the Reverend Buzz Taylor has something to say. As a musician, I understand a lot of what you're saying here.

01:14:57

Of course, one of the things that I strive for as a trumpet player is that when

01:15:03

I'm performing, I want the best possible sound coming out of my horn that I can produce. Now, one of the things that, of course, we want to remember in worship is that we don't want to draw attention to ourselves.

01:15:17

But on the other hand, if, as we would say, you know, with Bach in agreement, all the goal of all music is the glory of God.

01:15:26

How do you, how can you decipher between excellence and drawing attention to oneself?

01:15:35

Yeah, that's a tricky question. I don't know that I have a one -size -fits -all answer.

01:15:43

Because it's going to look different in different mediums. Let me just throw out a few thoughts, you know, underneath the specifics of you're playing your trumpet.

01:15:56

Here's the details. Let me get to some of the issues behind the issues and maybe it'll help. So as I was saying before the break, because God calls creation good, you know, before the fall,

01:16:10

Genesis 1 and 2, matter matters. That's a first principle.

01:16:17

So what that means is paying attention to the sound waves coming out of your trumpet matters.

01:16:23

It's not just, well, the artistic component of worship is kind of a throwaway.

01:16:30

Let me just worship Jesus. No, how you achieve mastery over your instrument is part of your spiritual life.

01:16:39

It is part of you living the scriptures that say matter matters.

01:16:46

So I would say that that's a first principle that's proven not only by the opening chapters of scripture, but by the resurrection of Jesus, that matter matters.

01:16:56

And then when you look at the big picture of scripture towards the new heavens and the new earth, matter's going to matter there too, right?

01:17:04

It's not that Jesus resurrects spiritually so that our souls can escape material existence and go off and, you know, strum harps on some cloud in outer space.

01:17:19

Jesus is in the business of redeeming all of creation. You know, you see that in Roman date.

01:17:25

You see that in the book of Revelation with the new heavens and the new earth. And so I would say, don't just play trumpet for the sake of playing trumpet, but put that enjoyment and that talent in the context of the big picture of creation, fall, redemption, and consummation.

01:17:46

The second thing I would say there is if you look at a lot of what passes as Christian art, there's kind of a happy, clappy attitude about it that, well, if I'm playing for Jesus, it's gotta be, you know, this kind of one, four, five, all major progression where everything is happy all the time.

01:18:13

And I think in a biblical context, if you look at the kind of art

01:18:18

God makes, if you look at, let's put it in a Calvinist context, where God is the writer and director of human history,

01:18:29

God doesn't limit himself to major courts. He doesn't limit himself to kind of happy, clappy anthems.

01:18:37

God ordains all of history. And there's a whole lot of minor chords in that.

01:18:43

There's a whole lot of lowered thirds. There's a whole lot of, you know, power chords of the first and the fifth, kind of the angry, wrathful sound that God makes.

01:18:54

There's a whole range. And so I would say in your trumpeteering as you're a musician, take your cues from the kind of art

01:19:05

God makes that has that kind of layeredness that isn't limited to just the major happy, clappy version of Christianity, but that is willing to make minor chords and integrate dissonance and things that sound off -key, that that's all part of the kind of art

01:19:26

God makes as the sovereign script writer of history, as the sovereign author of Scripture.

01:19:34

There's all kinds of minor chords in Scripture. There's all kinds of dissonance in Scripture. There's all kinds of weird jazz chords that seem like non -sequiturs in Scripture.

01:19:46

God is able to integrate all of that into making beauty. And so I would encourage the caller with a question to develop a fully -orbed theology of creativity, taking our cues from the

01:20:02

God of Scripture. Actually, it was Buzz that asked that question, my co -host. In fact, before I go to another listener question,

01:20:11

I want to ask both of you something that is, I think, a good segue to that.

01:20:16

I'll start with you, Thaddeus. I don't know how often you may have experienced this personally,

01:20:24

I have on a number of occasions, where I will be visiting typically a very small church.

01:20:32

The congregation is very tiny, and it's typically a church that does not have a lot of finances.

01:20:41

But there's something about certain churches and certain Christians that believe, where on the one hand, you have churches.

01:20:51

In fact, I've been interviewing, and I have two more interviews to go. I've been interviewing my friend

01:20:57

John Price on his fascinating book, Old Light on New Worship, where he is taking a position of strict, exclusive a cappella worship without the use of musical instruments.

01:21:10

And he makes a case biblically, historically, and psychologically. But you have that on the one hand, but you seem to have these people who think that you have to have a musical instrument being played during a worship service, even if no one is remotely close to having any talent in doing that.

01:21:31

And I have visited churches like this, and it can be really distracting.

01:21:38

And it's like, you're not focused on worship because you feel so embarrassed for the person who's horribly playing that piano or whatever else they're playing.

01:21:48

I don't know if you've experienced this, but I say to myself, why on earth do you think that you have to have that instrument played even if nobody has talent to do so?

01:21:58

I mean, am I making sense? Or have you ever experienced that? Yeah, that makes perfect sense. I've heard there's three kinds of singers.

01:22:05

There's good singers, there's bad singers, and there's the worst kinds of singers who are bad singers who think they're good singers.

01:22:14

Yes. They sing badly, loudly. And in fact, just this last week,

01:22:21

I saw a clip of a church, who knows where it was, where the worship leader just went all out, off key in a way that made me curl up in fetal position and suck my thumb.

01:22:42

It was that bad. And so all that to say, I think there is a sense in which you can get too fixated on, when you're talking about Christianity and creativity, on the actual product, the creative production, and say, is it

01:23:02

Bach? Well, the truth is, there's no churches in the country that on your typical

01:23:09

Sunday morning are creating anything on Bach level. That's just not happening.

01:23:15

So there's a sense in which the state of the heart does matter. So the state of the heart matters.

01:23:23

Are we worshiping to put on a show? Is this a concert? Is this all about the light show and the smoke machines and our lead guitars take it to a face -melting guitar solo?

01:23:37

So what I'm describing here can very easily fall subject to what

01:23:45

Calvin called our idle factory hearts. We can very easily, in the act of what we call worship, turn it into something that's less about the

01:23:54

God we're worshiping and more about the lead guitarist, the lead vocalist, the drummer who's doing his epic drum fills.

01:24:03

And so there's a real challenge in terms of the practicality of what this looks like to make sure that our idle factory hearts don't kick in and start turning something that's supposed to be all about God into being all about us.

01:24:18

Now, just if I could articulate one principle in terms of local church worship here and where I see what your friend who wrote the book about acapella, theology of acapella worship, where I see insight there, even if I personally wouldn't go that far to say, you know, instruments are verboten in the local church.

01:24:40

To me, I went to a church for years with my wife and my kids where you had a lot of skilled musicianship represented on a stage

01:24:53

Sunday after Sunday. And something dawned on me one Sunday morning we were singing a song and I stopped singing and I noticed there was no difference.

01:25:05

Whether I was singing or not didn't make any sonic difference in the room because we were being affronted by just this wall of sounds.

01:25:18

The sound system, the amplifiers, the drum fills, all of it overwhelmed the actual voice of the congregation.

01:25:26

And something, when you are singing and you are singing good

01:25:34

Christian songs that are affirming timeless truths about Jesus, there's something to be said for you saying the same, affirming the same truths about Jesus out loud, melodically with other brothers and sisters who love

01:25:52

Jesus. That congregational worship is at its best when you have a room of people who've been regenerated by Jesus affirming the same timeless truths about Jesus melodically out loud.

01:26:08

One thing that goes against that is when you have the sound system blasted to 11 and nobody can hear themselves.

01:26:20

And so I understand the reaction against that to say, let's go acapella where everybody's voice matters, everybody's voice can be heard, and we're all out loud affirming the same truths about Jesus.

01:26:32

So there's something to be said for worship that you can be heard and you can hear.

01:26:40

For me, it's powerful to hear my wife and my neighbor who's a plumber in front of me, and my friend who's a college student, two seats over.

01:26:49

So your plumber has good pipes? Is that what you're saying? Sorry.

01:26:56

Even somebody like Chris with a total atonal thing for hearing him worship alongside me who's in pitch -perfect key, you know?

01:27:13

By the way, you bring up a good point, though, because unlike the scenario where the person who is just absolutely devoid of talent in playing the piano, the trumpet, whatever it is, the violin, who insists on importing that instrumental music into the worship service anyway, they are doing something that's unnecessary.

01:27:38

On the other side of the spectrum, singing in worship is a command.

01:27:44

And if you don't have a medical condition, you are in disobedience if you're not singing in the worship service.

01:27:51

So the singing is a non -negotiable. And even if you have a horrible voice, and many people do, in fact, probably most of us do, in fact, not even probably,

01:27:59

I would say that there's a reason why people get paid a lot of money to sing well is because most of us can't.

01:28:06

And so isn't that true that the singing is a non -negotiable? So there's an area where it doesn't matter if you have no gift at all.

01:28:16

And in fact, it is quite fascinating to me that when you have a large crowd, especially a large congregation, it seems like all of those horrible raven voices disappear.

01:28:29

And when it's all combined together, it's this beautiful choir, if you will, when the congregation is all singing together.

01:28:38

Isn't that an interesting phenomenon? Yeah, yeah. In fact, even if you have a church that's filled with 99 % people with no talent, it still seems to combine in a beautiful way.

01:28:53

Yeah, absolutely. I'm interested in hearing buzzes. Yeah, in fact, that was purposely

01:28:58

I wanted to ask him because he's a trumpet player. And I mean, it might even annoy you more because you're actually a musician.

01:29:08

One of the reasons I play trumpet is because my singing voice, as far as I am concerned, leaves much to be desired.

01:29:16

But I'm just reminded one time when we first started, we returned to church, there was one person who had just as bad a singing voice as me, and that was my cousin.

01:29:26

And my mother was in church with us once, and she said to me, I want to hear you singing. So I sang and she heard me, and it was awful because she was between my cousin and me.

01:29:34

And she just laughed because it was so bad. But you know, Chris, the scenario you described here, a small church with maybe some bad musicians and stuff.

01:29:45

I remember years ago going to a church near Corbin, Kentucky.

01:29:50

I'll just say near so I don't incriminate anybody. I was preaching in the evening, Wednesday night service there.

01:29:57

And when the choir sang, somebody starts twanging their guitar.

01:30:03

And if you can imagine the worst country twang in voices, that is imaginable. They started singing a song about they built a new church down in the town, the steeple so high it reaches to the sky.

01:30:14

And then pride has stepped in where love should have been. And it was really deep theology, you know. But that was their culture at that time.

01:30:23

And I have found that there's a certain kind of, can I say this, a classiness that seems to accompany reform theology because you have educated people who have been well read and have been exposed to finer things than just your average town musicians.

01:30:42

Right. Well, and of course, the reason why I specified that this is typically a phenomenon in a very tiny church, typically a poor one, is because in our day and age,

01:30:53

I think that churches and Christians in general have too high a priority on the quality of music because they want to be entertained.

01:31:01

And if you have a church with money, they're not going to have a person who can't play the piano. They'll even hire a homosexual to be your piano player or an organist as long as he can play the instrument well.

01:31:10

Yeah, yeah. I'll say something else along those lines, too, though, that I believe, and that is there is a difference between when

01:31:19

I play in a worship service on Sunday and when I'm doing a Christian concert. When I'm doing a

01:31:26

Christian concert, I pull all the stops, anything goes, you know, come on, Maynard Ferguson, you know, I mean. But that's a

01:31:33

Christian concert with Maynard Ferguson. The way I do it, if Maynard Ferguson were sanctified.

01:31:41

But, you know, the thing about it is that, you know, it's like everybody comes to this conclusion, unfortunately, that if you're good on trumpet, you have to sound like Phil Driscoll.

01:31:53

You know, it's like, no, there's people out there named Maurice Andre and others that are very, very exceptional.

01:32:00

Of course, he died. But anyway, that's neither here nor there. But there's a certain, there's a difference.

01:32:09

I'm not going to call my Christian concerts worship services.

01:32:15

And I know a lot of people do. They, you know, go to hear this person. It's a worship experience. No, there's no call to worship.

01:32:22

There's no benediction. You know, it's not a worship service. It is a concert where people are going there to be entertained.

01:32:30

They want me to impress them with what I'm doing. And that's a different purpose altogether than playing in church.

01:32:37

But either way, it can be to the glory of God. Yeah, and on that, tying it back to the resurrection, the goal of a worship service in a local church and the goal of your concerts, where it overlaps, where those two circles have the shaded area in between, is to exalt the resurrected

01:33:00

Christ. And by having skilled musicianship, you are exemplifying the truth of the resurrection that matter matters.

01:33:10

You are showing that it's not, we aren't Gnostics here. We aren't just about, we aren't

01:33:16

Pietists. We aren't ancient Mothimists who just are purely about an emotional buzz.

01:33:24

It's not a spiritual playing that's elevated. How you play that trumpet, how you execute note to note, is important because everything's important to Jesus, and he's

01:33:35

Lord over all of it. And so you want that same truth expressed in both contexts. It might look a little different.

01:33:42

You know, you don't take the face -melting solo in the local congregation in the way that you might at your show.

01:33:49

But the same underlying truth is that Jesus is Lord of all of it. And before we go to the break,

01:33:56

I'm just going to read you a question, and you can answer it when we come back. This is from Arnie in Perry County, Pennsylvania.

01:34:08

He says, what, in your opinion, is the importance of architecture in Christianity?

01:34:14

I know that different groups within the faith seem to put a higher or lower or no emphasis at all on architecture in regard to the buildings where we gather to worship, because, of course, there is no specific guideline in the

01:34:30

Scriptures to teach us how to specifically, with detail, design a building for such a purpose.

01:34:38

And, of course, you have the Puritans, who have a very low view of any such thing, as a building other than the fact that it should be very simple and plain and not ornate.

01:34:50

Do you have an opinion on the importance of architecture or the lack thereof? And we'll be taking

01:34:57

Arnie's, we'll be having Thaddeus answer Arnie's question when we return for our final break.

01:35:04

And if you'd like to join us on the air, now is the time to send in your emails because we're rapidly running out of time.

01:35:11

That's chrisarnson at gmail .com chrisarnson at gmail .com Don't go away.

01:35:17

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01:38:49

Welcome back. This is Chris Orrins and if you just tuned us in for the last 90 minutes and the last approximately half hour, actually a little less than that, about 20 minutes to go, we are interviewing

01:39:01

Thaddeus Williams on the theme, Create Mirroring the Artistic Genius of Jesus.

01:39:08

And if you'd like to join us on the air, please do it quickly because we're rapidly running out of time. If you have a question, send it to chrisarnson at gmail .com,

01:39:16

chrisarnson at gmail .com. And please give us your first name, city and state and country of residence if you're outside of the

01:39:22

USA and only remain anonymous if it's about a personal and private matter. And Thaddeus, before the break,

01:39:28

I read you a question from a listener who asked about the importance or lack thereof in regarding architecture and your thoughts.

01:39:41

Are you there? Oh, here I am, here I am. Sorry about that.

01:39:48

That's all right. I think part of it, my answer goes back to a trip

01:39:53

I took to Europe in, must have been 2004. In Dusseldorf, Germany, I walk into a

01:40:04

Catholic cathedral that's at the center of the cathedral, what you find is kind of a pyramid of saints.

01:40:16

And you start at the bottom with a row of Catholic saints, and you go up from there, and there's another row of Catholic saints, and it just keeps going.

01:40:25

You get to the 12 apostles towards the top, and at the very pinnacle of this pyramid is

01:40:33

Mary holding Jesus. Sounds like a Catholic game show, actually. But anyway. Yeah.

01:40:39

And what I found was, you know, here's architecture that is sending a message.

01:40:46

And the message is, if I want to get to Jesus, I have to climb this pyramid.

01:40:53

I have to go through these saints, I have to go through Mary, and at the very tip top, if I'm lucky,

01:40:58

I'll get to Jesus. And on this particular trip, I went from Dusseldorf, Germany to Calvin's Geneva.

01:41:10

And I walk into Calvin's cathedral, and I was struck by the simplicity of it.

01:41:19

There was something to be said for, you walk in, and there's a pulpit, an elevated pulpit, because the word of God is being proclaimed, and that's in a position of elevation that's important, that's authoritative.

01:41:35

And the only real art I saw in Calvin's cathedral was a symbol on the wall under which the letters post -Tenebrous

01:41:49

Lux were spelled out. You know, after darkness, light. A very simple way of expressing the doctrines of grace.

01:41:57

We're in darkness, we're in deadness of sin, but after darkness comes light. The sovereign grace of God shines into that.

01:42:05

And so I'm looking at these very contrasting examples of architecture, and to me, they both embody the theology.

01:42:15

And so, to the question of how do we think about architecture from a Christian worldview, none of it's theologically neutral.

01:42:24

It embodies some view of who God is and how the gospel works.

01:42:29

And I think there's a way in which we can get too cluttered up with architecture where it actually becomes a distraction.

01:42:41

You know, it's the same conversation we just had about worship music. If you have somebody, you know, tapping on their guitar and doing an epic riff that now they're the focus instead of Jesus, you've missed the point of worship.

01:42:57

I think the same principle applies across the board when you're dealing with architecture. There's a way in which the building itself and the stuff that arrays the building can distract you from the true object of worship, which is

01:43:13

Jesus himself. And so I think there's power to the Reformed tradition in its rejection of icons, in its rejection of too much, too many visuals that could actually serve as a distraction from the sovereign

01:43:31

God himself. So I would say my only principle I would apply to Christian architecture is do it well, do it for the glory of God in the same way that Bach advised with music.

01:43:44

The aim and final end of all music is the glory of God. I would say the aim and final end of all architecture from a

01:43:50

Christian vantage point is the glory of God. So do it well, but don't do it in a way that the primary focus becomes the architect or the art itself, but only in so far as it ushers you into a state of awe and reverence for the

01:44:06

God you're worshiping. And just one quick example of when I've seen that done right,

01:44:13

I was at a PCA church in, I believe it was Nashville a few years ago, and they had constructed this beautiful pipe organ and a massive cathedral and the whole cathedral was arrayed with stained glass windows that take you through the whole history of redemption.

01:44:42

And they kept going all the way up to, you know, there's a stained glass window with Jonathan Edwards and the Puritans, and there's a stained glass window with John Calvin and the

01:44:51

Reformers. And standing in that room, it was awe -inspiring, but not in the way that the

01:44:59

Roman Catholic Cathedral in Dusseldorf conveyed on a visceral level this sense of, oh man, if I'm going to get to Jesus, I got to climb this ladder.

01:45:10

I got to go through all the saints and through Mary to get to him. This church in Nashville conveyed a sense of the history of redemption.

01:45:18

It starts, the first stained glass window is creation, and it takes you through creation, fall, redemption, the history of the church, all the way to consummation.

01:45:29

And here you have architecture that is designed to remind you of the gospel and bring you into a state of worship for the

01:45:39

God of the gospel. So I would say that's my operating principle in architecture, is does it bring you into a deeper state of worship, or does it become a massive distraction away from worship?

01:45:53

Well, thank you, Arnie, and Perry County, Pennsylvania. You have also won a free copy of the book by Thaddeus Williams, which is titled

01:46:03

Reflect, Becoming Yourself by Mirroring the Greatest Person in History.

01:46:10

And please make sure we have your full mailing address so we can have Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service ship that out to you.

01:46:15

That's cvbbs .com, Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service. And what you were saying reminded me actually of a tour that I was given by a friend of mine,

01:46:27

Jacob Smith, who is the rector of St. George's Episcopal Church in New York City, which is a historic

01:46:37

Episcopal church, low church, Calvinist Episcopal church in New York City.

01:46:45

And Stephen Ting was the pastor there in the 19th century. Very low churchman, very strongly

01:46:53

Calvinistic, and he designed the church building. And the people might be surprised to hear because they have a modern day concept of what an

01:47:04

Episcopalian or Anglican church looks like. Very often very Romish looking.

01:47:11

But Stephen Ting was extremely simple in his design for the building, especially the area of worship, where nothing was to distract from the word of God.

01:47:26

The Lord's table was specifically by design, just a simple wooden table.

01:47:33

There were no crosses, not even barren crosses, let alone a crucifix.

01:47:39

There were no barren crosses. The only thing that was on the wall behind Stephen Ting when he was the pastor there was a banner that had the

01:47:48

Ten Commandments and a banner that had the Apostles' Creed on the wall. And then on the other side of the spectrum, you not only have

01:47:56

Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches being very ornate, but you even have some of these charismatic and Pentecostal churches that some of them, which design their worship spaces to appear like some multi -billionaire rented out or opened up his mansion for people to worship in.

01:48:20

It's very often the gaudiest of tastes that this billionaire might have had.

01:48:26

They're trying to send some kind of a message, I guess, that that's what people should be emulating or striving for when it comes to their own homes or something.

01:48:37

But both of those would be the opposite end of the extremes. And I really loved hearing about Stephen Ting's approach to the way that a worship space should be designed.

01:48:51

Yeah, well, I saw that PCA church in Nashville, I think it was called Covenant. And what

01:48:58

I found at Covenant PCA in Nashville, when you walk up to it, it was very similar to Calvin's church in Geneva.

01:49:08

You walk up a little spiral staircase to get to the actual pulpit. And again, a architectural way of capturing the authority of the word of God, the preaching of the word is elevated.

01:49:24

And when you get up to, there's a wooden lectern up there on the pulpit itself.

01:49:32

It had the phrase inscribed, Sir, show us Jesus. And to me, that was so powerful because that was the whole point.

01:49:43

If you start getting sidetracked on how Jesus can make you feel good about yourself or three steps to being more fulfilled in your job, there's all kinds of ways to get sidetracked from the primary point of the pulpit.

01:49:56

Sir, show us Jesus. And to me, that becomes the principle in architecture.

01:50:03

Is it elevating Jesus? Is it putting him center stage?

01:50:09

Is it bringing him glory, which is the same principle we would apply to our conversation earlier about the role of music in the local church?

01:50:17

I think that's a helpful kind of snapshot of what it means to be theologically sound in our view of architecture slash music slash fill in the blank.

01:50:30

Are you showing Jesus? We have Susan in Setauket, Long Island, New York, who says,

01:50:36

Dorothy L. Sayers said that man is at his best when creating because he is made in the image of a

01:50:45

God whose first act was to create. The Trinity, seen as creative idea, the father, the creative energy, the son and the creative power, the spirit is reflected in the human experience of creativity.

01:51:02

Do you see validity in this? If so, how? Yeah, that's a great question.

01:51:09

And the short answer is, yes, I do. Let me say it this way.

01:51:16

The first time, again, that we meet God in Scripture, the first line of the Bible, in the beginning,

01:51:22

God created. So that's the first time we meet God. And then as you follow the story of redemption through old into the

01:51:29

New Testament, you see creativity pop up again and again.

01:51:35

So you have God making these aesthetic declarations, these benedictions, these good words he speaks at the end of every creation day.

01:51:42

It is good. And then as the Old Testament continues, you find

01:51:48

Bezalel and his sons are commissioned by God to design the temple.

01:51:55

And if you read those passages in 1 and 2 Kings, the

01:52:01

Holy Spirit is the one inspiring them with creativity. Now, I'm jumping over a lot of Old Testament history here, but just to jump to the main point, by the time you get to God incarnate, the

01:52:14

Phaeanthropos, God becoming man in the New Testament, it says something that when

01:52:21

God becomes incarnate in the person of Jesus, the Phaeanthropos Jesus, what does he do for the majority of his adult life?

01:52:31

He's making stuff. The Greek word is tekton, which most of us understand as, okay,

01:52:39

Jesus was a carpenter. But the Greek word is actually a lot more rich than that. Jesus was a craftsman.

01:52:46

He made things. He could do masonry. He could do woodwork.

01:52:51

He could do stonework. He could do these vast building projects. That was all part of how

01:52:57

God decided to do work after the incarnation.

01:53:04

And in fact, if you look at the gospel accounts, when Jesus is describing his resurrection, he uses the same language from the world of the tektons, from the world of craftsmen.

01:53:14

He says, destroy this building, and in three days, I will rebuild it. I will raise it up.

01:53:21

And so to me, it's very informative that when

01:53:28

God becomes man, he builds stuff. He makes stuff. Paul, when he starts his ministry, he continues building tents.

01:53:39

If you look at the Christmas narrative in Luke, after the shepherds encounter

01:53:45

God incarnate, they don't go off to some hilltop to ponder their belly buttons and achieve enlightenment.

01:53:53

They return to their sheep. There's something about doing things in the material world that is deeply, deeply biblical.

01:54:03

And so that's the way I would approach that is, again, following on the heels of Bach.

01:54:10

If you look at Rembrandt, Rembrandt was such a breakthrough in the art world because he had this pretty solid

01:54:18

Christian theology that what I do with these woodcuts, what

01:54:24

I do with the paint on the canvas matters in God's universe. And I think a go -to passage for all this is

01:54:32

Romans 8, where Jesus is in a redemptive work, not just, again, this

01:54:37

Gnostic sense of our souls floating up to the clouds, but all of creation is groaning and Jesus in the process of redeeming all of creation.

01:54:47

And so I think the way you make a dinner, the way you make noise out of a trumpet, the way you make your voice during a worship service, all of what we make is a reflection of our worldview, and on a deeper level, it's a reflection of our worship.

01:55:08

If we're really worshiping Jesus and Dorothy Sayers is exactly right, you're gonna make things in a way that reflect your identity as an image bearer of a

01:55:19

God who makes stuff, who makes the universe. Now, I only know that Dorothy Sayers was a secular poet and novelist in the earlier part of the 20th century.

01:55:32

I don't know anything about her theology. I mean, she could have been saying something right that may have some erroneous ideas behind it.

01:55:42

Do you know anything about her theology? I think Sayers was a good close friend of C .S. Lewis.

01:55:48

And so far as I know, she had a pretty solid Orthodox Christian worldview. Oh, good.

01:55:54

Yeah, I could be wrong. I quote her a few times in the book. I think she did a lot of work on Jesus in terms of his emotions, the emotions of Jesus.

01:56:06

And I quote her in my chapter on emotion, and everything I've read from her is pretty rock solid.

01:56:12

Oh, great. I could be wrong, but everything I've read, she understood who Jesus is and how the gospel works.

01:56:18

All right. Well, thank you so much, Susan. And so talk at Long Island, New York. You have won a copy as well of the book by Thaddeus Williams, Reflect, Becoming Yourself by Mirroring the

01:56:33

Greatest Person in History. And we are actually out of time right now.

01:56:38

And I want to make sure that our listeners have all the information that they need. First of all, if you have an interest in ordering this book or purchasing this book, if you haven't won it today, or even if you have won it, you want to purchase additional copies to give away, you can go to the

01:56:58

Weaver Book Company who supplied us with these free books today. Their website is weaverbookcompany .com

01:57:06

weaverbookcompany .com That's W -E -A -V as in victory, E -R, bookcompany .com.

01:57:11

And of course, you could always go to cvbbs .com, Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, cvbbs .com,

01:57:18

where you can order nearly any book that we discuss here on Iron Trip and Zion Radio. And if they don't already have it in stock, they will order it for you for very competitive prices.

01:57:30

And then we have the Biola University website, which is biola .edu,

01:57:37

B as in boy, I -O -L -A dot E -D -U. And do you have any other contact information that you care to share for our listeners?

01:57:46

Those are the main ones. I think they can go to thaddeuswilliams .com. That'll point them towards a few more things that I've done, articles and books and whatnot, thaddeuswilliams .com.

01:58:02

Yeah, I hope they check out Reflect. And my goal in writing it was to just give them a bigger, more captivating vision of who

01:58:13

Jesus is, so that we don't reduce discipleship to be a nice person, but to show them that Jesus, you know, to come full circle to where we started our conversation,

01:58:24

Jesus isn't just Lord over your spirit and getting you to heaven. He's Lord over your intellect. He's Lord over your imagination.

01:58:31

He's Lord over your emotions. He's Lord over your actions. Every square inch of human existence is under the

01:58:40

Lordship of Christ. And so I hope that the book Reflect pushes people in that direction to celebrating and enjoying the

01:58:47

Lordship of Christ. Well, thank you so much, Thaddeus. If you could hold on, I'd like to schedule you for those two additional interviews that we discussed earlier.

01:58:57

And I want to thank everybody who listened. I want to thank especially those who took the time to write in today.

01:59:02

I want to thank my co -host, the Reverend Buzz Taylor. And I want you all to always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater