Symbols and Shadows: Decoding the Deeper Meanings in Art

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All right, with that, that is the first time for listeners who have been listening to the podcast that we feature

00:35

Resurrection Design Company, check them out. With that though, we are gonna get straight to the podcast and we have a guest who's now been with us.

00:45

This would be the third time. We have Kruptas from X. And Kruptas, I think you might be my only anon guest that I have featured more than once.

00:55

So congratulations for that. Well, thank you. I hate being anon. I'd love to be, you know,

01:02

I was talking about this, as you know, like - You wanna be a real boy. Yeah, and it's one of these things where I generally am not afraid to say things.

01:13

It's more, I think, out of respect for my wife, who just worries that I am gonna say something untoward that's going to completely nuke my, and my business actually involves work with sort of, you know, the general public.

01:26

And so, you know, I work with liberals, extreme liberals sometimes, and non -Christians, and even people of other faith traditions and stuff.

01:35

So it's the kind of thing where, you know, you get the person with an ax to grind, who's, you know, committed to destroying your business.

01:44

And next thing you know, you can't feed your family. And so that's just one of those small, and it's, you know, it's

01:50

Canada. So our government here is just a little bit more ambitious about curbing speech that they don't like.

01:57

So that's one of those things, right? About this, over the last like three or four days, that there was kind of with the

02:05

Trump wave in the United States, there were a lot of guys who were loosely affiliated with the

02:12

MAGA movement, who really wanted their pet thing to be the thing.

02:18

They thought they're, you know, like, for example, you have like your Christian nationalists, you have more like libertarian types, you even have the pagan right, and sort of the

02:27

Nietzsche idolist guys. And I mean, I could go on and on and on with all these different groups that are more or less anti -liberal on a certain level, and saw in Trump someone who represented maybe an aspect of what they were looking for.

02:40

And anyway, in the last three or four days, I've been thinking, you know, fundamentally, like even though there's been a huge kickback against social justice and all of that, it is still there.

02:51

It is still there. And, you know, liberalism is very much part of America's, how people here see themselves.

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And I think it goes for the entire West. I think Canada is more so that way, but -

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It's structural. And that's one of the things that people don't realize that, you know, you think to yourself, oh, we're gonna get rid of the left.

03:12

And, you know, we're gonna get it out of all the institutions. The problem is, is that all the institutions are built fundamentally for liberalism, by liberalism, that really, if you wanted to get rid of liberalism in the

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United States, you would pretty much have to end America as you know it. And that's one of the things that people don't really realize.

03:32

I mean, that's a whole nother different topic to get into, but all of the basic institutions are built on the idea of social engineering, that we can, you know, incrementally apply better policies and with the goal of solving all of society's problems.

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And that is a fundamentally progressive mindset. And all of our institutions in society, in the

03:57

West in particular, are basically built around that framework.

04:04

I mean, you can run institutions without that kind of framework, but they run very, very differently and they can't run on the scale that we run them on.

04:11

So that's one of these things that people just like, basically until the

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West kind of craters, liberalism is going to be with us and it's going to have an institutional power that conservatism never has, because liberalism is just baked into the very nature of the institutions themselves.

04:30

Conquest law is a thing, and you can't escape from it because the institutions themselves are built to be liberal institutions.

04:40

Well, on that black pill, would you react to Canada? I'm curious, because I don't live obviously there, but in the

04:46

United States, you go out into rural areas and it's much different. So you run a business in a rural area, you're not going to have as much problems.

04:55

You probably wouldn't have to be in a non, in a more urban setting or possibly a suburban setting, depending on which region you would have the problems that you're obviously protecting your family and yourself from.

05:07

In Canada, is it that way? I mean, if you go out to an outlawing area, are they pretty conservative? And, or is it,

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I mean, do they support gay rights or I don't know what, how they call it in Canada? It's Canada.

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So, you know, there's institutions everywhere. So if you get like a, you know, a big national chain or something in a small town, you know, when they're going to hang a pride flag out, you know, these types of things, you know, your home depot is still going to paint the sidewalk in a rainbow color during pride month.

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These are the kinds of things that get done, but you're absolutely right. When you get out into the small towns, there's a lot more freedom, even different things like even in a rural setting.

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If you go out on a construction site, for example, they are remarkably un -PC and it just, they will say all kinds of things there that, you know, but it's a different environment.

06:03

So, but if you want to move within professional circles in Canada, you have to know how to mask certain opinions.

06:12

You know, probably the most prominent these days is not even sexuality, but your stance on immigration is probably the most prominent one right now.

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So, you know, there's certain limits. You can talk about curbing immigration, but you can't, you know, to get to the next level and say, well, you know, they don't really belong here and they should go home.

06:38

These are the kinds of things that can get you into real trouble in a place like Canada. But yeah, in rural areas, there's definitely a lot more freedom.

06:47

Canada is a little bit different than the US in the sense that it tends to be less ideological.

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And that's a hard thing, I think, for a lot of Americans to grasp because the country is, as a baseline, more liberal in that sense, but dispositionally

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Canadians are, and because Canadians are more statist, but there is within that sort of statism, that sort of peace order and good government, like Canadians don't really want a highly politicized ideological government.

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The ideal candidate in Canada or the ideal politician in Canada is one that you don't see.

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So everything is just supposed to hum along. Your politicians are not really supposed to have ideology.

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They're just basically supposed to be good managers. And the culture itself may be liberal, but your politicians really are more or less supposed to be embodying the values, but without being radical, if that makes sense.

07:48

Mm -hmm, yeah, I think Britain at least maybe used to be a little more that way.

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More that way, probably like in the last, I don't know how familiar you are with Canadian prime ministers and so forth, but he was not the best prime minister, but he really managed to practice this, was

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René Lévesque, who, the little guy from Schwinnigan, who really, you never saw him, and they balanced the budgets, but he was a liberal through and through, socialized medicine and all of, like all basically, they basically held all the liberal views, but on a day -to -day basis, you never saw him.

08:25

And that's kind of how you want your politicians to run. Whereas in the US, politics is everywhere, always in your face.

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Like it's just, everything is political. The idea, like in Canada, the idea that you would elect your policemen is just mind -boggling, that these types of things, that the county sheriff gets elected or that you would elect judges.

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Now, we have a problem in Canada with liberal judges because they're appointed by, the Liberal Party dominates, but it's just that there are subtle differences between the two countries that are not always apparent that way.

09:03

Yeah, interesting. And you would know more than I would being in Canada, because in the United States, we only tend to focus on our domestic disputes, whereas in other parts of the world, you're kind of forced to have to focus on us because of how much,

09:17

I guess, we control. So - Well, and I went, I studied in the States too. So I spent a fair number of years in my formative years living in the

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US and sort of, I kind of fell in love with the place too while I was there and fell in love with American politics.

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And because Canadian politics can be very dull, the blood sport that is

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American politics is a lot more fun from a news perspective and following the game perspective that way.

09:44

Yeah. Well, let's switch gears a little. I'd love to talk about Canada. Maybe we can do something else on Canada, because I know you're in the middle of an election season and it's quite zesty to say the least.

09:58

And, you know, it'd be interesting to go into, but really the purpose of this podcast is this idea.

10:05

Well, I'll let you actually kind of pitch the purpose of it because you reached out - Well, yeah, because I reached out to you and said, so I was, you know,

10:12

I was with work. I was in the vehicle a lot last few days. And one of the things that driving around for work gives you time to do is to catch up on podcasts.

10:21

And so I was listening to your recent episode, the one on, you know, should you read or watch fantasy?

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And it was compelling. I was just, I was startled like, cause normally you get the usual things like don't let your kids read

10:35

Harry Potter because magic, you know what I mean? And these types of things. But I was really surprised to hear that some people will say, well, you can read

10:43

C .S. Lewis, but not Tolkien. And I'm just like, which, you know, which is kind of, that kind of blew my mind.

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And then as you kind of got into the whole thing of the difference between story and allegory and history and so forth,

10:57

I began to sort of say like, I have some thoughts on this because in many ways your understanding of the relationship between things like story, narrative, allegory and archetypes and the nature of history are very, very important for how you understand and read history and how you, or how you read the

11:23

Bible sort of vis -a -vis this idea of history, but also then how you interact with and face off against, shall we say, modernism in society, sort of the modernist challenge to scripture, you know, like the idea, well, is it really true?

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You know, can you prove that these events are real? Are they, you know, do they have scientific veracity?

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Is the Bible really history? And so people get caught down these rabbit holes because, you know, well, if it's true and this was a story about real events, then the

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Bible must be history. And the problem is, is that history in the modern era has very different meanings,

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I think, than a lot of people, you know, and so you get this idea of, well, the Bible is all facts and you're like, okay, well, what do you mean by facts in this way?

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So it's one of these questions where the lines between the idea of history, story, allegory,

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I think are a lot more blurred than people realize, you know, so to say sort of, and again, like, well, what is the

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Bible that way? It comes down to these questions, you know, like, well, you can say, well, it's the word of God. It's the revealed word of God.

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It's, you know, in my tradition, we talk about it that it's, you know, wholly written by God and wholly written by men at the same time, you know, and it's not like these men were possessed by God and, you know,

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God took control of their hand and wrote them but they remained fully men and yet they spoke fully the word of God, you know, in breathe by the spirit and, you know, so all of these sort of baseline to the things like this is the word of God, but then the question is, well, what is this thing that we call the word of God?

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And I think in some ways it matters because it matters how we understand and relate to the world around us, but then also how we understand and relate to scripture and sort of what it is and how we read it in that regard.

13:35

Does that make sense? So that was kind of my framing and then I sort of thought, yes, you know, I think there's a conversation here. So I'm gonna just reach out to John and say, hey, did you want to talk about this?

13:43

Yeah, sure. Well, I appreciate your thoughts. You always approach things from an angle that I think for listeners in this audience is possibly different or, you know,

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I know for me, it helps me sometimes see things from a different perspective. And I don't know if it's because you've consumed so much of Jacques Ellul or if it's,

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I mean, you have a background in philosophy. In philosophy. This is more like my philosophical training. So in hermeneutics and, you know, philosophy of history, philosophy of language, right?

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These types of things, how meaning is translated and a lot of, so that was really my area of interest and the kind of the things that the rabbit holes that I went down to, went down in university.

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And they have kind of stayed with me that way, right? So, you know, when you're talking about scripture and you're saying, well, these are real events and real people, and that's, you know, that's something that we all agree on this, you know, and I would say, well, these events really happened.

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These are real people. But it's when you can start getting into the details of that, like, well, you know, what do you mean by history?

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Because there's an argument can be made that there really is no such thing as history, right?

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That history itself is a philosophical construct, you know, flowing out of Hegel, right? So it's an idea of immanentizing the movement and providence of God and then rooting it in human events and saying then that these human events have a grand narrative and meaning that we then need to divine and divide.

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And then you get into sort of things like, you know, like the Hegel and the end of history, but then, you know,

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Marx takes up Hegel's idea and you have this sort of historical dialectic. But even aside from that, you get into the whole question of scientific veracity, right, so, you know, the question, well, you know, the

15:40

Bible is factually true, and that's a very, very, it's problematic in a sense because you're, at least the way

15:51

I look at it, that it's problematic because you're accepting somebody else's framing of the argument.

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So you get the person who is scientific, who wants things to be verified, observable, measured, and he says, well, you know, the scriptures aren't scientific, they're not history, they're not facts, they're just myths.

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And then people get their dander up and say, well, no, this is really history, you know? And so then what they try to do is they try to demonstrate that scripture can meet scientific standards of proof.

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And so then what happens is, is that you're making the scriptures into a scientific document, and you're, in a sense, playing their game on their terms.

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And the problem with the scientific worldview is that basically it, in some ways, flips the world around.

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So the scientific worldview looks at the world as sort of dead, neutral matter.

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It's just out there, you observe it, you measure it, and whatever meaning is out there, and this is that sort of Kantian severing of metaphysics that maybe there's metaphysics out there, maybe there's meaning out there, but we have no access to it.

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So we come to the world, we measure it, and whatever meaning there is out there, we give it to the world, you know?

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So this is that kind of, you know, find your own truth, seek your own truth. Whereas from a Christian perspective, we look at the world as if it is, well, not look at it, but we understand that the world is made by God, it's woven with a divine fabric, it has order, it has meaning, the very notion of wisdom is all woven into the fabric of creation.

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God is active in creation and sustaining it, nurturing it. It's not like God is far off, that you see

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God working day to day and just sustaining and maintaining creation. So our world brims with meaning, and we see this in terms of certain archetypes that occur over and over again, and they express themselves this way, but we see in God that events make sense because we see that God is in him.

18:20

So we look at the event, and when we look at the event, we're not just seeing and trying to record sort of the bare facts of kind of, this is what happened.

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And then we can get into sort of the question of the fact and ethic. And then once we've established the facts, then we can ask the question, well, what do the facts mean?

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Whereas from a Christian perspective, we're looking at the world as if it is revealing

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God. And so events are revealing God. So when we talk about a story and a story is being told, we're trying to tell the story in such a way that you're not just seeing the bare facts of the event, but you're trying to get at the essence of the meaning that's there implicit in the observable surface, that in the surface of these events, there's a meaning that is carried with these events.

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And the way that we tell the story, the goal of that is to unfold the meaning of those events.

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So in this regard, you then would say, you might have like say storyteller's license.

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So this is where the question of like, well, why is Josiah cast as a second

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David? So in the way that the Josiah story is told, he's a second David. And one of the things that Matthew draws out in his account of Jesus is that Matthew is taking up or Jesus is taking up into himself all of these

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Old Testament elements of the story. So Jesus is at once Joseph, he's at once Moses, he's at once David, but he also then embodies the whole people of Israel.

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And all of these things are revealed in and through Jesus, but Matthew reveals this in the way that he tells the story.

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So the details of the Matthew account of Jesus' life vary from the Luke account, because Luke is trying to get at a different aspect of the richness of Jesus' life and show it.

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So what you have is you have two stories that revolve around the same set of events, but they're told in different ways to unpack the fullness.

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So the idea that you get at a single set of facts that then tell you the truth, the historical truth about Jesus, in some ways misses the point of what the stories are trying to do.

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And then you get into something like John, where John even changes the order of the stories, right?

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So for example, the cleansing of the temple happens early in the Jesus story in John, but happens late in the synoptics.

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And you're thinking, well, were there two cleanses? No, there weren't two cleansings of the temple. John is just telling the story.

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And you might say from a modern perspective, he's telling it in a factually different way, because for him, this reveals the meaning better to place the story in this order, right?

21:37

And for us, in terms of our modern sensibilities, in terms of historical truth and trying to conform it to sort of scientific historicity, then it ends up falling short to what the narrative is trying to accomplish or what the stories are trying to accomplish, if that makes sense.

21:54

Yeah, I think it's probably, I should start every conversation this way, but it's probably good to acknowledge for the audience that we are talking about this from the ruins, as it were.

22:06

We have been sitting in modernity for a couple of centuries and we've been given,

22:13

I think, a narrow, I think I agree with what I'm about to say, a narrow, right?

22:20

I argue with myself, I'm my biggest critic, but no, I think we are given a narrow slate of options that dictate what we ought to believe that are confined usually in this modern setting.

22:36

And so sort of dancing around some of the things that we're talking about, but I think they're important to, for the audience's sake, especially to acknowledge is that we underwent a modernist controversy about a century ago in which the

22:51

Bible was said not to match the scientific standards.

22:58

Standard of truth and verifiability and all these kinds of things. Right, and this had been going on for a while, though.

23:05

A lot of people don't realize that, because we look at, this was the age of the modernist controversy. It's like a 20, 30 year period.

23:12

And then we had the fundamentalists and the evangelicals. But before that, this was already being questioned, especially - 1700s, 1600s already.

23:20

Yeah, enlightened rationalism, and the guys like Wellhausen and others, documentary hypothesis, all these things that were eventually used to discredit the

23:32

Bible. And out of that, it seems like there were a number of reactions, right? So you have the neo -Orthodox guys who want to really just focus on this higher level of truth, that it really doesn't matter if these stories are factually true or not.

23:46

So we can give that up, and I'm oversimplifying, but - No, no, no, but yeah. Yeah, but that's how we're gonna retain orthodoxy.

23:53

We can still be orthodox, we can still hold on to biblical doctrine, but we don't need to necessarily believe in talking snakes or Noah's Ark or any of the things we know now as modern men are simply ridiculous.

24:06

And then you have, and I'll probably get killed for this, but you do have the more presuppositional

24:12

Vantillian types, who I, well, I must say, I appreciate much about that tradition and I've gained a lot from it, but I do think that there ended up being an emphasis on going on the offense to tell the unbelief that they're, to question their own standards.

24:31

Like you can't, the standards that you are advocating actually come from our Bible, or the biblical worldview, right?

24:36

So you could think of this as worldview thinking, but worldview thinking, I think, was one reaction, finding comprehensive answers to life's questions in this biblical worldview, and stepping outside of that is to be an absurdity.

24:51

And then you have the guys who are like hyper -scientific, like maybe you could call them evidential guys, that's what the

24:58

Vantillians call them, but you have the guys that wanna run to the lab, as you just, I think, described.

25:03

They wanna say, actually, you know, here's the evidence that all of this is correct. And I don't know that any of those things is actually really, there's actually aspects of truth in all of these things, in my mind.

25:15

Like all of them are getting at something that is true, but they're not, it's not the whole thing.

25:22

And I noticed that, especially like - Yeah, no. One last thing, and then I'd love for you to -

25:29

Sure, no. Homeschool family kids who grow up in like Answers in Genesis type homes, and I mean,

25:35

I could say I'm one of those kids, I guess, to an extent, but they go to the Big Arc, they go to the Creation Museum, which

25:40

I love, those are great places to go. But they're constantly told the

25:46

Bible's true, the Bible's true, the Bible's true, and it tends to be on these matters of facts and practicality, and I think there's something important there, but I see, there is a leaning that I can see being unhealthy, where you end up reducing the

26:05

Bible to a logic book, a science book, this book that must be 100 % factually demonstrated in order for it to be true.

26:17

And I can see what you're saying, like it is playing into their frame, and some of those kids, when they go woke, they, what do they call it, deconstruct, they are the hardest deconstructor, like they go crazy.

26:30

Because basically, once you shatter it, it's not true anymore, they can't find their way back to a sense of truth, that the scripture can't be true anymore because it doesn't meet the evidentiary standards.

26:44

And they have no way to get out of it. Yeah, yeah, so yeah, I don't know if you have a bigger thought on that,

26:50

I could keep going. Well, there's, no, there's a number, I mean, there's a number of things. So one of these things that people have to realize, like when you get into historiography, right, that even from doing history in a modern perspective, history is not accessible to us.

27:07

And people will go like, like what? But history isn't accessible to us, like you can't examine the events of the past scientifically.

27:15

You can't go back and replay them. What you can do is you can, there's, you can record people's memories of the events, so you can take, and even then, when you're recording people's memories of the events, you're not actually getting the event that's remembered in their head, and you know, the sights, the sounds, the emotions, and so forth.

27:34

You're getting a verbal accounting of something that's in their head. You know, so even then it's kind of a reduced thing.

27:42

So you can look at artifacts, documents, you know, you know, all these things that are left behind in the past.

27:50

And then from those, you can then try to reconstruct a story that then tries to accurately, convey the events as they happened.

28:06

But you have no access to history. And anytime that you're doing history, you're doing storytelling.

28:13

Now, if your goal is to just simply tell the story as accurately as possible, that's one way to tell the story.

28:22

But there's a question of if I tell the story, and you have to be kind of careful.

28:32

From somebody else's perspective, I might be playing fast and loose with quote unquote, the facts. But if by giving myself a little bit of license in how

28:42

I tell the story by, you know, adjusting the events somewhat, coloring certain things, in a sense, like say, like casting

28:49

King Josiah, telling the story in such a way that King Josiah looks like King David.

28:57

And in doing so, you know, maybe everything didn't happen in Josiah's life exactly the way it did in David.

29:05

But in telling the story this way, what I'm giving you in a sense is the significance of Josiah, that he's a second

29:13

David. And if in the course of the telling of that story, I'm highlighting some things, like maybe over highlighting them, but telling the story in such a way where it might offend sort of the accurate history guy who's trying to come up with the most accurate thing, irregardless of whether it conveys any meaning or not,

29:38

I generally tend to look at it that it's more important that we reveal to people the meaning that is there in the events, because that's really the significant thing is the meaning that's in the events.

29:50

So if the story is then crafted in a typological format, so you might get where it's told in a certain way, chiastically, for example, where you have like an

30:04

ABA pattern. And so you move in and out of the center and you're telling it in an ABA pattern to focus on a specific event, or you repeat certain elements because in biblical stories, anything that's repeated is significant.

30:20

So whether or not they were actually repeated over and over again, for example, a good example of this is

30:27

Paul's retelling of the story of him meeting

30:33

Jesus on the road to Damascus, which I think is told three, four times in the book of Acts.

30:39

And each time the story is told a little differently. So which is the most accurate telling of the story?

30:46

Well, all three tellings of the story are different and they serve a different purpose in the story. But the fact that it's told three times is maybe more important than even trying to come up with the idea, okay, which one's the most accurate?

30:58

You know what I mean? Or when did the cleansing of the temple really happen? You know, is John's gospel somehow lesser because he puts it at the beginning of the story and the story, you know?

31:06

And probably the biggie, and this is the one that people really get into, get themselves wound up the most with, is the notion of the

31:19

Genesis and creation. And so if you look at it, and let's begin and flip the story on, quote unquote, you know, the scientific community.

31:28

So because you can't examine history scientifically, you don't have access to it.

31:35

Nobody really knows what happens in the past, but there are all these artifacts that are left around. And so once all these artifacts are all left around, somebody sees all these artifacts and develops a story to connect these artifacts.

31:48

Now, when you begin presuppositionally with the idea that there is no God, so how did life form and how did the universe form?

31:57

Well, you then sew together all of these artifacts with a narrative of human progress, well, progress, but you then make it cosmological, right?

32:12

So evolution is really the cosmological version of the idea of human progress.

32:19

And so you take all of these, and when you get into the evidence, and people have done this, when you get into the evidence, from an evidentiary perspective, evolution is really problematic, but it's basically, it's an origin story, right?

32:33

And so it's an origin story that's told using artifacts as the means of threading and connecting the story together, right?

32:45

And this is, I know, this is a very postmodern way of looking, and this is one of the things why you really shouldn't be afraid of postmodern value, because when you look at that, the scientist isn't really doing science, he's doing storytelling, right?

32:58

And so he's got a story, and he believes that story, and that's his faith commitment, right?

33:04

But we tell a different story, okay? And our story is that God created the world in six days, and he created it in the way that the story tells us.

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Now, somebody says, well, is that the way it happens scientifically? You know, long day, short day, or whatever. And I would say, it doesn't really matter, because this is the story, and I believe that this is the story.

33:25

Well, what do you believe about the story? I don't know, I don't have access to the past, I can't tell, but what I do know is that God created the world, the story tells me that he created it in six days.

33:33

As for the meaning of that, I just leave that up to God, I don't worry about it. And you can worry about it, that may be a problem for you, but it isn't a problem for me.

33:41

And I can say that this is what the story says, and in many ways, like most origin stories, they're not designed, like even evolution is not really designed to tell you what happened in the past, but how we got today, and what does the world mean today?

33:56

And the evolutionary story tells you that the world has no meaning, that everything is all cause and effect, it's atoms bouncing around, one atom bounces around, hits another atom, bounces around, boom, there's life.

34:06

And so the universe actually has no meaning, it's completely devoid of meaning, there is no God, and you're an accident, and whatever meaning there is, is you giving it to the world.

34:15

And I say, well, frankly, I don't buy that story, this is not my faith commitment. And so I have a different set of stories that I believe very deeply, and I believe they're true, that God created the world in six days, he imbued the world with meaning, the world was created good, it was created ordered, and all of the things that other people worship, like the sun and the moon and the stars and animals, were all created by God.

34:39

And then this world that was created good, was given a purpose, so it wasn't in a sense perfected, but we got sidelined because we as human beings transgressed the boundaries set for us by God.

34:54

Right, and so this story then now frames the whole of my life and allows me to have meaning and to understand it.

35:02

And I don't feel compelled to answer a lot of questions that somebody with a scientific worldview comes at me with, because it's like, okay, that's your set of beliefs, but it's like basically trying to say, well,

35:15

Christianity has to answer to Hinduism and justify its beliefs to the Hindu. And that's more or less what we're doing, is that the evolutionary scientist is saying, well, you have to justify your religion by my religion.

35:28

And I just say, well, it's a false religion. You know, and that's kind of where you go that way. Yeah, let me ask you this, because the long day, short day thing, you brought that up.

35:37

I think the whole reason that's even a debate to begin with is because of attempts to fuse our story, if you want to call it that, with Darwinian evolution and try to -

35:49

To make it credible to the, yeah, to science. Let us suppose that these days were eras or epochs that could have been millions of years or something, right?

36:00

It could be, billions of years, who knows? Well, so,

36:07

I mean, I don't subscribe to that. I think that they were, you know, if you want to say literal,

36:12

I think they were days in the sense that the audience would have understood days to be, because I do think it's a narrative. But, and that's also another thing, poetry, apocalyptic, narrative, these different genres are intended to communicate different things.

36:25

But if we buy that, if we buy that this is a narrative and it's depicting events that took place, and there is obviously,

36:32

I think as you just wonderfully surmised these moral lessons and metaphysical lessons that we're supposed to learn from this, and then someone comes along and they take that story and they try to fuse it with the prevailing pagan story, and I don't care if it's evolution or something else, then

36:53

I can see Christians trying to react to that, to root out, as it were, any kind of pagan influence.

36:59

So if someone's saying, if their motivation, this is what I'm trying to get at, if the motivation for saying each day represents these huge epochs, and this is a novel idea, and the only reason someone's advocating it is because they're trying to justify it based on an evolutionary frame,

37:13

I think Christians would be right to reject that, to say, knock it off. Yeah. There's no reason for us to do this.

37:20

In fact, we suspect you because you're doing this. Well, and that's the thing, that's what I would do too, is like I would take the same posture in a sense that there's six days, and this is what the story tells us, and I'm going to believe what the story tells me.

37:36

And it's just like, you know, and I think, because in a sense, I don't have access to the actual quote -unquote facts, you know, and this gets into the whole problem of like, you know, what is a fact and so forth and everything anyways, but it's again, once you try to make the stories of the

37:58

Old Testament or the scriptures in general fit these kinds of standards, you're in a sense subordinating the word of God to the world's standards.

38:08

And really it's supposed to work the other way around. You come to the scriptures, you come to God from the world, and then as one of my professors in seminary put it, you're supposed to commit a kind of narrative suicide.

38:21

So you come with all of these stories that have defined your life up until this point that you encounter God, you encounter him in the word.

38:28

And then in the encounter with the word, you're supposed to put to death these stories that then you used to have, and then embrace in faith these new set of stories and these become your stories.

38:42

Abraham is my father. This is how the world began. This is what went wrong.

38:48

These are the problems with the world. Yes, the world was created in six days. You know, I was once an evolutionist, but then

38:54

I found Christ and now I'm a creationist, right? And these are the kind of transformations. And so in a sense, the scriptures are meant to be transforming us, not us subordinating the scriptures to the criteria of the world to somehow make the scriptures more acceptable to the world.

39:14

And this is that kind of bending to power that we're in a sense, we're trying to bend the scriptures to make it fit the prevailing ethos and mood of the age.

39:22

And really it should be the other way around. So I have a question, and then I wanna do maybe some more recent

39:30

American history and get into legend, because I - Well, that's part of the whole thing, because this gets back to story and fantasy, right?

39:36

Because we're still got to loop this back then again. Yes. Yes, because the point you've been making so far, and I think

39:41

I agree, is that there were events that happened, but there's legends and there's accounts, and sometimes these lines are blurry, that the legends arise out of these accounts and legends can be true.

39:56

Sometimes long past the time, and I'm not talking about the Bible specifically, but like King Arthur or something, long past the time of these events and within the embellishments that come,

40:05

I mean, these are the reflections of a people that are accurate to what characterizes this people, what this people idealizes, what a character looks like.

40:17

So I wanna get into that, but before we do that, I gotta ask you this. So God did give us reason and sense perception.

40:27

He gave us instruments that he fine -tuned for at least some kind of accuracy, because I can taste,

40:34

I can smell, I can build a house. We know that there's houses that have bad foundations, houses that have good foundations, et cetera.

40:41

So when we look at history, things that have happened since then, I agree with you, you can't go back in the past, you can't retest it or anything like that.

40:49

But as you say, we are left with these artifacts. And sometimes, and this is how

40:54

I've tried to explain history, because I mean, I have a master's in history and we had to go through historiography. I don't think

40:59

I did maybe as much as you did, but obviously I had to have a class in it and reading Butterfield and Lukasz and all these guys.

41:08

And I boiled it all down to this. It seems like the rules of the discipline, whether it's hermeneutics or historiography, a lot of it does come down to, here are the elements and the paradigm, whatever paradigm you believe in, these elements must be made sense of within that.

41:30

So you can't, this is what I see with a lot of like ideologies. They end up taking a few elements and then making this the rule.

41:37

Like this is the scientific, like all history is about class conflict. All history is about whiteness and power.

41:44

All history is about racial self -preservation or whatever the little kernel that the ideology says, that's what it is.

41:51

And it might get a few things right, but it leaves out all these other elements. And that's, to me, that's what a historical account should do.

41:58

A good one, it is, like if I'm trying to reconstruct what happened in the civil war,

42:04

I know for starters, I have an incomplete record because I'm not God and I only have what people have written down.

42:10

And they're gonna tell me from their perspective. And I had different perspectives and I have to test these perspectives.

42:18

And someone who in their elderly years talks about the war versus when it right happened, right?

42:24

So we put more weight on the person who talks about it when it right happened. There's things like that in the discipline that are common sense, but whatever tests

42:32

I run at the end of the day, all these various moving parts must fit a paradigm that makes sense of them.

42:39

I can't just throw out evidence that I don't, that doesn't fit my paradigm, right?

42:44

That's how I understand historiography to work. And that's my biggest gripe, I suppose, with a lot of modern historical retellings that are cartoonish is that they do tend to leave these things out.

42:57

And of course, I'm not talking in the sense of legends, maybe, although this could contribute to legends, I am talking about actual historical research, making accounts of the past, knowing we don't have a complete account, but this is the best we can do with what we have available.

43:13

So maybe, so I guess my question for you is like, in my description there, which is obviously a little simplistic, but I'm boiling down, this is historiography, this is hermeneutics to some extent, original audience, you know, contexts, all that kind of thing.

43:30

Am I approaching this scientifically? Am I taking, as it were, the pagan's tools and using them inappropriately?

43:41

Or is there something to this? Because I think there is something to testing things based on reason and sense perception and so forth.

43:48

So go ahead, I'll let you have as much time as you need. Okay, so there's a really good example that gets us away from maybe talking about it through the lens of scripture, because it does dovetail back into it.

44:03

So again, we talk about for the 20th century the importance of, you know, the events of World War, you know, the both

44:13

World Wars or shaping the post -war era, right?

44:19

You know, and this is that dreaded term, the post -war consensus. But what happened with the

44:27

World War II stories is that they were very, very quickly mythologized and made archetypal, which is very interesting in a world that is supposed to be completely scientific and free from archetypes and so forth.

44:43

So in one sense, you get a melding that this is the way it happened. These are the facts of World War II.

44:53

And these facts then, you know, we have the never again and blah, blah, blah, you know, and, you know, the

44:59

Austrian painter is the most evil man, just, you know, sort of, he's the archetype of Satan himself.

45:05

So there's this kind of dual things where they're admitting on the one hand that these events have implied meanings that, you know,

45:14

Hitler is revealing the, you know, it reveals sort of the Satan figure or whatever, you know, and this guy, and we can't allow anyone who resembles

45:23

Hitler has to be put down immediately because we can't allow Satan to walk the world again, you know, these types of things.

45:29

And then you get others who say like, dude, you know, like what we need to do is demythologize these events and just simply look at them for their bare, you know, the bare facts of the events.

45:43

And so we have to go back and demythologize them and just look at the events of history as history. And I'm sympathetic with that, just to look at history because we can look at these and we can make false archetypes.

45:55

You know, these sorts of things. And so this comes down to the question. And here is,

46:00

I think, where you get at the nub of what we're claiming in scripture, as opposed to say something like the post -war consensus is we're claiming with scripture that the archetypal revelations in a sense that the meanings that are unfolded in the stories that are exposed in the stories are true in a way that our own mythologizing of historical events isn't.

46:30

So in a sense that in spite of our best efforts to demythologize scripture, that for, and in part because this is the faith item that we believe that it's revealed by God, that there is something sacred in these books that resists demythologizing in the way that, say the events of World War II have been, both quickly mythologized and now are being very quickly demythologized, both for political reasons.

47:00

And so there is something then I think in this, in a way of looking at that, that people have tried for generations now to demythologize scripture and yet the scriptures resist that demythologizing.

47:12

Now we use myth in a sense of term of story with divine significance.

47:20

I know some people get really squirrely when you use the term myth because they just, but it's, so people wanna demythologize scripture and thus strip it of its implicit and look at it as just history.

47:34

These are just the events. And then once you've quote unquote demythologized it, then you can begin unpacking it and saying, well, the events didn't happen exactly this way, why are all these contradictions and blah, blah, blah, blah.

47:45

And the stories themselves resist this because the meanings within them are so potent.

47:52

They are there because God wants them to be. And in spite of our best efforts, they have persisted beyond the attacks against them.

48:03

And it comes down to like, I don't know how familiar you are with say the works of I .N. McGilchrist, the master and his emissary.

48:11

And McGilchrist argues that in the divided brain, like the two halves of the brain, I can never remember which is which, but one half of the brain sort of takes the world in intuitively and relates to the world sort of kind of more or less as it is.

48:26

It doesn't filter, it doesn't do a lot. And it sees deeply, it sees things and patterns that are maybe not obvious.

48:34

And you could maybe even make the argument that it sees the unseen, the spiritual, the metaphysical.

48:39

And then we have a rational side of our brain that takes all of this information in and it organizes, it correlates, it processes it and makes it quote unquote useful and rational.

48:50

It puts it into form of language, it systematizes it. It makes this so that we can use it quickly and easily.

48:57

But in so doing, it strips it of all of the richness of its meaning.

49:03

And so what McGilchrist argues is that in our age, we have really, really pushed the bounds in order to create modernity.

49:11

We've so pushed the bounds of this rational side of ourselves that we almost don't even trust our intuitive self anymore.

49:20

Like there's no truth in the intuitive. There's no truth in this kind of, right? And then so, and what

49:25

McGilchrist is arguing is that we've almost in a sense made ourselves schizophrenic and insane because we're so demanding that everything be this one half of the brain, it has to be systematized, organized, regularized.

49:37

And we look at theologies and we've lost sight of this sort of, in a sense, intuitive, like I can grasp the

49:45

Trinity intuitively and it can make sense to me, but I can't rationally, other than a certain language formula,

49:54

I can't explain with words what I really mean by that, but I can grasp it. You know what I mean? And so there's this sense where you approach scripture and you're seeing in scripture these archetypes, the meaning that is there.

50:07

And sometimes, you know, can you systematize it? And so there's a sense of where I can capture the truth of say

50:16

Genesis, of the opening chapter of Genesis, in a sense, in that intuitive sense and grasp the truth of it, and in a sense, the deeper truth of it is there and in the form of the story, but to then try to rationalize it and make it fit all these nice, neat, demythologized categories, well, that can't be done.

50:36

And people have been trying now for a couple of hundred years and you just run into a wall with it.

50:41

You can't make the Genesis story fit those rational categories. And yet you can still say the world was created in six days and this is the important thing.

50:50

And in many states, the fact that it was created in six, well, the sort of the, in the form of the story, that it was created in six days is the important part of the story, but the meaning of that, you grasp more intuitively than you can rationally to try to explain it.

51:06

Like, cause you can't really explain it quote unquote scientifically because it just doesn't fit those categories. Well, it's even brought up later as this is the template for your life.

51:14

You ought to work six days and rest on the seventh. And so you can see Moses is, he has a purpose in giving you this pattern from the beginning.

51:22

God has obviously a purpose in this. Oh, and then it's reiterated in the man in the desert. Right? And then

51:28

Hebrews that Christ is our rest. And so it's, so this symbol just goes, or this event goes right through.

51:38

Archetypally. Yeah, it pierces into the depth of our being in life. So let's, okay.

51:46

So I think what's happening, you're actually describing something that's happening now with Zoomers to some extent, and even millennials of my age.

51:54

I actually was just talking to my dad about this yesterday. Longing for a richness of sort of a tradition that will offer transcendence and mystery.

52:03

And so a lot of guys are going to EO. Some guys are going Roman Catholic. Other guys are trying to find high church alternatives to the evangelical populism.

52:12

They don't really have to though. They just have to sort of embrace the idea of like, the idea of sort of a mystical journey.

52:20

You can do a mystical journey within the Protestant tradition. You don't have to become Eastern Orthodox. Yeah, I think it's better.

52:25

And this is that whole thing of feeling, the head heart split, which is just dumb, right? Because what happens is it's like with the head, to counter sort of this hyper -rationalism of the faith, to go into feelings.

52:37

Well, feelings are untrustworthy. And then you end up liberalizing the faith because you're just going to do what you feel.

52:43

When really what you want to do is you want, you need to counter, like this is that kind of mediocrity. You need to counter your hyper -rationalism with just an intuitive grasp of God.

52:53

So you've got to just go and, you know, stop trying to think about God and just meet God. You know, theology, this is, and it is to come from the

53:01

Orthodox, right? We talk about words about God and you do rather theology as words with God.

53:08

And you can do that from within a process. And I think we need to do that within a process and framework.

53:16

That's another whole. Oh, I'm sorry. You were breaking up there. Can you hear me? I said,

53:21

I think, yeah, I can hear you. That's like, and I think we can do, you know, the mystical journey in that sense from within the

53:29

Protestant tradition. And I think we might be able to even do it better. Yeah. Yeah, you know, so, all right.

53:35

So there's so many thoughts. I don't know which one. Oh yeah, I know. We were just bouncing around. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I think that the hyper -Puritan focus in the last 20 years in evangelicalism and I'm not even knocking this as all bad, but I think that there's ditches and the attempt to be, to subordinate all of theology to these very strict rational categories and then to understand yourself fully, which is, that might be even more dangerous, but to try to go plumb the depths of your own soul to see exactly where you stand with God.

54:17

And there is a weird kind of, you know, and I'm gonna write an article about this, I think this week, even, cause

54:23

I was sort of introduced through John Piper and it created an angst and a feeling of dread and, you know, not everyone had this experience, but enough people

54:35

I know related to it that I think it was a problem, it might still be, where they really are using, as you say, maybe,

54:43

I mean, this is a way to look at it, that one side of their brain to approach every single question. Yeah.

54:49

And so it's almost impossible to give anything up to a mystery or to, like, you must find little hints from the

54:57

Bible of things that God said that might relate to the question, even if that's not even directly what the story's about, you gotta make it fit somehow because, you know, that's how you do things.

55:08

Well, and I got myself into trouble a while back, like, arguing that, you know, in a sense, it's for all of the good that has come about because of systematic theology in terms of, you know, rigor and precision and how we talk about the faith and dealing with certain questions.

55:24

There is systematic theology as we know it, as it emerged in the modern period, that the whole doing of systematics is part and parcel of the same cultural ethos that produces managerialism.

55:40

In a sense, that quest for the one perfect way to express the truths of scripture, right?

55:48

And in many ways, I think that quest itself is flawed because although you can definitely have false ways of, you know, you can have false theology and so forth that are deceptive or just simply untrue, the idea that you're going to produce the one single definitive rational theology,

56:14

I think, misunderstands the nature of, again, that's that whole intuitive side that you're always just the rich, you're never going to get to a point with just words that you can capture the faith once and for all perfectly.

56:31

It just can't be done. And obviously, and I want people to understand too, because I can already see the comments.

56:38

I'm getting into all kinds of trouble here. It's all right. No, I think it's a worthwhile discussion. That's why we're having it.

56:43

It's not because we even, I didn't even know where you were going to come from when we started exactly. But I think, you know, you see systematic theology.

56:51

I don't want to call it systematic. You see theology. We'll say that in the writings of Paul. That's probably the closest you've come.

56:57

Logical arguments and Romans obviously being the chief of those. Well, even Hebrews is a theological argument.

57:04

Yeah, oh yeah, absolutely. The supremacy of Christ against. But it's told out of the framework of the

57:11

Old Testament temple tradition and understanding Christ as, you know, in that. But anyways. Yes, absolutely.

57:17

So we, yeah, obviously we have theology. Theology is important. Theology is good. I don't even think it's bad to,

57:24

I have right on my shelf, I have, you know, the three volumes of Turretin there. And, you know, I'll reference those.

57:30

But I think what you're getting at something deeper. And this is where I think people are, you know,

57:36

I asked them to put on their thinking caps and really take a very broad view of the last couple centuries at the very least and how we have come to view these things in a reductionistic way.

57:49

And I think that's what you're getting at is there is a reductionism that the scientific world has brought to us and we've gone along with it to some extent.

57:58

And that's part of the problem. And maybe this will, and I should say too, before I get to the next step here,

58:05

I do believe, I'm not speaking for you Kryptos, I'm assuming you believe this, but I do believe, you know, infallibility.

58:13

And I think the Bible as scripture describes it is theanoustos, it is breathed out by the spirit of God.

58:22

God is one who is truthful. So when the scripture speaks about things, it does so accurately, including the archetypes.

58:32

But it, so it is infallible. It is inerrant. It is without error in a sense.

58:37

But I don't say that as a way to please a scientific standard or consensus.

58:43

I do that as a reflection of the attributes of the God or a distillation, perhaps, of some of the attributes of the

58:50

God that I worship, that he is a God of truth. And I think the way that's framed perhaps is important.

58:56

So I wanna get into the fantasy, Lord of the Rings and that kind of stuff. But if you have any comments on this first,

59:01

I'd love to hear. No, like, I mean, I have a fair deal. I mean, I'm, it's one that I'm not gonna get derailed to the words, you know, inerrant and so forth.

59:10

They can be problematic. There's a whole philosophical and stuff there. But I have a very high view of scripture as the word of God.

59:17

And, you know, and in part, if I quibble with words of this, it's in my sense is to protect and to avoid putting the word of God in a place where it is inadvertently subjected to and undermined by the critiques of modern rationalism.

59:40

So in a sense of just holding a very high view of scripture as the word of God and in the sense that when you're reading the scripture, you're hearing

59:49

God speak to you. Like this is like you're standing on the mountain and God is, you know, the booming voice or the silent, but whatever, but you're standing on the mountain there and God is speaking to you.

01:00:00

You're there as if you were with Moses standing, you know, put your hand on your shoulder as God walks in front of Moses.

01:00:07

That's the kind of experience you're supposed to be having in reading these words. I guess, you know, and as we get into story that just maybe perhaps one last small thing is this idea as people talks about like facticity.

01:00:24

And one of the things that people don't understand with this notion of a fact is that, again, we experience reality intuitively.

01:00:31

And then when we experience it, we never just take in everything.

01:00:37

Our brains even pre -consciously, subconsciously filter stuff out. Because if you took in all of the sense data, you would go crazy.

01:00:43

There's actually a mental illness where people can't filter out all of the sense data. And they do actually go insane after a while for not being able to filter it out.

01:00:51

So even when we talk about observable reality, it's always reductionistic.

01:00:58

It's always never the fullness and the richness of reality. It's always a reduced form of reality.

01:01:05

It's what I see, what I hear, what I feel. And so you're then looking at the scriptures in a sense of God has predetermined in the telling of this sense that certain things are focused on more so than others.

01:01:21

Certain things are highlighted. Like take, for example, a car crash. The car, he hit him with a car or his car smashed into the car.

01:01:30

And just in the choice of those two words, you create two very different images that way. And so God's guidance in a sense of these words, of their choice, of the selection of them, there's a reduction of reality in a sense to focus on, in a sense, what are the most vital truths and the most vital things you were supposed to notice.

01:01:52

And then once you have a window into that, you realize again, intuitively, there's this vast ocean and richness of things that really can't be captured with language.

01:02:03

And yet somehow God managed to do so. Well, okay, so reduction.

01:02:08

When I use the word reduction, I'm thinking of it in terms of putting up fences that keep out the things that don't fit our paradigm, even though they truly exist.

01:02:19

All right, so you're using it a little differently because you're - Maybe the way to look at it is like a map, right?

01:02:26

If you're standing on the ground and you're lost somewhere, getting reality in its fullest doesn't help you because you're already in reality in its fullest and you're lost.

01:02:36

What you need in a sense is that reality to be, in some sense, reduced down into a format that allows you to find where it is you're going so you're not lost anymore, right?

01:02:49

And the map helps you do it. In some ways, scripture is a map and it's a map that gets you to God.

01:02:55

In this sense, the other thing is that scripture is not an end unto itself, right? It's not an idol that you worship.

01:03:00

You're not saved by scripture. Scripture in a sense points you to God. And that's in a sense what the value and significance of it.

01:03:09

So even when you're looking at scripture, you're not necessarily trying to find the truth of scripture as an end unto itself.

01:03:17

You're trying to, by means of scripture, garner a truer understanding of God himself so that way you really encounter

01:03:28

God truly and you're not deceived in your, because the devil is very good at deceiving people, so that in your encounter with spiritual realities, you in a sense, you know that you're pursuing

01:03:41

God truly because you are, as you say, kept within the fences or on the map you have, points you in the right place.

01:03:50

And that place is God. Yeah. So I want to, with our time.

01:03:56

Our last few minutes. Yeah, I have an 11 .30 thing and I need to, so but I do want to get into fantasy here real quick.

01:04:04

I think that was a great description of scripture in the map and so forth, but I did advertise this as we're, you know, we're going to talk about some.

01:04:13

A little fantasy. Narnia, that's okay. And just, you know, whether there's higher, we talk about archetypes, the hero's journey, these things that exist.

01:04:22

And here's my scenario I want to pitch to you. So let's say it's a thousand years from now and we have.

01:04:28

This is the same story. This is probably the same example. Go ahead, go ahead. Yeah. I don't know if it is. A thousand years from now and then a nuclear explosion has destroyed everything or, you know, the

01:04:39

EMP went off and we lost everything that was digitally stored. And for some reason, though, there's this untouched, unaffected copy of Lord of the

01:04:50

Rings. And so someone who's trying to piece back what, gee, what happened 2000 years ago on this planet, which would have been a thousand years from where we are,

01:05:01

I suppose. They find this Lord of the Rings and, you know, they connect it with a certain region.

01:05:08

They think this must have something to do with England, with this island that, where these people once dwelt.

01:05:14

And he bases his understanding of the culture of those peoples based off of this fantasy written by Tolkien.

01:05:22

Is he going to get it right or wrong? That's the question I'm going to ask you. Well, and this was, this is in some sense,

01:05:29

I was going to create the same hypothetical for you. Because this is really the, well, in a sense,

01:05:37

Tolkien is maybe the best example to do this because this is really what he was trying to do in a sense was to, using story form.

01:05:45

And this is where I think people get very, very squirrely in relationship. Because I will use the same word for this as scripture, like for Tolkien as scripture, right?

01:05:54

That they're both stories, right? And the thing is about Tolkien is he intentionally set out to, in some sense, capture the essence of, in some sense, the archetypal mythological

01:06:13

English soul in story form. Right? So if in a sense you say, well, that's it, he did it.

01:06:23

He captured the English soul, the English spirit in story form.

01:06:29

And he did it in a, you know, he did it in a sense like weaving also into it, you know,

01:06:37

Christian faith, the whole bunch of, but there's a whole layers to this story. And there's these archetypes that are revealed.

01:06:45

And there's these, you know, truths that can be discussed. Like, it's just a, it's a very layered story.

01:06:52

So even though none of the events actually happened, is it not possible then to say that the story of the

01:07:03

Lord of the Rings is true? That's the question. And I would argue that a case could be made that way.

01:07:08

Now, and maybe for some people in a sense to get even squirrelier, because J .K. Rowling did this very intentionally.

01:07:15

And one of the reasons why, say, the Harry Potter stories, for example, are very, very popular is she set out to tell an archetypal story.

01:07:27

And so in the telling of this story, she revealed, you know, she gets at and reveals and uses a number of very, very deep archetypes.

01:07:38

Now it's unfortunate for many who are Christians that they get, they trip over the whole, you know, magic thing.

01:07:44

And that has a certain problematic things, but the archetypes that she's dealing with are very, these are very real archetypes.

01:07:50

And she's looking to explore them in this category of fantasy and magic that make a lot of people, but nonetheless does a very good job of unfolding certain of these narratives.

01:08:03

Now, there's also some that are somewhat problematic, but at the same time, it gets at, because she doesn't do it with the same deafness and high culture kind of level that Tolkien does.

01:08:15

But at the same time, there are things if you read those stories to say, yeah, there's something that she's saying more than just, telling a story that she's also trying to unfold for us something essential about human nature.

01:08:33

And that's really in a sense what good storytelling does. In some ways you can make, how do you say, you can show people things about the human condition, about human nature in a story that you can't, or that's just not as easy to do in prose.

01:08:51

And sometimes you don't have to necessarily have to hit people over the head with it, but in the unfolding of the characters and the unfolding of the events, you can reveal something that is very real and essential about human life.

01:09:08

And the sense of like, we know we've all played that game, telephone, where you whisper something in somebody's ear and they whisper something in somebody else's ear.

01:09:16

And you think to yourself of the very oldest stories that are told and retold. And we know this, this is why

01:09:22

I say reading like Walter, somebody like Walter Ong. When they do the, the people who do epic poetry and there were still, when

01:09:34

Ong was doing it in the early 20th century, there's still some true oral poets that when they did epic poetry and they were reciting these epics, they would tell you that it's the same every time and they're doing it from memory.

01:09:51

But when they would record various performances of these epic poems, they were only about 80 % the same.

01:09:58

The other 20 % was kind of made up on the spot. And yet you would say it's still the same epic poem, even though it varies over time and it's telling the same lesson.

01:10:09

So you think of like, Homer, the Iliad, all of these stories, these epic poems that were recited over and over again.

01:10:15

And the biblical stories are the same. So if you have a biblical story that existed for say a thousand years or 500 years, whatever, 10 ,000 years before it was ever written down and in the epic telling of the story, only about 80 % of it remains exactly the same as it was in the previous time.

01:10:36

But the other 20 % varies depending on the telling and the person and so forth. It gets at a very different sort of sense of the understanding of like, well, what is history?

01:10:45

What is story? And so forth in these epic, because there's a lot of this type of epic storytelling that goes into the scriptures.

01:10:51

And so in this sense, the line between the scriptures and what's happening in the scriptures and say something like the

01:11:00

Iliad or something like Tolkien is not as precise and clear cut as many guys would like to have it.

01:11:07

So you can say that Tolkien is telling a story, but like you say, a thousand years from now, the story keeps getting told and retold and retold.

01:11:14

At what point does somebody pick it up and say, well, this actually happened. And it starts arguing that this is history and we need to build a religion and a faith and a society around it.

01:11:22

It's completely plausible that this might happen. And then the story just simply becomes true.

01:11:28

There's some nerds out there hoping it happens. Yeah, there's some people out there hoping it, yeah.

01:11:34

But this is in a sense, I think, and this is why, and I don't wanna undermine, this is not in a sense to undermine scripture, but I think it's a way of,

01:11:47

I think primarily guarding against many of the attacks that modernity has subjected scripture to, to demythologize it.

01:11:56

And we have to look at the scripture. And I think that story is a far better category than history because history comes freighted with all this modernist baggage of demythologizing and so forth.

01:12:10

We're gonna do actual history and we're gonna demythologize the World War II period. And this is going to help us politically get rid of these myths that are bringing our society down.

01:12:21

And this is part of what history, the scientific history does. But scripture in a sense resists it and it remains stories that are potent with archetype, with meaning.

01:12:35

They are imbued with the spirit of God. And these stories are unique. This is our faith.

01:12:42

These stories are unique among all other stories. But yet at the same time, they remain essentially stories.

01:12:48

So you can see in biblical stories, something similar to the stories of Homer or the story that's told in the

01:12:59

Lord of the Rings or in Narnia, that there are overlaps between those stories.

01:13:06

And what makes scripture unique is that this is the story that God wants told about the meaning of life, the universe and things in that regard.

01:13:20

And that's in a sense what makes it significant more so than anything else is that we believe that this is the story that God gives us about the universe and the world and its true meaning.

01:13:31

And it remains essentially story in that regard but it's God's story for us. Even studying scripture, it is beneficial to know things about near Eastern literature and other stories that were popular at those times because God often uses similar forms through human authors who still, and this is another mystery, right?

01:13:56

We don't exactly know how this works, but it's the Anustos. It is breathed out by the spirit of God while these authors retain their own unique writing characteristics, even grammar.

01:14:07

You know, Peter's grammar is often critiqued as being somewhat like kind of redneck.

01:14:15

It's just, it's not really proper grammar for, it's not proper Koine Greek. And, but this is the mechanism

01:14:21

God wanted to use. And so this is all these different various authors, all these different genres, these different time periods.

01:14:29

This is the story God wants for us to see. And that's what makes it,

01:14:36

I think, what separates, that's the biggest thing, obviously, that separates it. But I'll ask this question and then let you go, say whatever you want, and then we'll probably have to end the podcast.

01:14:46

But obviously you touched on this a little. There are pagans, obviously, pagan stories that get some things right.

01:14:53

There's some archetypes in these pagan stories that could be correct. I haven't read extensively the writings in Hinduism or the, what is it, the

01:15:03

Bhagavad, I can't even pronounce it, the Gita. I'm just gonna say Gita. Bhagavad Gita. Thank you. I haven't read extensively in pagan literature.

01:15:12

I had a world religions course. We had to read clippings and so forth. But there's a lot of true things you find.

01:15:18

Even Islam, in the Quran, you see a lot of Christian elements, probably through apocryphal sources, filtered into the

01:15:26

Quran, some of which have some truth to them. But obviously there's things that are twisted.

01:15:32

There's lies. There's demonic forces that want a new story to convey things that will damage us and are evil.

01:15:41

And so maybe talk about that a little bit in our closing. Well, and we can actually flip that around,

01:15:47

John, because remember that the people of Israel sojourned in Egypt, right?

01:15:54

So I have a book here called The Symbolism of the Biblical World, Ancient Near Eastern Iconography in the

01:15:59

Book of Psalms. So we remember that the people of God spent 400 years in Egypt.

01:16:09

And if I think it's something like half of the Proverbs have pairs and duplicates in older Egyptian Proverbs, right?

01:16:23

And a lot of the images of, in a sense, the way that they think about the world in terms of how they conceive the heaven and the earth, the firmament above and all these types of things are borrowed in many ways or came out of the

01:16:40

Egyptian period that the people are in. So in a sense, you have this faith that comes out of, and this is in a sense where you look at the hand of God, that God is guiding these people while they're in Egypt.

01:16:56

They're learning stuff from the Egyptians. There's wisdom sayings, there's their conception of the world that they take on.

01:17:04

Some of it comes in from the Egyptians and yet God uses this to tell his story. And this is a sense where God selects his people out, gives them a story.

01:17:14

I will be with you as I'm with you. This is that sense of, when he takes the people out for himself and there is this whole thing in the

01:17:24

Old Testament of telling and retelling and retelling the fundamental story of how God took his people out, brought them through the

01:17:33

Red Sea. And this happens over and over and over again in the Old Testament and the prophets and even on Pentecost that these stories are.

01:17:41

And then again, in the book of Hebrews, all of this basic narrative of how God took his people out, but he took them out of a pagan world.

01:17:50

And so then shape them with this story alongside. Now, as you go out into the world, just because you're out in the world does not fundamentally erase the patterns that are there.

01:18:04

So the world around they can see these patterns. I mean, and they're twisted, they're directed in the wrong way.

01:18:15

And often they're directed to the, demons take these patterns and then get people to worship them.

01:18:24

And so they steal worship that's meant to go to God. But yet at the same time, those patterns exist out there.

01:18:32

I had a professor who talked about it in terms of the treasures of the Egyptians. And so you come out of Egypt and you take all of these treasures with it.

01:18:39

Well, you can do one of two things. You can either build a golden calf or you can build a tabernacle. So what are you gonna build with the treasures that you take out of the

01:18:46

Egyptians? And so this is in a sense with regard as you can go out into the world and you can read,

01:18:54

Zen or Hindu or African or South American, you can read these writings and you can see in them, certain patterns and archetypes and so forth.

01:19:06

But you have to recognize that, the farther you get from the word of God, the more likely that these, you don't then in a sense, and this is the thing we talked about, you don't then in turn come back to the word and now evaluate the word of God based on these other stories, but rather you evaluate these stories based on the word of God.

01:19:29

And so it's always in a sense of when you come into and encounter the faith, the idea is that you're setting aside the stories you have to embrace that sort of narrative suicide.

01:19:40

So you put to death your old story to take on this new story of who you are and the people, and this is part of what the discipleship process is supposed to be, is inculcating into people this new story that now then is supposed to define their life and not the old story.

01:19:56

And I think this is one of the things that we don't do well in the church today, is we don't disciple well and as a result, our churches are infiltrated by this smorgasbord of stories and nobody really is, because we've, how do you say, like with the seeker model, we tend to remove all of our distinctiveness to make it easy to come into the world.

01:20:21

But if you don't have to give up anything and you don't have to learn anything, are you really any different from the world around you?

01:20:27

And this is where that kind of syncretist element comes into there. So there should be a kind of strangeness and weirdness to the

01:20:33

Christian faith that it takes time to let go of your old stories to then embrace the new stories.

01:20:40

And if in there's some similarity between your old story and this new story, it gives you, in a sense, you can look at it as a form of grace that your old patterns of belief and living are not incommensurable with the gospel.

01:20:56

In a sense, there's things that you can use as a bridge. You're not starting from scratch because God's grace is out there.

01:21:03

You know, I grew up in the Dutch Reformed tradition of common grace. So there is this sense of God's grace is existing to show you, to give you without excuse to come to Lord.

01:21:12

But this also then gives you an avenue to come into the word. But then as a sense, you have to say like, okay,

01:21:19

I'm coming in with these, understanding these stories, but then you have to let go kind of of the falseness of your old stories to embrace the true story, shall we say, that comes from, you know, that God reveals to us in his scriptures.

01:21:34

Yeah, well, it was great. I only have like two minutes. So I just, I need to -

01:21:40

Oh, you've got to go. I'm sorry, John. No, no, no, you're good. You're good. I appreciate you coming on and talking about this. What's your

01:21:45

Twitter handle or X handle? At underscore Kryptos. And my sub stack is seekingthehiddenthing .com.

01:21:54

Okay, seekingthehiddenthing .com. Go check it out. I think that Kryptos has really insightful things that he puts out there quite a bit, some really good threads.

01:22:03

So if you're on X, I would encourage you to follow him. I think the big strength that I, and there's many things we could talk about, but we've already talked a bunch.

01:22:11

I just want to highlight this one thing. I think it's important for Christians, myself included,

01:22:16

I'm preaching to myself, to look at the scripture the way that Kryptos described earlier.

01:22:22

Not just, and I say not just on purpose, because I do think, and I'm not even quite certain if Kryptos and I completely agree on -

01:22:30

We probably don't. On all of this. I don't know. There's a lot of kind of set in, fundamentalist in me,

01:22:39

I suppose, that wants to fight the modernists. But I enjoy having these discussions.

01:22:46

And I think the thing that I was trying to get at in the video that you looked at Kryptos, and the thing that we've been talking about a little bit here is, it should be real for you.

01:22:55

This isn't just a dusty old book that you're looking in to make sure that it's tested - Accurately.

01:23:00

This is something that it's here, and now there's a section of my book, Against the Waves, where I talk about mountaintop experiences.

01:23:07

I mean, that's an archetype, but scripture has these all throughout it. Jesus did it.

01:23:13

Go out into nature, be with God. These stories are intended to help you bridge that gap that we have with our creator, to commune with him, to be close to him.

01:23:26

He gave it as a wonderful, I mean, some people call it a love letter, but I actually think that's kind of beautiful.

01:23:33

It's a wonderful note to us that helps us to know him better.

01:23:39

And it's a tool for that. So anyway, I just wanted to say - Every time you open up your Bible, think of it like you're meeting

01:23:44

Jesus on the road to Damascus, or standing in front of the burning bush. And that I think will help you immensely. Yeah.