The Lord is There

Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson here with Greg Uttinger. We’re missing Bryan Broome this time.

We’re about to be introduced, you and I, listener, to the work of Harvey Cox. Did I get that right?

You got it right. Oh, how shameful it came down to that. You mean So-crates? Plat-o?

This is a way to segue out of some current elements in pagan humanistic thought back to our overarching theme, the City of God.

Harvey Cox wrote a book in 1966 called The Secular City. Emily was asking me, “Who’s Harvey Cox?” He’s the guy who wrote The Secular City in 1966.

Apparently very popular then and not much remembered today.

It was very popular at the time. The Times bestseller list noticed him and it got him a job at Harvard as a professor. He retired in 2009, I think I just saw on Google. He had a habit of jumping from one philosophical fad to another. He wrote The Secular City and within a couple years he was running in a very different direction.

I’d seen this book referenced by other people writing on sociology and philosophy and epistemology, so somewhere along the line I must have seen it at a used bookstore and picked it up, and it’s pretty well-written actually. As I read the early chapters on the origin of the city, as opposed to the tribe and the town, I recognized the people he was quoting as people I otherwise respected, and he did a good job.

It seems like Fustel De Coulanges would come in here.

Exactly. That’s one of the people he quotes. He builds this argument that man began presumably at some point in his evolution in terms of family and then tribe, which is extended family, and the jump from there to the town or the village is the next big step from superstition to formal religion, and that we eventually go to the city and the city shakes things up again.

Beyond that is the rule of technocracy or what he calls technopolis, a city in which technology is so integrated into the way we live and think and act and react that it has to be a dominant factor in what we’re doing, and in which religion, metaphysics, and philosophy – Christianity yes, but all the others too – slide into the background, sort of like the cocoon falling away, because this is what history is all about.

How does he define technology, or how would you infer his definition?

I actually do not remember him giving a definition, but that may be the lack of my memory, since he wrote it in 1966. Let’s see – no internet, no home computers, no cell phones. In some ways he was a prophet, I suppose. He saw where this could go, and of course there were a great many science fiction writers at the time, classic science fiction, not the Star Wars type, but people who looked at the real possibilities of technology and said, “Well, if we extrapolate into the future, this is what could happen.” So in the sense of saying, “These are possibilities. We’re not only able to use nature, but we become integrated with it through our extensive technology,” he was onto something.

So science and tools together as a concept.

Exactly, and that this will frame the modern community of man. To meet such challenges, he argues, I guess is the word, that men need to give up the religious taboos of the past, just as they gave up their primitive superstitions, and recognize that there are no divine voices from Sinai or Mecca or anywhere else, that man’s on his own, that the removal of the supernatural leaves only the natural, leaves man in charge, and man has got to decide, or men collectively have got to decide what they’re going to do about that.

Hiding behind religion isn’t going to work anymore, but if we want a happy world then we have to learn to live together somehow and use this technology for the benefit of the planet. There’s a little bit of green-speak going on there, but most of it is still very man-centered. “We need to live together and just get along, and that’s going to require us to make some hard choices and to make up some rules.”

He has the wisdom not to tell us what the rules are, because first of all the whole thesis is this has to be something that every person, every nation, every country, every region, every continent has to have a voice in, because we’re moving toward a global community, so no one person can make up the rules. We all have to come up with some kind of system, probably a flexible and expanding one, that will take into account the needs for today and tomorrow and next century and next millennium.

Christianity, he argues, is the womb or cocoon out of which all this grows, for a couple reasons. Let me lay these out and we can see how close he gets. He actually almost gets it, and then takes a dog leg to the right so sharp – or to the left in this case – that you can’t believe it just happened.

First of all, he looks at the Hebrew doctrine of creation and comes up with the proper interpretation that God made the world. God is not the world. The world is not God. There is a sharp distinction here that cannot be crossed, and that the Hebrews were unique in believing this.

He probably had read The Ancient City by Fustel De Coulanges, because that’s very much Coulanges’ approach. Yes, he even quotes Coulanges at points. Every ancient city was a religious institution. The gods indwelt – not simply in the sense of acknowledging religion, but the gods actually lived in the cities. The cities were constructed by magic in terms of the central altar fire, which was a testimony to a deified dead ancestor.

The Ancient City, for our listeners, is the book by Fustel De Coulanges and is the definitive work on the worldview of the ancient pagans.

So Cox has read that and he gets it and he does a good job of setting it forward. There’s another book whose title I don’t remember and I don’t think I quote in my article, but it’s on philosophy before Socrates, and it discusses the worldview of Mesopotamia – Syria, Babylon, and Sumer. It’s very much in line with all of this. It shows the classical world thought one way, and then there were the Hebrews.

Those Hebrews were funny people. They did not think that God was immersed in nature. They absolutely stood by that and their whole worldview came out of that. Right, good. I wish Christians understood that better.

On this first doctrine, Harvey Cox – whether he believes in the biblical doctrine of creation; he doesn’t actually say – understands the implication of the doctrine that people have professed and have believed. God is not creation. Creation is not God. God does not incarnate himself in a political order or in an ethnic group or in some magically-constructed institution. God is God and the world bows before him, and all men of all sorts owe him allegiance, and his will is revealed in his word – the biblical doctrine of creation.

Cox argues that as that became assimilated in the ancient world through the Christian gospel and the spread of Christianity, people began looking twice at their social institutions, their conceptions of government, society, of the empire and the emperor, and began to wonder, “Hmm, what if all that’s not divine? What if God is in his heaven, and Jesus Christ is at the right hand of the Father, and we’re human, just men, but charged to be stewards of this creation which is God’s territory and God’s property?” That’s a fantastically different worldview than saying that we’re all God and we’re all in this together.

There’s a divine spark in each of us.

Yes, and in the ant and in the possum and in the skunk and in the palm tree and whatever.

Second, he turns to the exodus and again is able at least to read what the text says. Whether he believes it or not I cannot say. The book of Exodus, in showing us that incredible movement of God to rescue his people from bondage, shows us God completely overturning the worldview of Egypt, the bureaucracy, the magic, the political empire, which were all tangled up together.

You can’t come to Egypt and say, “Well, here was their politics, but their religion was over here, and the way they implemented things…” – it was all compact into one system. It was the most powerful thing on the planet at the time, and God just took his finger and flicked it and it went down and never recovered really.

Cox looked at this and says, “See, this is what God (and Hebrew thought and Christianity eventually) does to the realm of the political.” It desacralizes the political, so you can look at the political and no longer say, “Wow, those are the gods. That’s divine.”

It turns out that the emperor is just a man like me, and he puts on his pants one leg at a time. He’s just this guy, which was a huge thought. Again, he’s right. This is part at least of what was going on. It’s not the whole story by any means. God had bigger things in mind than simply doing that, but he did that along the way.

The book of Exodus and the psalms are full of notes that God brought judgment on the gods of Egypt. It was not simply an economic thing. It was political. It was religious. It was all wrapped up together.

And even throughout scripture you have the use of the word ‘gods’ as meaning human authorities.

Yes, the exodus did take all that apart, and what follows of course is Mount Sinai – revealed laws that come directly from God that human judges are to implement. God does, as you say, at that point call the judges ‘gods’ because they work for God. They’re exercising divine authority in part and in pieces, on a very local restricted assignment. But it’s God’s authority. It’s not made up. It’s not man’s. It’s not the vote of the group. This is not democracy. This is not Roman republicanism. This is theocracy in the sense that God wrote the rules and we are to enforce them.

Now, we have to enforce them with wisdom because he didn’t provide us with a 12,000-page long book that covers every single possible example. He expects us to reason from general principle, through case law and biblical story to practical application. Again, that requires a man to walk with God and to know his word thoroughly so you can start making connections.

And that was the requirement, the qualification for those judges. It was not that they’ve lived so long in Israel. No, they had to know the law of God.

They had to be wise, and they had to have the character of despising bribes. They were supposed to be able to look at a situation.

I just read this on LinkedIn on one of those things that flashes up that tells you what our first responders and law enforcement people are doing. A boy was constantly being caught breaking into a gym to exercise at night, and they kept telling him, “Stop it or we’re calling the police.” But no matter what they did, he kept finding new ways into the gym, apparently. Finally they just called the police and said, “This has got to stop.”

The cop talked to the young man and he said, “Look, I just want to exercise. I had a membership here, but then things happened to the family, we don’t have any money and I can’t afford it. All I want to do is exercise.”

Now, we could say “Thou shalt not steal. You’re going to make restitution. You’ve crossed boundary lines. In American law that may mean some jail time.” There’s a lot of ways you could go with a very legalistic literal handling of this case. What the cop did instead was say, “Okay, I’m going to buy you two months’ membership. I’m paying for it. Here’s the money. Sign him up.”

The word got back to corporate and they were so impressed that they said, “We’ll take that and we’ll parlay that into a two-year membership.”

Now, do you think that helped the community more than slapping the guy on the wrist, giving him a few days community service, and slapping some fine on him? Probably, and he’s probably going to be a better asset to the community, and he probably is not going to come back and, I don’t know, spray paint the outer walls of this gym out of frustration.

It was an elegant solution. It cost the cop a bit of money, to be sure, but there’s a practical application of what the difference between “Here’s the law, here’s the offense, here’s the penalty” and “What does wisdom require? What’s the goal here? What does God want in this situation? How can I make that happen with the least muss and fuss, in a way that everybody is going to be blessed by this?”

A machine can’t be a judge. This is why artificial intelligence can’t handle it. It takes the human touch, so judges are called gods, Elohim, in scripture.

Harvey Cox says he comes to Sinai and realizes some of this. He realizes that this is Yahweh the Creator, speaking from outside of time and history into history and laying down a law. He looks particularly at the second commandment and realizes that the second commandment in saying “Don’t make any visualization of God” is in effect saying, “Don’t try to create your own value systems.” I don’t remember if he says this himself or he’s quoting someone else, but he says the ancients understood that every idol was in essence a value system.

What is it with these people who are not even Christians who understand the second commandment so well, like this guy and Neil Postman, I think.

Exactly. Emily is referencing Neil Postman in Amusing Ourselves to Death, but Neil Postman did consider himself a Christian of some sort.

Oh, I thought he was a secular Jew. I must be mistaken.

I don’t believe so. At least one point he was working with the National Council of Churches.

I stand corrected. We can look it up.

I may have misinterpreted a remark, because he does remember the second commandment from his youth. That could be Jewish, but he gets it. He understood, even with his secular leanings, that the second commandment meant that some things cannot be communicated through visual images, and that among these are religious absolutes and religious values and ultimately God himself, who is truth. You can’t reduce God to a picture. That’s something of what Harvey Cox is getting at here. You can’t bring God down into concrete images.

Now, as Christians we would say now look back at the first commandment. “I am the Lord thy God which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” There’s a first commandment. It says, “I’m God. Here’s my law.”

So in saying no made-up religions, no man-made value systems, he’s sweeping them away to make room for his value system, for his law. Harvey kind of misses that and says, “See? This just demolishes all religious value systems, all metaphysical systems, all philosophical systems, all -isms, and ultimately it leads to the point where we don’t need systems of thought. We’ve just got to be us and make hard choices in the face of life’s challenges. Christianity set us up for that. It’s brought us this far. We now need to have the guts to push through to the next level, leave behind anything that is merely superstitious or that is merely a system of thought or an -ism, for the sake of the city of man,” and that’s how he brings in the city of man.

The city of God, such as it was, the Hebrew people and the church, existed to bring forth this new human community that will operate in terms of human rules and values that we will make up to meet our needs as we go along, apparently, because again you can’t know the future and you can’t legislate for all time. The romantics at least understood that. It has to flow out of all of our hearts together in a given moment. He says more in the book, but I think you get the point.

Here is a line from Harvey Cox. It’s only about 30 pages in, but it sums up his thought to that point: “All idols and icons must be exposed for the relative, conditional things they are. Tribal naivete must be laid to rest everywhere, and everyone must be made a citizen of the land of broken symbols.”

The language is powerful. He understands rhetoric well. “Broken symbols” is so reminiscent of T.S. Eliot. He’s using images to call for the destruction of images – intellectual images, philosophical images, systems, ways of looking at the world.

This is what I wrote in response: “Once everyone abandons his imagined absolute, once every society and culture admits that their values are relative, then the whole world can work at creating a pragmatic value system that can benefit everyone.”

Harvey Cox says, “Secularization places the responsibility for the forging of human values, like the fashioning of political systems, in man’s own hands.”

So this is taking us back to the garden and saying, “We will determine good and evil.”

“We will know for ourselves what is good and evil, because we can’t count on God.” His idea of God’s transcendence apparently kicked God out of the universe at some point. I’m assuming he believes in a god of some sort, although I wouldn’t swear to it. He was ordained as a pastor in a liberal Baptist denomination.

He wrote this originally for a group of Protestant students who were studying issues related to this. He adopts a religious position, but here he becomes a prophet of the end of all systems or religion, Christian or otherwise, and points us to what lies beyond. So much for using Harvey Cox as a springboard.

We’ve talked a great deal in the past about the ancient concept of the city of man, as in fact a city of the gods, men and gods living together in the same community, and every city is a city of God or of the gods. It’s divine. By living there you’re divine, and anyone who tells you you’re not is the enemy and probably needs to be killed in some fashion, but of course every city had its own gods.

Alexander complicated things by conquering half the world, and then they had to decide, “Wait, now who makes the rules? We have so many gods that we’ve conquered, so who’s the boss?”

The fascination with keeping around the gods that you’ve conquered is just amusing.

It’s like serial killers keeping trophies.

R.J. Rushdoony writes this about Christianity: “By de-divinizing the world, Christianity placed all created orders, including church and state alike, under God. By denying divinity to all and by reserving divinity to the triune God, all created orders were freed from one another and made independent of each other and together interdependent in their dependence on God. Church and state were alike required to be Christian, but neither was able to be a total Christian order.”

So going back to the Creator/creation distinction, which was affirmed so powerfully at the Council of Chalcedon, by saying that even in Jesus Christ the human and the divine do not mix, Christianity was saying, “God’s God. Jesus is God. You’re not. We’re not. Nothing on this planet is God,” which means you’re not the boss of me. You’re not God. I don’t have to bow down and cower before you. I can tell you no, and hold up a Bible and say, “Thus saith the Lord.” Western liberty is implicit in these doctrines.

Could I interrupt and ask you to tell the story of the students that you overheard cheating on a Systematics test?

[laughing] Yeah, one of them grew up to become a pastor and was president of our Synod, but in my first year teaching he was my student. I was teaching theology and using Dr. Rushdoony’s book, The Foundations of Social Order, which was a book on the creeds and councils of the early church and their social and political implications.

I’d given them a test, probably on the Council of Chalcedon, and as I was walking around the tables as they were filling out the test, I heard one young man speak to this future pastor and say, “What’d you put on this?” He looks over and says, “The state becoming God? Is that the answer?” My student said, “It’s the answer to everything else in this class.”

Having taken that class, yes, accurate. The state cannot become God. Just remember that.

You know, it’s an issue today. Romans 13 – does that mean that we have to obey the state totally under all circumstances, no matter what it tells us? Most Christians I think get the idea, “Well, if it commands you to worship idols then you should say no, but short of that…”

My wife and I were just having a conversation about this with regard to our own school. At what point do we tell the state no? Obviously, if they come in and say, “Bow down before this idol,” we would hope that everyone would refuse. What if they say, “You must teach evolution, because science says it’s true”? We would also say no. “But science… But the state…”

“But no. You’re asking us to teach lies.”

How about if they tell us we have to hire a drag queen to come in and entertain our kindergartners? We’re going to say no, and so it goes.

Some Christians haven’t thought this through far enough, and I won’t go to all the places that are really touchy right now, but think about it for a while. What else has the state been telling us we have to do because science says so? Well, are you going to disobey in these other places? How about these touchy ones? How do we decide? Where does it end?

Where does the rest of scripture balance out a superficial reading of Romans 13 and tell us the state is a servant, the deacon of God. That means we’re supposed to expect it to obey God and do God’s stuff, when it is in flat-out rebellion and trying to subdue us and tyrannize over us, especially in America where the state is not the final authority. The constitution may not formally recognize God, but it at least recognizes we, the people.

The Constitution doesn’t recognize the people who are currently in power as the supreme law of the land. The Constitution recognizes itself.

Yes, and beyond that the people who created it. There are some fundamental misunderstandings. We don’t live in the Roman empire where Caesar is perceived as God, and where any motion against him must automatically provoke condemnation and probably persecution. We live in a nation that was founded upon the idea that there are transcendent laws that the people in power right now actually have to obey and should be called on account if they don’t obey. That means that in some place resistance has to begin.

Now, that doesn’t mean we have to be vicious and mean, and it doesn’t mean we grab guns and go out and assassinate people. We don’t start blowing up bridges.

And it might look different for people in different roles.

Different times, different places, different conditions. In staff devotions this morning we were just reading about Samson with the foxes. You remember the foxes. He collects them and ties them tail to tail and gets 150 teams of foxes or jackals and sticks torches between them and throws them into the standing wheat.

How does he do that? I’ve tried to bathe a cat and I’m not sure how he managed to tie foxes’ tails together.

He can tear a lion in half, I think he can manage this. That’s the question every kid asks. In fact, my wife just taught through this and that was the first question. “How did he catch them and tie them together?”

“Super glue. Duct tape, no doubt.” It doesn’t mean he actually had to take the tails and intertwine them. It just means that somehow he tied them together. Maybe he did. Maybe he broke a lot of foxtails in the process.

I don’t like that.

The point in all of this is you can look at that and say he’s a terrorist, and when the odds get upped, the Philistines find out why he did this. It’s because his father-in-law had given his wife away to someone else, probably truly believing that Samson had abandoned her, and this was Samson’s revenge. The Philistines took away his seed, and he’s taking away their seed – a play on words, puns and all that.

When the Philistines find this out, they then burn down the house of Samson’s father-in-law and his wife and kill them, and Samson basically says, “That’s not for you to do. You just killed my family. Now as a judge I will meet out due vengeance,” and he takes out a whole lot of them.

Yet Christians looking through the eyes of Romans 13 can say, “He’s a social revolutionary. This is just wrong. He’s out of control.” No, this is a time of war. Judah is occupied. Samson just offered them a peace treaty by offering to marry one of their girls, and they threw it back in his face and killed her. This is what a guerilla leader does, especially when he has the powers of Superman.

And the authority of God as a judge of Israel.

Yes, he was a lawful judge with lawful authority. “But they’re in control.” They’re unlawfully in control.

I was just thinking about this today. I was talking with someone about the Great Escape, a wonderful conversation between the Nazi camp director and the commanding officer of the Allied prisoners of war. The Nazi is saying, “Stop your people from trying to escape. We know that’s what they do. We would like them to stop,” and the guy says, “Well, it’s their duty. Just because you have them at gunpoint doesn’t mean that their loyalty or their duty has changed. It is their job to continue occupying as much of your energy as they can manage, to help the Allied war effort.”

They’re still soldiers. They’re still frontline soldiers. You hear it in older movies all the time – the first duty of a prisoner of war is to escape, for the reasons you just said. It’s still part of the war effort. But that doesn’t fit into the nice neat – “Well, the government told us to, so we have to.” Romans 13 has a context. It has the context of all of scripture, the book it’s actually written in, and a historical time in which he’s writing. That doesn’t mean we’re supposed to be social revolutionaries. It does mean that there’s more to it than simply saying, “Obey under all circumstances.”

David didn’t obey Saul. He ran away. Jesus said, “If they persecute you in the city, run to another one.” We are not advised, if we are private individuals, to pick up weapons and shoot at county, state, or federal officers. That’s not it, but there is such a thing as simply saying no.

We can appeal to the apostles. When the Sanhedrin told them, “Don’t preach in the name of Jesus,” and then arrested them and threw them in prison and the angel released them and said, “Go preach,” they went out and preached. But when the guards came for them, they went peaceably. They didn’t start a riot. You can disobey without hurting people.

You can work through lawful channels, especially in America. You can enter lawsuits in state and federal courts. There are other options than becoming anarchists whereby you can oppose evil, at least for now there are. Better to take the options while we still have them than to wait until we are an occupied country and we can’t tell who’s the good guys and who’s the bad guys anymore.

We’re going to be going back to Daniel, and if we haven’t already covered that we’re going to cover it there for sure.

So Ezekiel. The last few chapters of Ezekiel are apocalyptic. They’re visionary. Ezekiel sees a city that in most respects seems very much like a concrete brick and mortar kind of city. Everywhere he turns there’s something to measure – a door, a passageway, a staircase, a wall. The angel has him going all over measuring all kinds of things and specifying the exact configuration, particularly of the temple in this new city. It's realistic that many commentators believe this is a real city that will one day be rebuilt, but there’s a couple problems with that.

First is the size. If you read the language carefully, and you can compare translations here, some of the measurements given sound like the city and the temple are about the same size. That’s a little odd. Biblically it makes a lot of sense, but in terms of architecture it doesn’t really.

Another is that there is a fountain that flows out of the temple, and as it goes outward toward the Dead Sea it gets bigger and bigger as it goes, and everywhere it goes life springs up and there are trees of life bearing fruit all the way along the way, and the leaves are for the healing of the nations. Now we should be remembering Revelation 21 and 22. And when the waters reach the Dead Sea, everything in it lives. This is living water coming from the temple. At this point we should be able to say, “Wait, this sounds really familiar.”

The minor prophets mention this a lot. Zechariah particularly has a vision, but here the water goes in one direction. In Zechariah’s vision the water goes toward both seas, both the interior sea within Israel, the Dead Sea, but also to the Mediterranean, the whole Gentile world. And in Zechariah’s vision, which is clearly the time of Messiah, the mountain is lifted up to great heights so the waters can flow freely to the ends of the world.

So what we should see here is yes, it’s cast into the form of an architecturally correctly described city, but that’s not what God’s people needed to know. What they needed to know is that God has a plan for them for a place, a time, a community, a situation where there will be peace – and more than that, the peace will be peace with God. The book ends with this –

…the name of the city from that day shall be, The LORD is there. [Jehovah Shammah]

It’s the city of God. We somehow lost the temple in the city. Well, surprise surprise. You get to Revelation 21 and we’re told the city has no temple, for the Lamb and God are the temple thereof. The temple and city become identified. God dwells in his people.

Is this prefigured in the restoration, where the city is considered holy?

Yes, exactly. This is the background for the restoration, when they rebuild the temple and then the city walls in Nehemiah. They sanctify it all. In fact, there’s one slip where Nehemiah and his group are clearly standing on the city walls, and he calls them the walls of the temple. It’s just a passing little remark and it’s easy to miss, but if you go back and look you’ll see, “Wait, you’re now standing in the temple of God, but a minute ago you were on the city wall. Wait, you’re still on the city walls. What?” He understands what’s going on. It is now going to be the holy city.

It had only been called that I believe once, maybe twice in all scripture, but now it is that because the whole thing has been sanctified. This is where God dwells in the midst of his people. The glory cloud is gone because he now has filled them with his Word and Spirit so that they can become the beginnings of the glory cloud. Now, the true fulfillment comes with the ascension of Christ and the outpouring of the Spirit, but this is the down payment. This is the image.

This is more than just an image, it’s a movement in that direction, as God is preparing for the evangelization of the world. The restoration covenant is that last step, during which Jesus comes. He comes during this restoration period. All that to say, and then we get to the book of Revelation and we see these same images again.

The - I won’t call it paradox because it’s not, except in words – of Christianity is this. “God is completely separate from his creation, distinct from … well, God is completely distinct from his creation, and yet God dwells in his people.”

The pagan world wanted to get rid of the first and get the second. They wanted to blend those. “God is so immersed in people that we are gods.” That’s humanism. That’s Satanism. That’s “You shall be as God, knowing good and evil.” Christianity says, “No, that never happens,” and yet in another way we call it covenant. We call it the indwelling Spirit. We call it the Word of God written on the heart. God does condescend to dwell in his people, to be in them and with them and among them, both by his providence and his revealed will and the power of his Spirit.

I remember now that there is a little thing here to read. This is from John Gill, the great Reformed Baptist preacher. I think this is partially my summary and partially his quotes. He says that there is a three-fold way in which God gives himself to his people. I’m just going to read what I have here –

“The Father gives himself to her (to the church) in Christ. He provides all things for her so that she lives and moves in the spiritual environment of total blessing and provision.
The Son gives himself to her as the prophet in the midst of the church, teaching and instructing, as the high priest in the midst of the golden candlesticks, lighting and trimming them, as the king in Zion to rule and govern, protect and defend it.

The Holy Spirit gives himself to her to qualify men with the gifts for ministry, to apply the Word and make it useful, as the Spirit of grace and supplication, and to help the Lord’s people in the exercise of grace and to discharge their duty, and to be their comforter and remembrancer, to bring to their minds all that Jesus has spoken.”

And from Matthew Henry –

“The Lord is there in his church, to rule and govern it, to protect and defend it, and graciously to accept and own his sincere worshippers, and to be nigh unto them in all that they call upon him for. This should engage us to keep close to the communion of saints, for the Lord is there; and then whither shall we go to better ourselves? Nay, it is true of every good Christian; he dwells in God, and God in him; whatever soul has in it a living principle of grace, it may be truly said, The Lord is There.”

I think one of the dangers of some kinds of Calvinism is to so intellectualize and formalize the faith that it amounts to, “Believe these things, do these practices, and you have the best Christianity, and if you’re a part of that you’re a Christian and that’s what it means.”

No, that’s not quite it. Yes, the Reformed theology represents the purest strain of Christian doctrine we have right now. That’s not to say we can’t learn some things from some other people, because sometimes we get a little closed in ourselves and miss obvious connections because our own Scottish or German or Dutch presuppositions and traditions don’t let us see things, and thus there is more to the church catholic than just that narrow stream. And yet the Reformed faith is pretty consistently the faith of scripture. But subscribing to it and then arguing about it is not Christianity.

It’s not faith.

It’s not faith. Knowledge does not save. Theological correctness does not save. There’s more to one’s walk with God and to knowing Jesus and being indwelt by the Spirit than having that kind of head knowledge and being an arrogant defender of it.

It’s the same thing that Sinclair Ferguson talks about in The Whole Christ. If correctness to you is checking the boxes of theological statements, you’ve still divorced God’s desires from his person. You’ve made a new legalistic checklist of believing the right things.

Yeah, rather than doing the right things, you believe the right things. I’ve been saying this for years, but my daughter was asking me about it the other day in a different context of why do there have to be denominations and all that.

I said, “Well, have you noticed…” and she’s kind of made the rounds of the three basic traditions… “that if you’re in the Reformed tradition you care about what you believe and what you know. You care about doctrine. In the charismatic Pentecostal tradition you care about what you feel and the experiences you’ve had. In the broader evangelical Baptist community it tends to be the decisions you’ve made, the choices you make, what you’re busy doing and your actions.”

Did you just prophet, priest, and king everybody right now?

Of course I did, because we all, as you well know, tend to bear the image of God with a tilt toward one of those more than another, and sometimes toward two. We’re rarely well-balanced enough to have three, but some are.

That means that naturally people who are intellectual tend to be fond of Reformed churches, not without exception but in general. People who are very emotional tend to be more comfortable in charismatic Pentecostal churches, and so on.

Now, when the parish system existed, that was irrelevant because you went to the church that was nearest and that was that, and you all had to learn to live together. The intellectuals had to live with the emotionals who had to live with the “Let’s get stuff done around here” kind of people, and it was a beautiful thing, although I’m sure it was very hard at times, throwing those three kinds of people into the same box and saying, “Be Christians together.”

And the establishment church has its problems too, as our Anglican friends will testify.

Oh, I’m sure it does because you’ve got to hold the leaders’ toes to the fire on all accounts, but in America particularly – well, first of all we splintered churches from the beginning, but particularly once we invented the automobile, now I can go to whatever church suits my taste and needs.

I can go to a Reformed church, broadly speaking. I can go to the Reformed church that holds to my particular take on the Reformed doctrine, because I can drive 20 or 30 or 40 miles on a Sunday if I want to, and I can go to the one that only sings psalms or that sings praise choruses. I can go to the one that’s post-millennial or the one that’s amillennial. I can even find a historic pre-mil church if I tried hard enough, and be Reformed.

I can go to the one that has the best potluck lunches.

Oh, absolutely. I can go to the one that has the most young people of the opposite gender so I can find a spouse.

Which is not a bad reason to take into account when you’re picking a church.

None of these are necessarily bad reasons, but the thing is we have so much freedom to travel now that we can go find the church of our taste, and we become church shoppers.

Now, if we would just find our church and settle down there, okay, we’re on the right track, but now we’re with people who think and value things the same way we do, and that can be a problem. The other problem – and I can speak from my own church’s experience – is “So, we have people who are driving 20 miles from five different directions to get here. Guess how much they see each other during the week?”

Not very much.

“But we have social media!” Oh, great. Let’s reduce the communion of the saints to looking at a little screen. So creating the church the way Jesus envisioned is not as easy as one might think. It’s going to be a learning process, and technology is always going to challenge us.

Harvey Cox got that right. Technology is an issue. We’re going to have to figure out what we’re going to do with it. Ignoring it is not the solution, but letting it do anything it can do, simply because it can, is another problem, and those are discussions I suspect for another time.

In the meanwhile we can delight in the fact that God is in and with his people, not in the sense that the pagans thought, but in a sense that’s far more comforting. Because God remains God, I don’t have to be. I can trust my Savior to take care of me.

Amen.

That is a wonderful note to end on, so let’s make some recommendations and head out.

I believe you had one.

I did. I was thinking about changing it because…

You can change, that’s all right.

No, that’s all right. I’m going to recommend having a cat. It’s secondary to the true recommendation, which is to have a baby.

I think you had that one, though.

Did I? I recommended being pregnant, definitely.

Don’t you think that maybe the baby should come out at some time?

Yes. Anyway, I try not to talk too much about this because it’s very easy for me to just go on and on and on about how great it is.

We recently took in a stray cat that had been hanging around our neighborhood. She had come to visit us a few times and shown herself to be very patient with little Gretchen, just a very sweet cat, so Monday night she moved in officially. We got her litter box and her little cat food set-up, and Gretchen wakes up every day just so delighted to see this cat. She looks at the cat and she does her little dance and goes, “Kit kat! Kit kat!” It’s very cute. It's just brought that extra spark of joy into our home and it’s really nice to have the cat.

We’ve got things to do and we’re not sitting around petting the cat all day, just having cat cuddles, but it’s just nice to have her around. It’s kind of like Jordan Peterson talks about. “Pet a cat when you find it, because you don’t know when you’re going to get a cat to pet again and it’s nice.”

Well, with Jordan Peterson recommending it, I will jump on his bandwagon and take my recommendation next. Pet a cat.

My wife and I do not own a cat. Our girls own two. We got them a cat when they were little. They really, really, really wanted a cat, so when we finally moved to a house where we could have one we got them a cat, and for a long time the cat was just the center of everything. But they got tired of that cat, and that cat got kind of old and grumpy. There’s a long story that we’ll skip through.

My oldest daughter finally got her own cat. Her own cat is noisy. The one rule I laid down was, “It can’t be a Siamese.”

“Okay, dad. Half-Siamese – what’s included in that?”

Her name is Lucy and she does cry a lot and she doesn’t always do what you want. She doesn’t know how to be a very good cat.

That’s how it goes with Siamese, right?

Yeah, but lately I have been learning how to just – she’s on the bed, she’s being annoying, and I simply push her down, hold her there and pet her, and then she succumbs and starts purring. There is something about that.

I’m a dog person. Dogs just come up and want to be petted and they know what they’re supposed to do. Cats don’t, but next to petting a dog, petting a cat relieves a lot of tension, and having a cat in the house, this other living creature that’s not human, that just wanders around and does its own thing –

Lucy has this habit of pawing at things, just to see what will happen when they fall. So if we’re in our bedroom at night and hear a crash, “Okay, that was the cat. Do we find out and clean it up now or wait until morning?” “Let’s wait till the morning.”

They are beyond our control. Dogs are trainable, cats not so much, but it’s an interesting element to liven up things and to bring the whole idea of the dominion mandate a little closer. The original dominion mandate started with taking care of animals – yes, oxen in the field and horses in the barn, but also dogs and cats and whatever else that you want to domesticate, in your house, in close contact.

It’s a little like Eden when “the child will play on the cockatrice’s den.” Well, cats aren’t that bad. They do scratch occasionally and bite you, but petting a cat is a good thing. If you’re not a cat person, there’s always dogs and other such things.

I laughed when you said “living creature,” because I was on the phone with my friend Virginia today and she was like, “Tell me about this cat.” I was telling her about how much we like it and how much Gretchen likes it, and also that it’s kind of nice to have something else that Gretchen can obsess about, because otherwise it’s just mom and I get nothing done.

Virginia used that term “living creature,” specifically with reference to Ezekiel. It’s a weird thing when you think about how they’re called living creatures, which is kind of weird, but then you read the description of them and it’s like, “Well, what else are you going to call them? They’re just sort of living…creatures.” So I had to laugh when you used that specific phrase.

And it’s good to bring the recommendation back to scripture. I mentioned the dominion mandate, but the living creatures as they appear in Ezekiel seem to symbolize God’s presence and angelic presence in all living creatures, so again this is far removed from a secular view that would treat them simply as a mass of moving molecules that we can use however we want. They have a place in God’s creation and that place was ordained with respect to us. We’re made to have relationships with these things, and not just as food items.

Yeah. The phrase I’ve tried to use with my students when we talked about the dominion mandate was “taking care of” rather than “using,” which is what I liked about Paddington, but we know we disagree about Paddington, so we’ll have to talk about that sometime on the air.

The film, not the book. We all like the book.

Everybody loves Paddington, the book, unless they’re, you know, a Nazi or something.

On that note, thank you so much for this conversation. It’s been a delight. Thank you also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband.

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