In the Beginning... Again

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 and Rachel Voytek, and we are here with a brand new season of Halting Toward Zion. If you’ve ever been curious about world history or church history or how the two relate, or really anything tangentially remotely related to those topics, this is the podcast for you.

Let’s reintroduce ourselves, since we’ve been on a little bit of a hiatus. Greg, why don’t you go first.

My name is Greg Uttinger. I have been teaching Christian school for 40-some years, mostly high school. I teach theology and history, appropriately enough for what we’re going to be talking about now for the next several months.

I’m a writer of various sorts, although a lot of it is ghost-writing. The original seasons of Halting Toward Zion were taken from things I ghost-wrote for a friend of mine. This one is coming from all kinds of sources and we’re largely going to make it up as we go.

I’m sure no one is surprised.

There is that. I’m an elder in the Reformed Church of the United States, but I’m now retired from active service, which in theory is buying me more time. So that’s who I am, and you get to find out more about who I am and who we all are by listening week by week. Here’s Rachel.

I am happy to be here. My name is Rachel Voytek. I have a background in studying government and history, particularly the Middle East, so you will often hear me talk about that. For the past 10 years I have been teaching at the same Christian school as Greg and have spent a lot of time in history, as well as teaching a whole assortment of other things. I am now working in the background for that school and am doing administrative things as I support my new husband, David – not the same David as Emily’s David.

This is great. We go from having Bryan, who is married to another Emily, to having Rachel, who is married to another David.

Yes, that seems to be the way with Bible names. My David, as I call him, is a new pastor here in a small town called Willows in California, and we are just getting our ministry started and are excited to be still involved in lots of things, including sharing our knowledge with people and, for me, teaching about history.

And you’ve been teaching church history specifically for quite some time.

Yes, that has been my specialty because both in my study of the Middle East, as well as in teaching, I love the connection we should always be seeing between what people believe and how they act. Our religion and our politics should not be separated.

No controversy in that statement whatsoever.

I know, not at all.

We’re so excited to have you with us. When we thought about what we wanted to do next, world history and church history were both top of the list and we thought, “It would be really great – it’s not going to happen, but it would be really great if we could get Rachel.”

“But she’ll be too busy teaching school and all…”

But I’m no longer teaching. I’m helping all the teachers that took over all my jobs to learn how to teach the classes that I taught.

I heard it took five or six people to replace you, so I’m not surprised.

Yeah, I taught across a broad range.

Including you’re working on accreditation for the school.

Yes. Actually, interestingly enough, about a month ago I started developing our standards for the school, particularly in the study of history, so many of the things that Greg is going to be drawing on for some of these episodes, I was already reading through to try to put together, because a lot of our history curriculum has been based on some of the things he has written about history, in terms of how we approach it and the things that we talk about.

Then let’s get into it. What better place to start than the beginning. If you have already listened through Halting Toward Zion from the beginning – in which case I’m so sorry; hasn’t our recording quality improved? – you’re going to hear some familiar content I think, but from a different angle because now we’re doing history instead of biblical theology and sociology and all that.

You made an interesting comment there. We need to go back to the beginning and start there, but do you notice what that presupposes?

That there was a beginning. And we’ve already left paganism behind us.

Yeah, haven’t we, because although Christianity presents us with a linear view of time – something that has a beginning and, with regard to redemptive history, an end, a finale, a climax, a culmination – all of the various pagan/non-Christian interpretations of history have a problem. They don’t start anywhere.

In Stephen Hawkings’ Brief History of Time, people are looking for some way to get around time – history having a beginning – because having a beginning smacks too much perhaps of it having an end.

That’s rather insightful.

It is incredibly insightful for a man who hated God. The thing is, in his next book he said, “Oh wait, I found a way around that. Time doesn’t have a beginning, nor an end. Time/space is just – to borrow an allusion from another genre – a timey-wimey kind of interspersed goo. He presented it in far more scientific language, of course, but that’s what it came down to.

He managed to get around his own criticism sort of by saying, “Yeah, there’s a way you can look at time/space where it didn’t have to begin. It just sort of folds in on itself, and the universe creates history just by being what it is. We don’t need to have a start. We don’t need to have an end.”

Before that though he realized something about the children of Adam. We don’t want history to have a beginning for two reasons, at least. First, that means Someone started it. That’s awkward. Secondly, it may mean that that same Someone still controls it, and that would have implications. And third, that Someone may call an end to it, may blow the whistle, or in this case the last trump, and we may have to answer. On all of those counts, a linear view of history has been traditionally unacceptable to the pagan world.

That changed when Augustine of Hippo write The City of God and said in essence, “Let me tell you a story. This is reality. God created the world. God had a plan for the world. God moved it through the history recorded in the Old Testament and brought it to Christ. The gospel is now spreading, and one day Jesus will come back and end this thing we call redemptive history, and then eternity begins.”

The pagan world stood back and went, “Whoa,” and scratched their heads and said, “We don’t know about this. Wow, this is a completely different worldview. Hmm. And religion. Hmm.”

As the Middle Ages embraced Christianity, the idea of some kind of cycle or eternal return faded into the background until we begin to get to the Renaissance. Then it begins to sneak up again, and by the time of the Enlightenment we’re beginning to think that maybe there might be something going on, but the post-millennial vigor of the Reformation, particularly Puritan thought, inspired the gentlemen of the Enlightenment to say, “But look, there’s a great incredible future for us. Things can get better and better! We’ve got reason. We’ve got math. We can build a better brighter future for our grandchildren and their grandchildren.”

They didn’t look at this. The first generation was still sort of looking at, “Alright, there’s a god I guess. There’s a god of some sort, the divine geometer who, with one sweep of his compass created the universe, but he retired and went into the background, having given us the world to play with.” Basically, the computer programmer retired, having pushed Start, “So as we learn the intricacies of the program, we learn to be really good mathematicians and physicists. We can control history and it will soon go in a positive direction.”

So why did the linear view take so long to take hold? Augustine was back in the 4th century?

It existed throughout the Middle Ages, but it existed in a rather mild form. It begins to come into its own in the Reformation. The Middle Ages, following their understanding of Augustine, saw Christendom and the medieval world as God’s kingdom. It had come.

This is a closed perspective on reality, but nonetheless it was a sort of an amillennial “things are about as good as they’re going to get. Things are not going to change very much. Christ is reigning. Europe is his dominion. There are bad guys out there, but they’re out there and we don’t really have to worry about them.”

Islam was a threat from time to time, but it wasn’t until the Reformation came along and proved that change in a positive direction is possible in at least one area, worship. If we can reform worship, which stands at the heart of human life, if we can make it better than it was, if we can grow, then why can’t things grow in other directions? And why can’t these first steps toward reformation see an even greater expanse? The growth can grow.

The Puritans, particularly those who came to America, picked up on this for a generation or so and really began to hammer this. The church will experience a great latter-day glory before Christ returns, a millennium not introduced by Christ’s return, but by the preaching of the gospel and the discipling of the nations by the church, and this is going to have spill-off. This is going to have side effects. This is going to have collateral improvement. It’s going to bless and affect the whole world.

We look back at particularly the prophecies of Isaiah, but throughout the prophets there are those things that speak of the coming of Messiah and how it’s going to change the world for better, until everyone sits under his vine and fig tree and the nations beat their swords into plowshares and all of those kinds of things. There was a generation or so that was disposed not to push him off into heaven or into an earthly millennium ushered in by the second coming, but that saw them as the fruit of the gospel.

Backing up along the way there’s a developing and maturing of the idea of linear history. When the Enlightenment came along, these guys looked over at Christians and said, “Wow, that’s a worldview. It’s powerful. It’s optimistic. They want to change things. They are changing things. We could do that. We can have a worldview like that. I mean we have this incredible tool called mathematics. We have sort of a sovereign God. I mean he started everything up and programmed everything perfectly.

“We have smart people, philosopher kings, scientists, and technicians who can implement plans – many of them belong to secret societies, we won’t talk about that yet – and through this we can reap the positive sanctions, the benefits of this clocklike universe and there should be no end to the progress that can be made.”

What they didn’t see, and what the next generation rather impolitely pointed out to them, was, “Uh, you’re borrowing Christian stuff. You still have a Creator God and you still have these virtues. Now, you think it’s all great and cool that you picked up justice and love and kindness and respect and all those kinds of things. You do realize you got that from Christianity?”

“Well, no, we didn’t. They’re just natural things evident to logic.”

“No, you’re making that up.”

It’s so ironic, even the image of the watchmaker, right? Clocks were invented by monks who wanted to know what time they should pray.

Exactly, so we have that first generation that looks for their own version of the Heavenly City, but it’s a manmade version resting upon logic, reason, and mathematical competence, but it’s still going to be by individuals who have these Christian virtues. Their thought was, “We’ll get the superstitious elements out of the way, and the basic underlying morality will then be set free to permeate the human race. Man’s basic goodness will take over and we’ll know, using our mathematical tools, how to bring about this New Jerusalem.”

The next generation says, “Uhh, you’re cheating,” and from there it’s a very short distance to Darwin who says, “Yeah, there’s a development but it’s not what you think it is.” Darwin is still borrowing capital. He’s still talking about this possibility of development, of improvement.

Then along comes the Lisbon earthquake that kills thousands and thousands and we get Tennyson’s brilliant line, “Nature, red in tooth and claw,” and people begin to realize, “This is not necessarily going where we thought it was.” It’s not too long from there to the dystopian novels that begin to say, “This is not going at all where you thought it was, and why should it?”

So for a while the humanists are borrowing Christian capital and they’re imitating it. There’s a sort of rough parallel to Christian doctrine, but not enough to sustain social regeneration. Man is not good. Nature is not good. Nature is not nice. Nature is an unpleasant animal.

We keep seeing this. We saw this throughout our previous arcs of Halting Toward Zion where you take any one doctrine in Christianity, and any one aspect of a developed Christian philosophy, and isolate it from everything else and it ruins everything, absolutely wrecked.

Yes, so unwinding now and going back. That’s what their open-ended universe has given them, and it plays out ultimately on this sea of irrationality. Notice, universe – we can’t even use that word because it implies a unity of plan and intention. It’s a Christian word. Cosmos? That’s a Greek word so I suppose they get to use it, but even cosmos implies some kind of order and balance.

Jesus used that word also.

That too, so you’re left with this reality that we experience after some fashion that came out of chaos. And whether you’re talking about the Big Bang, an explosion of some singularity that lies at the beginning of present history, or whether you’re talking mythological and the gap between fire and ice, or the great chaos from which the gods sprang, it’s all the same.

There is this chaotic beginning that throws up stuff that for a little while looks promising to us, because we’ve been hypnotized by the Christian worldview, and we look for order. We look for beauty. We look for pattern. We look for story. But it’s all a lie. It’s just an accident. It’s like trying to find pictures in the clouds.

“Look at the dragon up there!”

“That’s just a cumulonimbus cloud. Let it rain and it’ll be gone.”

“Oh, I thought it looked like a dragon.”

It’s way more fun for it to be a dragon.

Yeah, it’s more fun and that’s it. We’re tempted by “It’s more fun, it makes more sense, it’s more purposeful.” Yeah, dream on. You’re making it up. Let it go. The bottom is chaos. What comes out of chaos, however it masquerades for a time, is ultimately chaos.

Back to something that I talk about a lot, borrowing from Dr. Van Til and Dr. Rushdoony, the idea of continuity of being. For the pagan, for the humanist, for the non-Christian, all reality is the same kind of thing. There are no differences.

I’m going to use universe, just because I’m tired of trying to find a different word or reality. There is no reality outside of reality. There is no god outside the universe, above the universe, transcendent with regard to the universe who can impress order, give direction, shed light on what in the world’s going on, or use it to tell a story. That’s just a dream, and the sooner we give it up, probably the happier we will be because we’ll stop being frustrated trying to find meaning.

Dr. Greg Singer, a Christian historian, wrote a theological interpretation of American history. He tells of a historians’ conference that he attended where there were a lot of big-name historians from the major universities and such. He just sort of dropped the question, “Gentlemen, why exactly do we teach history? And why do we require it of students? What’s the point here? What’s our justification?”

“Um, well um, I think I forgot to wash my socks…” and people just began to go away because they did not have an answer.

When I was doing notes for what would become an almost unpublished book on epistemology, I came to history and I thought, “Well, what are they saying today?” and I looked it up and there was one guy who said, “Here are great reasons for teaching history. There are cultural allusions. There are moral examples. There are cool stories,” and I think he had one or two others.

Cool stories is correct.

Yeah, except what’s a story?

What’s a story? Why is it cool? Why should cool be good?

Why do we resonate with that? Why is cool good? And why do we pay thousands of dollars for our children to be taught this cool stuff? Can’t we just put them in front of a TV? I’m sure they’ll learn plenty of cool stories that way. Why do we need stories about people who we’ll never meet, in cultures we don’t understand, that lived a long time ago and very far away? Where is all this going?

Often the answer is – and sadly, even from Christians – “Because we’ve always done it that way? Because it’s on the SAT? Because it’s required in college and we want to make sure that we’re ready to get good grades? Because mom and dad make me?”

I think the one that I read from the state of California was “to make good citizens.” The government needs to teach their children the past so that they can behave in the present.

Behave in the State’s interest, of course.

Right, because they’re going to tell them the stories they want them to hear.

That’s what Rome did. Roman education was largely moral tales – citizens who sacrificed their pride, their honor, their lives to defend and rescue Rome from its enemies. That’s about all that’s there. This and the alphabet and maybe some simple arithmetic was the bulk of the average Roman citizen’s education.

You take any of those moral examples that they give and make that person not on Rome’s side, and suddenly they’re a bad guy. Suddenly they’re an immoral example.

And those same stories lingered on. Anybody who took Latin – that would be me – up into the 1920s or ‘30s, of course when you’re learning Latin you read Latin stories. You read Roman stories and those names continue to resonate – Horatio at the bridge, Cincinnatus putting on his toga to receive the senators who are about to make him dictator for a day or week or however long, the geese that quack and spoil the invasion to the secret tunnel, the goose sacred to Juno, of course.

These kinds of stories kept circulating and there was a time when they did form a certain amount of the moral vocabulary of America, right up there beside “Zaccheus was a wee little man.”

Honest Abe, George Washington…

And you had the Bible stories, and that’s largely what we did as a country. We didn’t want to go to the Bible because the Bible was controversial. We gave an official nod to it in our schools, but the curriculum we adopted first of all fell back on Roman stories, not Greek. We didn’t like the Greeks because that was democracy and that was horrible.

The Romans taught us that the Greeks were very bad.

Yes, they did, although I actually found a quote from John Adams, and I can’t even remember where I saw it, where John Adams is writing to Thomas Jefferson and basically says, “I’m not convinced there were any good Romans. I think all of that virtue stuff – they made it up. They claim that they never had it. They’re all a bunch of stinkers.”

Well, John Adams was a Presbyterian, was he not?

He was Congregationalist. Unfortunately, his church went Unitarian and he was okay with that. His son protested. “Dad, what are you…?”

The better but lesser-known Adams.

Yes, much better, as least as far as his character and worldview were concerned. He also played a key role in the development of America.

Anyway, we’re way off here. The point is if all is one then there are no standards outside the universe by which to judge. What’s happening in the universe just is, and we in our finiteness may have conceived this idea of story, and for some reason it tickles the chemical compounds that make up our brains, but it’s ultimately a foreign concept. There is no story in the universe. There’s no purpose. There’s no goal. There are no heroes. There are no standards.

Charles Manson, the mass murdered, once said, “If God is one, what is ‘wrong’?” He understood very clearly if all is one, if God and the universe are identical, then there’s no right and wrong. There are no standards to appeal to. What is, is right. The Marquis de Sade is a good example of this. “If this is the way the universe made us and it gives me a penchant for wanting to do nasty things to women, why not? There’s nothing that can judge me. I’ll never have to answer.”

We can think here of Henley’s poem “Invictus.”

Out of the night that covers me,

Black as the pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be

For my unconquerable soul.

He goes on and talks about how it doesn’t matter how straight the gate (alluding to Christ’s words), how charged with punishment the scroll, how much the Bible threatens me with eternal punishment, I’m the master of my fate. I’m the captain of my soul. Or not, because what’s a captain and what’s a soul and what do you mean by inconquerable?

What are you even going to aim for?

And why do we care?

Yeah, why are we listening to you? And who are you anyway? “Who are you?” becomes a good question. I think you’ve all heard me ask that question a lot of times. It’s now an official part of the curriculum. “Who are you? What do you want? Whom do you serve? Whom do you trust?” I borrowed that, and for those of you who don’t know where that’s from, shame on you.

I can only guess. It’s an educated guess, but it’s a guess.

I’m right with you, Emily.

You can think about it and get back to me. It’s interesting how many of my students have mentioned that in their graduation speeches or in their papers. “No one ever asked me who I was, or to think about who I was, or why it mattered or how I could know.” Well, that’s sad. So now it’s an official part of what I do with the kids. At some point they have to write it.

This is usually the year that the “island game” appears in. If you don’t know what the island game is, never mind. It’s an adventure story that we play out in the classroom, and one of the first things is who are you? You need to have some clue as to who you are before you can pretend to be somebody else. You’re going to play someone like yourself because you’re not a good enough actor to do much else, but we’re going to take who you are and tweak it, so you need to know who you are. That’s more than just a list of skill sets. It’s more than percentages on a gaming character sheet.

Who are you? You’re the image of God. You are a born-again child of God. You’re in covenant with the God who made the universe, and thus with all of its people. You are a creature. You’re not God.

We look now away from all of the continuity of being religions, which is to say simply humanism, paganism, atheism that denies the true God in favor of something, and we look at Christianity and things change. We have a Creator who is self-existent, who made everything that’s not him, who is in control of everything, including himself. He is not wild and chaotic. He is infinitely wise, infinitely loving, orderly, kind, gracious, just.

And this God who is a person (in fact he is three persons) created the world with intention and with purpose. He has a plan. He has a story. And being the Creator, he is sovereign and he has the ability to accomplish that story, to bring about his intended consequences within the time stream, within heaven and earth, and this we call history.

Christians over the last generation or so have taken the word ‘history’ and proudly said, “Yes, it’s his-story.” Yes, good, but now you have to come to terms with what that means. Imagine Tolkien writing Lord of the Rings and leaving out the fourth book because he wasn’t sure what was going to happen there or what his characters would choose, but he tries to pick it up afterwards. A storyteller does not leave gaps and what-ifs.

We’ve all done roleplaying. For those of you who don’t know, that’s interactive storytelling where someone sets out the conditions of a story and leads you through an adventure and says, “You walk into a room and you see this and that,” and you respond in character. “Well, then I go over to this and do that to that,” and it’s a back and forth.

It’s like D&D but it doesn’t have to be D&D.

It’s better.

It’s so funny that for most people if you say D&D these days, they don’t look at you funny anymore. It’s pretty great.

It’s very mainstream.

When you said that I suddenly realized that that’s apparently the case, or you wouldn’t have just done that. Forty years you did not do that.

Right. People would think you were a Satanist.

Yes, and thus I coined the word – I was not the only one; it was coined simultaneously all over the place apparently – but I was one who coined the phrase ‘interactive storytelling.’ Someone is telling a story and you’re contributing to it.

It is possible to have an understanding of God where God is telling a story but does not know the end. He has a projected end. He knows where he wants the story to go, and being very wise and very creative, and having the physical universe at his disposal, he can dump a snowstorm so you can’t get where you were going. He can have an earthquake that disrupts the freeway and traffic so that that’s not going to happen over there. But he can’t actually control human choices because then man would be a puppet. So God is sitting back, waiting and watching, hoping we make the choices that he would really like to see played out.

This is not storytelling. A storyteller writes every single word to the last syllable of recorded time. He writes all the details. He does not leave blanks. So when we talk about God as a storyteller, when we say history is a story, we’re not saying he planned a broad outline, hoping we would fill in the rest in a way that would glorify him.

Right, and this does not make us robots or puppets. Say you’re reading Tolkien, then Aragorn is doing what Aragorn wants to do. We have a concept of this character as existent, and we can understand him as someone who is motivated to do what he’s doing. He’s doing what he wants the whole time. Sauron is doing what he wants to do the whole time. Frodo is doing what he doesn’t want to do, but knows that he kind of has to.

And thus he does choose, however reluctantly, to bear the ring to Mordor.

And it’s in a different sense that Tolkien decided what all these people were going to do. It’s both true, but it’s in a different sense.

And when Boromir dies, we don’t try to try Tolkien for murder. In another vein, we don’t hold Agatha Christie guilty of the murders on the Orient Express, or we don’t blame George Lucas for blowing up Alderaan with the Death Star. There is a difference even on a human level between the storyteller and the story.

We don’t think nearly enough about infinity, probably because we can’t get very far with that thought, but when we think of a God who infinitely transcends the universe we think of God as Santa Claus. He’s a big powerful supernatural person. He knows when you’re sleeping, he knows when you’re awake. Sure, great, but he doesn’t really control everything, does he? Yeah, he does, but not the way you think.

When I have been asked on occasion, usually by one student to explain to someone else, “Explain to them predestination,” I say, “Really? Why don’t you?” But knowing what’s coming, while they’re talking, I reach into my pocket and pull out my keys and say, “So you want to talk about the sovereignty of God?” and I throw my keys toward them. Guess what happens every single time?

They catch them.

They catch them. I say, “Look, I knew you were going to do that. In fact, I planned for you to do that. Did you do it because I planned it or did you do it because you wanted to?”

“Well, it just seemed the obvious thing for me…to…do…”

”So I didn’t make you do it, but you did it, even though I planned it and knew it was going to happen? Now, do you think God’s greater than I am? If I can pull this off, do you think that God, who is infinite can pull off this thing we call predestination, the foreordination of all things, even the death of his own son?”

To take it from a different direction, Genesis 1:1 says, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” How did he do that? How do you reach into nothing, which isn’t there because nothing is not a thing, and in through that nothing create a there for something to be, and start the clock ticking in that there-ness, in that space you’ve created, and set matter in motion, when none of this existed before? How exactly do you do that?

The answer, I think, is “I don’t know.” Neither do I.

We have to take God’s word for it.

Yeah. When we figure that out, maybe we can talk about predestination, but until then let’s acknowledge that there are things God can do and he understands perfectly well. He knows how he does it. We don’t, we can’t, we won’t, and probably even in eternity he’ll not sit down and say, “Today’s lecture is Creation 101. Here’s how you create out of nothing.” It’s not going to happen.

The Bible from Genesis 1:1 presents us with God who has a story, and in fact he has a plan. He shows us just a little bit of this plan. Before he creates man, he’s created heaven and earth - and we could talk about that a long time, but we won’t because that way lies rabbit trails without end – and he says, “Let’s make man in our own image,” and he keeps coming back to that.

(Genesis 1:26-28) And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

There’s more but that’s a good place to stop. He mentions man – “Let’s make man” – but immediately it’s “in our image.” Man is going to be an image bearer of God, and part of that is he’s going to have dominion over the planet. But also man is going to come in two genders – male and female – and these two are going to relate to one another in a positive way such that, with God’s blessing, they are going to be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth – have children, have children, have children. But let’s be clear as to what it is that’s multiplying. It’s the image of God, and they’re supposed to fill the earth.

There’s a discussion in itself, which I’ll carefully avoid. The earth is not full, despite everything we’ve been told, so history is not done yet. God from the beginning planned to fill the earth, not with just people but with his image, but that involves understanding what in the world the image of God is. That’s where we would have to go back and read what we just skipped over.

How do we know what the image of God is? We read the Westminster Standards. That’s great, but Adam didn’t have those. The Westminster Standards are great as far as they go. They focus on the narrow thing of knowledge, righteousness, and true holiness, with dominion over creation. That’s all good and it corresponds roughly to man’s threefold offices of prophet, king, and priest. But if you go back and look at Genesis 1, the first thing that strikes you is God is a creator.

He’s an artist. He’s an artisan. He’s an engineer. He builds things – complex beautiful things. There’s an aesthetic dimension to all of this. There is a dimension of intelligence, of taking incredibly complex things and putting them together in ways that look superficially very simple and are very beautiful and that are tremendously functional. That’s the first thing we run into.

Man is supposed to be like that, but he’s supposed to do it as the image of God, so the moral qualities of righteousness and holiness come in. In order for man to be the image of God, he has to walk with God, fear God, obey God, and maintain his fellowship with God. If he doesn’t, he will still in some sense be the image of God, since that’s what he is by definition, but that image is going to be corrupted, defiled, defaced, and God’s vision here will not come to pass.

So already there’s this, “Wow, that’s a great plan. The whole world is going to be a community that together is going to constitute one moving mass, one body, where every human is a cell that together makes up the image of God not only individually, but in terms of their relationships with one another. It’s almost like all humanity were a city, a bride, a body for God.” That was the plan. That’s what’s presented here.

And the earth, what is its function? Well, God likes the earth. He made it. The emphasis on the dominion mandate actually came originally out of Dutch circles where it’s called the cultural mandate. The emphasis was very much on the idea that man is a cultural creature. He makes stuff. Then the arguments began over, “Does that stuff pass into eternity? What’s its relation to the gospel? What’s the relation of the cultural mandate to the Great Commission? Which one takes precedence? How do they fit together?” and all of that stuff. Dutch theologians gave some really good answers. Henry Van Til’s book The Calvinistic Concept of Culture I recommend highly along these lines.

But as far as I’ve seen, I think there’s a missing dimension, or maybe I just haven’t read far enough, but this is what I see and what God has impressed on me for the last several years.

So you want to be a Christian, you want to be godly, you want to be more spiritual than you were yesterday. Even in a fallen world this is a necessity. Remember that Jesus as a young boy grew up. He grew in wisdom and knowledge and favor with God and man.

In a fallen world there would still be a need to move beyond bare innocence – “I haven’t done anything wrong” – to healthy righteousness – “I faced trials and I overcame because I trusted God all the time.” In an unfallen world you can say that. “I never doubted God once.” Wouldn’t it be great to be able to say that? We can’t say that, but in an unfallen world they could, but they still would have to trust. So if you’re going to grow, you need a challenge.

Painting the Mona Lisa for Leonardo presumably was a challenge. What if he painted the same painting over and over again, and what if he did it for eternity? You think he’s going to grow as an artist? As a Christian you constantly need new challenges. You start with something difficult and then you need to move beyond to the next difficult thing.

Sooner or later you move out of your comfort zone into someone else’s comfort zone and you say, “I’m taking on this project and I know how to do the painting, but I don’t know the math behind it. I don’t know the computer programming behind it.” You go to someone else and you say, “Teach me or work with me or help me or let’s cooperate.”

Now you’re working as a team, as a body, where you’re humbling yourself to listen and to learn. You’re growing in new directions, and you together are facing challenges and you’re trusting God all along. So this whole body is feeding and growing and developing itself as it takes on things in the real world.

Let me show you backwards if that doesn’t make any sense. “I want to be really godly so I’m going to abandon the world. I’m going to go find a mountaintop someplace and I’m going to sit there. I’m not going to have any cultural products with me, and I’m going to pray and talk to God and meditate on the Bible that I know. I’m not taking even a Bible with me. I’m going to be so spiritual.”

Does that work? That’s a real question.

No, it does not.

Not for very long.

No, because you’re not being challenged to look temptation in the face and refuse it. Even our Lord upon his baptism went deliberately into the wilderness to meet Satan head-on. He took on the challenges and they culminated in Gethsemane on the cross. Though he were a son, yet learned he obedience by the things he suffered.

Even though he was innocent, though he never strayed from the Father’s will, he still had to face, “Okay, so this is what I’m doing, right Father? Right? This is not going to be fun. I’ve got it right. This is the cross. That’s where I’m going. Not my will but your will be done.” Until finally, “Hey Peter, the cup my father has given me to drink, shall I not drink of it?” Even he had to grow, and it involved things like gardens and swords and people with torches and clubs, and a cross.

We grow as we face historical challenges in a real 3-dimensional material world. Take that away and you might as well be a monk sitting on a ledge someplace meditating on your navel. There will be no growth.

And so is there a conflict between the dominion mandate and the Great Commission? No, they need each other. We’re making disciples, not just winning souls to Christ. We’re making disciples, and to be disciples you have to face hardships, temptations, trials, tests, being better than you were when it’s really hard.

It’s teaching a classroom full of 50 kids who don’t really want to learn theology, and you do it with prayer and you do it in faith and you learn, one hopes, the wisdom on how to communicate to teenagers and how to present the material and what’s going to ring their bell right now, and what cultural allusions can I make that are going to get their attention, and what real-life situations can I bring in that are going to stir them up and set them on fire so they say, “Oh, this is important.”

That’s why we need the earth. That’s why we need to develop a planet. Yes, because it’s beautiful, but also so that we can become beautiful, so that we can grow and we can be challenged. Adam and Eve and humanity were not commissioned to be eternal gardeners. They’re supposed to build a city.

On one of my econ tests is, “Which one of these is not true?” and one of the options is, “Adam and Eve were to maintain the ecological integrity of the garden.” No, they were supposed to glorify it, build it, develop it. They were not to leave it a garden.

When we get to the end of the Bible, the garden has become a city. The city is filled with trees and rivers of water and people and beauty, but it’s a city now. Urbanization is not evil. Urbanization is the goal of history, but it’s the right urbanization, it’s the right city. It’s the city of God, not the enlightenment city of man.

We’ll talk a lot more about that next time, I think.

As we begin our march through 6,000 years of human history, that’s where we’re going. “But wait – sin!” We’ll talk about that maybe next time. Did the fall leave God shaking his head, throwing up his hands and saying, “Wow. I had this great plan. They screwed it up. Oh well, let me see if I can come up with another one, maybe something that doesn’t involve Earth and bodies and humanity.”? Or did he say, “Watch this.”? That’s for next time.

It is for next time. I’m going to ring the bell on giving up on matter. <ding!>

Rachel, that’s called the Gnostic bell.

Every time Gnosticism comes up, we’re supposed to ring the bell.

It’s everywhere.

Yeah, it’s going to show up a lot.

This has been wonderful. Let’s wrap up and do some recommendations before we go. I’ll go first. I realize I forgot to introduce myself at the beginning when you both introduced yourselves.

I thought you were just assuming everyone knew you.

That would be easier, but instead of doing that or introducing myself, I’m just going to make my recommendation super self-promotional. I am recommending a different podcast that I’m on called Make Me a Swiftie, where my friend Savannah tries to make me a fan of Taylor Swift.

How is that going?

She asked me to put a number on it recently and I think we hit 30%, which is a failing grade.

Where did you start?

I started with “incalculable” because I hadn’t listened to her.

I am right there with you, Emily.

So that’s what we’ve been up to lately. I’m kind of the musical and textual analysis kind of person, and Savannah is not like me. She’s cool, so we make a good team and we’re having a good time. So if you want to hear more of my voice for some reason, go listen to that. Search “Make me a Swiftie” on any podcast catcher. Greg, do you have a recommendation?

I already made mine. It’s Henry Van Til’s book, The Calvinistic Concept of Culture. It’s an older book, but it looks at how Christians, particularly Calvinists, have looked at culture and its relationship to the gospel. It is a profound book, but I think most people would find it within their reading ability. It’s the kind of book you read with a highlighter in one hand, a pen in the other, and you don’t plan to get more than a few pages read when you sit down. The vocabulary is very understandable and there is a great deal that’s very worth reading. It’s Hendry Van Til, not Cornelius Van Til.

Are they related?

I think it’s a nephew/uncle thing, but I couldn’t swear to that without looking.

Rachel, do you have a recommendation for us?

I do. I actually made this recommendation to you recently, Emily.

Oh good, I was hoping you would say this again so that I could remember the title.

I know, this is how it goes. Greg, maybe you’ve heard of this, and maybe you were even the one that recommended it to me. I can’t remember who told me to read this book but the book I’ve been reading is called The Book that Made Your World: How the Bible Created the Soul of Western Civilization by Vishal Mangalwadi.

It’s a fascinating book that honestly reminds me of your teaching a lot, Greg. It’s a man who is coming out of Indian Hinduism and went to a secular university in India and then went, “Neither of these can account for the technology that we’re enjoying from the West, and yet we put down Western civilization as highly oppressive and everything bad that we don’t want to be. And yet somehow we got all these things from them, and it doesn’t make sense.” So he went on a journey and became a Christian, essentially a spiritual journey.

He’s then evaluating Hinduism and the cultures that want to reject God and yet want to enjoy all of Western culture’s technology. It has quite a few stories from him living in India as a Christian, facing Indian culture where they’re like, “Sure, we can kill our daughter who’s sickly. She doesn’t serve us any purpose. We don’t see any reason to save her.”

It's fascinating. He’s mixing in Kurt Cobain and Bach and it’s just all over the place, but it’s really that without the God of the Bible who starts as Creator, nothing that we have today would be as it is. If you haven’t heard of it, I definitely recommend it.

I have not heard of it. I’ve heard of other books along those lines, but they’re all written by Westerners for Westerners, so this sounds like it would be a gem.

It’s so fascinating as he contrasts the Hindu gods and the Islamic god with the Christian God and says, “We do this because God does this. We do this because God…because God…because God from the Bible.” It’s definitely a worthwhile book. I’m going to be purchasing it because I’ve been borrowing it from the library. I need to get my own copy now.

It’s always good to find those that are worth spending money on.

Which is why I use the library. It’s a great way to cull through all the books.

Thank you so much, both of you, for this conversation. It’s been a delight. A big thanks also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband. Thanks to our financial supporters who help us keep the show rolling, paying for microphones and software and things like that. Thanks to you, our listeners. We hope you’ll join us again soon.