The Ark and the Angels

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. This is an “everything along the way” episode. We are answering some email questions that have been sent to us from listeners. How are you doing today, Greg?

Mostly pretty well, thank you.

Good. How are you, Bryan?

Is that one of the questions from the listener?

Yes. The questioner would like to know how we all are.

Doing great.

Awesome. Did you have a good Easter?

Yeah! A very good day.

Fantastic Easter.

All right, so the first question of the day is regarding Noah. “Do you think there’s a possibility that Noah did in fact forget to bring some species on the ark? We’re told that God commanded him to bring two of every being, but he wasn’t a perfect man, and if he needed to wrangle those animals himself I wonder if there were any he conveniently or accidentally forgot about, such as the unicorn.”

The unicorn – we saw that one coming.

What about the poor T. rexes? That’s what I want to know.

A lot of people do, actually. That’s probably more to the point.

I have Genesis open beside me and there are, I think, two answers to the question. One is this. This is Genesis 6 starting in verse 20 –

Of fowls after their kind, and of cattle after their kind, of every creeping thing of the earth after his kind, two of every sort shall come unto thee, to keep them alive.

So far as animal wrangling, it sounds like God was going to send them. Wrangling T. rexes at the last minute, along with the Diplodocus and the rhinoceroses and the Triceratops – that might be a difficult thing to leave for the last second. But you can’t store them too early because…anyway, logistical problems on all sides. So first of all, God brought them. They were to come.

I didn’t realize that or had not noticed that in the text.

I grew up believing that. I actually had to look around a little while to find it, because what we get more than once is this –

Thus did Noah; according to all that God commanded him, so did he.

And that’s repeated a couple times into the next chapter, 7:5 –

And Noah did according unto all that the Lord commanded him.

So no, Noah was not perfect, but this was a finite job with a finite list of possibilities. And since God was bringing them, all he had to do was to shoo them into their proper compartments and make sure there was enough food, and he did. God says more than once that Noah did exactly what God told him to do.

That brings us back to T. rexes and such. People do wonder oftentimes about dinosaurs on the ark. Reptiles mature fairly early, but they keep growing as long as they’re alive. Think of the size of a T. rex egg, whatever that might be. Let it hatch and let the thing grow for a few months and you’ve still got a pretty small T. rex and it would fit easily along with all the other dinosaur kinds that we know onto the ark, without taking up all that much space.

There are only so many really large animals. You go for it. Excepting dinosaurs and their ilk, what other large animals can you think of that Noah would have to find room for?

And we’re not counting whales, right?

We’re not counting sea creatures. These are land creatures.

Rhinoceros, hippopotamus, elephant.

We also see the giraffe necks poking ou, so we can’t forget them.

The giraffes who are here to see the tapestries, yes.

Boars.

Boars are actually pretty big.

What about the giant tortoises?

Moose.

Elk and deer and antelope. They’re not the things we generally think of as that huge, but they’re pretty good-sized. Wildebeests, and what’s the animal that’s in African rivers?

Cebu?

Yeah, things like that.

Water buffalo.

So there you go. We ran out pretty fast, and a few of those may actually be related and part of the same kind.

Lions are pretty big, too.

Most animals are sheep-size or smaller, and given the cubic footage available on the ark, it wasn’t that hard to fit all the animals on. Someplace I have the numbers. It didn’t occur to me to bring them along, but we can come up with them if you were curious.

So yes, Noah didn’t leave anything behind. He did all that God said, because God helped him by bringing the animals to him. And since the ark is a type and figure of the church, that perhaps should not surprise us a great deal that God would be the one who brings the occupants to this floating church service and baptizes them.

So that was one. That was easy.

Next question. “Regarding angels, I’d love to get a list of the Bible verses that reference that the angels don’t know about God’s plan for salvation. I thought that was very fascinating, as I’ve always assumed the angels are always filled in on what’s going on in heaven and on earth.”

I took this and was like, “All right, Strong’s Concordance, I’m going to look up all the angels,” because when it comes to angels I am very open-minded, because everything I know I probably learned from Renaissance paintings and Milton, so I need to throw it out, so I don’t know.

That’s when I realized that angels are kind of like hell, in that they are talked about more by Jesus than all of the other appearances in the Bible combined, basically. Jesus talks way more about this than the rest of the Bible.

In your Strong’s Concordance search you might not have thought of principalities and powers, cherubim and seraphim, and the ambiguous word saints. The passage that comes most easily to mind, and I’m guessing it was me referencing it at the time, is I Peter 1:12 where the apostle says – actually, backing up to verse 9 for context so it makes sense. Speaking to his audience, Peter says -

Receiving the end of your faith, even the salvation of your souls. Of which salvation the prophets have enquired and searched diligently, who prophesied of the grace that should come unto you: Searching what, or what manner of time the Spirit of Christ which was in them did signify, when it testified beforehand the sufferings of Christ, and the glory that should follow. Unto whom it was revealed, that not unto themselves, but unto us they did minister the things, which are now reported unto you by them that have preached the gospel unto you with the Holy Ghost sent down from heaven; which things the angels desire to look into.

The reference to angels is sort of icing on the cake. The main point of the passage is that the salvation that we enjoy in Christ was prophesied, spoken of by the prophets, who themselves did not always understand what in the world they were saying. They sought what or what manner of time the Spirit of Christ was signifying when it spoke of the sufferings of Christ and his glory. They didn’t get it. They said the words, but they didn’t understand how it would be fulfilled.

What they got, we’re told here, “Unto whom it was revealed, that not unto themselves, but unto us they did minister the things, which are now reported…” They were basically told, “You’re not going to live to see it.”

“Oh. Dang it.”

They were not given a full briefing. They were not given a full explanation. So Peter tacks onto that, “and likewise the angels.” They would like to know more than they know.

I think part of the problem here is that we tend to think, “Angels are stage managers. They’re behind the scene. They have God’s ear. They see all the stuff that’s going on. Surely they have the script.” As a director of plays, I make sure that the stage manager has a script with all the notes in it, so they know exactly when and where things move, and who comes on and who goes off, sound effects and all that kind of stuff. Wouldn’t God fill in the angels, just in case?

Just in case of what?

Yeah, see, there’s the thing. God doesn’t need to tell them all because it’s his providence superintending all this, and they come and go at his bidding. We’re told this a number of times. They’re to minister to us who are heirs of salvation, but that doesn’t mean they need a total briefing on our future, let alone on the future of the Messiah, in order to accomplish those errands.

That’s really the big passage, but there are a couple other things. In the book of Ephesians 3, starting in verse 8 –

Unto me, who am less than the least of all saints, is this grace given, that I should preach among the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ; And to make all men see what is the fellowship of the mystery, which from the beginning of the world hath been hid in God, who created all things by Jesus Christ: To the intent that now unto the principalities and powers in heavenly places might be known by the church the manifold wisdom of God, According to the eternal purpose which he purposed in Christ Jesus our Lord.

So Paul is busy telling humans about the mystery that is in Christ, the redemption that he’s provided, but along the way, “To the intent that now unto the principalities and powers in heavenly places” – he doesn’t say angels, but that’s what it’s talking about – “might be known by the church (through the church, by means of the church) the manifold wisdom of God.”

The angels are the audience, to a certain extent. They’re watching this play out, and God glorifies himself by, in so many words, saying, “Now watch this!” and the angels go, “Ooo! Whoa! Wow! I didn’t see that coming. What is God up to? I don’t get it. I missed something, I was out for popcorn. Wow, let me tell you!”

God is revealing his glory through creating this human thing called the church, and the angels sit back in amazement and wonder at the incredible wisdom of God in bringing Jew and Gentile together. That’s a discussion for another time, all of God’s tricksiness in what he does through 4,000 years of history, plus.

There are a couple other things that came to mind. This is from Daniel. Again, the word angel as such doesn’t appear, but angels are what we’re dealing with.

While you’re getting there, the imagery of the audience participating as God sends his angels here and there and involves them, even they don’t know the final thing, that’s so fun, right? Especially if this is a theatrical production, in Sound of Music, say, at the end when the audience becomes the group that’s singing Edelweiss and it’s just wonderful and it just warms your heart, unless you’re a psychopath.

Or a Nazi, which is sort of the same thing. Then the Nazis come and start flashing their flashlights through the crowd, looking for the escaped Van Trapps, and it pulls everything together.

I’ve seen Shakespeare – I think it was Taming of the Shrew – where Petruchio and Kate are walking on the road to the city and they meet an old man, and in this production they pulled someone out of the audience to play the part of the old man, and they gave him cards. It turned out to be an English professor, so he knew all the lines, even the ones that weren’t on the cards, so he threw them for a loop but they carried it off beautifully.

That just sort of adds to this spectacle, this pleasant wonder that God is weaving and building and presenting to us and to the angels.

So Daniel 8:13 –

Then I heard one saint speaking, and another saint said unto that certain saint which spake, How long shall be the vision concerning the daily sacrifice, and the transgression of desolation, to give both the sanctuary and the host to be trodden under foot? And he said unto me, Unto two thousand and three hundred days; then shall the sanctuary be cleansed.

The point there is these saints presumably are angels, and one of them – and you could argue this is purely for theatrical effect and this is purely rhetorical, but one of them says, “How long till this is all done?” and the other one answers it.

One angel has the briefing cards and the other one doesn’t, and his card says, “Ask the question now,” and he does. This angel, just on a surface reading at least, says there’s something here he doesn’t know about this prophecy. They’re sent to reveal it, yet one of them doesn’t have all the details as to what’s going on.

Something similar happens in 12, starting in verse 5 -

Then I Daniel looked, and, behold, there stood other two, the one on this side of the bank of the river, and the other on that side of the bank of the river. And one said to the man clothed in linen, which was upon the waters of the river, How long shall it be to the end of these wonders?

And I heard the man clothed in linen, which was upon the waters of the river, when he held up his right hand and his left hand unto heaven, and sware by him that liveth for ever that it shall be for a time, times, and an half; and when he shall have accomplished to scatter the power of the holy people, all these things shall be finished.

Then Daniel says –

And I heard, but I understood not: then said I, O my Lord, what shall be the end of these things? And he said, Go thy way, Daniel: for the words are closed up and sealed till the time of the end.

So again we have this man standing on the water, who sounds an awful lot like the angel of the Lord, and others saying, “How long?” and he answers with an oath that it’s still really vague – a time, times, and a half. Okay, 3-1/2 years? Seasons? Centuries? Millennia? Acts in the play?

We’re not really told, and commentators have done all kinds of things with that, but the point for our purpose is again here’s an angel who does not know what’s going on or how long the schedule is, so they want to know.

We’ve said before that the Bible is a mystery story. There was a phrase used back in the Ephesians passage. The mystery is how can a holy God deal justly with sinners, and yet extend his love to sinners and save them from the wrath to come? That’s the great mystery.

That God could overcome Satan is no mystery. That one was easy. But how do you answer Satan’s charge that, “If you let these people live, you’re not a holy and just God.” Wiping out Satan doesn’t solve that problem, and it leaves God’s reputation hanging, as it were. So God leads Satan around until he will answer the question, and despite all of the hints, the foreshadowing in the sacrifices and rituals of the law, and eventually the prophecies of Messiah, the truth is that when Jesus went to the cross, even after Jesus had said to his guys, “Look, I’m going up to Jerusalem. The high priest is going to turn me over to the Gentiles. They’re going to beat me, spit on me, pluck out my beard, and then they’re going to crucify me. And after the third day I’m going to rise again,” they went away saying, “I wonder what resurrection means.”

“We could ask him.”

“No, that went bad last time. Let’s not. It’s got to be something figurative or spiritual or something.”

They did not understand. Not until John gets to the tomb on Sunday morning does he believe, and even then Peter is still in a fog like, “What? I don’t get this. What’s going on?”

Here’s something that’s potentially confusing, the angel of the Lord. We know that Jesus is not an angel because Hebrews says, “For unto which of the angels said he at any time, Thou are my Son, this day have I begotten thee?” But we have all these appearances in the Old Testament of “the angel of the Lord,” who sounds a lot like God himself.

And calls himself God, Jehovah, Yahweh, things like that.

And Wonderful.

Yeah. There are a lot of hints, and actually toward the end in the minor prophets there are actually some direct references. “In that day the ruler shall be as God, even as the angel of the Lord,” or “I will come, even the angel of the covenant, whom ye delight in.” Okay, that’s pretty crystal-clear, in case we missed it all the way back when the angel says, “Thus saith the Lord, ‘Now I know you love me,’” referring to Isaac’s sacrifice.

So Jesus did appear as an angel, which is to say a messenger. He’s the messenger of the Lord, the messenger of the covenant, and even before he assumed true humanity he manifested himself on occasion – a lot of occasions, actually – as an angelic being.

Now, an interesting question would be, “Did the normal angels recognize what’s going on here? And if they did, did that really help any?”

“Oh, I get it! So the Son is going to appear as this angel of the Lord guy, and that’s going to be Messiah.”

No, next.

Do we have to make the distinction between angel as messenger and angel as a separate class of beings, if you will? What is that?

The word angel, both in Greek and Hebrew, simply means messenger. John the Baptist is called an angelos messenger. The messengers to the seven churches are angels, but they’re also clearly pastors, but they’re also angels and they appear often.

Revelation is where it really comes together where, “Wait, these are pastors, but they’re called angels, and there’s seven of them, and all through we keep seeing seven angels. Wait, are these the seven pastors or are these completely different angelic angels?”

Then right at the end we get the answer when John bows down before one of them and he says, “No, get up. I’m one of your servants, the prophets, them that have the testimony of Jesus.” In other words, yeah, it’s still the pastors.

The function is more important than the metaphysical essence. We are not metaphysically the same thing as angels, but the job of heralding the message of the Gospel is something that really the angels never had. The closest they ever got were the skies over Bethlehem.

In Revelation they don’t sing the Song of Redemption because they haven’t been redeemed. The cherubim do because they represent the creation and are wrapped up in all of that. They sing with the saints, but the normal angels sing praise to God for creation and for his various attributes, but only the Church can say, “You have saved us. You have redeemed us,” and praise the Lamb on that basis of personal salvation.

Paul says, “Do you not know you will judge angels.” Despite their metaphysical greatness and the incredible powers they have, ultimately they are servants sent forth for our sake, and one day we get to rule them and tell them what to do and make use of their services, which they will yield gladly, as they have sat back and watched this whole story.

That’s the weird thing because right now we think of them as holy and perfect and great, and in some ways they are, but they’re not the stars of the show. We are, in Jesus. He came for us, not for them. He took not on him the nature of angels, but he took on him the seed of Abraham.

So they’re like the audience who watches, and at the end comes up and shakes everybody’s hand and offers them flowers and bottles of wine and chocolate and says, “Can I have your autograph? I really enjoyed that role where you did this and you did that, and that expression on your face was just great.”

That’s the closest we have, I think perhaps, to understanding our role with angels.

Cool. The next question is also about Noah. “In the episode about Noah and his duty to preserve cultural references, you all gave suggestions as to what you might bring on the ark. I was really surprised that no one mentioned a copy of the US Constitution or Declaration of Independence. While they’re not perfect, I would argue that they are some of the most influential documents you could bring, and certainly important to understanding American history and culture.”

I think chiefly the reason I did not say that I would bring them on the ark is because I didn’t think of that, although I do think it’s funny, in a sense, how reactionary these documents are. They’re sort of the foundation of our government today, and big parts of our history, but especially the Declaration of Independence, it’s like, “Who’s this King George III guy?” If we were taking it on the ark, it’s responding to something very specific in its historical moment, and yes, I would obviously think it’s important to remember that, but I don’t know that it would come to mind as a government document, as indeed it isn’t today.

Bryan, how about you? Do you remember your thoughts at the time, and do you even remember what you included or why or such?

I don’t, except that probably I included Lord of the Rings. I don’t quite remember my thoughts. I also wasn’t thinking of that. I mean I could definitely see an argument for including the Constitution, sort of because it’s a descendant of the English common law tradition, but you could also just snag the Magna Carta for that too, if you wanted to really get the common law tradition complete. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it then.

It’s hard to think of the entire common law tradition. I guess the Constitution, especially with the Bill of Rights, is a fairly concise summary.

Yeah, I could see that. I don’t remember what my three were, but maybe one of them is not as good as the Constitution. I could knock it off the list.

It would have been interesting to go back and see what we all did pick, because I don’t remember mine at all.

I remember I had Solzhenitsyn.

I’m guessing I probably did the Westminster Standards or Calvin’s Institutes or something like that, or maybe the complete books of Shakespeare. I don’t know. These are just guesses.

To answer our listener, I think there’s a couple things, at least from my perspective, and then you can address this as you will.

First of all, I was thinking more broadly cultural, not a plan of government as such, but something that will shape a culture. The original article that I wrote had reference to Time Machine, the movie version, where the time traveler comes back to the present, snags three books, and returns to the post-apocalyptic future to rebuild a civilization.

That movie kept me awake for days. It was terrifying.

The house guest asked the housekeeper, “Can you tell what three books they were?” and she says, “No. Does it matter?” He says, “I suppose not, but if you were going to re-build a civilization, which three would you pick?”

There’s a number of ways of approaching that. You can say, “We need technology, so the three books would be something that would help me re-build the technological side of civilization.” Another might be, “Theology trumps that, so I want basic theology that explains the Bible, so that we can skip past the Arianism, Sabbelianism, Arminianism, and find brand new heresies in the future, but at least we’ll have something to ground us.”

I’d probably lean that way more than anything, but you could also just think in terms of broad cultural appeal. There are things we learn about living, not from discrete propositions but from being immersed in a story and a world where we see people acting nobly, bravely, purely, truly, acting out friendship and love in honorable godly ways, being shown beauty, both in the natural landscape and in architecture and in jewelry and clothing and this sort of thing. Thus, I would say that Lord of the Rings is a wonderful choice.

I came across something just a day or two ago. I don’t remember what it was a commentary on, but it mentioned Tolkien. Oh yes, it was the whole Father Christmas Tolkien/Lewis argument, which it seems you’ve changed on our website. You can tell me about that later. But one of the commentators argued for the superiority of Middle Earth to Narnia, on the basis of consistency – both internal consistency and consistency with Christian worldview.

His closing line was, “Just in reading this, I could see that the author – even if I knew nothing about him, I would know the author was a communicating Catholic.” I thought, “Hmm, that’s interesting. Not Protestant?”

“No, not Protestant.”

It’s Catholic. It’s Roman Catholicism, a nice version as things go, but it’s a medieval sort of Catholicism that Tolkien is reflecting, but there is still great beauty and great glory and wonder in the book. I do regret that at points his Catholicism gets in the way and we’re not able to see Jesus clearly, as opposed to Lewis, who shows us Jesus pretty plainly, but it’s a bit fragmented and confused, with Father Christmas charging into battle with a centaur and a minotaur and whatever else.

I’ve known people who preferred both, for different reasons. “In Narnia I get to meet Jesus. Trump that one.”

“Yes, but in Middle Earth I get the full experience of what God’s world is like and how godly people behave in a variety of circumstances, some of them very trying, some of them not.”

So I think there is much to be said for picking books that have a more universal appeal, a broader cultural appeal, than simply a list of, “This is how you should live.” If we want that, we can look at the 10 Commandments or we can bring along the Westminster Confession of Faith or the catechism or something, and probably should. But I would still prefer the complete works of Shakespeare or Lord of the Rings to the Declaration of Independence. So that’s my first response. I do have another one, but do either of you want to chime in on that, one way or another?

I have a lot of thoughts touching on what you just brought up about the need to see stories and human-made stories, not just the great big overarching story of history, but I actually want us to have another special episode about why Christians should read fiction, so I’m going to save my thoughts for later.

“Tune in next time for a very special episode.”

Bryan, do you have any thoughts or do you want to save yours, too?

I don’t have any right now so I will cover for that by saying, “I’ll save them for next time.”

You’ll come up with some for next time.

My other response to including those two documents is a sort of philosophical/political skepticism. For a while I worked for a gentleman, and he was truly a gentleman, who was part of that educational movement that sort of enshrines America’s Christian history, the early founding documents and anything the founders wrote as a very thorough representation of biblical Christianity, so I’ve heard enough of that, and honestly most of it’s garbage.

The Declaration of Independence is theologically very…

Bankrupt?

You’re even harsher than I was going.

In nice terms, it’s loose.

Thank you, that’s exactly it. The laws of nature and nature’s God – okay, probably at the time when that was written the language was common ground to Christian scholars and Enlightenment scholars as well, when everybody took it to mean God as they conceived of him.

Rigid Calvinists would say, “Oh yeah, that God, the God of the confessions, the God of scripture.” The Unitarians and probably Deists would say, “No, not that, but there is a God of some sort who started the universe, the Grand Architect of the universe” or some such thing, and without necessarily recognizing that not everyone held their interpretation, although sometimes they understood it only too well.

They went on, and it becomes a compromised document where everybody who can speak of a God of some sort is comfortable talking because everyone assumes, “It’s my God, my interpretation. If you naïve people are thinking of another one, well, that’s fine. It serves my interest right now, but let’s go on.”

It privatizes religion, doesn’t it. It forces it into the individual heart and out of the common square.

Yeah, the common square is left with a vague God who is unnamed, about whom we can say nothing in creedal form, which of course is the God of the Constitution, only more so. The God of the Declaration does exercise providence. He does endow men with the rights of life, liberty, and property, so he’s now a wholly deistic God, and if you didn’t know better and if there were no other competitors in the field you might legitimately be able to think this is the God of the Bible. But when you realize where some of these phrases come from, it’s John Locke, watered down sometimes through the Virginia Constitution and some other sources.

“Well, John Locke was a Christian.”

Yes, as far as we know, he was, and Trinitarian at that, but in Two Treatises of Government none of that comes across. He is very much the distant God who started things, then channels his revelation through human reason, through the laws of nature.

Again, Christians could appeal to this because their Christianity wasn’t as self-conscious as we would like, but on the other hand Enlightenment scholars could appeal to it because they weren’t as atheistic as they eventually would become and should have become in terms of their presuppositions.

So we’re in a moment of historical compromise where they can throw this down and say, “Here’s a lawsuit.” The Puritan/Presbyterian element would say, “You mean a covenant lawsuit?” and the Enlightenment people would say, “No, a violation of a social compact. Okay, let’s just get on with the charges,” and the bulk of the Declaration actually is just a list of charges against the king, the part that we usually skip over because it’s boring and we don’t know what they’re talking about. It only returns at the end to reliance on divine providence and such.

Lives, fortunes, sacred honor.

Yeah, all that. Sacred, there’s that word. So it is in that respect very much a compromised document because it was written for a worldwide audience. It had to satisfy people at home, most of whom were Trinitarian Bible-believing church-attending Christians, but its main audience was the king of France and his court.

They needed allies. The whole point was, “We’re not a bunch of revolutionaries out to tear down the system. What we are doing is acting in terms that you all say you believe.” The French Revolution hadn’t happened yet, so they didn’t know how bad that was going to get, but at that time all the French intellectuals were full of this kind of stuff.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident” – that’s not the argument of the Declaration. The Declaration says, “You can’t deny this without denying reality, and we all know that, so let’s get on to the argument, which is the king’s broken his contract.”

In terms of American history, you want a little snapshot of American history, yeah, it’s great. You want to repeat it as a foundational document for anything else? Give it up. This educational movement I spoke of earlier, this promotion of American’s Christian history, I taught my employer’s son and tried to explain it. He was a young man and naïve, and that’s the way it goes.

He said, “I talked to my dad, and the reason we appeal to Locke is because if we appeal to the Bible, no one would agree with us.”

“Right!”

“What?”

“So let’s appeal to something that’s obviously not biblical.”

“Well, it’s kind of biblical.”

“No, it’s not. This is not biblical covenant theology. It’s a watered-down secularized version.”

But here’s the thing. We started with Locke. We can’t go back that way. We got here because of that. The common phrase of, “When do things get back to normal?” – my complaint is we don’t want to go back to normal. Normal got us here. We need something new. We need the next step in God’s plan.

The often-longing of Christians to go back to the ‘50s or the colonial era or the Victorian era, Jane Austen, Camelot, pick something…

Camelot, there’s an example.

If we could go back it wouldn’t help, because we have moved through history past that, and going back and trying to pick one of the healing ointments of the past when the disease was slight, and trying to apply it now when it’s eating our body to pieces, is a joke. You need radical surgery.

It’s kind of like Perelandra when Ransom arrives and realizes, “This world has not been corrupted. I have to be very careful about what I do because I bear this corruption inside of me.”

Yeah, so anyway thus far the Declaration. The Constitution, if we were going to go that direction I would say let’s take a copy of The Federalist Papers, and the Constitution is usually included at the end, so two for one.

Again it’s not so much to reproduce the Constitution. A number of nations over the last 200 years have tried to take our Constitution and incorporate it into their own political system and their own history and it has never worked. Mexico tried it. Russia tried it. It doesn’t work because it assumes a certain sort of mindset and morality in the people, without which it doesn’t accomplish anything.

But as a case study in the influences of Christian theology, you can look and see, “Here is what you do when you believe that man is totally depraved. Here’s the kind of government you build. At least here is an example of one kind of government you can build when you believe that men are sinners, men are not angels, and not to be trusted one bit. Here are lessons in dividing up power, working out checks and balances, and keeping people in their place.”

Did it work perfectly? No, but then the authors of The Federalist Papers themselves are very clear on that. They keep speaking of parchment barriers. If people are going to be corrupt, it doesn’t matter what laws you write, what Constitution you write, what amendments you add. They’ll get around it, very deliberately and very quickly. So I’m wary of enshrining the Constitution as a perfect expression of Christian civilization, and there were some flaws in the original document.

First of all, the whole bowing down to slavery and the 3/5 rule. Yes, I know why it’s there, I know what it means, I understand the compromise, but really? We’re going to label slaves as 3/5 of a person, for whatever reason? Wait a minute, why do we even have black slaves? Why do we have slavery based on a racist ideology in the first place? That should be standing out like a sore thumb, and if they had dealt with it then, yeah, we might have ended up with two nations rather than one, but our current history would be very different.

Then from a capitalist free-market point of view, those little things that allow the government to set tariffs and other kinds of meddling with the economy, the lack of a clear dedication to a gold standard or silver standard, whichever you prefer – those are real things.

Then the general welfare clause as it appears a couple times. It basically got read in as, “And the government can do anything it needs to to make things better for all of us.” Really?

Then there were the amendments. The authors of The Federalist Papers said, “The amendments are a stupid idea because what’s going to happen is people are going to use those very amendments as their launching point to destroy what the amendments are trying to protect,” and history has proved them correct.

Freedom of religion? Which amendment has been used most to chase Christianity out of the public square? The first amendment, by turning it into something it’s not. Which one has been used to attack the freedom to keep and bear arms? The second amendment, because of that stuff about a militia being necessary. “See, that was only for militia.” And you could go on.

And then, of course, we do have the 9th and 10th amendments, which everyone just flat-out ignored from day 1. If the government isn’t explicitly given this power, it doesn’t have it. “Yeah, we never said that, so let’s get on with it and start grabbing power.”

The division of power, the checks and balances, the legislative/executive/judicial, which mirrors prophet/king/priest, Father/Son/Spirit, there are profound Christian influences at work. The thing is almost covenantal, but then we get to, “No religious tests may be given, but everyone needs to swear to uphold the Constitution.”

“By what God?”

“You can’t ask that.”

“In whose name?”

“Can’t ask that.”

We’ve lost what an oath is. We’ve got this oath of office with no divine power backing it up, no divine witness, nothing.

Since so many of the founding fathers were Masons, even if in the most innocent sense, they were used to belonging to an institution where you swore all kinds of horrible blood-curdling oaths, all in good fun, of course, but in the name of a God yet to be named, the name of no one in particular. So it fails at being a covenant document in that there is no call on the real God to back it up.

As an important case study in the forward history of political and social science, yes, there’s much to be learned and the Federalists are the best commentary on it. You might want to kick in some of the anti-Federalist papers as a balance.

So why didn’t I include it? That was pretty self-conscious on my part. I think if you want a good biblical understanding you’d be better to include Calvin’s Institutes, where the idea of resistance to tyrants led by lesser magistrates or coordinate magistrates he expresses in like three or four paragraphs. It doesn’t take long because once you’ve got that, once you understand that God is God and man isn’t, the details of how you work that out are interesting and could form an interesting part of the record and may save us a lot of time.

“Here are some things we tried that didn’t work. Here are some things we tried that kind of worked.” That’s all good, but until the gospel becomes fundamental to our way of thinking, we will continue to use politics as a way of saving the world. From that point of view, I’d rather have Rushdoony’s book, The Foundations of Social Order than any political document. Let’s go back and talk about the creeds and their political implications.

Any thoughts from either of you along those lines, or along other lines?

Just that it’s very fraught, this picking out one thing, specifically with reference to government and governmental theory, because that’s not what God gave us. So everything else, all of our other options, are deeply, deeply, fundamentally, radically flawed, and that’s our options.

The same could be said of any other human book. I think what you’re looking for is something that represents the development out of scripture, out of the biblical worldview and out of the specific propositions and commandments of scripture that shows us a way of applying this in a way that we don’t have to apologize for too much.

Too much, that’s the key words.

That’s the key word because, as you said, everything is going to be flawed. Lord of the Rings is flawed. Calvin’s Institutes is flawed. The Westminster Confession has some questionable things in it, especially its original version. I for one do not think the Pope is the Antichrist. He’s just bad. Or the office is, at least, but that’s trifling. The document is profound and beautiful and something to be treasured for multiple generations.

The question becomes what kind of effect are you looking for? What are you hoping to accomplish here? Then there’s always the danger of enshrining a book. I think at the beginning with the original article I reference a Star Trek episode, “A Piece of the Action,” where the Starship Enterprise goes to a planet the Federation visited years before, decades before, before the Non-Interference Directive was in place.

They’re curious as to, “Well, so there’s going to be cultural contamination. I wonder what it’s going to look like,” and they beam down and they find a planet that looks like Earth in the late industrial age, or maybe just before the war. But more than that, it looks like Chicago in the ‘20s, where the mob has taken over and the city officials are called Boss. When they finally meet the big boss, they find out that the previous starship crew left behind a book called The Mobs of Chicago, and it literally is “the book,” the pattern that they have enshrined, nearly worshiping, and they’ve recreated a society in the image of that. They thought it was so great that they literally became that.

I would hate to take Lord of the Rings on the ark or on a starship, and then come back and find that everybody was in effect reenacting a Renaissance fair, where everybody is dressed as an elf or a dwarf or a hobbit or something.

Don’t you think that’s already happened with Lord of the Rings?

Yeah, there’s that.

But if we were all hobbits, what a life.

I’ve got to agree with her on that one.

Lots of food and lots of naps. I could handle that.

There’s another Star Trek episode called “The Omega Glory,” where again the crew beams down and finds a post-apocalyptic condition, where there’s a white race and an Oriental race. It takes them a while to figure out that they have replayed Earth’s history, the war between the Yankees – the Yangs in their story – and the Coms – the communists, eastern Asia.

The whites have treasured a few very particular things that belong to their culture and their past, to the point of worshiping them. Things are given away when the American flag appears and the white chieftain starts pledging allegiance in fractured words that he does not understand. Kirk breaks in and says, “And to the Republic, for which it stands, one nation under God, with liberty and justice,” and everybody goes, “He’s spoken sacred words!” and we go on from there.

It turns out that the most sacred document, the holiest document, is something called “E Pleb Neesta.” Finally Kirk is asked, “Say the holy words and we’ll know you’re really from our God. Otherwise, Spock looks a lot like the devil, so…”

Kirk can’t recognize them at first, but eventually he makes the connection and says, “Look, these words that you’ve enshrined, they’re not just for you but they’re also for the Coms,” the communists. “They have to be for everybody or they don’t mean anything. These words, these first three, were written more proudly than any ever before. They proudly say ‘We the People of the United…”” and Bill Shatner gets to read the Preamble of the US Constitution.

So they face one culture where everything is taken out of The Mobs of Chicago, and another one that blindly and without understanding worships the artifacts of America, our political and republican values, but wrapped up in symbols they don’t understand.

So when we’re talking about taking three books, there’s a reason we say three and not one, and we assume that the Bible is there automatically. The Bible’s a given. It’s more a question about ourselves. What do we value as individuals? What kind of emphasis do we not want to do without? And honestly, what do we want to read on late nights when the fireflies are out and the jackals are howling out in the distance? If all we have is this, what have we got and what are we comfortable with?

Anyway, that’s some of the reasons why we didn’t include the Constitution at the time, not to say we couldn’t. Again, I would argue if you put in The Federalist Papers at least it becomes something which you analyze and don’t just accept blindly as historical artifact, without understanding why it was what it was. It doesn’t do a lot of good, not like the Bible.

Cool. Shall we wrap up with some recommendations for this evening?

I’m going to recommend first a vegetable, which is Brussel sprouts.

Yes, sweet chili sauce!

In the past two weeks I’ve had them I think three or four different times, and each time they’ve been marvelous. I will describe to you what each one was. The first was at an English pub. I don’t know if either of you know what elote is, but it’s Mexican street corn, grilled corn covered in mayonnaise, then the mayonnaise is coated with chili powder and Cotija cheese, so they did that on roasted Brussel sprouts, which was delicious. I did not expect it to be as good as it was.

Then a few days later at a really fancy restaurant there was like caramelized Brussel sprouts. It was a fairly fancy restaurant because I was on a date.

Presumably with your fiancée.

Yes, of course. Who else would I be going on a date with, Shadow? He has terrible table manners. But it was also very good. It was very sweet and it had arugula kind of built in. It kind of came as its own column, with a vinaigrette on it, and it was really delicious.

Then for Easter dinner I roasted Brussel sprouts myself this time, and it was really good just by itself. It was just olive oil, salt, pepper, and garlic salt, and it was really good.

So I’m recommending that first, Brussel sprouts, because – fun historical fact – the Brussel sprouts we have now are different from the Brussel sprouts we had before the 1980s.

Those have gone a bit off by now.

Yeah, those ones are bad, but their descendants live on. Some scientists found out which chemical in Brussel sprouts made them taste bitter and awful pre-1980s, and then bred them, for lack of a better term, to no longer have that, so the Brussel sprouts we have today are better than the ones that are stereotypically complained about.

Yes! This is why all the memes historically – not memes as we know them today – because I never got what the hype was against Brussel sprouts. These are delicious, what’s the problem?

I didn’t either. We never had Brussel sprouts, and I think it’s because my parents both grew up with the bitter nasty ones, so they never cooked them. Anyway, that’s the first thing.

The second thing should take much less time to explain. I’m going to recommend donating plasma, because at least where I do it, which my fiancée convinced me to start doing this, they pay you for the donation. As long as you eat and drink water consistently for the day of and the day before, I’ve had no problems – no dizziness, no fainting, anything like that. If that’s something you’re prone to, maybe don’t do this. Don’t follow this recommendation, just eat some Brussel sprouts instead and you can still say, “I followed Bryan’s recommendation.”

Okay, this may be a stupid question, but what’s the difference between donating plasma and donating blood?

In a plasma donation they stick you with a needle and the blood flows out into their machine, and I don’t know if it does it like a centrifuge or what, but basically they separate out the red blood cells from the plasma, then they return the red blood cells back to you.

The plasma gets taken off, and it’s either used in surgery to give to people who have lost blood and they have the red blood cells, or they’re anemic or something and they just need extra mass in their veins. Other bits of it go off to help with creating medicine, so it just gets used in testing, basically. Apparently they make enough money that they can pay you fairly well. Then you also get the nice serotonin boost because you’ve done something nice for people.

And the money, with which you take your girlfriend out for lunch or something.

I haven’t actually touched any of it yet, but yes.

I mentioned a book earlier that I will pick as my recommendation. It is called The Foundations of Social Order by Rousas J. Rushdoony. It should be available online someplace. It is a study in the creeds of the early Church, together with their social and political implications.

Some people find it hard to read, and those of you who maybe aren’t strong readers might struggle with it a little, but it’s still worth the effort. There is no other book like it. The only thing that comes close, honestly, is a series of articles that I wrote, which are available on the Chalcedon website, called “Christianity 101: Studies in the Creeds of the Church” or something. That’s chalcedon.edu. Just look up my name and look up creeds or something, and it will probably pop up.

We’ll link it in the show notes.

It starts with the most basic idea of what a creed is. It starts with the Apostle’s Creed, the Nicaean Creed, the Formula of Chalcedon, and then other documents that we’ve talked about here on a number of occasions, and shows that what you believe makes a difference, not just in terms of your own walk with God and your understanding of who God is and what he’s done, but also in terms of the broader culture, including its political aspects.

There would be a book worthy of being among books we bring along, if only for the fact that it actually includes all the ecumenical creeds, which trying to find nowadays is somewhat difficult.

Trinity Hymnal?

Does it have the Formula of Chalcedon?

I don’t think it does.

Or the Athanasian Creed, I don’t think.

I think it has Athanasius. Maybe not.

Speaking of things that we could bring along, I don’t know if we said so at the time, but we sure should have, a psalter with some hymns and with the creeds in it would be a great thing to bring along, talking about other dimensions of human life.

For the sake of time I don’t think I’m going to read the whole poem that I’m going to recommend, but I’m going to recommend the work of an Australian poet by the name of Banjo Paterson. This is the genius behind the poem “The Man From Snowy River,” also “Waltzing Matilda.”

It has all of the sort of very easy lyrical qualities of English poetry, especially sort of Scottish ballad kind of feeling things, but it’s also got the rugged humor of the frontier and the bush, so it’s excellent reading material. Especially I feel like a lot of them are good ‘boy’ poems.

I feel like girls like these poems about flowers and self-reflection and meditations and things, and these are adventure stories and they’re fun and they’re humorous, and there’s horse racing and shooting and death. So Banjo Patterson. Maybe in an upcoming special episode I will read the poem that I had in mind, we’ll see.

Thank you, guys, so much for this conversation. It’s been a pleasure. Thank you also to the listener who wrote us this email. We enjoyed your email and hope you have enjoyed the podcast.

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