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Wayfair issue 7 is almost ready to print, and we can't wait for you to read it. It's all about the concept of trust. Trust in God, in ourselves and in our communities. And it centers women's wisdom and experience with trust, especially the trust in our individual relationship with heavenly parents that allow each of us to act with power and integrity in our own lives. Become a friend of Faith Matters or become a paid subscriber to Wayfair magazine by March 31st. To receive this beautiful issue in the mail. Links are in the show notes. Hey, everybody, this is Aubrey Chavez from Faith Matters. We live in a world that prizes activity. Being productive, staying in control, always doing something. So when life brings seasons of waiting through illness, loss or circumstances we didn't choose, it can feel unsettling, even threatening, to our sense of self. But what if those seasons are actually inviting us into a deeper understanding of God? Today we're joined by Taryl Givens to explore an extraordinary book called the Stature of waiting by W.H. van Stone. Van Stone noticed something hiding in plain sight in the Gospel accounts of the last week of Jesus life. Up until a certain moment, Jesus is the one acting. He's teaching, healing, feeding, leading. And then, almost imperceptibly, the grammar of the story shifts. He's no longer the one doing, but the one to whom things are being done. He's handed over. He waits, he receives. And Van Stone suggests that this isn't a tragic turn in the story. It's its deepest revelation. Teryl and Fiona introduced so many of us to the God who weeps in Moses 7. In Vanstone, we meet the same vulnerable God again, this time waiting. And we ask what it means to follow that God in how we love, how we age, how we suffer, and how we let ourselves be carried. We hope that as you move through Holy Week, that this conversation helps you see the face of God in the most vulnerable moments of the Easter story and in your own. And with that, here's Terrell Gibbons.
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B
All right, Terrell, thank you so much for being here.
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C
Great to be here again.
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B
It is always. You're our favorite guest. Do we need to edit that out?
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C
I was going to say they'll let that out, won't they?
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B
It is just so good to be with you always.
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D
Thanks.
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B
Very excited about this discussion. I wonder if you'd start by saying a few words about William Vanstone, who publishes as W.H. vanstone.
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C
Yes.
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B
You mentioned just before we started recording, that you've been shaped by him.
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C
I have been shaped by him. I love this man. He died in 1999. He was an Anglican, kind of a country parson. His friends said of him that he could have been Archbishop of Canterbury, that he had the talent, the academic level of achievement, the brilliance. All he ever wanted to do was just minister to country, you know, working class in England. And I discovered him probably not much more than a year or two ago when I was at a retreat. I had gone to a cabin that my good friend Judge Griffith loaned me to try to finish work on my history of Christianity. And I took just a couple of books with me. And one of his was his book called Love's Endeavor, Love's Expense. And I can't think of anything that has affected me more deeply, both just at the spiritual, the heart level, but also theologically. And I'll just summarize one, one thing that he said in that book. He quotes Anselm, the, you know, hugely, hugely influential medieval theologian who said in a very famous Latin phrase, you have no idea what the cost of sin was. And Van Stone said, no, no, he got that wrong. You have no idea what the cost of love was. And that's not just a kind of poetic shift in emphasis. There's a profound theological distinction between those two approaches to the work of, Of Christ. So I knew in that moment I had found a kindred spirit and a beautiful soul as I, as I delved into his biography. Nobody has written a full length biography of a man, but there have been some tentative efforts to piece together the elements of his life. And one of my favorite stories is, of course, he was a. A person for many, many years, half a century or more, and yet none of his sermons survive. And the reason is that he would destroy every sermon after he gave it. And this was out of his belief that to give a sermon is a sacred duty and it has to be suited to that people in that moment of time. And to have recourse to something you had written before for a different audience would not be a genuine offering. Wow. And how could you not love the heart of a man who has that kind of a sense of what it means to be called, to serve his people? So Love's Endeavor, Love's Expense, published in America as the Risk of Love, was my first exposure to him. And then I discovered he'd written two other brief books, one called the Stature of Waiting, which I hope we'll be talking about today, and the other, Farewell in Christ, which is a collection of his stories from the ministry. He's. I don't. He doesn't seem to be on the radar of most people, even most theologians today. He's. He's a favorite of Sarah Coakley, one famous theologian. I asked Ian McGilchrist if he knew his work, and he said no, but everybody tells me I need to read him. So I think he's. His star is kind of in the ascendancy, I hope, because he's. Nobody is more worth reading than Van Stone. In writing the preface to one of his works, another theologian said, all theology is written in blood. It comes from the deepest places of our heart. And I feel that's true of Van Stone. In fact, I won't say who, but it was after finishing Van Stone that I committed to never read a certain theologian or theologians again. I just feel like if their heart isn't in alignment with God, then I'm not sure I want to hear anything they have to tell me about God. And I think it was Van Stone that convinced me of that principle.
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B
Would you, before we get into the real body of the conversation, would you say a few more words about the cost of love and what he meant with that, with that shift?
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C
Yes. And he comes back to this theme in the stature of waiting. But what he means is
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B
that God
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C
is vulnerable by loving. God is vulnerable. So you may have to stir me back because I, you know, I tend to digress, but I. I get onto this topic of love, and I think that love is a paradigmatic example of a problem in theology general. And let me, let me, let me just frame it this way, because I've wanted to. To say more about the problem of vocabulary in theology. If you were nuclear physicists or cosmologists and you began to talk to me about quantum uncertainty or black holes, I couldn't stop you and say, well, you know, I've always understood a black hole differently. Or when. When I talk about electromagnetic waves, I mean something different, I have to defer to you because if a study has achieved the status of an academic discipline, then we defer to the specialists to define the working vocabulary of that field. Yes. And that's true in engineering. It's true in physics, true in biology. So curious thing happens in theology. A recent example, I was criticizing in one of my manuscripts the dominance of sovereignty and glory in theological voc discourse from the 4th century on. And a Catholic theologian wrote back to me, and he said, you massively misunderstand. I love that. I'd never been put down quite that way before. You massively misunderstand. Glory.
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D
Wow.
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C
And I think that was the moment at which I I realized theology does not occupy the same hegemony or monopoly on vocabulary in the religious field that a scientist does in science, because religion is a lived thing. And so I, sitting in the pews, have every right to hear a word like sovereignty or glory or God through the lens of my experience. And so it gets very complicated trying to narrate a history of theology. And I think it makes more sense to. To narrate it as a history of ideas. So love is one of those. Those. Right. There's no more key term in theology, it seems to me, than love. And yet I think there's no term that has been more abused, especially since the Gospel of John gives us a set of parameters within which we can frame our conversation about love. And so when I read what Van Stone had to say about love, I felt he gets it. He. He understands the message of John that, that love so obviously, so obviously entails relationality. Right. It has to be between two persons. And as we know from human experience, to love is to be vulnerable. It is to open us up to the unexpected consequences of that commitment and that interrelationship. And Van Stone, one of my favorite sentences in his book, he said, no one can take seriously the proposition that love means something different for God than it does for us. And when I cite that passage, I say, unfortunately, all too many people have taken that proposition seriously.
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D
So I'm so surprised that this is. That he was a newer discovery for you, because I figured this was foundational to the God who weeps. And I know you were drawing on Moses 7, but I mean, you. This is, this is the same God, vulnerable God. He. And he's obviously not using Moses 7, but I'm. I'm so surprised that this is something you found after this.
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C
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I'm kind of glad I did that. I don't feel like a plagiarist. In fact, talking to Fiona about this book, I said, fiona, he wrote the God who Weeps many years before we did.
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D
Yeah.
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C
And he just wrote it in a different vocabulary. But I can find virtually no, no space between his positions theologically and feelings of mine.
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D
Well, tell us, would you talk about how he gets to a vulnerable God?
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C
Yeah. And this is one place where vocabulary really becomes very, very important because he is trying to operate within the framework of an Anglican theology. Yeah. And so he does have certain commitments that are kind of non negotiable. And, and one of those that he thinks is non negotiable is the impassibility of God. So you'd think that would be a non starter. But his. His third book, the Stature of Waiting, is pretty much a study of. Of the word passibility, passion, and an attempt to. To reframe it in both an etymological and historical way to give us more room to buy into the creedal view that God is impassable but makes himself passable. And so. Okay, I'll allow him that.
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D
Okay, that makes sense. Yeah. That's why the. Okay, that's interesting. I actually don't feel like. Because I didn't come to the book with that particular baggage, like, I was very primed and ready for, like. Yes, tell me more about how God is vulnerable.
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C
Right.
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D
But that's such. That makes more sense that. That's such a. Yeah, that's such an important distinction.
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C
And I don't. I don't like to go that route for this reason. It hinges on the concept of kenosis. Okay. And I hate to keep introducing technical vocabulary here, but kenosis, it's the word that appears in the Epistle to the Philippians, and it's that famous verse where. Where we're told that Christ emptied himself and made himself in the. In the form of a. Of a servant. So here's the question, and it seems to me that Christianity just kind of is split in twain on this question. Is God concealing his fullness by becoming that squalling infant in Bethlehem, or is that the full revelation of his dividend in greatness? And Van Stone inclines toward the position that, well, he's willingly forsaking his grandeur and sovereignty and all that. And. And I. I don't. I don't. Because I don't feel creedally bound. Yeah. To find a place for that word impassable. So I. I feel. No, as John says, Christ is lifted up so that he can be lifted up. In other words, there's a coincidence between his assumption of mortality, his incarnate nature, his passibility, his vulnerability, his weakness, and what it means to be God in the fullest, most glorious sense of that word. So for. And. And I. I guess, you know, one would have to concede, I think, with Van Stone, that God could choose not to be vulnerable, but I don't think he could choose not to be vulnerable and to love.
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B
Yeah. So would you talk about the distinction that Vanstone draws between Christ as subject and Christ as. As object.
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C
Yes.
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B
Trying to get sort of into the meat.
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C
Yeah. So here we get kind of to the meat of the. Of the book, which is. Van Stone points out that there are 32 or 33 references in the New Testament to the betrayal of Christ by Judas. But he goes to the Greek here to show that there's something subtle that we have missed. So the Greek word for to give is dittomy. And there, when. When Judas betrays Christ one time is called prodidomy, and that means betray. But every other time, the Greek word is para, didomy. And the difference there is that when you say betray, what are you drawing attention to? Like, he betrayed me or he betrayed him, you're drawing attention to the culpability of the traitor. But to say hand over, which is what is used 32 times, is to draw the attention to what it is that awaits the person that you have turned over. And so then Stone is doing a study of what it means to say that the passion of Christ is inaugurated and in fact essentially consists of the being handed over. Yeah. So the question is, what is he being handed over to? And one way that Van Stone would answer that is, well, nobody knows. Christ didn't know. It is the unqualified nature. It is the unconditionality of Christ's willing embrace of whatever awaits him. That is the only metric of true love. In other words, anytime that we set a limit or a condition or a parameter to love, then it's. It's not universal. It's not inexhaustible. Yeah. And it's not costly. And so let. Let me come to it from a slightly different direction. So I. This past December, I was in Scotland to interview McGilchrist. And then Zach set up a kind of soiree in London, which is. I begged him to let me out of it. And he said, no tarot. We've invited too many people. And they brought you here. You can't stay home.
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B
That sounds like the truest story I've ever heard.
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C
So I had to attend a soiree, and it was. It was with a dozen kind of thought leaders, spiritual guides, scholars, and. And one of the. One of the people there was Ian McGilchrist, publisher, I think his name was John Rowson. Yeah, Brilliant, brilliant man. And I met him just in the closing minutes of. Of the evening. And so it was just he and I speaking. And he described himself as a kind of proto Christian. So he's not committed denominationally. He's. He's in that kind of seeker phase, intellectual slash spiritual. And so he was genuinely curious about Mormonism and he was asking genuine questions. And I felt in this whole setting, it seemed to be populated by people largely who had given up on denominational Christianity. And yet we're still seeking something. And that spoke volumes to me about how better prepared we need to be to tell our story in ways that haven't been shaped by creedal preoccupations or apologetic norms. And so I found myself talking to him in terms that I'd never used before. And before I knew it, I was telling him the story of Christianity and humanity and Christ's redemptive work through the language of Van Stone.
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D
Wow.
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C
And we'd been talking about embodiment and materiality. And so here's how I kind of rephrased my understanding of endstone. So this, the. The saga of the Cosmos begins. For McGilchrist, it begins with consciousness. For Latter Day Saints, it begins with intelligence. And I think there's. There's an integral connection and. And maybe even an identity between consciousness and agency. So something about our. Our primordial nature is rooted in or commensurate with agency. And this is one of the most phenomenal, exciting facts of existence. Is it. Is it we. We can choose. We can shape ourselves. We can act upon this universe in any way we choose. And so I'm. I'm describing to. To this man in. In these terms what I understood to be the nature of human existence. And I said, so that's the. That's the beauty of it. The costliness of it is when the recognition dawns upon us. Oh, you're an agent too. And you're an agent too. And that means that even as I find this indescribable power to act upon other things and beings, they have that same power to act upon me. And so existence is kind of sheared between these two imperatives. The one to act, to be the center, the. The behind agency and action and change. And the other is to be acted upon in ways that we might not like. And, and so I said, that's. That's the beauty and the terror of existence. And I think few people in human history have captured that beauty and terror simultaneously. I think William Blake did, where he tries to imagine what it means for a spirit to experience that moment of embodiment. And that's what he does in the Book of Thou. And so I'm talking to this. This gentleman, and I said, so I think what Christ was doing was saying, I will model for you the optimal
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B
way
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C
to experience that. Those twin dimensions to act maximally toward the thriving of every other agent in the universe and at the same time, to be willing to be exposed unconditionally to the agency of others.
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B
Yeah.
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C
And no human Being has modeled that as perfectly as Christ. And the Passion Week was inaugurated when he chose to allow Judas to hand him over to the infinite unfathomable terrors of the worst that humanity could throw at him and demonstrate his sufferance of that, his vulnerability to that, and the victory of a non transactional love in the face of that.
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B
Yeah, so to me that's, that's controversial on multiple levels. Right. The first being that there's this fundamental human instinct, I think, born out of our, you know, original tribalism, to have control over our surroundings and over ourselves. It's just like we really lean into the agency half and not the other half because that implies that we'll be secure, that we'll be safe. And so I think there's just something inside all of us that wants that and only that to be true. And then on a Latter Day Saint level, the scriptures that come to mind immediately are the ones that. And I'd be curious on your take here, and I think it's two Nephi too, you know, that we are to act and not to be acted upon, or, you know, that we're to be anxiously engaged. And I think there's also, especially within Latter Day Saint culture, there is an idea that the most righteous among us are the most successful among us, those who have acted upon the universe to their own benefit and to the benefit of others most successfully. I don't want to strawman that. I don't think when we look at the mission president who's achieved great success in business or whatever, I don't think we are glib enough to say that that man has just achieved for himself. But we do look at a bigger picture of how these people that we've looked up to have benefited the world. But it has always been out of this anxiously engaged action.
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C
Yeah.
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B
So there as a Latter Day Saint and a human, you know, there are multiple things working on me that, that, you know, raise some eyebrows.
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C
Yeah. Okay, so let's talk about some of those. First of all, the title of the book does a lot of his work for him. The stature of waiting. So part of what he is trying to do at both a deep theological level and also at a practical kind of quotidian level is to dignify waiting and to suggest that there is a, if not active, there's a willful component to it. So the practical dimension is, resides in the fact that in prior generations, disease takes most of us prematurely. Now most of us will end our lives in nursing homes being dependent objects of care. And so he Said there's an urgency to rethinking what it means to be the object of care, to be an up right, to be an object without sacrificing our agency. And I think that's the paradox that he's trying to create here. So there is a way in which, you know, as Milton said, those also serve God who stand and wait. So there is a kind of waiting that is not hopeless and passive and. And fully acquiescent, but embraces the, the necessity for that phase, that dimension of our lives. I do think that we are to be actively engaged. I, I'm. I'm a fan of nature. I think he gets some really important things wrong, but I get. He gets a lot right. And it's. It's easy to tar all of his ideas with the same brush. But when he talks about the will to power, I. If you read him carefully, you read something like the Genealogy of Morals, where he talks about the will to power. It doesn't have a malignant, an inherently malignant dimension. It's. What he's saying is, as humans, we realize we're agents and we want to leave a footprint in the sand. We want there to be some evidence that we were here. And I think that's a noble and godly thing in and of itself, but it can easily get twisted in different ways. But he simply means the will to power is how agency manifests itself in its purest form. I think that we have a kind of mania for action in, in our culture that hasn't served us well. We choose the beehive, not the lotus flower as a stadium. Says a lot about us, but I do think that we are too quick, too prone to equate agency with visible evidence as monuments to ourselves, what they. What they often turn out to be. So I think. I think that's problematic. Yeah, I know there are other, other questions you raised.
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B
I didn't address anything there. This is, I think that's where we get. This is Lehi's sermon, right to act and not to be acted upon.
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C
Yeah. You know, I think contextually that's not problematic at all. I think. I think we are continually. Obviously, we're being acted upon, and we can't escape that unless we retire to a monastic cell. And I don't think that's what he's suggesting. I think all he means in that regard is that our agency is always intact. You act upon me in any way that you choose, but I don't succumb to those influences. I respond to those as an Agent. So I'm always acting even in response to what you are trying to impose upon me by way of influence.
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B
Yeah. And do you feel that that's a fair characterization of what happened to Jesus in the final. Or what happened with Jesus in the final days of his life?
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C
Well, yeah. And, and Vanstone points out that all of the verbs up until that moment are action verbs. Christ is doing, ministering, teaching, feeding, and then suddenly everything is being done to him. But it's, it's, it's in his acquiescence, it's in him accepting those dimensions of embodiment and, and mortality that I think the beauty lies. I think. You know what struck me, it wasn't until I finished reading the last page, and then I double checked with a word search, the online version, and the word atonement never appears.
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D
Really?
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C
And yet the book is a book about atonement. And I think that's another reason why I love it. Because, look, I know I'm fighting uphill battle and I'm never going to get the word atonement expunged from latter to saint culture. But, but just let me just say a couple things in that regard. You know, you might respond, well, it's one of our articles of faith. Yeah. But let's look how it's framed the article of faith. Right. We believe that through the atonement of Christ, all mankind may be saved. We're getting, we're getting the emphasis wrong. When Joseph came back from the sacred grove, what did he tell his mother? Remember, we get all these different kind of accounts, but his mother said the first thing he said was, I've learned for myself, Presbyterianism is not true. Wait a minute. What. What did he learn? What he learned was through the atonement of Christ, all mankind may be saved. Presbyterians believed explicitly according to the sign out of Dort, in a limited atonement. Wow. So Joseph isn't defining that term. He's talking about the expansiveness of whatever reconciliation is being affected by Christ. And so I think Van Stone is trying to avoid the baggage of atonement theology, which is so fraught with presuppositions and doctrinal foundations that are radically incompatible with the Restoration gospel. Yeah. And so part of this, I think, is coming back to your question through a different route. And that is, yeah, we want, we want equity, we want justice. We want, we want to see the consequences of what we chose, not the consequences of what somebody imposes on us or how they disrupt our plans. And I think that has led to, in Christianity, And I think this is the greatest tragedy of Christian history. It's led to 180 degree inversion of what Christ was trying to teach us about love and forgiveness and justice. So Jesus teaches, doesn't matter if you come at 9 or 5 o', clock, I'll pay you the same. The sun shines on the just and the unjust, the last shall be first. Right. So in every conceivable way, he's dismantling our conceptions of least retributive justice. And so what we do as a Christian people and sometimes as Latter Day Saints, is to say, well, we're just deferring justice. So we suffer now, but he's going to come and boy, then you'll get yours. Yeah. And so we still harbored, right, these apocalyptic dreams of retribution and equity. And it, you know, Jesus last words on the cross weren't, you're going to get yours, it was forgive them.
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B
Yeah.
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C
And so it seems to me that there's the invitation to an eternal inequity that is almost impossible for us to psychologically embrace. And yet I think when Christ hands himself over, Van Stone is saying it's an infinite handing over. It's not like I'm just going to hand myself over for these three days. I will wait eternally upon the response to love because the cycle is never fully closed. As long as I am in relationship with you, you continue as an active agent and you continue to have within yourself the power to determine the nature and meaning of that relationship. So Christ in that sense is still waiting upon us.
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D
So what does that look like if, you know, when we are to actively try to emulate God? I think it makes, it has made more sense to me that we practice becoming agents. It feels so much muddier to imagine what does it look like to practice being godlike in a vulnerable, acted upon way? Like I don't know how to put that into a, into spiritual practices.
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C
Okay, okay, let me, let me, let me, let me suggest what it might look like in spiritual practice and what it might look like in terms of future cosmologies. So one way to get a good conversation going in Institute class is to ask if Hitler is going to be saved, which I did last week. And please, for the record, I'm not making a determination here. But of course, many students are, are appalled. And one student said, well, not if I can help it. And I said, then he won't. And he said, what do you mean? And I said, well, it's up to, it's up to you. And you know, there's this moment of confusion. I said, well, well, let's look at a minute. What do you mean by heaven? What. What do you mean by salvation? And it's so hard because we think we're Latter Day Saints and we're still using the vocabulary of Protestants. We're still using the conceptual paradigms of. And then you think, wait, what is. What is. Okay, section 132, same sociality. Okay, so it's about eternal. So it's about relation. Oh, so heaven is living in these perfectly loving relationships that are untainted, uncontaminated by selfishness, greed, sin. Okay, so who will be in those relationships with you? So then I returned to Matthew, chapter five, the Sermon on the Mount. And there's this. There's this for. I think it's 26, 27, where Jesus says, if you're on your way to the altar and you remember that somebody has something odd against you, go to that person. We reconcile. So I gave that to the class. I said, I want you to read this and reread it and reread it until you see something wrong with it. And they read it and read it. And finally the student raised their hand. She goes, oh, oh, it's backwards. I said, yes. What's backwards? Well, it. It seems like it should say, if you're on your way to the altar and you realize you have something against your brother, go and be reconciled. But if your brother has something against you, but what if it's your brother's fault and Jesus is saying, it doesn't matter. It's not about fault.
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D
Wow.
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C
It's about relationship.
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D
Yeah.
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C
So if you're really upset with me and I did nothing wrong, what is Jesus telling me I need to do? I still need to go through Reconciled? Yeah. Why? Well, because unless we're reconciled, we're not in relationship. And if we're not in relationship, then we're not in heaven. Wow. And this is why Joseph said otherwise it would have been his most enigmatic statement, but now we can understand why. He said, if you have no accusers, you will enter heaven. And so God waits upon us, and we wait upon each other to see where love will take us. And what that means is that heaven is. Seems to me always dynamically being reconfigured. It's. It's a. It's a process. It's not this state. Okay, you got this many points. You go in that kingdom.
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D
So can I ask you. Because this is a. This is a really relevant conversation to something that came up in a discussion in our Word yesterday. And I think that the pushback is that. Yeah, but you can't abandon your line like you can't abandon the what's. You can't stop judging righteously. Yeah. To. To sink below your. The. The true standards. Because you could reconcile a relationship where there's a disagreement about values, but if you know you're right, like, you can't compromise that ground. And like, that felt like an impasse.
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C
Yeah. Yeah. And I think a lot of times it does feel like an impasse. But. But think about. I'm not compromising anything if I continue to love you. You're not asking me to practice a different morality. You're asking me to practice Jesus morality, which is loving and forgiving. So I think the conflicts are almost always imagined. We're not being asked to participate in a different moral practice, and we don't have to countenance a different moral practice from our own. But that doesn't impede. I don't see why that would need to impede relationality, does it?
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D
Is it necessarily something because it's relational that requires both parties to have an intention to heal? I think that's a tricky part too.
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C
Yeah. The intention is this, it seems to me, and there is a rigor to love, you know, And I think this is, I think, one aspect of love that I think Fiona and I could have made clearer. So. So let me describe how I understand love. And my. My understanding of the core of love is. Is a. A philosophical commonplace that to love means to actively promote the thriving of the other. But the. The richness is in the word thriving. So what constitutes your thriving? So I may have a different idea of your thriving than you do. You may think, no, I want to live this way with these practices, and I'm going to be happy. And what love demands is I am continually respecting your agency while I'm trying to influence you to see a richer way of living. And you're hoping that I will thrive and that I will see a richer way of living.
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D
Yeah.
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C
And in that dynamic tension, relationality is maintained at an optimal level because we're both seeking the thriving of the other.
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B
Yeah.
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D
Oh, that's interesting. That's not the pro. That's not what's. That doesn't have to be the thing breaking the relationship.
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C
On the contrary, thriving is always. And relationality is always dynamic. It's changing, it's evolving. It's never this equilibrium. Yeah.
- [38:55]
B
I think that, you know, that scenario sounds lovely and exists sometimes. And I guess I'm thinking about a fairly, I would say, practical and realistic scenario in which I feel that I want to promote the thriving of another. And we do see what that thriving entails differently. And this person is not necessarily thinking along the same lines of we're going to have this dynamic interchange and we're going to be continuously promoting each other's thriving. But there's more of a. Let's say I go to this person and say, in some manner of speaking, I say that I love them and I want their thriving. And they say in order for us to. To continue in relationship, I need you to support me in the way that I have chosen to live. Do you support me? I think my instinct is to say, yes, I support you. And because what they have set as the sort of table stakes of this conversation is if I say no, or if I say I don't believe that that promotes your thriving, they say that's not support. We are going to end this relationship, at least for now. I think that's a fairly. I think that's a fairly fairly realistic and common scenario.
- [40:10]
C
I think you're right. How.
- [40:11]
B
How would you address that? Because, like, I feel like in that, in that scenario, I'm not necessarily empowered to stay in relationship with that person.
- [40:18]
C
Yeah.
- [40:19]
D
Otherwise.
- [40:20]
B
Otherwise.
- [40:20]
C
Yeah. Yeah.
- [40:21]
B
So.
- [40:22]
C
Yeah. Well, this is. This is why Fiona is a hardcore universalist and I'm a hopeful universalist. And there is a difference.
- [40:30]
D
Wow.
- [40:31]
C
She thinks, as Augustine did, she doesn't like to be put in his camp. But Augustine said that in the end, God's love will always be irresistible and we will all find unity in him. And my feeling is, I hope so. But I also think that agency can eventuate in different paths. And so I always hold out as a possibility that some relationships won't be reconciled because each people are just going to continue to see the cosmos and. And their agency is going to be exercised differently.
- [41:04]
B
And in that case, what I think the. If we're defining heaven as relationality and Right relationship, which I. Which intuitively resonates for me, then another person might impede my ability to ever be in heaven.
- [41:18]
C
Yeah. And here's where I think the best analogy comes either from mathematics or adoption in mathematics, we've known since what, since the 19th century? I think that there are different infinities. Right. That the number of natural numbers is infinite. Natural. The number of prime numbers is also infinite, but they're not commensurate infinities.
- [41:37]
B
Yeah.
- [41:38]
C
And Van Stone actually comes to this question and he compares it to adoption, like, let's say that you and I are married and, and we have a child and we feel complete and happy and we are. And then we see a child in need and we adopt that child. And now we're whole and complete, but we're one more than we were before. It's like a different infinity. And so I think that, that the fact that one person may choose to be excluded from our circle doesn't mean it isn't heaven. It means it isn't the largest infinity that it could be. But it still is infinite because we are infinitely capacious and receptive and, and as I said, there's always dynamic change and infinite possibilities.
- [42:26]
B
I think there's an interesting, an interesting train of thought here potentially where we, to the extent we believe, I mean, I think and theologically in latter day, in the latter day Saint tradition, I think we do in an anthropomorphic God that there are no doubt many people, you know, some percentage of people at all times simultaneously believe in that God and reject that God or are angry with that God. And so I guess the implication is if we believe that God is in heaven, that this must be, this must be true. That simultaneously God exists in one infinity but is still capable of others as potentially those relationships change over, over time.
- [43:05]
C
That's right. And again, I think that's all inherent in what Benstone calls the waiting of God.
- [43:15]
B
Yeah, that's the waiting. Yeah.
- [43:18]
D
I think also part of what is powerful about seeing the passion through this in this new way, like seeing a godliness in this helplessness is that it feels like it does dignify these places that feel so powerless, where like I have a very, I have a strong impulse when I'm in a relationship where it feels like we're at an impasse to control. And I learned over and over that the, the control is so ineffective that just like the energy of control does something to, to distance me from that relationship. And, and I feel like this version of Jesus like this, this using my agency to, to really inhabit something that's genuinely vulnerable in a relationship. Which, like, that's where it feels the most painful to me. Where I feel like I'm positive I know the right answer. And there's a vulnerability about choosing not to try to control this person's agency with me like that. That has been like. I've experienced what feels more like a godly love in those dynamics than I have in any situation where I've been so right and, and, and I expressed it perfectly. I have these like, dreams of articulating My point so perfectly that they just know they're wrong. And it just feels like that. It doesn't feel like God, actually. And so this. This seems like a really important piece of the puzzle. Like whatever human in me resists just like not being positive and. And feeling so powerless that I don't know what to do in these complicated relationships. It feels like this is part of an answer which is kind of an unanswer. Like maybe it is just. You just hold how much it hurts to not have a resolution that you both agree with.
- [45:04]
C
No, I think that's exactly right. Van Stone writes movingly, to the point of tears, about the tragedy in Aberfan. You read the Statue of Waiting. Does he talk about it in.
- [45:17]
D
I don't think so.
- [45:18]
C
Okay, so it's in the other book. It's in his Farewell to Christ. Aberfan, you may remember, is the mining disaster in Wales.
- [45:25]
B
That's right.
- [45:26]
C
Where a slag heap slid down after torrential rains and it buried a school of young children. And over a hundred children died. And Van Stone defies his own creedal tradition by saying God did not ordain that. And God did not countenance what happened.
- [45:52]
D
Wow.
- [45:54]
C
God is infinitely grieved by what happened, but his resources for turning something that horrific into something beautiful with time, maybe with the passing of generations is always intact. And. And so there's. There's a kind of a startling moment when you realize, no, you think you're powerless. Imagine experiencing that tragedy with the power to do something, and yet love doesn't allow you to intervene.
- [46:29]
D
Oh, that's interesting.
- [46:30]
C
In the natural world or in human agency in such a way. And then you realize, no, this is the cost of love. And as I sit here impotently watching my child suffer because she continues to make terrible decisions, and I'm just. There has to be some way out of this impotent suffering. And the answer is no, there isn't. No, there isn't. And then you see, that's what Christ was trying to teach us in. In the Passion. It wasn't about retribution or paying a debt of justice. What a horrific ideas, right? That somehow somebody or something is going to be pleased as long as somebody. No.
- [47:08]
D
Yeah.
- [47:08]
C
No. It is about the infants of suffering in the face of evil, responding with love and coming out triumphant in the end.
- [47:18]
B
In what way are you saying. Just to clarify, in what way are you saying that God was. In the Aberfan example, in what way would God have been powerless to intervene there? This gets at the problem of evil,
- [47:29]
C
obviously, it is the power. And I always quote C.S. lewis here, right. Perander, where he says, either everything or nothing must depend on human agency. And if everything, then you can't set the bounds.
- [47:41]
D
Wow.
- [47:42]
C
So I feel that, you know, God dropped us off at school and says, good luck. And we can write letters to him, and he can write letters to us, and he can send, you know, maybe informations and guidance. But. But he has said no. These are the conditions of mortality. It's a fallen world, and you are subject.
- [48:04]
B
So why in your mind does God sometimes help us find our keys or to use a less flippant example, sometimes reverse the irreversible course of cancer?
- [48:15]
C
Yeah, I think that I don't pretend for a moment to have a formula, but I believe there is a calculus, and I think it largely depends on individual agents who are responsive to impressions. So give you an example. I have a child who has had a really, really, really hard life. And after years and years in the wilderness, he finally found this perfect situation. And for a brief span of months, he just thrived. He was happy. He was mentally and emotionally healed. He was spiritually well. And then he lost his job and his whole world just fell apart. He has children. He's got dependents. He has. And he called me just absolutely distraught. Why did God do this? And I said, God had nothing to do with this. Well, then why doesn't God rescue me from the situation? And I said, well, I think he's trying to, but I would. I would posit that whoever is in a position to help you isn't listening to the message. I feel like we are all vulnerable, and the only way out of our vulnerability is when angels are available. And I believe in that. Literally, I believe that anytime you are praying for something, you are hoping that your doctor is the kind of person who that morning when he gets up, he listens and he just feels this twinge of inspiration to maybe do this. Or this hiring manager just feels the inspiration to give this person a chance. Or this other person just feels, maybe I should go sit it with that lonely person at the lunch counter. Every single time a miracle happens, I think it's because somebody was receptive. And I don't think receptivity is a matter of righteousness. I think it's a spiritual gift that may be as genetic as blue eyes, really. I think we can seek and obtain certain spiritual gifts, but other people just seem to be able to heal or to hear God's voice or to.
- [50:39]
B
I've noticed this something that just always seemed to Be in the right place at the right time. Have that gift of receptivity.
- [50:45]
C
Yeah.
- [50:45]
B
Yeah.
- [50:46]
C
Wow. So I think some people, you know, they pray because they really need their keys to get to work and not lose a job, and they get the impression and somebody prays that their daughter won't be assaulted during her two years in the Peace Corps, and she is. Because the people who did the evil weren't receptive. You see what I mean? There's. There are too many agents involved in all of these cases.
- [51:09]
B
Oh, sorry.
- [51:10]
A
Well, my.
- [51:11]
D
My question is then, like. And has something gone wrong? Like, like, can't, I guess. Like, I was. I've been reading Falling Upward Again, and. And Richard Rohr says that spiritually there are no dead ends. And I want to believe that if we step back that, like, even when the worst happens, that it can be made good. And so even when those, like, relationships are fracturing and there's not a tidy way to. To fix them, or when something terrible happens in your life that is. That feels like it's really causing suffering. Is that. Is that what this all means? That, like, there are seasons of helplessness and there are seasons of traditional agency where you feel like you. You are in charge of your world. And, and, like, God works with both. Like, is that. Is that the. Is that your takeaway? Or, like, what. Like, how can this be a. How can this, like, give you hope, you know? Yeah, Like, I. There's just, like, something so disturbing about the helplessness, and I want to believe that at least.
- [52:12]
C
Yeah.
- [52:12]
D
Even in the free fall, like, nothing can. Can go completely wrong.
- [52:21]
C
Just make a kind of parenthetical comment here. I. I personally am a doctrinal minimalist and a theological maximalist. And. And by that, interesting, what I mean is, as President Oaks said, we know so much less than we think we do. So I. Yeah. How many questions, doctrinal questions are there in the temple recommend interview? Like, three. Right. But the possibilities that we can build out of our. So I'm. I'm. I'm speculating.
- [52:48]
D
Okay.
- [52:49]
C
But I don't think everything comes out, even in the end. Look, I. Look in the world, and I think there are people who are suffering far more than I have or. Or than I will. And I don't think that's by God's design. I think. I think the universe is messy. I think the world is broken. I don't think God is orchestrating pain and suffering. And we talked a little bit about urgency earlier, and this is what's urgent about the Gospel is not the particulars of our evangelizing program, but the sum total of what we're trying to do. If we really convert people to the gospel, they really get the gospel in their hearts and they're really motivated to go out and alleviate human suffering, then we're doing the best we can to help Christ repair the broken world. You know, it's wonderful, as Fiona's pointed out, that when we read the baptismal covenants in Messiah, all three members of the Godhead are implicitly invoked. Right. The bearing of burdens, the. The comforting. And help me with the third one there, bear one another's burdens. The afflicted and mourn with those who mourn. So we get the weeping God, we get Christian, and we get the Holy Spirit.
- [54:17]
A
Wow.
- [54:18]
C
Yeah. And so they're communal covenants. Right? I will bear your burdens. I will. And so I think. I think the work is more urgent. And all that we know is in the end, there will be no more. All tears will be wiped away. But in the interim, I think we all suffer unevenly and sometimes disproportionately to anything God intends or desires.
- [54:42]
B
It's interesting to me that you bring that up. I actually wrote a fairly lengthy entry in my journal about this yesterday because I was. It was Sunday morning. You know, we're in this beautiful valley. You know, it's silent, it's clear outside. And I feel immense gratitude for where and when and how I live. And at the same time, you know, bombs are falling on Iran. You know, at that very moment, someone is receiving a cancer diagnosis or being abused in some way. And so I simultaneously have this gratitude and a sense of very, I would say a very strong sense of guilt that I am living this way. And who knows what's going to happen, you know, in the future in my life. But at least it's fair to say that I have suffered far less than many, many people.
- [55:30]
C
Yeah.
- [55:30]
B
And how do you deal with that dichotomy?
- [55:32]
C
Here's how I deal with it. We used to have a number of voices in our culture that would say, well, you are where you are because you are part of the chosen and you're part of the elect, and you. You earned it in the pre. Existence. And that was the only narrative I heard until I. I wrote my book on premortality and read the story in Plato's Republic, where this person named, er, gathers this assemblage of spirits and is about to give them their assignments in mortality, and he allows them the option to choose by lot. And as they are Choosing the life as they are going to live, as embodied spirits. He says, remember, the purpose of mortality is the acquisition of virtue, and the life of a rich king may be less conducive than of a struggling peasant. And that was when I first was struck by this idea that to the extent that we did choose the nature and conditions of our embodiment, which is a speculation and not doctrine, but to the extent that that may be true, then I'm looking at all kinds of souls more valiant and durable and less fragile than I am, apparently. And so if I'm going to speculate, I speculate in that direction.
- [56:54]
B
I was going to ask, could you help me with one more dissonance that I feel about this entire thesis of Vanstone's? And it's that this. It's sort of around the impassable passibility of God, of Christ in particular. There are moments in my life when I am genuinely vulnerable, when I am genuinely acted upon and genuinely powerless. I feel. And I think that's true of almost everyone. And I think we believe in this actually as Latter Day Saints too. You know the scene where Peter cuts off the soldier's ear, it's like that is a manifestation of what Christ could have done if he wanted to. But he genuinely chose this vulnerability. And in that sense, it's not genuine vulnerability. In the same way that we experience it, we actually comfort ourselves in the way that we say, well, Christ gave himself up to the cross. This was all a choice. The Romans thought that they. That they had Christ in their power, but they. But they didn't. And so, like, that gives us comfort in the sense that God was always in control. This was all part of the plan, but it also inhibits the empathetic nature of the relationship in some ways.
- [58:00]
C
Yeah, it's kind of like the undercover boss, right? Yes, right, exactly. He really isn't. He isn't really subject. Yes, that is such a good rank at any moment that he wants to. And let me just. Let me just say initially that that's such a good question that I want to sit with it before I answer any kind of a glib response. So while I think that through, let me digress a moment to just lay out the terms so that we know what we're talking about with passability and impassibility. Technically, to be passable means to be subject to influence from outside. So in classical theism, aseity is the term that is used to describe God's self sufficiency, which means he can experience emotion. He could feel love or anger, but he will not be influenced by anything outside of his own judgment. And I think in that regard, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John all give us at least one example of Jesus changing his mind. And really significantly, in Luke, it's the resurrected Christ who changes his mind. And in Third Nephi, it's the resurrected Christ who changes his mind. So in that sense, we have scriptural authority for the passibility of. Of the divine.
- [59:23]
B
You're saying changes his mind based on the. An external.
- [59:26]
C
Based on external things. That's right. The pleading, the importuning of disciples, and he changes his mind. Given that they are kind of narrative minimalists. Yeah, that was in. And that's a pretty deliberate gesture in all those cases. And as far as is. Is, isn't God's vulnerability a provisional vulnerability? And I guess I would say. I would say no, not given the fact that. That he committed himself from the beginning to the full onslaught of human weakness. So having. Having made that decision at the incarnation and then reaffirmed it in the garden, where it seems to me Passion Week is not a turn of events, it is the culmination whose end he was always anticipating. But I don't think that the fact he is born in a manger of a peasant woman accused of adultery or fornication is somehow meant to just suggest humility. I think it is the full enactment from the beginning of that total vulnerability that is authentic.
- [60:59]
D
So. So to close us out, I think probably what will stay with people is this. This new idea about. About choosing vulnerability and that. That being so godly? Is there something that you can say that maybe is an invitation, like, how can we be like Jesus in this way? Especially if this is kind of a new exploration, that there's not something undignified about these seasons that feel so powerless? And is there a way that we can inhabit those seasons with a little bit more intention and trust that there's dignity there?
- [61:34]
C
Beautiful question. I don't know if I have an answer or if I just want to echo your question. I've been reading rereading Julian of Norwich this week, who I think was the purest voice of revelation that I've ever heard. And she hears this constant reframe, right, all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well. And that's the line we always turn to as the sum total of what she learns. And I said to my wife during a recent period of anguish, how is that helpful if I know that that's a thousand years away? It's these thousand years during which I need the. The. The. The sucker. And. And another favorite author of mine, Helen Oppenheimer, who's an English philosopher, so not a conventional Christian. And she said, Christ has the moral authority that he does because he didn't sit in heaven to watch our travails. But he said, whatever you go through, I'm going to go through with you. And so the Incarnation was an act of solidarity. And I guess if we see the Passion Week that way, not that he is on his way to affecting an atonement, which is this magical, mystical thing, but rather, no, this is the reconciliation. This is you watching me experiencing with you the fullest onslaught. And so our reverence for our experience of Passion Week should be the. The togetherness with him in his pain and him seeing our pain. And it's like that, that moment in the Descent from the Cross that Brian Krishir Snake captures so powerfully. When you see the faces surrounding the descending, they don't know there's going to be a resurrection. And so it's their presentness to that tragedy that is the sacred experience. And I think that we have to. We have to be there in that moment during Passion Week.
- [64:11]
D
Thank you so much, Tara. This is a lot to think about, and it really changes how Easter, how this whole season feels actually, to incorporate this, this. This part of the story that has been. That's been there all along, but it's not something that we have explored. So it feels very applicable and useful. Thank you.
- [64:32]
B
Thank you.
- [64:34]
A
All right. Thanks so much for listening. If you're interested in exploring these ideas further, you can find the Stature of waiting by W.H. van Stone and the God who Weeps by Terrell and Fiona Givens wherever books are sold, and we'll link to both of those in the show notes. If this episode is resonating with you, we'd love for you to share it with friends. We're always grateful when you leave a review to help others find the podcast. Thanks again for listening.