B (2:58)

Yeah. So the term was coined by Paul Tillich, I believe, at least it was popularized by Tillich, if not coined by Paul Tillich, great 20th century liberal theologian, kind of the last great of the liberal theologians. And in my view, by the way, was the pioneer of adding the preposition of attached to theology. And I think for that reason we're all living in Paul Tillich's world, if we're in the theological world, because there has been a proliferation of theologies of theologies of liberation, theologies of gender, of sexuality, et cetera. All of these things originate with this innovation of applying theological analysis to things other than God. Now, in that sense, Tillich is a classical theological liberal insofar as theology came to be about human experience rather than God in the kind of modern liberal era of theology. But in an attempt, I think, at dealing with the problems of modern liberalism and really the challenges of figures like Karl Barth, who were calling for theologians to pay more attention to God, Tillich attempted, I think, correctly, if imperfectly, to deal with God and human experience simultaneously. And because human beings are sinful, to use kind of traditional biblical language, our experience with God is simultaneously one of being affirmed and disaffirmed. And so, therefore, I think the theology of culture is an attempt at dealing with the world as creature and the world as sinner at the same time being both affirmed by God, but also dealing with the contradictions of the fact that in really serious ways, God is not God to us. We're really fixated on ourselves. And so, descriptively speaking, I treat theology of culture as an attempt at identifying what is the implicit theology of certain cultural artifacts, but also kind of more normatively speaking, I attempt to critique culture from the tradition of Christian theology.

A (5:03)

Specifically, I want to pick up on one thing you said in there, which is human being as creature. And by that you're inferring, like, and God said that it was very good, you know, like, affirmed and also sinner, human being as taking part in a world that is imperfect, in which evil and unnecessary suffering and injustice exist and where we hurt the ones we love the most. Fill it out however you want. Is it fair to say, would you say from your perspective, that a bad progressive or liberal theology or approach to maybe anthropology really like a view of the human person, that a bad liberal or progressive one will just almost exclusively focus on that creatureliness, the goodness, the, you know, can collapse into sort of shitty self help in its worst moments, and that a bad conservative theology or anthropology is going to focus so much on you know, just the filthiness of our rags of righteousness before God and, and like our complete inability to do anything and, and just this extreme focus on, you know, God's goodness and everything gets refracted through that lens. Like, do you think that that's oversimplified or inaccurate or fairly accurate thing that you're trying to kind of find a balance in between?

B (6:29)

I don't think it's inaccurate. I think it's like a particular way of articulating and I think it's correct in many ways. Yes, a bad anthropology is one that doesn't deal seriously with human sin. And by the way, obviously one of the interesting intersections with psychology I think immediately emerges here, which is responsibility versus say trauma responses or compulsive behaviors or things that we might be inclined to say are symptoms rather than kind of deliberate moral choices. But I think broadly speaking, the human condition can't be defined so narrowly as to exclude human freedom, human evil, human goodness, all of these things. It's a mess. And my struggle as a person, as a Christian person, as a thinker, as a theologian is to try to hold all that together really seriously. Which is maybe why, for example, you were a little ambivalent in describing me as to the right. In some ways I try to take the whole moral political spectrum really seriously. I often don't know where to put myself exactly on these things.

A (7:43)

We talk sometimes on this show about like how therapy culture can sort of jump the shark. It can, it can jump out of the realm of therapists through, often through social media, sometimes popular books and stuff. And some of those terms can take on a life of their own. And that is where I mostly see sort of therapy speak being used in the way you describe it in a sort of like overly progressive, overly left leaning kind of a way that sort of denies the reality of human agency and responsibility. And that could be because immature individuals are finding that when they use it that way, it lets them off the hook and makes them feel momentary happiness or something. It can also be from maybe something that we'll get to today, which is on the left. We like to overcorrect. We like to correct for the overemphasis on individualism on the right by overemphasizing systems and groups and identities and all the various inputs that lead to a particular human in a time and place. And what I like about therapy, that is done, I wouldn't just say done well, I would say done by the book, done roughly the way that all therapists are trained to do it. So this is not a, not some little subset of therapists who are the good ones, like most therapists will. We want to do both. Like you're not coming to therapy individually if there's nothing you can do individually about it. Otherwise you would only have group therapy, or you would only do politics and activism if that's the only thing that would actually help people. And yet a good therapist will help someone understand their issues in a larger context, which might involve bigger systems and whatnot, under which, you know, they are under the influence of those systems at various levels, whether they be national, local, familial, etc. Right. So I do think that a regular therapist does have a nice way of sort of including both of those when you get into sort of cultural punditry and especially sort of like content creators and stuff like that. Well, the safeguards, you know, of course they, they roll away pretty easily.

B (9:58)

I think that that's right. I also think in the therapeutic context, one of the things that's clearly necessary in a lot of cases is the suspension of moral judgment in order for people to have the freedom to look honestly at themselves and understand themselves more fully. Which is a, I think a temporary suspension that should actually kind of restore a person's sense of agency so that they can have a sense of moral responsibility for their own choices. But getting to that sense of responsibility in a funny way kind of intuitively requires you to not be so anxious about your moral responsibility for a while, just so you can look at it kind of dispassionately, look at your life somewhat dispassionately.

A (10:39)

Yeah, I think that's right. The client is encouraged to sort of, especially if they are perfectionistic or if they are self judging, if they are self critical, which is so common, especially around anxiety and depression. You know, like let's, let's, let's increase our self compassion, let's take a pause on all that shitting all over yourself that you're doing. And as a therapist, I am withholding kind of all moral judgment at the beginning, certainly whatever I might assume about somebody coming into the relationship. But also as you say, ultimately it is about that person, my client, lining up better with their own values and, and I would say in my own case, conceptualization of what's going on with each client and where I am hoping to help them get to. There is an implicit morality in that as well. I am hoping for a more flourishing life, which does include adherence to their own values and sometimes might be differing with my values, but generally not like, on the main stuff, like, I haven't had very many experiences with clients where maybe any experiences where when they really get down to their personal values, they go, it's my value to not be connected to any of my family members. You know, like. Like, things like that. People don't really have those values, not very often. Most people value some sort of connectedness and ability to keep relationships going through time and, you know, all these kinds of things. Like, most people's true values are not to be assholes, islands unto themselves and stuff like that. So most of my work with clients, even if they engage in decisions or patterns of behavior that I wouldn't and that I think are, I don't know, maybe not ideal. There's rarely a real value morality clash there in the therapy room. But I want to move on from therapy because I talk about that all the time. And we're talking about. Let's talk about God a little bit. So one of these recurring strands in your theology of culture work is, like you mentioned Karl Barth, who's known for sort of trying to bring God back to the center of sort of theology, New Testament hermeneutics and study and all that stuff. And you talk about, like, God is God, like, only God is God. Our culture, our personal identities, our politics, our technology. I like how you write about technology so much. These are all subordinate to, like, whoever or whatever created the universe. And, like, why do you think it's hard to keep that distinction in mind? Is maybe a good place to start this conversation.

B (13:18)

Yes, I think the way to start it would be to say we often don't know what we mean when we say the word God. And when we begin to try to fill it in, it becomes very quickly apparent that what we are describing is not really God.

A (13:37)

Can you give us an example of that?

B (13:38)

Yeah, I mean, I'll be. I'll give a very flippant example, but I think it's worth. It's worth using anyway, which is, God is not embodied. Right. God is. God is not a thing. God's not a thing among things. So even if we say God exists, and this is, I think, a pretty standard line of argument in theology, traditionally, we would say God does not exist in the way that you and I exist. God does not exist in the way that a table exists or in the way that an idea exists. It turns out even when we apply the word exists to God, we should be cautious to not import into that word the things that really don't apply to God. Traditionally in theology, that's the doctrine of analogy, that everything we say about God is in some way, it's at a remove from what we mean when we say it about things that are not God. So I think by definition, as animals that have a sensory bias, we'd like to imagine God looking a certain way, living in heaven somewhere. And increasingly, and this is, I think, a thing that's more true of evangelical piety. God is an object of personal love can easily turn into God as an object onto which I can project my desires, my fears. And we end up confining God to a kind of religious use box Right. So like, I've got my professional life, I've got my relationships, and God might be a source of morality, perhaps, or a source of comfort in my fears of the unknown, fear of death. But for the most part, it's very easy for us to segment God away from whole swaths of life when in actuality, insofar as God is ultimate. Again, to use that theology, culture, language that can be Tully Everything else is related to it. So traditionally in theology, and this has not always been my shtick, we typically define God negatively by what God is not. So we're kind of in a really important way living with the mystery of not knowing what God is positively. But we know that God is not changing. God is not subject to the same things that we're subject to. And in that important way, God is not conditioned. And all of our lives are. And everything about us, everything around us is radically conditioned and God is not. God is actually the ultimate condition of everything else. And so we might invert it and say something like this. What would be the meaning of human life if there wasn't God? I would suggest it would be the burden of coming up with meaning on your own. We would be in a kind of Camus situation, choosing not to die perhaps out of a. A choice to enjoy pushing the boulder up the hill over and over again. That God exists, to me is the final condition that guarantees that everything has meaning, everything has ultimate goodness, everything has ultimate purpose.

A (16:51)

We literally have the same view in that. Like that's exactly how I say it and have been for a couple years now. It's very cool to hear you put it that way. And this is coming as a surprise. Like, I didn't. I'm not lying, I'm not pretending I didn't read this or something. For me, the way I've been saying it, it's very similar. Language is like theism is the idea that everything that happens has actual meaning, not only the Meaning that creature, creatures create within our own minds. We do do that. We do create meaning. Like that's undeniable. It is a basic tenet of psychology as a discipline and theory and practice and all that stuff. We. We create meaning. Absolutely. And it's fascinating to sort of think deeply about how we do that and to sort of diagram it out. But theism would mean that also in the mind of God or something akin to that phrase, there is additional meaning. There's also like hope for something better in the future, but even that's not. That's not necessarily guaranteed. And then atheism or no God is. Is the meaning is solely whatever meaning creatures make, that there is not some additional sense in which anything all caps matters. So I think we're saying basically an identical. Making an identical distinction there between sort of God and no God views of the world.

B (18:22)

Yeah, that's right. And I would add just one thing, which is that an important facet of theism is that the world is not God. And I think that to go back to the kind of where we started, which is that creatures are good and sinful, I think one of the ways to describe that is to say we are not God and to be sinful is to experience that fact as a problem.

A (18:44)

Now, when you say the world is not God, what I take you to be doing in philosophical terms is saying, I am not a pantheist. So this is a view in some Eastern traditions especially, but maybe in some other kind of more esoteric Westerners that like just when we say God, what we really mean, if we're being accurate, is all the whole universe, everything that exists that just is God. And you're saying no, you're rejecting pantheism, Correct?

B (19:18)

I am rejecting pantheism. I think I'm also making an existential point, which is that the meaning of our lives comes ultimately from without, not from within. Coca Cola for the big, for the small, the short and the tall. Peacemakers, risk takers for the optimists, pessimists for long distance love for introverts and extroverts, the thinkers and the doers for old friends and new Coca Cola for everyone. Pick up some Coca Cola at a.

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Liberty Liberty Liberty Savings Fairy underwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates Excludes Massachusetts. Yeah, so here's where I wonder if this is my own just kind of psychological preferences or kind of preferred lenses or whatever or natural inclinations rub up against yours and I'm curious if they do. So you talk about how in one of your pieces, correct whatever I'm getting wrong here from memory that a liberal Protestantism that is insufficient to the task as you see it. You know, like Tillich at his worst, maybe to go back to your intro could collapse everything, collapse all religion and theology and talk about God to talk about the human experience that that is just what it is. And I don't think that's true because in a basic sense I am a realist about both truth and morality. I believe there is like a fact of the matter truth wise about any propositional question we could ask doesn't mean we know it doesn't mean we know we have the answer. Doesn't mean that we know that we know it. You know, like so it doesn't mean that we have properly earned confidence or certainty about it, but that there is a reality. It's not like it's not like that reality doesn't exist and morally same there is in any case like there is a true answer to most moral questions or maybe all moral questions. Again, that doesn't mean that it's easy for us to determine what that is. But I don't think that it's like you dig all the way down and there's nothing there. However, again maybe just my predilection Whatever the way I'm wired, it all filters through the human experience, and it all filters through human psychology and the way that we use language and make meaning and relate to each other. And there's no scripture in any tradition that has been written without passing through that filter of both individual and corporate sort of human identity and experience. Where am I in danger as someone who's kind of tuned that way, in your opinion, where am I in danger of going too far with that lens or giving it sort of too much power? Too much explanatory power, something like that?

B (23:54)

I don't think there is really a danger. At the risk of sounding too permissive, I think all that's true. I would say we could perhaps use those correct observations as license to excuse ourselves from the difficult task of striving for what is unattainable. I agree. Ultimate truth does exist and is not ultimately knowable. There is a moral good that is real, that is probably not known to us in most situations in a definitive, Cartesianly certain sort of way. And yet that we can't know doesn't mean we don't strive. So, I mean, I think maybe a flippant example again, would be something like in the Trump era. Early on in the Trump era, journalists kind of came out and said, like, hey, look, objectivity is not really a thing. Journalism better become activist at this point. We've got to now save democracy from its populist. Populist dangers. And there's a fallacy there. Perfect objectivity isn't possible. But that perfect objectivity isn't possible does not entail thereby that you simply give in to all of your power interests or just say, well, then my perspective is all that matters. And I'm not answerable to the attempt at objectivity. I mean, I think that that's the reality of life. And so I do think, yes, like, there's no such thing as meaning or morality that doesn't get filtered through culture, through personal history, through psychology, through basic biological facts. As organisms, there's a whole host of our history. And yet I think the minute that we reduce ultimate meaning, ultimate morality, the truth of existence, down to just like an expression of all of these things that are passing away, all these temporal things. Yeah, we've given up at that point. And that kind of captures, I think, again, like, what a proper theology of culture is. It's a way of saying we don't get to talk about the ultimate outside of all these preliminary condition, penultimate things, but these preliminary, penultimate, temporary penultimate things, they require us to Deal with the ultimate that is always just out of reach.

A (26:22)

I'm thinking that thinking of God as God and creature as creature, and the different way. I like how you said you try and take very seriously the sort of left, right, continuum. And I do, too. I want to understand how it works on either side as well as anything in the middle. Like, that's a part of my kind of insatiable curiosity probably, is what my wife would say and everybody who works with me that, like, I really. I want to know how it works. And I think that you're putting something in mind that I want to get your thoughts on. So this idea, God is God, we're not God. Everything that we might be sort of. That might be passing away or. Yeah, like, sort of impermanent, like, you're talking about these penultimate, not quite ultimate things. I think that the left and the right both acknowledge that and then sort of go about taking it seriously in different ways. So I want to see if you think that I'm sort of placing this correctly. So on the right, I think that a naturally conservative person who finds themselves comfortable, like, let's just say in a conservative Christian setting, be Catholicism or Protestantism, for our purposes, or fuck it, Eastern Orthodoxy. I'm really feeling wild today. They would go, okay, yeah, so God is God, and we're creatures and all that. So when God really showed up with Moses, and when God really showed up in Jesus of Nazareth as the Christ, like things were figured out back then or through the centuries or whatever that we really gotta hold, those are not as negotiable as we might want to think. Because that would mean we're focusing too much on the penumbra, the penultimate, the stuff that's not ultimate. Right. And that's a very Bardian kind of a view. And then I think on the left, and I would associate this with Tillich and Schleiermacher, and certainly my own view is like, okay, but let's zoom out a little bit. Cause now we know that the universe is 14 billion years old and that we are one planet in one corner of one galaxy in a universe with billions of galaxies that each in themselves have billions of stars. The numerical and timescale stuff ought to have us rethinking ultimate and penultimate things both. And so to say, yeah, okay, we have this scripture, we have these stories, we have these traditions. But even just on Earth, on just this planet, we've got six other roughly competing stories, and then a hundred smaller ones. I'm talking about other religions and wisdom traditions. Of course, we've got other things that other humans, in all their particularity, have said about ultimate things over time. And that's also a way of trying to honor the ultimate and not overly honor the penultimate or the particular. But it leads to in 2025, in real time, or in 1975 or in 1575, to different sort of realities on the ground, but maybe in a way where they're both sort of trying to take the same problem seriously. And then that raises a host of other questions. But I want to just get your take on sort of that table setting.

B (29:44)

Yeah, it's a table setting I very much appreciate and relate to. And what I would say is this. The temptation mentally is always to resort to zero sum thinking. And the truth of the matter is rather incomprehensible. I'm in the tradition of BART historically, and my major influences have been very formed by Barth. And yet I think that Barth would also actually be a good person to point to here. As somebody who wants to acknowledge things like the staggering, incomprehensible fact of deep time and the dignity of human religion across cultures and the insights that you get from many of these faith traditions. I would suggest that the Christian faith really stands or falls with belief in the resurrection of Jesus. And I think this is actually an important detail here. Christianity is not a philosophy of life. It's not a philosophy of the universe. It originates as an allegation that something occurred if Jesus rose from the dead. And I think, by the way, as a good liberal Protestant, you can mean a lot of different things by rose from the dead.

A (30:59)

Thank you. Thanks for saying what I felt compelled to say as a parenthetical. Yeah.

B (31:06)

And like, look, I would say on the spectrum of theology, I would be, I perhaps called a kind of literalist about the resurrection. Although it depends on who you ask, I suppose. Among Episcopalians, I'm a literalist. Maybe among evangelicals, I'm not so much.

A (31:21)

Yeah.

B (31:21)

But I think Jesus is alive. And I could say that without my fingers crossed. And I believe that that claim lives alongside, you know, the universe being 14 billion years old or whatever, 13 and a half billion years old and being incomprehensibly large. And human religion predating Christianity and Judaism by many, many years, by many, many, you know, by millennia, and exhibiting many of the same traits, many of the same habits. And I think that ultimately, yes, the burden of biblical faith is the burden of not becoming a philosophy in a funny way. Because I think that once it becomes a philosophy, that's when it becomes a competitor to all these other claims.

A (32:13)

I guess I'm just not sure how that is accomplished. Like, so take a very pared down version or explication, I think, of what you're saying. When we look at Jesus, we see God. Okay, something like that. Just a very simple phrase. Well, as soon as I start saying something about that, oh, here's the thing I see when I look at Jesus, or let's go even more confessional. Here's the things that the early church saw when they looked at Jesus that were codified in the creeds and made it into early scripture. The letters of Paul and the Gospel accounts. So here's what those people saw when they looked at Jesus and how they understood that to be God. I've already introduced a bunch of variables here and I, and I just don't. I'm not sure how you. And once you've introduced variables, that means you can contend with it. You can massage, agree, disagree, separate out different claims from other claims. You know, the non. The sort of multivocality of Scripture, the fact that different authors of different parts of the Bible seem to. I think if you're being honest with yourself, disagree with each other and push back. Obviously anybody who knows a finger's width about Judaism knows that that sort of wrestling and pushing back and whatever has been codified into the faith itself and Christianity comes out of Judaism. So, like, I don't, I just don't. Like, I've heard people talk that way before, Matt, but I don't know how to square it. To me, like, of course it is. These are. They end up as claims that can be debated, considered. You could think about evidence or not. They're propositions. All propositions can be kicked around.

B (34:08)

I think that that's right. Yeah. Don't misunderstand me. I'm not saying it all kind of happily coexists. I mean, I'm not saying that we don't make mutually exclusive claims in relation to other things. I think that we certainly do. There's no, there's no doubt about that. But I don't think being a Christian commits one to a view of reality that de facto is excluding other points of view. I guess that's what I'm trying to get at is that I think it's. It's funny you bring this up because not to like, jump the gun, I literally just finished writing an essay that's yet to be published about this exact issue. So you're the first to hear about this.

A (34:48)

Great.

B (34:49)

I tentatively titled the essay does Christianity invite us into a bigger or smaller world. And what I was grappling with in the essay is this. I took very literally the concept of a worldview, which is, I think, a much abused concept. And I said, well, okay, thanks a lot, Francis Schaeffer. Yeah, in one very. It's really funny. In one very basic sense, a view of the world is measured by how much it can take in. It's a breadth. The size of your world is the measure of your worldview. Now, obviously, that needs to be nuanced in terms of depth and complexity and detail. But just from the metaphor of view, the more you see, the better your worldview. And if your worldview inhibits what you can see, it's not a very good worldview. And so what I was grappling with was, does the Christian faith commit a person to not seeing certain things? And what I was. I love that I used the examples of failed marriage and the Christian commitment to the permanence of marriage. And I used in another instance in the essay, the example of immigration and its effects on societies, mass immigration. So in the case of marriage, I said, look, a person in a failing marriage, a person who gets to a point where they are saying to themselves, I can't take another day of this on the outside, they might not qualify, theologically speaking, for the ecclesiastically acceptable reasons for a marriage to end, and those of us on the outside are not on the inside of that marriage, may thereby kind of judge a decision to end it as not acceptable morally. And yet for, say, a clergy person to say to a person in a marriage that feels compelled to get out of their marriage, no, no, no, stay. It'll work out. This is sanctifying. This is, you know, this is good for you. They might change any. Any of those number of things. Ultimately, what that person ends up, what the clergy person ends up doing inadvertently, I think, is asking this person to trust the Christian worldview and not trust what they see with their own eyes and thereby inviting them into a smaller world. And that, actually, I think, entails a crisis of faith. Because if Christianity means inviting, being invited into a smaller world where I'm not allowed to see certain things, like I'm not allowed to see that marriages fail, or I'm not allowed to see. So the other example was, was mass immigration. And I said, like, look, the overwhelming biblical witness is hospitality to the stranger. It's like one of the core categories of moral obligation in Scripture. And yet no one with a brain can look at the world and say that mass migration hasn't had enormously negative effects, especially on recipient populations. And the fact is, Jesus seems to like, tolerate like zero moral wiggle room when it comes to moral mandates about poverty, about wealth, about hospitality. And so the fact is, rightly so. Christian leaders are for the most part advocating for hospitality to migrants. And yet one has to be honest and live in the actual world where the evidence of your eyes tells you, hey, this doesn't always work out. And I don't hear a lot of Christian leaders saying, for example, look, Jesus is calling you to welcome the stranger. This is a cross you're going to bear, and it's a cross you're going to be crucified on, and it's a cross your children are going to be crucified on. It's going to cost you dearly. But that's the cost of following Jesus. They're not saying that. What they are saying instead is welcome the stranger. And if you oppose that, it's actually because you're a racist. It's not because it actually has any cost to you. That's nonsense. We live in a world of abundance, not scarcity. Stop pretending. So there's a lot of denialism. And again, it's that denialism that reveals that it's an invitation to a smaller world. And what's going on there is that the ethic is being defended by means of excluding evidence. And I think that what has to be, you are.

A (39:11)

You've just, you've plugged your IV straight into my heart. I just keep going. Just keep it. Please continue.

B (39:18)

Well, so in any event, what I, what I argue in this essay, which, like I, as I was writing it, I was like, I am, I'm grappling with a problem that I don't know if I'm qualified to solve. And I turn to the cross because I'm a Christian. And I.

A (39:34)

You should also turn to the experience of theologians who came before you, who thought, eh, fuck it, I'm gonna answer it anyway.

B (39:43)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. To hear the rest of this conversation, you can go to patreon.com danko thanks for listening, Sam.