Read the Text, What Does it Say?
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Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson here with Greg Uttinger and Rachel Voytek, and we are returning from a somewhat lengthy hiatus. We have added new members to our families, we have celebrated holidays, and we are very, very tired, but we are back. Tell me I’m wrong, Rachel. I’m tired. Are you tired?
My son Titus was born at the beginning of October, so he just turned three months. It was very challenging to start with. Newborn babies are extremely hard, but there’s a lot of fun especially as he gets a little bit older now and is a lot more interactive and starts talking – in the sense of babies talking. I really think he says hello, but of course that’s probably my ‘mom sense.’
I say the same thing. I think I heard hello first from Ransom, who is my newborn son, who was born not in the beginning of November like he was supposed to, but the middle of November. Are you getting some good smiles from Titus?
Oh yes, also where he’ll smile because he’s trying to get your attention. He’s a lot of fun most of the time now, where you start talking to him or playing with him and he just smiles, smiles, smiles, and starts talking back at you. He’s very active and strong in terms of movement, although he has a ginormous head so he’s still learning how to lift it, but other than that he’s very strong.
We are starting a new story, as it were, and yet the old story. It’s the same thing. The Bible has an Old and New Testament and yet it’s one story, so what are we doing? We have to start doing something new because apparently nobody has done the thing that we’re trying to do correctly. This is a very roundabout way of telling you what we’re about to do.
What’s the problem with history books? Let’s start there. Let’s start with the problem.
He didn’t have very much history to cover, to be fair. There’s more of it these days, as Aunt Bea from The Andy Griffith Show would say.
This is so, and yet the principle holds. To get a sense, we need to step into America in the middle 1800s when most people would have called America a Christian nation, when most people went to church, and when these new-fangled Christian schools had been created to Christianize the incoming immigrants and save them from their Roman Catholicism and their other pagan ways, and instill in them patriotic virtues necessary to the Republic.
The problem was that the first amendment guaranteed either equal time for all variations on monotheism, because at that point that was the only thing that was considered real religion, or a vague enough monotheism that everyone felt comfortable.
Now Presbyterians and Baptists and Lutherans and Mennonites and lots of other folk could to a certain extent feel pretty comfortable together. They weren’t Roman Catholic. They believed in the doctrines of the trinity, the infallibility of scripture, creation and so on. They looked over the fence at the Roman Catholics and weren’t so sure what they were. I mean they worked for the antichrist and all, because at that point the Pope was still the antichrist. That was going to change quickly, particularly once Napoleon came along.
Yes. The one thing that all the reformers were agreed on, and the Anabaptists, was that the Pope was the antichrist. It got written into the Westminster Confession of Faith and into the introductory epistle to the King James Bible, where he’s called the man of sin without qualification, which sounds so weird to this generation.
There was a problem with John F. Kennedy getting elected. He was Catholic. People thought we couldn’t elect a Catholic because all of that. That was still baggage, and people were a little surprised when he won without much difficulty. They suddenly realized, “Boy, we don’t really care about denominational issues anymore,” as if it were a small thing to have this battle between Protestantism and Roman Catholicism.
We had the Unitarians, who did not believe that Jesus was God, and deists who were Unitarians that didn’t go to church. They didn’t believe in the trinity or special revelation or miracles or special providence or any of that stuff, but considered themselves godly and religious people, and these new public schools were for their kids too. So if we’re going to send all these kids to school where they’re going to be taught, the curriculum needs to be theistic but religiously neutral. Right.
From Donehoes magazine, volume 23, 1890, “Our schools are established for the education of all our children. Any language therefore by our schoolteachers justly offensive to any class of our citizens, whether rich or poor, Catholic, Protestant, or Jew, white or colored, cannot be too severely censored. Boston is too enlightened, too just.” This was from Boston. Of course it is, the heart of Unitarianism.
You get the thing. This is a public argument for why textbooks cannot favor any religious point of view, and yet the public schools were founded to teach virtue and to acknowledge the Bible as something special. The Unitarians would agree it was God’s word, they would just redefine that. The deists probably wouldn’t even give you that much. The deists were not as a big an issue as Unitarians were.
So you’re left with trying to produce curriculum in history, literature, and in reading more generally for younger kids, that teaches these children those virtues that we think are essential to a free republic, things like hard work, patriotism, sobriety as opposed to drunkenness, honesty. So we get a lot of textbooks that have lots of stories with good morals, but they’re not grounded in anything. These are just things we all agree on and we can all ground them in our particular creed. It’s the same morality because it’s sort of the same God, kind of. “We’re not going to talk about that, that’s divisive.” So that’s what we end up with.
I collect old textbooks when I can. They’re hard to find from the 1800s and earlier, but I found a couple a long time ago. One was written by a Presbyterian and one by a Roman Catholic. The interesting thing is that as far as historical detail they’re very good. They way outshoot anything that’s in the public school today or any Christian school I’ve ever seen. The amount of detail is just enormous, but then they come to Jesus. “What will you do with Jesus? What think ye of Christ?”
Here are two books. The first one is by a Presbyterian, talking about the time of Christ’s birth.
“The most interesting event of this period was the birth of our Savior, which is supposed to have taken 4 B.C., that is four years previous to the day commonly assigned for the Christian era. The crucifixion of our Savior took place in Judea in the 18th year of this reign AD 33” – this reign being that of Tiberius. That’s it.
“Most interesting…” – is that in the midwestern sense? What does that mean?
I don’t know but the next one is better, and this is Roman Catholic. They’re a little less ashamed of their faith.
“But the most glorious event which took place during the reign of Augustus was the birth of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, which happened according to the best authorities in the 26th year of his reign and four years before the period commonly assigned to the Christian era. In the 18th year of this emperor’s reign, our Lord Jesus Christ suffered death upon the cross.”
There are I believe some references to the interaction of the early church with Rome later on, well after AD 70, but that’s it. Now, this was in a time when again most people claimed to be Christians and went to church, but you don’t want to offend anybody and if you say something like, “And this Jesus was God incarnate,” we lose the Unitarians. Can’t do that. Maybe there’s something inherently wrong with the public school system, hmm.
This one I picked up not as an old book but as a reprint of an older book. It’s from someplace called Mile High Publishing or something in Denver. It was a Christian publisher that republished it because an older book will be less favorable to secular humanism and evolution. The version they published says this about the coming of Jesus into the world.
“The Temple of Janus, which was shut only in profound peace, was closed, and at this period the Desire of Nations, the Prince of Peace was born. The whole civilized world being now included in one vast empire, the fullness of time had arrived when the Savior of mankind made his advent upon the earth. His birth is supposed to have occurred four years before the Common Era. It was under the administration of Tiberius that our Lord Jesus Christ was crucified in Judea.”
That was the ’43 edition. Several years later the authoress amended her text and added this. She speaks of Jesus as “the Son of God and man.” She associates him with “a new and heavenly kingdom.” She actually describes the trial under Pilate and then writes – “But on the third day HE AROSE FROM THE DEAD,” all caps.
She also speaks of the Holy Ghost, the promise of the Father sent down. She calls Jesus “the Word of Life manifest in the flesh,” underscores his resurrection and the miracles of the apostles, and in footnotes sends readers to Adam Clark’s commentary. Adam Clark was an evangelical Methodist. I have his commentaries and use them from time to time. They’re pretty good and he’s certainly a full-blown Trinitarian evangelical writer. So somewhere along the line something pricked her conscience and she changed some important things. However, that’s still it.
Oh, it’s better but the question is, “So what do you do on Monday?” or to put it differently, “So Jesus is in heaven. Now what?”
When Jesus ascended into heaven, did he pass out of this existence into something totally unrelated to our world? Did he come at the end of Bible times, Bible people, Bible lands, and carry that entire environment into heaven where he is now continually living with Bible people in Bible times and Bible eternities, where our clock keeps ticking to a secular note that has nothing really to do with him, except that he left behind a church to win people to faith in him and to believe in his gospel? Is that what we’re left with? And do secular textbooks even mention that much? These become real questions.
When we get to the 20th century things change because in the 20th century we’ve passed through the Hegelian revolution of the ‘60s and now there are no more absolutes and everybody’s opinion is as good as everybody else’s. Textbook writers no longer feel threatened by orthodox Christianity because who believes that anymore? So they’re not afraid to say, “Oh, this is what these people believed.”
For instance, in one text that I use in my Christian school, though it’s a secular text, it says,
“Jesus spoke of himself as the Son of my Father in heaven, and his followers believed that he was the Son of God, the Messiah described by some of the Old Testament prophets. Jesus believed that his mission was to help all mankind attain the Kingdom of God through his life and teachings. Furthermore, he believed that men could gain salvation not only through his life and teachings, but also through his death, that God would forgive men’s sins if Jesus gave us his life for mankind. According to the gospels, Jesus arose from the tomb and remained on earth for 40 more days. His resurrection became a central part of the message to his disciples, who as missionaries set out to convert all people to his teachings.”
For what it is. They’re trying to be nice. They’re trying to be fair. They’re obviously not Christians and so they don’t get it quite right, but at least they say, “This is what Christians believe,” and they take it through the resurrection, the ascension, and the spread of the gospel. That was a high school text.
“According to the gospel, Jesus’ greatest miracle was his resurrection, his return to life three days after he died on the cross. The early Christians not only accepted Christ’s ethical precepts but worshiped Christ himself as the divine incarnation of the Omnipotent God. The doctrine of the Trinity gave Christianity the unique advantage of a single infinite philosophically respectable God who could be worshiped and adored in the person of the charismatic, loveable, and tragic Jesus. The Christian deity was both transcendent and concrete.”
Try finding that in a Christian text. They don’t believe it, but they understand that that’s what Christians either say or ought to be saying, given what they say they believe. Now, they do the same thing for Buddhism and Islam and everything else. They try to see it from their perspective and explain it on their terms.
“The gospels concentrate on the birth of Jesus, the brief years of his ministry, his death and resurrection. Faithful converts would later accept him as the Christ or Messiah, the true God in human form incarnate. They would believe that his sacrifice on the cross atoned for the sins of humanity, and his resurrection promised life eternal to all who loved and followed him.”
I believe it’s the same book, and I threw this in at the beginning of this article, that says this,
“The nature of the historical Jesus then is shrouded in doubt. Was he Son of God? Son of Man? Inspired prophet? Religious reformer? Humanitarian idealist? Or as his Jewish critics insisted, a blasphemer and an imposter? A final answer acceptable to all cannot be drawn from the available sources.”
We came to the point in the ‘60s and ‘70s or early ‘80s where you could write a history book and you could talk about what Jesus claimed and what his disciples claimed for him and what the early church said, and you could be more or less honest and not bat an eye, and then move on to, “…and Mohammed said… and Buddhist said…and Confucius said…and native Americans said…” and you just keep going because none of it is real and none of it matters. We all have our own truths, right?
Back then, though, people were still gentlemen about it. They still wanted to not offend the mass-market textbook industry and so they didn’t attack Christianity just because they hated it. They just wanted to pretend that they were neutral and polite and gentlemen and played by the game.
That brings us to some Christian texts. This is from a 6th grade book, which is the textbook that I used when I was in 6th grade and we use it at our school. Overall it’s a really good textbook, but when it comes to Jesus – now this is a Christian textbook written for Christian schools in the Dutch Calvinist tradition – you would think that this is where they’d take the gloves off and just tell it all, because what have they got to lose honestly? I’m sure I’ll meet the author in heaven someday and I’m going to say, “What were you thinking, because this doesn’t make sense to me.”
“At this time God sent his son to be born of the virgin Mary. This was the best time in history for Jesus to come and save his people, to send his apostles out into the world with the gospel of salvation. For slaves and the poor, as well as for the rich, Christ alone had the true comfort. Christ had taught them to be meek and humble and to endure suffering for a while, and for those who believed there would be a better life hereafter.”
Notice first of all the Christian-ese – save, salvation, gospel, better life hereafter.
It reminds me a lot of some of the modern progressive teachings that I’ve been looking into recently, because they focus so much on the oppressed and bettering their life and better outcomes, and we can’t possibly talk about illegal aliens or any of these things. We have to supposedly love our neighbor as ourself, meaning love everybody and have no sense of what that really means. That’s what this sounds like. It’s very here-centered and physical comforts and things like that.
When I was growing up, the hereafter was another word for being dead. Hereafter was the after life, heaven principally, but all it says is it’s a better life. “Why is it better? Because we’ll be with Jesus? We’ll be free from sin? We’ll be reigning with him?”
“It’s just better than the suffering we have down here.” That’s all it communicates. Now, this guy is a conservative Dutch Calvinist as far as I know.
Can you tell me if this is a unique pet peeve? I know it’s not unique to me personally, but is it a reasonable pet peeve to be annoyed by, “This was the best time in history for Christ to come,” like God surveyed all the possibilities and said, “Eh, I can work with this part.”
Yeah, the time that God ordained and orchestrated all of history to come to – it’s kind of like, “Well, I’m looking for a good hole to shoot through. There we go – oh, got it almost.”
I think it points to the underlying frustrations that we’re having with these, that none of them acknowledge God as the sovereign true orchestrator of every detail of history, which is I think a lot of what we’re getting at. It wasn’t just that it was just a great time. God said, “These will be the exact conditions, and they will be the right and perfect conditions for what I want because I’m making them.”
And an infinite number of strands came together in that moment when Jesus was born. We can’t even begin to calculate backwards and figure it out. We list a few things – the Pax Romana and the roads and things like that…
Yes. There were things beyond our imagination that God brought together. They didn’t just come together. God brought them together at that point to make it the perfect time, the only time that His son would come, and that’s all cut out here.
This next book – this is in the Preface. This book is written by Christians and published by a Christian publishing house, but it’s designed to be used in public schools as well as Christian schools. At that point we could just call it a day and go home, but I will read to you what they say. “A public school textbook should be objective…” VanTil is turning over in his grave here.
“…recognizing that parents and pupils represent a wide variety of philosophical, political, and religious beliefs. Every attempt has been made to present a balanced and objective perspective on world history. The Judeo-Christian background is presented objectively and thus not offensive to those of other faiths.” Want to bet?
You haven’t presented it right if you aren’t offending people of other faiths.
Yes! Again, we could just stop there, but when they do get to Jesus – and again they’ve told us they’re writing in an objective, neutral, non-committal fashion, and here’s the thing. Not only will it not offend Buddhists and Muslims, it’s not going to offend Christians. Let’s see if they pulled that one off.
It’s like Saltine crackers. Of course they’re not going to offend anybody. They don’t taste like anything.
“The mother’s name was Mary, and the Bible record states that she was still a virgin at the time of the birth of Jesus, so the birth of Jesus was a miraculous sign that the promised Savior had come into the world.” See, they said that actually happened. They cheated there.
Now we’re going back to what the Bible says. “The Bible states that Jesus was the son of God and that he came to earth to save his people from their sins.” It talks about the crucifixion and then says, “Then shocking news rocks Jerusalem. The body of Jesus buried three days before was gone from the tomb. It is this one event that makes Jesus different from other religious leaders and great teachers.”
“He was the only one ever resurrected from the dead. More than 500 people saw and talked to him after his resurrection. Christianity is based on the death and resurrection of its founder rather than on his teachings.”
I know what they’re trying to say, but I don’t think they quite said it. Paul would say, “He rose again according to the scriptures,” not “He rose again, and let’s not worry about what the scriptures say about it.”
This is from a different text, a Christian university that I believe has revised this, but a year or two ago this was what their world studies book said. “After centuries of predicting the coming of the great Savior, God raised up the Man…”
“…who would prove to be the most important human who had ever lived, Jesus of Nazareth. Mary, however, was not married, though she was engaged, so she did not know how she could have a child. Gabriel said that God would cause her to conceive. For this reason, the child would not have a human father. He would be the son of God.”
Because he is God incarnate? Or because he’s called that by virtue of his miraculous birth? Those are two very different ways of looking at that passage. Speaking of the angels,
“They told the shepherds that Jesus was a Savior, Christ the Lord. By Lord they meant that Jesus would fulfill the Davidic covenant. He would rule as David’s greatest son.” That’s not primarily what that meant. “By Christ, the angels meant that Jesus was the Messiah. Christ is the Greek word for Anointed One. By Savior they meant that he would save his people from their sad condition.”
Something that I was thinking as you were reading through those, which is something I have said a lot in my history classes, is the fact that the details are not just what we would call objective, but that it’s our worldview that gives them significance, so we choose what we think is important and that’s how we focus whatever we study. It’s not just that everybody memorizes the same facts, but rather how we view the way the world works. In our worldview we will then talk about what we think is important.
So when texts pick these details, either they’re trying to pick out what they think we think are the most important details, or from the Christians what sticks with them maybe from what they’ve heard at church or from other people, “These are the things I’ve most heard people say about Jesus coming,” which shows how little they seem to know about the gospels as actual history.
I’m going to say something radical to all you would-be history teachers out there. You should not be standing in front of a classroom teaching the history of anything – United States, the world, Western Civ, the church – until you have had a thorough grounding in systematic theology, including a survey of the creeds and confessions of the church, because until you have some standard by which to do that evaluation, what’s important here? Why is it important? What are we following? Who are the good guys? Who are the bad guys? Arias thought that Jesus was great. He wasn’t one of the good guys.
And the way that our histories have been rewritten in this last generation in schools, where they’re turning everybody on their head and making the previous heroes into villains and creating all these sub-study groups – “Go find these people in history and make them the heroes of women’s studies and LGBTQ studies” – suddenly we’ve made them into the heroes of history and thrown out everybody else and found everything wrong with them that we possibly can.
When in fact there is one hero in history, and everybody else is a bad guy.
There you go. To find a biblical touchpoint to what we’ve all been saying – I alluded to the verse earlier when Paul says to the Corinthians, “I’ll declare unto you the gospel” – he says that Christ Jesus died for sins according to the scriptures, and that he was buried and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures.
That is, there are objective historical events, objective in the sense that they really happened. We know they really happened because God said so, and He’s everywhere and knows everything, and He has recorded it in scripture and His word is absolutely accurate. So in that objective sense, God himself being the objective observer, we know these are facts, but not just the facts. They are interpreted facts.
He died, according to the scriptures. That is, the Old Testament scriptures explained that he would come, that he would die, why he would die, and what his death would accomplish. And then he rose again (historical fact) on the third day (calendar time or clock time), again according to the scriptures. The Old Testament scriptures explained why he would rise.
Paul, in talking to one of the Roman governors said, “I’m not saying anything that the prophets didn’t say, how the Messiah would come and he would be the first who would rise from the dead. Christianity is not new. It’s 4,000 years old. I’m just repeating it and adding some names and details, but the substance has been there all the time.” It is historical fact, but it’s also divine interpretation.
So as we come now in our historical studies to the time of Christ, we have some hard choices to make for the podcast because we could spend forever with the time Jesus spent on earth. Remember what John said, that if everything that He did was written in books, the world itself could not contain them? I don’t think we want to spend forever right here, because that’s not our mission and calling, but we will have to spend some time here on the assumption that not everybody has mastered the creeds and confessions of the church and has had a good grounding in systematic theology and early church history, so we need that.
And to go back to where I started earlier, so Jesus ascended into heaven. At that point did Bible times end and get sucked up into heaven, and Jesus now is in perpetual Bible times consciousness? I imagine by now anybody listening has heard my repeated tirades on Bible people, Bible stories, Bible lands, Bible times. It’s basically a Gnostic approach to history, picked up by way too many Sunday School teachers and writers of Christian books for children, that just kind of assumes that there was this other worldly fabulous time where these Bible characters all dress exactly alike – they all have robes and things on their heads tied on, and they have sandals – and they all move in a semi-desert territory, and that this was the condition of these people for however long, because they never stop and tell us how long it is.
When did Sunday School teachers actually stop and say, “Now, this took 480 years,” or “This took 430 years,” or “This was 490 years from the exodus to the building of Solomon’s Temple,” or “This king reigned for 40 years and died.” I never heard that. I had maybe not the greatest Sunday School teachers. I had a few who were really good, but that’s not what we do.
Instead, to continue my traditional tirade, we get, “So Jonah was swallowed by the great fish. And David killed the giant. And Jesus raised the little girl from the dead. But the flood came and destroyed the world, and the animals came off 3-by-3. And God made the world in six days, but John the Baptist ate locusts. Peter raised this old woman from the dead because God so loved the world.” That’s Sunday School and that’s the Bible. In other words, it’s a bunch of fables, fabulous stories.
These are faithful Bible teachers who would die rather than say they never happened, and yet they talk about them like they never happened in our world, in our history, in our geography.
Nowadays we even treat fairy tales with more respect than that. We try to have portrayals of Cinderella and Rapunzel in ways that are suited to the time and place in which their stories originated, but we don’t place the Bible stories in history, in a chronology, in a timeline as faithfully as we do fairy tales.
Most children who have been taught the Bible stories very faithfully could not tell you where they come in because they’re not taught in sequence and they’re not taught how one leads into the next, and how God is building a plot toward a goal. So when we get to Jesus and the book of Acts and all that ends, it’s almost like Acts is a fade-out because Jesus puts in a few appearances and there are a few miracles, but then it fades into “real history” and Jesus is done.
My kids were pretty good in high school saying, “Well, he’s interceding for us.” That’s true and that’s good and that’s important. I was impressed that they got that without any prompting, but then we ask about, “Is he reigning?”
“And what is his kingdom?” and now we have the next question, “Is it the church?” The Westminster Confession says that the church is the kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ. There is truth in that. I’m not Presbyterian so I can get away with it.
No. If you mean the citizens of the kingdom are those who belong to the church, that’s fair enough. In my systematics syllabus that’s actually what I say, but there’s more to Christ’s rule. At Christmas-time we sing, “He rules the world with truth and grace.” He most certainly does. He also rules it by divine power and sovereignty that moves every atom, every photon, every breath of air, every gust of wind, every drop of water, every tide, every cycle of the moon, every sunbeam, every heartbeat, every cell splitting and developing. He personally rules all of that, for the good of his church because he does have a plan here.
So we can look at World War 1 and World War 2 and say, “Did God lose control?” A lot of people thought he did because their ideas of God’s sovereignty had been so crippled by their poor theology that all they could do was say, “Where is God?” not “What did you expect after Europe turned their back on God for 150 years? What did you think was going to happen?”
We shut God off in the nice-nice box, kind of like Plato – God only does good quiet puppy dog rainbow things, and Jesus is like that. He works in people’s hearts secretly, but that’s about all he’s allowed to do. If we write any kind of Christian history it becomes church history, unless you don’t have a strong view of the church, in which it becomes the history of significant believers who said and did cool things that I’ve been told about, and we enshrine people not only like Wycliffe and Luther, but people like Finney who was a heretic. You could go down the list of mainstream heretics who are put in Christian textbooks as examples of men of faith, because no one’s tried their doctrine against the confessed doctrines of the church.
We think, “Oh, we’re studying Christian history because we’re reading about the revivals of Charles Finney.” You should read about the revivals under Charles Finney, and what happened because of them and how it nearly destroyed America. But you sure shouldn’t be imitating him. You should also read his own writings and find out what he actually said about himself and what he believed and how horrible it was.
Again we need facts, but we need a standard of interpretation. So this is in part what we’re going to be doing from here on out as we go forward.
No, we’re going to keep appealing to scripture, and sometimes we’re going to get it wrong because of our own ignorance, because we don’t have enough historical facts, and sometimes we’re going to misapply scripture, but at least we’re going to try to point out that this is how it should be done, and we should have started this 1500 years ago. Once Augustine wrote City of God there should have been a City of God 2, City of God Reborn, City of God Revisited, City of God Strikes Back.
Exactly, but that one book dominated medieval culture because no one did the follow-up. It sparked men’s imagination but it didn’t grab their reason. That’s not Augustine’s fault. It was just too many pagan influences.
To come back home, we’re going to spend some time, and we haven’t talked about how many episodes, about Jesus’ own coming to earth and his ministry here, his death, resurrection, and ascension. We’ll spend a little time with the book of Acts.
We are going to hope and pray and assume that most of our listeners hear about this stuff regularly in their good gospel-preaching churches, and we’re going to feel that we don’t have to do everything, but we’ll hit some high points. But what we’re going to keep focusing on is that Jesus rules the world. He is not cut off from history. He runs history.
We still misinterpret history not only in terms of what he did 2000 years ago, but in terms of his ongoing providential rule and his spiritual rule of the gospel and the Holy Spirit to build his church and to subdue his enemies and to prepare the world for the full harvest, the saving of the world he talked about, which will culminate in his return in the resurrection.
So that’s where this is going, Lord willing, if we all live long enough to do it, and if I’m not there, ladies, I hope you will keep doing it anyhow. This may take a few years. We’ll see how it goes.
I had a history professor who was actually an elder in my church during college who used to say, “Providence is like Hebrew. You can only read it backwards.” It’s a good joke, but the fact is you can’t even read providence backwards. You don’t know what it means.
What we do is kind of like what my little Gretchen does, which is to ‘read’ books by remembering that certain words come with certain pictures and we can piece together a story. That doesn’t mean that we really understand anything close to the fullness of what God is doing, even though we can point to a couple of things and say, “Ha! Pax Romana, that was important and maybe here are some reasons why.”
So bear with us. We hope you’ll enjoy the ride as we are on this little adventure doing the best we can.
We are so happy to be back with you. Thank you so much for your patience with us, Listeners. Shall we close out with some recommendations?
I have a super relevant one. It’s Tom Holland’s book Dominion. I was reading it over the break. I very much over-estimated how much I would get done with a newborn. You’d think I would have learned, but no, so I’m about halfway through this book and it’s been really fun.
Tom Holland, at least when he wrote it, was not a Christian. In the introduction he talks about how he was really turned off from church and the faith because his Sunday School teacher didn’t care where dinosaurs fit in the timeline. He was like, “If that doesn’t matter, what’s this all about?” That strikes me to the heart because I have never in my life cared about dinosaurs and I would be that teacher.
Yes, that’s my problem, I guess, but I would have given the same answer that his Sunday School teacher did. “That’s not really the focus of the story here,” or something like that, but it meant a lot to him as a little boy, so he never felt like Christians were taking history seriously.
If only, but then maybe we wouldn’t have this marvelous book Dominion, in which he as a non-Christian says, “Look, Jesus took over the world, and do you know what paganism was really like? Do you know what anything was really like before Jesus came?” It’s an incredible book. I’m really enjoying it.
One of the things that I have appreciated is that he doesn’t have a dog in the Protestant vs Catholic fight, so he’s going through all these stories of saints. You’ve read this already, haven’t you, Greg?
I’ve read about half of it. I got as far as Julian the apostate. You remember Julian? “Pagans, you need to take care of poor people and sick people like we do.”
He tells the story of the saints, and as Protestants it’s very easy to be like, “Well, those miracles are probably pretty embellished. We don’t have a lot of historical data on those miracles, and anyway these people are Catholic and sometimes ascetics. Their doctrine was certainly not correct.” But the things that they were said to have done were talked about because they portrayed Christian virtue, and we wouldn’t be talking about that if Christ hadn’t turned the world upside down and taken dominion over the kingdoms of this world.
It's been a fun read. Ironically for someone very interested in history and the writing of history, my memory for history is not very good. I remember people more than the sweeping stuff, and this is a sweeping book, so I’m like, “This is a really cool book. I just can’t tell you anything about it.” The people are what I remember and it’s a fun read.
Yes. Over our break my husband David and I have taken up the practice of him reading to me while I’m feeding Titus. The first book that we picked up was one that I had gotten for him called Shepherds for Sale by a woman named Megan Basham, who works for The Daily Wire. From what I can tell by reading it, she’s a godly Christian woman who knows her Bible very well, and is also a well-trained journalist.
In the book she is tracking down all the details of how different non-Christian leftist groups with lots of money have thrown that at different conferences, trainings, and such to try to rewrite the beliefs of the leaders of the evangelical church, because they realized if they’re going to get their leftist policy through, the evangelical Christians of America are their biggest problem. So they have strategically targeted different pastor groups and things like that, to try to break them down on different issues. She documents all of the money flow and also the progression of different leaders’ opinions on things and statements on things.
For me it helped make a lot of sense of what I was seeing, because we were reading it right around the time of the election, and I was seeing people espousing these positions that I would never have thought they would as fellow Christians, and so much of it aligned perfectly exactly with what she was saying, and the exact arguments she was documenting I was hearing people say or seeing people say.
I think one of the biggest eye-openers was her tracking of the shift in the abortion discussion, where suddenly you had to be all-things life if you were going to be pro-baby lives. You had to be pro illegal immigrants. You had to be pro climate. All these different things became wrapped so that, as she said, when everything is pro-life, nothing is. You have to care about everything before you’re allowed to care about anything.
She showed how a lot of that came about as Trump came into power and people didn’t want to be on his side. And since he was moving toward pro-life things and in many ways was instrumental in overturning Roe vs Wade, all these Christian leaders, who had always said “never abortion” were suddenly saying, “Well, it’s a nuanced issue. We have to think about this and we have to consider all these different arguments,” instead of, “No, it’s murder. That’s it. There’s no nuance.”
It was very interesting to understand it, and very discouraging to read it, but her last chapter is extremely encouraging as a call to trust in the gospel. So I highly recommend it, although as I say discouraging to see the people that have compromised in those areas. So that’s Shepherds for Sale: How Evangelical Leaders Traded the Truth for a Leftist Agenda by Megan Basham.
Recommendation: Shepherds for Sale: How Evangelical Leaders Traded the Truth for a Leftist AgendaI’d like to go on the record as saying I am pro-climate. I think we should have a climate. [laughing]
Whether or not we Californians should have the one we have is another issue.
The thing I’ll recommend at this point is The Book That Made Your World, but you’ve already recommended that, Rachel, a number of times.
I think you should recommend it again. It’s a fantastic book. I believe he’s working on a sequel as well, or some other book that corresponds in some way.
We just set up an honors program at our school, and for World History the honors assignment that lifts you above the common rabble is to read that book, takes notes on it, and then come up with a presentation of the heart of its message that’s suitable for 6th and 7th graders, so we’ll see what we get out of that.
The Book That Made Your World shows what we’ve been talking about, the influence of Christianity, particularly the influence of the gospel, in all kinds of areas. In the latter chapters the author goes from one thing…”And this brings us to economics! And this brings us to education! And this brings us to freedom!” and it just keeps going.
Recommendation: The Book That Made Your WorldThe delightful thing is the man is from India, so he’s not by normal standards a westerner. He is at heart because he’s embraced Western culture because he sees that its foundation, Christianity, is true, propositionally true, historically true, theologically true. It’s an outsider’s viewpoint, someone who did not grow up in Europe or America, looking and saying, “Look at the stuff you’ve got, and it’s a gift from God and you’re screwing it up and throwing it away. Stop!” It’s written in a very popular level and is easy to follow. I have highschoolers reading it and so far they don’t seem to have any trouble with it.
The other thing I’ll tack on just in passing, what we read from in school today was Saint Athanasius’s On the Incarnation of God the Word. I just got pulled into reading it because it was so beautiful. “How do we know that Jesus is God? Well, let me tell you,” and he goes on. “Who else walked on the sea? Who else stilled the storms? Who else turned water into wine, transforming matter into…” and he just keeps going, and we haven’t even gotten to the good stuff yet, but I know where it’s going. It’s going to, “And who made the oracles fall silent? And who overturned magic? And who made the demons run away?”
I think one of you said earlier about how bad the ancient world was. It was really bad. It was a demon-possessed world. People were terrified, if you actually read Greek literature and take it seriously – not “Oh yeah, that’s another story like a movie.” No, these are the things they actually believed and the things they trembled at, and Jesus by coming changed all that. We’ll talk a little bit about that somewhere along the line.
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