The Harmony of the Gospels

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.

I recently learned that one of our listeners, who started listening at the beginning of the podcast, back when our recording quality was not as good as now, was convinced that we were saying that we limp like chickens to the Promised Land. That is not what we were saying, but I appreciate that this listener kept listening, even though we were apparently saying such non-sensical things.

Speaking of sensical things, today we are talking about the synoptic gospels and the harmony of the gospels, all four gospels, not just the synoptics. How do they all fit together? What’s the message of the four when we try to find a chronology, because they don’t all put all the events in the same order. What are they doing there?

These are questions that have – I’m not going to say plagued the church, but they have interested the church and challenged the church and been a point of discussion for the church over the last 2,000 years approximately. So Greg, where does this discussion need to start? What are the foundational things that we must keep in mind?

For the peace of mind of our listeners I think we should start by saying whatever we say tonight does not in any way discount the doctrine of verbal plenary inspiration. When we talk about the author’s choices or how they edited their material or how they amassed records – Luke was really good at doing hands-on research with eyewitnesses – we’re not saying that the Holy Spirit did not inspire these words, that they’re not God’s word, or that God let the writers put them in a Cuisinart and push puree or something. God had a plan in how he had the writers write and how they organized their material. There are themes the individual writers pursue, and yet it’s all with reference to actual historical events. Rachel is going to talk to us some more about that in just a little bit.

As they looked at the life of our Lord, Matthew and John were eyewitnesses from very early on, John especially. He was there almost from the beginning, and Mark was listening to Peter. Luke came along later, but we keep seeing references to his personal research to make sure that what he was saying was in fact accurate.

As they took these pieces under the inspiration and guidance of the Holy Spirit, each pursued a particular theme with a particular audience in mind. Matthew is slanted toward Hebrew Christians or Hebrews who might become Christians, Mark is toward a Roman audience, Luke is toward a Greek audience, and John toward the church catholic, the world, everybody, thus the appearance of “world” so much in John’s gospel.

The first three we call synoptics, which means to see with the same eyes, syn-optic, because a lot of the material is common and they cover more or less the same pathway and point to Jesus’ ministry. John comes after, not necessarily all that far after, and he spends more time with things that they had left out, particularly with Jesus’ ministry in Jerusalem and Judea.

As we read through these gospels we will see that they sometimes change the words in a story, sometimes not, sometimes drop a story or include a story (his-story, the historical account) because it adds to the particular theme they’re pursuing. Matthew is presenting Jesus as the son of Abraham, the son of David, the Messiah, the great prophet who would come. Mark presents him as the Son of God, the new Caesar, God’s servant, yes, but the conqueror, the man of action. Mark’s favorite word is “and” – “And they went here and they went there, and then immediately he went there and then immediately he did this.” It’s full of action, very like Matthew but there’s a lot less in the way of sermons and such.

Luke pursues Jesus’ true humanity as the Son of Man and there’s more about old folks and women and children. It opens and closes in the temple. It’s the priestly gospel. Then John takes us back and shows us – “In case you missed it, we’re talking about the eternal Word of God who came into this world to save the world.”

So we come knowing that, but we also come knowing then that because they’re doing this, at points they’re going to follow a chronology, and sometimes depart from it. They have not said, “By the way, here are all the events of our Lord’s life in order,” because if they had done that they would have done that, but they didn’t always. So we don’t have to be embarrassed or afraid of, “Well, Matthew puts it in this order, but Luke inverts the order.” That’s not a problem because the order was not the point, unless they tell us it is.

One of the things I read recently was just because something is told out of order does not make it not-history or less true, just like two people can tell a story differently and will tell a story differently with different details and different orders. It doesn’t make the story not true, it just gives two perspectives.

We’re familiar with this concept in modern storytelling, the concept of the flashback. It matters that the flashback comes after you have a certain amount of information.

Or it’s not a flashback.

Or the trend now to have the stories told from multiple characters’ perspectives, where you keep jumping back and forth across the characters, which can be very disorienting and confusing, depending upon how the author aligns it, but we understand there are different voices and perspectives, and as we hear one person talk about it they’re going to give a completely different account of an event than somebody else.

I’m curious if either of you have an answer about this, but how much of our expectations of things being told in the same order might come from Greek theatre, of how everything was supposed to be in real-time and real-place.

Now that’s an interesting thought. I’d never thought of that. Certainly it passes through the rationalism of the 19th century, where we’re expected to do things their way, and if it’s not logical by their terms then it becomes mere art and therefore sacrificeable to label as fiction or something. Could that go all the way back to Greece? Yes, it sure could. That’s an interesting thought.

One thing about flashbacks, God invented the flashback in Genesis 2. We come to Genesis 2, and again this led Bible critics to say, “Oh, there are two creation accounts. There’s chapter 1 and that gives us one story, and then there’s chapter 2 where the story is very different, so obviously a contradiction.” No, it’s called a flashback. He’s taken us through the six days and then flashes back to the creation of Adam and then the creation of Eve and then brings us up to where we were.

Another one in the gospels, I believe it’s the synoptics that give us one idea of where the woman who washes Jesus’ feet appears, and they all seem to agree and it all seems to be not at all connected with the triumphal entry. But when we come to John’s gospel, he specifies the time length. He actually says after so many days the washing of his feet happened, and then after so many days the triumphal entry.

He’s very clear, and anybody I’ve seen who’s done any interpretation says, “Yeah, that’s pretty clear. He just told us. Why did the others put it in a different place? They were assuming different things and they just did.”

One of the other ones that I came across was somebody that was saying, “If there are different details then it’s a different event,” and they took it to such an extreme that they said that Peter denied Jesus six times instead of three times, even though Jesus said, “You will deny me three times.”

“Well, that one was different than that one, so it must have been a different denying than this denying, and therefore he denied him extra times.”

We don’t want to go to the other extreme that every single difference makes it a different event, nor do we want to merge anything that sounds at all similar.

Right, so that’s the background we’re working on. We’re coming to the gospels and right now we’re just looking at what is great literature, but also great historical research and historical revelation. These men walked with Jesus, they knew Jesus, they knew the men who knew Jesus, and they’re telling us true history, but they’re writing it with incredible literary style and flair and that’s okay. We don’t need to be afraid that somehow that spoils the element of divine revelation, God’s control over the text, or that we have anything else than the pure word of God.

As a history major I say historians should write well. It’s not too much to ask. Look at Whittaker Chambers and his autobiography. That’s a marvelous piece of writing and it’s still meant to be true.

It would be nice if all historians wrote well.

They miss the fact that history should be fun and exciting and interesting. It’s storytelling, after all.

“Caesar was born in 76 BC. His mother and parents were…”

This is why no one cares about history.

Dates and places and names and all that are all good and well, but you need to tell it in a winsome, attractive, engaging way with style. We’re dwelling on it and I think they have the idea so I’m going to hand this over to Rachel now, who’s going to tell us what things she’s been uncovering in her research.

Interestingly enough as I researched, one of the things that people said most when you approach the synoptic gospels is that your presuppositions matter the most, so we are presupposing that the gospels – all four of them – are the word of God and are true, and therefore there is a way that they all fit together, but the likelihood that we will ever perfectly figure that out in this world is not likely, both because we lack the information necessarily and because we are finite and sinful creatures trying to interpret scripture.

When something doesn’t appear to go together, it just is a difficult passage and it doesn’t mean it’s an untrue passage, so we always want to keep that in our minds, which we’ve already been talking about a lot. Therefore, when we look at these we actually should be amazed that Jesus’ life has not just one witness, one testimony, but four distinct ones, which therefore gives greater breadth and depth to what we know about his life. Of all the lives ever lived on earth, his is most important for us.

It's not like the Muslims with Mohammed. We’re not trying to imitate his life and be a good Christian by being just like him, because we are not Christ, we are not the Messiah, and therefore we’re not going to simply ask ourselves, “What would Jesus do?” and try to imitate him.

You’re sure about that, are you? [laughing]

Yes. I threw away my bracelet from high school.

But have you given up your copy of Thomas a Kempis is the question.

That might still be on my shelf, but I haven’t read it in a while. But the point is we’re not simply studying Jesus’ life for an example to us. Rather we’re studying his life as the only Son of God, Savior, and therefore what he does is part of how he saves us. That’s what we’re looking at. Also his salvation changes us and it changes the world, so the things that he does and the things that he teaches will have an influence on the rest of history for us.

Some principles that I came across that I thought were useful as we think about harmonizing, before we actually get to doing it – and I think some of these we’ve already touched on, but just to kind of go back through them – the first is that the people that the authors were writing to do not share our same Enlightenment or post-Enlightenment obsession with detail of exact geographic names and locations and chronologies in the same way that we do. They can have multiple names for things and that doesn’t bother them. They can hear things more story-told rather than date-by-date told and that is completely fine to them.

I think we have a bit more obsession sometimes with some of those details, and therefore we will completely miss the message of a story in the gospels because we’re too busy being like, “But the name is slightly different. It’s the exact same story but why is this name different?” so let’s not let those things distract us because there can be multiple names for things and, as we’ve already said, things can be told in different orders. Things can be organized and are organized topically or theologically rather than just chronologically.

Matthew does this particularly where he groups miracles together and then he groups parables together. He’s doing this to make a particular point in the different sections, although he’s still moving in a chronological fashion towards the end of Christ’s life. He moves things around on purpose. It’s not that he didn’t know what order things went in.

One thing that was kind of interesting that I hadn’t thought about before is that Jesus is an itinerant preacher. He’s moving around to multiple cities, which means he likely said similar things in different places and did similar miracles in different places. Again, there’s only so many miracles to do.

Only so many things were mentioned in the prophets as signs of the Messiah.

Yes, and he has a clear message so if he’s saying something similar in two different places, it’s probably because he did actually say them in two different places. For example, we have the Sermon on the Mount and the Sermon on the Plain. At first you go, “Wait, but they sound really similar. Oh no, are these the same thing? Why do they seem a little bit different? What’s going on?” He can have sermons in different places and say similar things.

He cleanses the temple twice, one at the beginning of his ministry and one near the end of his ministry, and he can do that because most likely they filled everything back in the temple after Jesus left the first time, because that’s what people do who are making good money.

Doesn’t that also fit with Leviticus, the cleansing of the house with leprosy. The priest would come twice to examine and judge.

Exactly, so when we start thinking theologically we realize, “Oh, this makes sense, that Jesus would start and end there because he is the true priest.”

One of the other things is that like in any history book, the gospel writers are not giving every detail and they can, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, summarize or compress some of the things that Jesus said. They can either, by inspiration, give us the overall summary of what he said or the exact words that he said, and both are true and both we should listen to equally.

So when it seems that Jesus said two different things in the same circumstance it’s because sometimes we’ll say, “My mom said ….” with details and sometimes we’ll summarize what she said, and both things are equally representative of what went on.

I bet you see this as a teacher a lot when you give your class the task of summarizing a reading. When you have 20 kids in your class you are not going to get 20 of the same summary of the reading, but they could all be good summaries.

Or not. [laughing]

That was very optimistic of me.

When I was a child I didn’t understand how to summarize so all I did was pick out what I thought were key sentences and would kind of string the key sentences from the paragraph together and make it a smaller paragraph but with basically the same words because I didn’t understand. I was like, “They said it great. How do you paraphrase this? I don’t know how to put in my own words. I’ll just use fewer of their words. I don’t want my own words.” It can confuse us, but we have to think of them all as an overall event and different people telling about it.

Another example I was reading was that depending on the audience you’re talking to, you will share more or fewer details. If my car breaks down and I go to the mechanic, he’s going to give me probably a very basic definition of what’s wrong because I don’t know very much about cars. But if somebody else came in who he knew knew all about cars, he would give a much more detailed explanation or he’d speak in different words, different terms. The same thing with computers or medicine. We adjust how we explain something depending on who we’re talking to.

Have you heard of “explain it to me like I’m 5”? It’s a thing that people say, and I need to say it more often.

“Explain it to me like I’m 5 years old.” That’s where the audiences that Greg was talking about make a big difference because the background of that audience will change what details are significant to them. If you are Jewish, Roman, Greek, or you’re trying to go for a really broad audience, it’s like someone trying to do a sermon or a talk. They’re thinking about, “Who do I expect to be in my audience?”

Obviously there can be others there too that you don’t expect, but I would not speak the same way to say students in a classroom at a Christian school and students in a classroom at a public school, in terms of the words I’m going to choose and how I’m going to explain something, on certain topics particularly. I I know they don’t understand the meaning so I’m going to need to adjust the way I talk. I’m not going to water down the truth. I’m just going to realize they need and will appreciate different details.

Even in teaching from class to class, I know this class is all into anime so wherever I can tie that in I’m going to. Or this class is really into Star Wars so I’m going to try to pull that in. In order to engage the audience we try to connect with things that are in their experiences.

One other principle that I found helpful was to remember that the authors of all four of the gospels are actually translating what happened from one language into another. That was something I didn’t know for a long time or hadn’t thought about. Jesus spoke Aramaic. He didn’t speak Old Testament Hebrew either typically, but all the gospels are in Greek, so there is a movement of words from the Old Testament into the time of Jesus into the New Testament Greek that will also adjust the words being used. Sometimes they’ll be using the Septuagint, the Greek Old Testament, instead of the Hebrew text, which will have some different words.

We see this frequently when they’re quoting the Old Testament in the New Testament. When we look at the Old Testament, “That’s not exactly what the text says,” but they’re quoting the Septuagint. Just realizing that whichever way you go about it, they’re not giving the exact words that Jesus spoke, because he was speaking in Aramaic.

That’s also an interesting jab at the Muslims because they would say that Mohammed was supposed to recite the words, and therefore the angel gave him the words in Arabic. So if you’re actually going to have the words of God you have to have them in Arabic, and all other languages are not the true words of God anymore, so everyone has to learn Arabic in order to be able to recite properly for their prayers.

But the wonder of the inspiration of the scriptures is that it goes across all languages, so when you translate you don’t lose its quality as being the word of God. Rather, it’s maintained by the Holy Spirit.

The god of the Muslims is a very small god, isn’t he, that he can’t actually communicate in more than one language. As our God says, “Who made man’s tongue?”

What’s always interesting to think about with the Muslim god is that they claim that the words that come to us as the Quaran are the eternal words of God that have forever been in the heavens, so therefore Arabic has been forever? Arabic is the language of God? How very convenient that he found somebody speaking that language here on earth that would know what it meant, and it was in the exact version of that language that he spoke. And yet it somehow has been in the heavens forever waiting. It creates some strange ideas.

So those are some useful concepts to keep in our minds as we’re looking at that, because sometimes when we approach the scriptures in the New Testament we’re used to just seeing little events of Jesus’ life and not trying to put them together historically. Then it creates even more confusion because for one thing we’re not seeing the flow of the story, but we’re also not really understanding the context that it’s happening in.

That was one other thing I found that was useful to think about. Each book is a book in and of itself. We read it from beginning to end, so first and foremost it’s best to read through the four gospels in order. When we try to harmonize it’s our attempt, but that’s not actually how the Lord gave it to us. We need to realize that each book is its own unit, so we first need to try to understand any passage within its own context before we try to jump into, “Why is it not the same as this? And why is that? And why….” and so on.” First and foremost, look at it in its own context before you start trying to pull in other passages.

Can I make an illustration that might help with this? Reading the Narnia books. If you read them in the order that they were written you get a gradually unfolding understanding of who Aslan is and this world that he’s made. Most boxed sets that I’ve seen have put them in a different order that is the “chronological order” of the stories, starting with The Magician’s Nephew, which was actually the second-to-last book written. That assumes that you know so much about Aslan already.

If you want to experience the story the way the author intended, you don’t start with The Magician’s Nephew. It’s a different experience. But if you do want your ducks all in a chronological row, just do that afterward and then you don’t miss out on the wonder of Aslan.

I think it’s helpful to do both. I’ve been reading through a Bible plan that puts the scriptures in chronological order, or it attempts to, so sometimes it has you going back and forth within a book or pausing in the middle of a book to go read another book. I see pros and cons to it. One of the pros when you do put it all together is that sometimes you put details together that weren’t there before, so you do get a greater understanding.

I was talking with our dear friend Shannon the other day and she was saying, “I was reading it chronologically and I finally realized that the Manasseh of I Kings and the Manasseh of 2 Chronicles – that Manasseh actually repents in the end and I never got that when I read 2 Kings because I didn’t realize it was the same person by the time I got to 2 Chronicles.”

So there are points where it’s helpful to read those stories side-by-side, but we always want to remember that the Lord has given us the books as a whole unit, and therefore we want to make sure that at least every other time we’re just reading straight through to get the flow and the overall intent of those authors that he inspired.

The Lord actually endorsed a certain order in a sense, didn’t he, when he talked about the prophets from Abel to Zechariah.

Yes, from Genesis to 2 Chronicles. Abel dies in Genesis, Zechariah dies in 2 Chronicles, which in the Hebrew ordering were the first and last books. How far we need to rearrange our Bibles to comply with that is another question.

That’s always one of the questions to ask too. Is it arbitrary, the order that our gospels are in? For quite a while there was an assumption that Mark must have been written first, primarily because they said it was the shortest and therefore it must have been the starting point and the other ones built upon it. But the thing is, each one has such a different approach. It’s not like, “I took this and then I added my own details to it.” Each one is doing their own things and has individual stories that the others don’t.

I have a lot of Civil War histories on my bookshelf and I would not presume that the shortest was the earliest written. That just seems like bad logic.

Usually not, as a matter of fact. As to the order, I champion the order as providentially maintained because the pattern – first of all, 3 and 5, include Acts. That’s familiar. When you look at Matthew and there’s these sermons and prophecies, you look at Mark and there’s this action, you look at Luke and it starts in the temple and ends in the temple and has more references to Levites and things than the others, you begin to see a prophet/priest/king motif.

Then you pull back and you see here’s Messiah establishing his authority. Here he is as the representative of God. Here he is in human relationship. Here are the sanctions of the wilderness. By the way, they match up with the five books of the Torah too. Then in Acts we get the next generation. So I’m inclined to believe that however the order has come about, it’s the right order.

“Mark’s the shortest. Therefore it came first.” I remember reading one commentary who said, “Well, that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” for exactly the reasons you just gave. When you start small you usually start with groundbreaking material and then you work down to the things that speak in more simple terms for a fast read.

As time goes on, what is important becomes clearer. We could go on a whole tangent about Civil War paintings.

You could!

I’ll do that sometime but not today. We don’t have time today. But as time goes on it becomes clearer what the significant details are, so your summary gets more succinct in general.

I just think of telling a story to somebody else and it’s the same thing. When I first tell a story I tend to give all the details. Then as I tell more and more people, partly I get tired but I also think, “Actually that wasn’t as important as I thought it was when I first was telling this story.” I can simplify and summarize, which is also something you see in a good teacher over time. They learn to focus on what’s most important.

And on a less spiritual level, where you get the laughs and what phrases sound really good to you. “Keep that joke in. Drop that one. No one ever gets that.” There’s one joke I did for years and no one ever got it. “It’s funny guys! Oh well, never mind.”

When you have to explain your own jokes to teenagers it’s fun. “No, this is funny, guys. I promise.”

You feel like Cogsworth giving the tour of the Beast’s castle going, “If it ain’t baroque don’t fix it – ha ha!”

So that is what I have for the harmonization part of things, in terms of how we approach it. I don’t know if there’s anything else we want to add or if we want to try to start harmonizing.

I think we could do this, without committing ourselves deeply. I think we can just look at how each of the gospels begins and see they begin not harmonized. Then we can show how they begin to harmonize with the ministry of John the Baptist, for instance, just in order.

In Matthew we start with the genealogies. We start with the title “The book of the generations of Jesus Christ, the Son of David, the son of Abraham.” The book of generations is Genesis. He’s telling us up front, who is this Jesus? He’s the son of David, so think of all the messianic promises about the royal kingdom. He’s the son of Abraham. Think of blessing all nations. We go into a genealogy that runs from Abraham, through the kings of Judah, up to Joseph.

Our emphasis here is upon Joseph because he’s biologically descended from the kings of Judah, but there’s a legal bar on it so he can’t be king. Then the angel comes and talks to him, and Mary kind of takes a back seat in this version. Then we have Gentiles coming from the far ends of the earth to worship the newborn king, and then we have Jesus and his family fleeing into Egypt. Those things together don’t appear in the other gospels.

Mark gives us no birth narrative at all. It starts with the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and it shows us John the Baptist immediately, the herald of the king. I don’t know how popular this is now, but it used to be that commentators would say this is because he’s writing to Romans and thus he’s portraying Jesus as a slave, God’s slave. You know what? Slaves don’t like slaves. They admire power and that’s what it actually says. He’s the Son of God.

You write to Romans and you say Son of God, they know who that is. That’s Caesar. That’s the world emperor. Oh, but his name is Jesus? Oh, and he has a herald? And he does stuff, powerful stuff. He keeps on doing powerful stuff. He goes from one thing to another, doing powerful stuff. Wow, what a ruler, what a king, what a conqueror.

We come to Luke and there’s more of a literary deduction. He explains what he’s doing, who he’s writing to, why he’s doing it, then he sets the historical stage. He goes back before the birth of John the Baptist and introduces the annunciation of John in the temple, so we’re in the temple. We get that story and then we’re slid into not Joseph this time but Mary.

Luke concentrates, as I said earlier, more on old people, women and children, so we get a lot of that in these opening chapters, and the style is almost poetic until we get to the ministry of John. The things that happen there, the annunciation of Mary, the Magnificat, the birth of John, the manger, the presentation in the temple and then his boyhood, none of that appears in any of the other gospels.

Then we come to John and it’s “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God.” Okay, we’re in Genesis 1 and Proverbs 8 all the sudden and we’re talking about Jesus as divine, as being God himself. The Christmas story gets shrunk down to, “And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us.” That’s it because his emphasis is not on Jesus’ humanity, it’s on his deity. Then we slide right into John the Baptist.

So the beginning of the harmonization is actually John’s ministry. He begins to pull it all together as he baptizes Jesus and the Spirit descends upon Jesus. Once we have that, then things get a little less clear. Does Jesus go immediately into the wilderness to meet Satan? Or is there that little bit of time when John points him out as the Lamb of God? What order do those things happen?

After that, then things become a little more up for grabs, but we do have some general ideas. The gospels do observe, by and large, the calendar of Israel, particularly Passover, so we can track it against the most recent Passover or the Passover that’s coming up or the Passover he’s attending. Occasionally there’s a reference to one of the other feasts, and once or twice there’s just “a feast” and everyone is sitting back scratching their head and saying, “Which feast would this be? If we go back it’s this. If we go forward it’s this.” There’s not much in the way of hints.

Those are some of the things that scholars need to work out. I don’t think these need to detain us a lot, but maybe Rachel can have some more thoughts for us next time.

Next time.

This is a great place to wrap up with some recommendations. Next time we’ll have more thoughts on the harmony of the gospels and begin the ministry. At least we’re going to try. So recommendations. David told me when he was editing this last episode that we can sometimes sound unenthusiastic about our recommendations.

It’s more the process of giving them.

It’s like trying to decide on a thing that you like. I don’t think most of the time in our daily lives people come up to us and say, “Hey, name a thing that you like!” But if that does ever happen to you, then you know that as soon as that person asks you, all of the things that you have ever liked in your life suddenly vanish from your mind.

It’s like being asked your favorite movie, and suddenly you go, “Uhh, I don’t have one.”

“I think I did a minute ago, but I sure don’t now.” Now that you mention that, suddenly I don’t have a favorite movie. I can think of a bunch of movies, but none of them am I going to recommend right now.

I’ll start with a children’s book that we’ve been enjoying. Did I already recommend Knight Owl?

It doesn’t sound familiar so go for it.

We’ve read it many many times, so I’ll recommend it many many times. There are two books in the series. I hope there are more forthcoming from this author. This is Knight Owl by Christopher Denise. It’s a short children’s book with delightful illustrations. Christopher Denise is one of the illustrators for the Redwall books, so if you read and loved those and you now have a child – this is very generation-specific – but this is the book. It’s it. I’ve texted friends that I’ve not seen in years, if not decades, to say, “Hey, you should go get this book.” It’s adorable.

It’s about an owl who wants to be a knight. Then the sequel I would argue is even better. It’s called Knight Owl and Early Bird. And if, once again, you grew up on the Redwall books and now have a child who wakes you up early in the morning because she “wants to spend time with you,” Knight Owl and Early Bird is the book for you. It will hit close to home.

It took me a second to get the “night owl and early bird” because, given my own background, the first thing that came to my mind was Batman and Robin. The heroic team that both have code names, somebody and somebody. Again, background and presuppositions matter, even in picking book titles.

Rachel, you got anything?

Sure. I’m going to give a recommendation which again could be controversial, but I don’t know and I’m going to give it anyway. I got a recommendation for a YouTube video from another pastor in our denomination who serves down in LA. It’s by a group called Sola Media. The particular presenter is named Adriel Sanchez. He is doing a 9-minute video on infant baptism and it’s one of the better and more succinct straightforward presentations I’ve heard about it, asking really good thought-provoking questions and giving good answers that are very scriptural.

I found it useful and I think if you have that as a question in your mind that you would like to be thinking more about, it’s a helpful video. Or if you want to give it to somebody else that has that question, it’s less than 10 minutes which makes it a nice little handoff to somebody that has a question.

I can think of some of our friends who probably could profit from that right now.

I’ve got nothing but I’m going to recommend watching movies because it’s a thing. It’s not a pagan thing. It’s not a debauched worldly thing. It can be, depending on what you watch and how you watch it, but tere are Christians who just look at the whole world of theater as an abomination before God and something that will contaminate their minds. You know? Some movies can and you must choose carefully, but there are many movies out there that show what the world is like, and they do so with great skill and taste and power and emotion.

Believe it or not, the rest of the world speaks that language. “This is the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Tomorrow is another day. The Force will be with you always.” I’m making this up as I go.

My friend David Farschman and I more than once were accused of talking in code because so many of our references were not high literature. Yes, we’ll quote Hamlet or Much Ado, but theater and cinema, all of these are touchstones that allow us to share a wider experience with the world, and the world is already there.

Again, be careful. You might want to do some checking up in advance to see if there’s going to be scenes that offend you. More than to the point of whether they offend you – and a lot of Christians get this wrong – “Well, there’s sin in it.” There’s sin in the Bible, okay? The question is what’s the intent? You read about David’s sin of adultery, and I don’t know anyone who’s ever read about David’s sin of adultery and said, “I’m going to go practice adultery now. That sounded cool.”

You can show the sin and make it exceeding simple and make sure that people don’t want to do this. It may look good at the beginning, but by the time you’re done not so much. You may show the forces of evil and make them very horrible, and yet in the end the good guys win, hopefully through faith in God and Christ.

But to be afraid of art forms simply because your tradition says so or they lay outside your experience or you wouldn’t know what to watch, or you’d rather be out snowboarding – okay, that’s something, but you begin to shut off a connection with the rest of mankind and I think there’s a danger there. You need to be careful.

Lewis said it allows us to experience a world we’ve never experienced to see with new eyes, and I think there’s something valid there, so find some good movies. Over the course of this podcast – has it been five years? – we’ve recommended movies very regularly without ever doing any kind of formal apology for that. Maybe some people think we’re horribly wicked worldly people because we watch movies.

There was a family that was thinking about joining our church when I was up in Anderson, until they found out that some of our people went to Disneyland and then we were right out. “How could you ever go to Disneyland? That is the most abominable place on earth.” That was before…

Before Disney went woke?

Yes, before there was a woke thing. It was just obviously worldly.

Can I piggyback on this recommendation? I’m going to go even more specific and say watch movies with your children, because otherwise they will grow up and not know how to watch movies with discernment.

Oh yes, absolutely.

We’ve been watching a lot of Anastasia, from 1996 I think, the animated one. I was a little bit worried that Gretchen would be afraid of Rasputin because he’s one of the most outrightly Satanic wicked ugly villains in all of film. We get to the end and the relic that is magically preserving his existence is destroyed, and he turns into a skeleton and then to dust.

That really stuck with Gretchen. She wasn’t disturbed by it but she kept asking me for days afterwards. “Did the bad guy turn into dust because he died?” So then we got to talk about, “Yes, because from dust you came and to dust you will return, and the wages of sin is death. He turned into dust because he was bad,” and we’d get to talk about that.

I did not see that coming. I thought she would be freaked out or something, but totally worthwhile.

One of the most memorable conversations I had with my own Emily when she was about 2, we were on our way to church by ourselves for some reason and out of the blue she said, “Daddy, why does everyone try to kill princesses?” That led us to talking about us being sons and daughters of God, of being kings and queens before God, of the war of the serpent against the seed – biblical theology just opened up and she was ready to listen.

We hadn’t had her watch these particular movies with that in mind, although there’s a good deal of biblical imagery in most of them, but she got it and it did open channels of conversation. If you don’t teach your children how to watch movies, they’re going to watch movies eventually without having any guidance on how to do it. That’s another thing that we probably should dedicate an entire episode to someday.

Sometime. Thank you both for this conversation. It’s been a delight and I look forward to next week.

A big thank you also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband. And a big thank you to our financial supporters for keeping the show rolling. We appreciate you paying for the editing software that makes David’s life so much easier. You have no idea how much time it saves him. We appreciate that very much.

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