Liberty and Responsibility

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 Bryan Broome.

We’re talking about liberty today – what it is, what it isn’t, where it comes from, etc. With this, as with many other things we’ve talked about on this podcast, we need to take this back to the Triune God. Any conversation about liberty needs to have a definition, and to have a definition we have to have a metaphysics and an epistemology. So Greg, why don’t you take it away and tell us how the Triune God is the source of liberty, as he is the source of everything else we’ve talked about on this podcast.

One thing that we keep doing is coming back to God as the starting point for everything. Even if in the long run some of our conclusions are off-base, if we can just simply encourage people to go back beyond human reason, human experience, and human tradition, and look at God as he’s revealed in scripture and consider him the archetype and the starting point for everything, we will have accomplished something in our small lifetimes, and it will be worth it all.

When we look at God, we look at absolute freedom. God is who he chooses to be because he absolutely delights in himself. He is absolute perfection. He does not need to make resolutions, grow up, change, see a psychoanalyst or any such thing. He is perfect joy, perfect beauty, perfect harmony, and perfect freedom. He does as he will.

Our Lord is in the heavens. He does all that he pleases.

He hath done whatsoever he hath pleased. Ultimately, no other deity in the history of philosophy and religion can make this claim. We’ve talked a lot about the idea of the continuity of being, which ultimately traps all other expressions of reality, all other would-be deities within the framework of that being, and they too simply become corollaries or extensions of the universe that we all move in and that we all perceive. Their freedom isn’t absolute any more than man’s freedom is absolute. Only God can claim absolute freedom.

Now of course you could say, “But wait. He’s not free to be other than himself,” and since other than himself would be imperfection, that does not seem to be a problem, although I’m sure somebody someplace has thought of it as such.

You can think of the argument – it’s barely an argument – “Could God make a rock so big that he couldn’t lift it?” Well, no, since that’s not consistent with the nature of infinity.

It’s like, “Congratulations. You thought of something stupid.”

In many ways that’s the answer. “No, because he’s not stupid.” The children’s catechism, “Can God do all things?” and the answer isn’t yes. The answer is, “He can do all his holy will.” God can do as he pleases. He does not please to contradict himself. He does not deny himself. There is in him no variableness or shadow caused by turning. He is completely self-consistent, self-coherent.

When we introduce or begin to look at God as Trinity, we don’t have any problems there either because God is one. He’s metaphysically or ontologically one God, one essence, and the three persons there are in complete harmony. The Father begets the Son as his own image and delights in the Son. The Son rejoices before the Father. They breathe forth the Spirit, one to another in perfect joy and satisfaction.

There is even in this shared communion and community still perfect freedom. Each does as he pleases because each wills what the other wills. This is love. There’s perfect love here, perfect concern for each of the others, transparency, communication. This is God. This is not creation.

Christianity, in drawing this line and saying “Here’s God. He is freedom and love and beauty and glory,” and then there’s creation, which in and of itself is none of these except insofar as it submits itself unto God. God made creation as his reflection. Particularly he made man as his image, as his analog, and insofar as man submits to the realities and parameters that God has prescribed for his creation, man too experiences freedom.

But here’s the thing – it’s not an absolute freedom. It’s not an autonomous freedom. It’s not, “I can do whatever I want.” Honestly, try that. “I want to fly. I will jump off the Empire State Building.” You will not fly. “I want to conceive a child all by myself. I want a virgin birth.” Go for it. It won’t work. “I want to live without eating any kind of food in any way, shape, or form.” You’re going to die.

You could go down the list of all the things where we say, “But I want to,” and reality says, “No.”

Too bad.

Too bad, and there are consequences for rejecting the way that God runs the universe. Our secular friends speak of the laws of nature. We speak rather of God’s providence. To a certain extent we can at least agree that things that fall off the Empire State Building, at least until they reach terminal velocity, fall at the rate of 9.8 meters per second per second, and when they hit the concrete below, they stop suddenly, and all of that pressure goes in all kinds of directions that basically turns things to mush. That’s the scientific word.

It’s inescapable. You can’t say, “I don’t want that to happen. I will fly. I will be free. I will not be bound by the constraints of this universe,” and God says, “Yeah, you are too,” whether we talk about physics or biology or economics.

A whole nation of people decide that debt is prosperity, and they will monetize their debt and thus escape all economic crises in the future. It doesn’t work because that’s not the way God runs his universe.

There have been a lot of people who have spoken of freedom just to do whatever you want, and anything that gets in your way is some kind of tyranny. The first thing we have to realize is it’s not realistic, and any little experiment can prove that real fast.

Van Til used the phrase – he wasn’t the first, but I think of him when using the word ‘analogical’ to describe any attribute of God that is shared with humanity. We experience it not in the same way that God the Creator, the uncreated being, experiences it. Everything that we know as freedom is only freedom by analogy to God’s freedom. It’s true, but it’s an analogy. It’s not absolute, as you said.

We can look at the definitions of freedom that people have come up with over the last several thousand years. Aristotle – “Man is a political animal. Liberty is in the life of the polis. Do exactly what you’re expected to do for the sake of the polis, no matter what that requires of you, and you will be free by definition, whether you like it or not, whether it makes you happy or not. That is what freedom is, conforming to the life of the polis.”

With Jean-Jacques Rousseau it’s the general will, which isn’t too far removed from Aristotle, for that matter, because the general will is not the democratic will of everybody. It’s the consensus of the leadership, the intellectual elite, who tells you what your freedom is, and you will submit to it or you will be forced to be free, as Rousseau taught us.

You can think of Karl Marx. “Freedom consists of the shortening of the workday.” Really? All this bloodshed, all this massacre so you can have a shorter workday? That was it? That’s all you’ve got for us? But of course it means also the abolition of private property, of marriage, of religion, and everybody having to work to provide for everybody else, which we will do cheerfully because our natures will somehow magically be transformed. There’s freedom.

Even when we look at Islam, where freedom is the submission of the world to the will of Allah, Allah himself is simply an extension of the universe. That would take some argument to show, but from a consistent Christian point of view there’s no alternative. He’s not the Creator God. He’s not self-sufficient. He is not Triune. He creates the universe out of necessity, and therefore he’s a corollary to it, and it to him; so whatever he commands and produces is simply again the universe stirring the pot within itself. Same thing with pantheism.

All of these things have offered freedom, and they’ve borrowed in the process a lot of Christian language and lingo and idioms to make it sound really cool. Marxists have been great at this. The progressives in our generation were really great at sounding like they really want you to be free, but largely it comes down to free to practice your sexual perversion without government interference and to experiment with mind-altering drugs. Aside from that, you don’t get to do much because we’re going to take most of your money and we’re going to use it to make sure that there’s no coming back from this situation.

It’s not something that any other generation would have called freedom, but it sounds convincing in soundbites played out on social media.

There’s an interesting linguistic shift in the past century or so, where we talk a lot more now about freedom from things. We’ve got gluten-free, we’ve got sugar-free, we’ve got freedom from fear, freedom from want. That supermarket parlance is so pervasive. Sugar-free means there’s no sugar. It’s not that you’re free to eat all the sugar you want. It’s the exact opposite.

I don’t remember if that was something Orwell touched on in 1984. I have a vague bell ringing in the back of my mind.

It would have been worthy of him, to be sure. The whole idea of rewriting the dictionary to justify existence and to justify government policy is hardly new. You started out by saying that if we’re going to talk about liberty, we need definitions. This is something that my wife and I were talking about just last night, and here’s a good recommendation – the need for catechisms and confessions to just define basic terms.

“Who is this God person anyway?” as Douglas Adams might ask. “What do you mean by providence? What do you mean by law? What do you mean by liberty? What do you mean by salvation? What do you mean by love?” There’s the big one in this generation.

If we have no definitions, we’re easy victims for people who just pick it up as an empty banner, as Francis Schaeffer would say, and wave it around, and we feel committed by our Christian commitment to follow that banner because Christians love everybody, right? That’s what we’re called to.

Bryan, did you want to say something?

No, just physically reacting like, “Hmm.” It’s sort of like if you don’t have a definition for love, then even the Golden Rule doesn’t mean anything because if it’s “Just love one another as you love yourself,” then what if you hate yourself? Or what if you think love involves physical harm, because your mind just thinks that way? It’s messed up. There has to be an objective definition of love to work from, or else even the most basic simple command that even the world likes to acknowledge in words falls apart.

Yeah, the assumption seems to be, “Well, you all know what love is,” but the answer is, “No, we don’t.” Pick any random group of people who happen to be standing nearby and say, “You sir, how would you define love? You ma’am, how would you define love?”

Very quickly you’ll start running into either incoherent definitions, things that turn in on themselves and don’t go anywhere, or into very different kinds of definitions that may involve you not only letting me, but you enabling me to be exactly what I want to be as I perceive my best. And if you’re not doing it you’re selfish and obviously a political conservative and probably Republican, because people who love each other would fund my sex change or my abortion or my drug habit or whatever, because they want me to be what I want to be.

These are the kinds of things we run into so easily, even among Christians, I find – certainly Christian young people, and I suspect Christian adults as well. It’s come to mean something like total acceptance, to the point of footing the bill for other people. And if you question anything – question someone else’s lifestyle or life preferences – then you’re obviously hateful, evil, a persecutor, and stupid. Your mind is unenlightened.

I think that especially applies to women today. “If a man loves me, he will enable me to be who I want to be,” whereas if you turn that around it becomes clear how bad of a definition that is. I’m not saying that’s the love that men should experience, either. I’m saying that’s a bad definition altogether.

But it is a very common one. And you’re right, I never thought about it. Just turn it around and say, “And if you love me…” –

“No, it doesn’t count. You’re a man. It doesn’t work that way for men.”

“Where is that written?”

“You’re arguing. You obviously are not sympathetic,” and everything just starts snowballing into verbal assault that’s illogical and irrational, because I get what I get, and anyone who challenges that on any level or belongs to a group that I perceive as challenging it – males, whites, blacks, Asians, educated, not educated – these people obviously form at least a segment of society that needs radical reform, and more likely a self-conscious enemy who needs electroshock or something to blast them out of their mindset or something.

In the next 10-20 years we will see what that ‘something’ is. We’ll see how far the progressives go in demanding that those of us who don’t agree with us have our thinking readjusted.

And isn’t it so weird too how, for the most part, you get these people who currently are on the fringe saying, “Well, obviously we’ll need to have some sort of re-education camps for Trump supporters or conservatives in general, or whatever I don’t like, to go to.” But then they’re also incensed, horrified, at the idea of electroshock treatment to counteract homosexual impulses.

For the record, I’m not really in favor of either of these things, but the intense irony of being completely horrified – and it is just a double standard, and double standards abound on both sides of any issue – but that’s one that I immediately thought of as you were talking about that.

Yeah. I’m looking over my original discussion of this material, and interestingly enough I see that what follows falls into five categories, and this is not an accident. Actually, we’ve already talked about the first – the source and origin of liberty is God himself – and we being by understanding who God is.

For those of you who don’t know what we’re talking about, we’re talking about covenant thinking. Once you’ve established God as the source and origin, the archetype of all reality, then you have to look and see what God has done.

We can look both at the world around us, and specifically look at the world around us through scripture, and we find that God has put us in a world full of relationships. We have a relationship to the planet. We have relationship to our own families, the family that begat us, the one we create by marriage, the children we bear. We have friendships. We have employers or employees or people we work with. We have people we go to church with and we have commitments to. We have a civil community, a neighborhood, a town, a city, a state, a nation.

These are all givens. We’re not given a vote before we’re born. There’s no checklist. What’s the recent Pixar thing about souls?

It’s called Soul.

Yeah. We don’t get that kind of preparation. Mormon theology may allow for it, but biblical theology doesn’t. We’re not given a checklist of, “What would you like to do? Where would you like to fit in? What kind of gifts would you like to have? What do you want that’s going to set you apart? What country? What hair color? What do you want your father to do for a living?”

None of that is anything that we are asked about or get any kind of vote on. God just plops us into this. Family – God has already defined in scripture how that works. Church, civil government – these have biblical definitions. Friendship, being an analog also of our relationship to God, comes with some severe limitations. Tick off all your friends regularly and you won’t have them anymore. This is not a hard thing.

Then we could go on to talk about economics and the market and all kinds of relationships that God imposes, that God ordains, that God has structured, and that God has described in large part in his Word, and if we want freedom, we have to play by the rules. That’s not oppression. That’s not tyranny. That’s freedom.

Some theologians have written, “A fish is most free when it’s in a river, not sitting on a tree,” or “A railroad engine is free when it’s on the tracks, not when it’s going over the Sahara.” The boundaries are the things that generate the freedom.

We learn how marriage works and it’s a wonderful thing. We learn how church fellowship works and it’s wonderful and contributes to our own growth and the growth of others. The freedom that exists within a civil society of not stealing each other’s property and lying about one another or about the goods we’re trying to sell to one another is a wonderful opportunity for growth and prosperity and obtaining new and wonderful things.

But if we challenge those, if we break God’s commandments, we’ll soon find we don’t have any friends, we don’t have a family anymore, we’ve been excommunicated from our church, and the civil authorities are looking for us with the goal probably of incarcerating us indefinitely, after we’ve eliminated a few people who are in our way in some bloody manner.

This is the second part of covenant life. God structures reality and we deal with that.

That brings us right immediately into the third, which is to say boundaries. Did you want to say something?

Yeah, about relationships. I was reading recently Kurt Vonnegut’s book Cat’s Cradle, which I might recommend, depending on who you are. It’s not an unqualified recommendation. But one of the questions that he asks in a really fascinating way is, “What is it that binds people together?”

The character that you’re following through this book kind of sneers at the superficial connections like, “I grew up Indiana and you grew up in Indiana. Why does that mean we have anything to do with each other? That’s kind of a stupid idea.” But meanwhile he’s got this idea that there’s this inexplicable fate that certain people are bound together by the role that they serve in this inscrutable world that’s unfolding. It’s kind of incoherent, as they say, but it’s a real question and there are real knowable answers.

It was very frustrating to me that I couldn’t be like, “Kurt! These are the answers! You’re throwing them out the window. Stop it!”

There’s an episode of Babylon 5 where our heroes are interrogated by a character who turns out to be Jack the Ripper at the very end, but the question he keeps asking them is, “Who are you?” It’s something similar to what you’ve described, because “This is my name. This is my family and my father.”

“No, your name is just a title. Who are you? No, that’s a relationship. Who are you?”

Probably the idea is that we’re supposed to look at our core values or something like that. I’m not even sure what the point here was, but “Who are you?” It’s originally taken from The Lord of the Rings, where Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas are crossing Rohan, trying to catch up with the hobbits and the orks that took them.

The Riders of Rohan come sweeping by and circle them and challenge them, and the question is, “Come, who are you? Whom do you serve?” which is very much a question about relationship. It is not amiss to say, “I am married to Kate Uttinger. I am a member of the Reformed Church of the United States.” You two and others I could name are my friends and associates and colleagues. This does define who I am. This is not, “Oh, these are just externals. What’s really important is what’s in you.”

No, no, no, no. God puts us in these relationships, and these relationships make real claims on us and are, in good part, our identity. The church we belong to does define who we are. Therefore, changing churches is not a light thing, as changing families is not a light thing, whether you’re leaving your family to get married for the first time or whether you’re pondering divorce. You’re talking about your basic identity you’re about to change. It is worth deep consideration, and we need to be sure that we do these things in the fear of God in terms of his Word.

Again, that brings us to the third point, which is simply a discussion of the law of God in all of its broadness. David says, “I’ll walk at liberty because I keep your commandments.” These commandments are exceeding broad. It’s not a narrow tightrope of, “Well, you’ve only got so many choices here. Be careful. God’s gonna smack you.”

It’s, “Okay, you’re not committing adultery, stealing, or killing people. You’re probably all right then.”

“But I want to invent a new process that may make me millions or may make me broke.”

“Go for it.”

“But I can marry this beautiful girl or that beautiful girl.”

“Oh wow, life stinks. Make a hard choice. Be a man.”

You get this, “But what if I choose wrong?”

There’s this circle of God’s law. If you’re within it, it’s not a wrong – that is to say, not an immoral choice. Now, you need to act in faith, and it’s more than just the letter of the law, to be sure, but this is something a lot of people really struggle with, particularly in light of – and again, Bryan, you might want to address this – the old Pentecostal and Holiness movement. “Find the perfect will of God, because if you miss it, you can never get back on that track again.”

And how do you find it? Because it’s hidden in God’s secret counsels. It’s not really a matter of reading scripture and doing what the Bible says and making sure your choices are in conformity. You’re trying to read the mind of God and you start asking for signs and such. Does that ring a bell with you at all?

Oh, yes. I forget exactly which epistle it’s in, but when scripture speaks out, “You will find that which is the good and acceptable and perfect will of God,” where pretty much for all of church history everyone said, “Oh okay, these are three adjectives towards the one will of God,” the Pentecostal movement basically splits it up and says, “All right, so there’s a good will and there’s an acceptable will and there’s a perfect will,” and you’ve got to be careful because, yeah, there’s the good will but it’s not as good as the other ones.

It’s like a B, B-.

Then there’s the acceptable will. It’s like, “Yeah, you’re on C grades here, but it’s fine. Jesus is covering that for you.” Then there’s the perfect will, which is like, “This is the best. You are so in tune with the Spirit and everything is great.”

It just, as you might imagine, is a very big source of anxiety, undue anxiety, where it’s like, “Wow, okay.” Every single step you’re just wondering, “Is this one that’s going to take me out? I want to be in the perfect will. What am I doing? What if I step wrong? What if this happens and I end up somewhere else and I’m not able to be used by God in the way that he wants me to be used, because obviously we can thwart things like that.” It’s just a mess. There’s no other word for it. It’s just a mess.

Yeah, but it is a real thing. To those of us who didn’t grow up in those circles it may seem a little weird, but I’ve had enough students from enough different traditions that I’ve seen it and it can be very frustrating. It can be very oppressive. “But how do I know this is God’s will? Can I throw out a fleece?”

“No. You have the Bible.”

“But chocolate or vanilla? Whether I find the perfect will of God may depend upon it.”

“No, it really doesn’t. Which one do you like?”

“Well, chocolate, personally.”

“Pick the chocolate.”

“I can pick something I like? Isn’t that like worldly somehow?”

“It’s following the lust of my flesh. It’s making my god my belly.”

Yes, so there you go.

So back to the boundaries that God actually sets for us, they’re exceedingly broad and provide all kinds of opportunities – things we can like, things we can enjoy, things we can profit in, things that are blessings to other people. But where God has spoken and drawn the line, the lines are sharp. “Thou shalt not commit adultery” means exactly what it says. It doesn’t require any skill in hermeneutics to figure that one out. That God rejects homosexuality as sin is very clear. Killing babies in the womb is wrong, it’s murder.

The Bible is clear about these things, and that in our generation so many people should be so near those boundaries is in itself amazing. Why are we constantly encountering people who want to kill their babies? It’s this weird thing.

When I was younger we heard about abortion. We knew it was a thing, but we didn’t know people who actually did it. It was maybe something that happens in those big dark cities and back alleys, and now we’re finding more and more that we actually have to wrestle with Christian people – people who claim to be Christians, who go to church – about whether or not they should kill their babies or adopt an alternate lifestyle that involves something that the Bible has labeled perversion. We like to play near the boundary lines because we’re a rebellious people.

I’m reminded of a pastor whose kids said, “Dad, can we go outside?”

“Okay, you can go outside, but you have to stay on this side of that line over there.”

“Okay,” and he looks out after a little while and all of them are standing right on the line the whole time.

We seem to be in a generation like that. When I was a kid, hypothetical problems? Sure. Moral dilemmas in the abstract? Sure. But real things you actually had to talk to people about because they were about to do them? No. Society has changed dramatically in the last 50 years and probably will accelerate in those changes because we’ve used up most of our Christian capital. People don’t believe even superficially in Christian principles and Christian morality anymore, and therefore they don’t believe in freedom.

What they see as freedom is slavery. It’s slavery to sin, to addictions, to sexual lusts, to sexual diseases, to death, to the will of the majority, lest we cross them with our political incorrectness. This is a world of bondage, far more than what I grew up with.

That brings us to the cross. That brings us to the fourth point. Where does freedom come from? Freedom comes from Jesus Christ. If the Son shall make you free, you shall be free indeed. We need our sins forgiven, which means we have to admit we have them and that God defines them, not us. When we find forgiveness in Jesus, then we also find the power of the Spirit to stop sinning, not perfectly but substantially, to grow in grace and to turn from progressively more and more of the corruption that has enslaved us.

We’re not perfectionists. We’re not “get the second blessing and you’ll never sin again,” but neither are we Antinomians who say, “Well, your sins are forgiven. Go live anyway you want,” because that’s not freedom.

It’s not freedom to tell somebody, “Your sins are forgiven, but this thing that’s been driving you crazy? You’re just going to have that forever because there’s no real help in Christ for that. He doesn’t even want to help you with that. Maybe if you get really serious and have some kind of special extra-grace experience down the road, sure. You make Jesus Lord of your life and you can have some kind of second blessing, but just be happy you’re going to go to heaven when you die.”

The gospel represents itself as a new creation, the imparting of supernatural fruit through the Holy Spirit so that we become new people with a new lifestyle, a new character rooted in the resurrection power of Jesus. When this happens to a people, a community, a nation, then freedom becomes possible.

But to try to do it the other way, to come from a purely political or statist or militaristic approach and say, “We will make you free. Obey us and keep these rules,” is to engender bondage and hatred and internal warfare and slavery, because telling someone to be good doesn’t make them good. It doesn’t empower them to be good, and simply becomes, on the one hand, a path of frustration and on the other hand a cloak for doing all kinds of nasty things in the back, in the closet, in the back alley, in the basement that are destructive. This is true whether you do it in the name of Christ or you do it in the name of some other religion.

I was having a conversation several years ago with a friend about Jane Eyre, the book, and this friend didn’t like the book because in his view morality for Jane was a boundary that kept her from doing something she wanted to do, rather than the driving force of her character, which I see, except that it leaves out the gospel.

The central driving force of Jane’s character is not morality, because morality is a bad engine for your character. The driving force of the character of Jane Eyre is the gospel of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. I’ve come back to that book and wrestled for a long time with that argument before reading it again. It’s a great book. Everyone should read it. It’s about the gospel.

My wife would agree. It’s her favorite book.

That leaves us with the fifth point, the heritage of liberty – “To secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.” Constitutions and Declarations and legal codes play a part in that, but ultimately what we’re transmitting is a covenant way of living. We’re passing on the gospel. We’re inviting our descendants – our children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren – to believe in the God that we believe in, to serve Jesus Christ, to trust him to be the source of our morality, to change us from the inside out, and to cover our sins with his blood.

When a nation continues to act this way, it will find itself progressively free from fraud and theft, including by the government, from the attempts to create a welfare state, and from laziness. People will want to work. They’ll want to rejoice in God’s creation. They’ll want to create new things, new products. They’ll want to bless their neighbors by providing them useful services as opposed to bogus services like prostitution and drugs, and you will end up with a very productive society.

Yes, you need some legal structure there, but the legal structure can’t bear the weight of generating the liberty. We’ve tried that over the last couple centuries, where some have taken the US Constitution and tried to impose it on a different culture. It was tried in Mexico. It was tried just before the Bolshevik revolution in Russia when Prince Lvov was in control for a little while, and it just doesn’t work.

It doesn’t work simply to have these rules and this structure, because they’re a reflection of the character and history of the American people and reflect what was at one time a deep commitment to righteousness, to morality as defined as scripture, to hard work, and to not messing with other people, letting them be themselves, even where it was far from perfect, even where the faith was not clear and dominant. Still, even the echoes and the backwash were enough to give America a certain amount of political freedom and economic freedom that startled the world and continues to be something amazing.

Although there are things we could repent of and apologize for, yet overall the tendency of American history, because of its roots in the gospel, has been more positive than negative. Some people may think that’s faint praise, but compared to the Roman empire or the Greeks it’s actually pretty good.

The root of this is these are not political problems, so a political answer is not going to solve them. I think conservatives are some of the most guilty of trying to solve problems with policy that are not political problems, like the love of family is not going to be generated by a policy that supports strong families. This is a value problem.

Yeah, Augustus tried that one when he was ascending the throne, as it were, although he technically never did, but you know. He actually not only encouraged families to have more than two children, but actually was offering economic incentives because he, and the Roman people in general, recognized that “If we don’t start having more kids who are Romans by descent and by law, we’re going to be hiring mercenaries. We’re not going to have a tax basis. We’re not even going to be able to have senators who are Romans setting our laws. We’re going to turn our future over to other people.”

They saw the problem, but they still didn’t want to get married and stay faithful and have kids, so along came Christians who started adopting kids that they found outcast beneath the aqueducts and such. As you say, it’s a value issue. It’s who do you love? Who do you serve? Who are you? These are real questions that we have to face and we have to ask ourselves.

Does that about cover it? Any other comments on liberty?

I’m done.

Let’s wrap up with some recommendations.

I’ve got one. This is one I’m currently reading. I started reading it a long time ago and liked it but put it on the shelf and never got back to it. It’s a history book, and therefore if you don’t really like history you might not be interested. One thing it has going for it is it’s written by Terry Jones, who was one of the players in Monty Python.

I thought I recognized that name.

He was one of the co-directors of Holy Grail and it comes out a little bit here and there, but what I didn’t know – actually I didn’t know until just a minute ago when I checked Wikipedia, although I could have deduced from this book – is that he is also, or was – he just passed away – a very well-respected historian as well. It sounds like his other books are interesting.

This book is Who Murdered Chaucer?: A Medieval Mystery. Since I haven’t finished it I won’t give away what I suspect the ending may be, but the section I just read is so appropriate to right now that I just want to sum it up as fast as I can.

The title includes Chaucer, but also – and I mentioned this to my wife and she said, “You’re kidding!” – Chaucer and Wycliffe lived at the same time. They knew the same people. What was going on there was a shift from writing in Latin, which the common man could not read, to writing in English.

Now, those of us who stand on the tradition of the Reformation get what that meant where Wycliffe is concerned. He’s translating the Bible and his followers are translating the Bible, in addition to writing a great deal about theology and philosophy beyond the mere translation. But what it means more generally is that everybody, including Chaucer, was now writing in English, which the common man could read. You no longer required a university education to hear what people were thinking about politics or religion or philosophy or economics.

A lot of ideas that were just in the air – and of course this was the Renaissance, which Professor John Green of Crash Course argues was not a thing, and he’s onto something there, but I think I need to reevaluate in terms of this book. His argument is, “People did not wake up and one day say, ‘Lucia, come and see the Renaissance! It’s dawning all around us!’”

That may be true, and yet in England there was a sheer marker which was that I can now pick up a book or a tract or a pamphlet and read about what intellectuals in Paris or Rome are talking about, and I can go upstairs with a bunch of my pals and play whatever their version of checkers is and have a drink, and we can debate this. The level of intellectual conversation is being elevated in English, and yes, it’s including religion, but it’s including a whole lot more.

What the church at that point did, the institutional Church, was to say, “Um, this is not safe. We have always been the ones who have given the definitions and set the rules and the parameters of discussion,” and we’re going to get the same thing that Luther gets a couple generations later of, “What if every plow boy starts discussing theology?”

Well, there are dangers there. Why don’t you get ahead of the curve and teach them good theology, rather than say, “No, this English thing has got to end! No more writing and talking in English! Even if we examine you to find out if you’re orthodox, you’re going to talk to us in Latin because we don’t want these commoners around us to hear the nature of the debate and what your answers are.” More often, the so-called heretics would answer in English anyhow.

So although Wycliffe got shut down by the official Church in his official role, he had enough protection from the lords who belong to the Peace party and were tired of the 100-years war and wanted it to end to go on writing and translating, and this birth of English is the birth of the ordinary man as the intellectual, as the guy who reads hard stuff and thinks about it and talks it over with his friends. It’s a cultural transformation for England, and since most of our roots are there it is very significant for us.

The title again is Who Murdered Chaucher?: A Medieval Mystery by Terry Jones.

English actors are so funny that way, about how much they know about things. I had the privilege of hearing Tom Hardy speak once in college. You might know him as Cornelius Fudge from the Harry Potter movies. He showed up at my school during finals week and gave a little talk and recited some of the Anglo-Saxon that he’d learned from Tolkien, no big deal, but it turns out he’s also a medieval weaponry expert. He was one of the foremost scholars on the longbow and all this stuff.

It was like, “I thought you were in movies. Go live a normal celebrity life.” But no, it was fascinating to hear him talk.

Bryan, do you have a recommendation?

I do. I found this new channel on YouTube which is hilarious, and I need to find the first one that I saw from him. It’s an English gentleman and his channel name is Lindybeige. His very first video was a very odd rant, but I ended up agreeing with him by the end about the pure insanity that in every Hollywood movie, whenever someone is tied up and they are let go from their bonds, they just cut the rope.

He goes, “No. This is a span of rope that I made,” and in the subtitles it pops up, “Well, sort of.” He’s like, “It took me a long time to make this. I’m not just going to cut it at the first opportunity. I would untie it. It just takes like 10 more seconds if you’re even a barely competent knot-maker.” He goes on and on talking about rope. He’s like, “This rope which I made” – subtitle, “kind of,” every single time he mentions that.

Then I started watching other ones he did and it’s mostly about medieval technology. He has one about how Scottish Highlanders would fight with a broadsword and targe. Then one video was about fire arrows and why they are nonsense, and why the movie scenes where they cast the sword in a mold that’s open-face is dumb, because it’s always in stone molds. It’s like, “No, it doesn’t work that way.”

That’s not how any of this works.

Exactly. I really just enjoyed them. He’s just a charming random British man on YouTube who talks about medieval technology, and I was like, “I need to subscribe to this man right now,” so that’s my recommendation, Mr. Lindybeige. I don’t know what his real name is.

Awesome. My recommendation is the Disney movie Lilo & Stitch. It’s wonderful.

Yes, I will co-sign.

We watched it for Valentine’s Day. It’s about love and family and it’s very nice.

It’s so good.

I cry, honestly, throughout the entire movie, it’s so good.

And can we just say that Hawaiian Roller Coaster Ride is the bomb.

So good, so good. David had actually never seen it. He’d heard it quoted, and you know how when you’ve heard a movie quoted a lot and you haven’t seen it, you can kind of just have an antipathy to it for that reason? I suspect that David had some of that, but he was very gracious and agreed to watch it because I liked it so much, and I think I won him over.

So that takes care of it for this evening. Thank you, guys, so much for this conversation. It’s been awesome. Thanks also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband and Lilo & Stitch buddy.

Thanks also to our financial supporters. We really appreciate you helping us keep the show rolling. If you’d like to check out any of the resources we’ve mentioned, you can look at our show notes. We also have transcripts available on our website, which is anchor.fm/haltingtowardzion.

If you’d like to send us an email and tell us what you think, [email protected] is our email address. We look forward to hearing from you. Have a good night.