History as Story

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.

Last week we talked about teaching “social studies.” We saw how social studies as a framework is something of an empty vessel that can be used to convey any number of ideologies or values. One thing we noted in passing was the historical hermeneutic or principle of interpretation that was hinted at in one definition that was kind of Marxist, looking at history as fundamentally a power struggle between classes.

Today we have an alternative historical hermeneutic to propose, that of history as fundamentally a story, which necessarily implies a storyteller. Feel free to correct or nuance that, but I think that’s the main thrust of what we’re going to say today.

But first I have a question for you. If you could have a Muppet adaptation of any classic book or movie, what would it be? I’m not going to ask you why, because you don’t have to justify this decision, but I would like to hear some casting recommendations if you have them.

For me it has to be Citizen Kane. I think Kermit should be the person trying to figure out what Rosebud means, the investigator. Is he ever named? I forget.

I don’t know. We never see his face, do we?

I don’t think we do. He’s always in the foreground and facing away from the camera.

That’ll be great with Kermit.

It would be fun because it would just be his voice all the time. I think the one human actor should just be someone random in the background. That would be the funniest thing to me, I think. It’s just like, “Who’s the human actor? It’s that guy. There he is. He’s gone.”

There he goes. Cameo appearance by a genuine human being.

But yeah, Citizen Kane with Kermit as the investigator. I think Citizen Kane should be Fozzie Bear. That’s just funny. And Rosebud will be played by…

Don’t give away what Rosebud is.

I’m not, but Animal, because that’s even funnier.

Wonderful. Greg?

I might as well go with Princess Bride.

A good choice as well.

Is there any question that Princess Bride isn’t a good answer to, besides “What’s a terrible movie that no one should watch?”

Kermit the Frog can play the Man in Black, and Miss Piggy, of course, gets to play Princess Buttercup, because Buttercup is a fitting name for Miss Piggy. Inigo Montoya gets played by Animal. Vincini gets played by Fozzie Bear.

Yes, absolutely.

I’m just imagining that classic dialogue exchange, but in Fozzie Bear’s voice, and it’s perfect.

And Andre the Giant (Fezzik) is played, of course, by the giant Muppet character, whose name is Sweetums.

Yes! Very good casting.

So there you go.

Who is Prince Humperdinck, though? I feel like the Professor would be a very humorous choice for that.

I don’t remember the Professor.

And Beaker is the man with six fingers?

Oh, Dr. Bunsen Honeydew, yeah.

Because his head looks like a honeydew.

Emily, your turn.

I think I’m going to go with Pride and Prejudice.

I’m so glad I didn’t say that.

Well, I’m really glad I didn’t say Princess Bride, because it was on my list.

That was the other one I thought of, too. What other classic movies would be funniest, and that’s them.

I think Kermit and Piggy are Mr. and Mrs. Bennett, and I think Lizzie and Darcy are both human beings, although I would love to see Beaker somewhere, and I’m just not sure where. He could go almost anywhere. Wickham could be Pepe the shrimp guy, and I think Sam Eagle would be a phenomenal Mr. Collins.

I’m sorry, did you already say Mr. Collins was Pepe?

No, Mr. Wickham was Pepe.

I think that Beaker could be a really funny Mr. Collins.

That’s true!

It’s the manic energy.

So if Sam Eagle is not Mr. Collins, I think we can make Sam Eagle Mr. Darcy, actually then, because he can just sort of stand in the corner of the party and say, “You are all weirdos.”

That’s pretty delightful.

I’m glad we’ve got that settled. Back to history as story. I couldn’t figure out how to make that work before the intro, so that’s just how it is. We’re rolling with it.

So history as story. This is something that’s distinctive to Christianity, that it in fact has things to say about events not in some timeless mythological alternate plane, but here on earth in the history in which we live. This is really our history, not just the mythological history.

Three things come to mind, one of which we just did. To go with the classic Christian intro and explanation, surely everybody has read Till We Have Faces. [buzzer sound] Most people haven’t.

I hadn’t until last year.

Of all Lewis’s books it’s the most neglected, and there are reasons.

I think I started it in high school. I didn’t finish. I made it about a chapter in and I was like, “There are other books I need to read.”

This is where you plead the fifth, because you’re talking to a former high school teacher of yours.

It wasn’t for an assignment, it was personal reading.

Probably not on your reading list. So I will try not to give much away, but suffice to say that it is a retelling of the Psyche/Cupid story, as it really happened, except there really are gods.

Psyche has an older sister, and in the original myth there were a couple, and there’s another one here but we don’t have much to do with her. The older sister is ugly, she’s homely, but that very thing forces her to assume more responsibilities, and eventually she rises to become queen and kind of bosses her little sister Psyche around, and kind of controls her and all that, until one day the god comes and whooshes her away and she loses Psyche forever and she’s very upset with this and spends her life being sad for herself that the gods have taken her darling little sister, who she loves so much, and it’s not fair, it’s not fair, it’s not fair.

One day while she is traveling from Point A to Point B and the little expedition is stopped in a forest, she goes out just to wander and get away from everybody because nothing makes her happy, nothing makes her happy, and she doesn’t want to talk to anybody.

She comes upon a little shrine in the middle of the forest and there is a statue, an idol that has a black hood over it. She wonders about this and then the local priest comes up and says, “Would you like to hear the story of the Goddess Istra?”

“Um, sure,” and for a nickel or whatever the priest begins to tell the story of Istra, and Queen Orual recognizes it’s the story of her little sister, so she wants to hear this. So it gets to the point where the god has taken Istra away and yet everything falls apart and what’s happened and…the priest stops the story.

The queen wants to know, “How does it end?”

“Well, she goes about the earth mourning and mourning.”

“I know people who are sad and mourning, being one of them. What happens?”

“Well, in the spring we take the hood off of the statue and Istra comes back to life and the world is reborn and nature revives, but then in the fall we put the hood back on because nature dies and the land mourns her descent.”

“Yes, I get that, but what happened to her?”

“Well, in the spring we take the hood off the statue and nature revives. But in the fall nature dies so we put the hood back on.”

Eventually Orual, the queen, recognizes that the priest is incapable of differentiating between a real historical event and a religious story. To him the one phases into the other and there is no answer to what became of the girl Istra because this is a religious story, and religious stories are open-ended, mythological, cyclical. There is no resolution.

Year after year, same story acted out in the rituals of the temple. The story, in fact, is about temple ritual and therefore is not a story because it doesn’t have an ending. It can’t, because it’s cyclical. It just keeps going over and over again.

Orual eventually gets that and walks away in disgust saying, “He doesn’t get it. I’m not getting through. I’m not going to learn anything that I want to know that’s meaningful, because this man only thinks in terms of religion,” which is to say the stories connected with the rituals of the template.

Lewis is showing us something about a pagan conception of religion. Religion is – to borrow the line from Dr. Schaeffer – an ‘upper-story experience’ symbolized by things that we know, but not truly manifest or connected in any way with our ordinary lives.

To put it in Christian terms, Christ rose from the dead for me, as he did for the disciples when he came alive in their hearts, and he’s alive in my heart. Is he alive in your heart? If he’s alive in your heart, then he lives for you.

“But was the body gone from the tomb on the third day?”

“That doesn’t matter. That’s a question for science. Religiously he’s alive and we can celebrate. He lives within my heart.”

That’s Gnosticism <ding!> and it’s neo-orthodoxy, Barthianism. It’s not Christianity, but there are a great many Christians who are caught in the same kind of dialectical conflict. There’s fact and things that can be measured and weighed and touched and recorded historically on the one hand, and then there’s religion and meaning on the other, and these two do not touch except insofar as certain things in history we can point to.

We can point to the empty tomb, which may or may not have been empty, and that becomes a symbol of resurrection life in us. We can point to the cross and that becomes a symbol of atonement, in that I now feel better about myself. But there’s no actual penetration of the supernatural and the history, merely a dim reflection in terms of symbols and such.

That brings me to the second thing I wanted to refer to. I don’t remember how I found this originally, but right now it’s on – I think it’s Gospel Coalition. It’s by John Updike. He wrote it as a very young man and it’s titled “Seven Stanzas at Easter,” and it goes like this –

Make no mistake: if he rose at all
It was as His body;
If the cell’s dissolution did not reverse, the molecule reknit,
The amino acids rekindle,
The Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
Each soft spring recurrent;
It was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled eyes of the
Eleven apostles;
It was as His flesh; ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes
The same valved heart
That—pierced—died, withered, paused, and then regathered
Out of enduring Might
New strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
Analogy, sidestepping, transcendence,
Making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded
Credulity of earlier ages:
Let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,
Not a stone in a story,
But the vast rock of materiality that in the slow grinding of
Time will eclipse for each of us
The wide light of day.

And if we have an angel at the tomb,
Make it a real angel,
Weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair, opaque in
The dawn light, robed in real linen
Spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
For our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
Lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed
By the miracle,
And crushed by remonstrance.

—John Updike, “Seven Stanzas as Easter” (1960)

There’s an answer to neo-orthodoxy in flat terms. Let’s not play games with God. God is describing history and he means it. We can’t shove it aside and still have Christianity. We may have some post-Kantian mystical experience, but it’s not what the Bible is talking about.

That actually reminds me of a great song by Andrew Peterson called “His Heart Beats,” where it very definitely walks through …

His heart beats
His blood begins to flow
Waking up what was dead a moment ago.

He breathes in
His living lungs expand
The heavy air surrounding death turns to breath again.

It’s real. This isn’t some emotional spiritual enlightenment in type that we experience the anti-type of. It’s a real historical event, an action with a real body and real blood and air entering lungs. It’s real. I don’t know how else to put it except to say it’s real.

There’s a great scene in The Great Divorce, also by Lewis, where a young man is talking to a theology professor who went to hell and doesn’t even know where he’s been. The theology professor keeps insisting, “I want the religious value. I want the religious truth. You’re trying to just tell me that it’s just like God’s just there?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, that would be of absolutely no religious significance to me whatsoever, and as such I would not be interested in it. What is my mind to do if it’s not free philosophical play to search after ultimate mysteries? If you could just wrap up and give me God’s phone number or page him for me.”

“Do you not even believe he exists?”

“What is existence, after all?”

Oh dear. That scene is probably one of my favorites in the book too, because Lewis just has so much fun mocking people like this.

Sort of a grim fun, but fun nevertheless.

The inverse of that is so wonderful, when you realize that the God that you serve, who has called you by name, is the same God who made the trees and the earth and the sky, and who brought the Israelites out of Egypt, the same person. That’s pretty wonderful when that hits you.

And that man who went to the cross is that same God. It’s the most incredible wonderful story anyone could ever believe, once they’ve believed it. Until then it sounds an awful lot like a fairy tale, and no intelligent rational mind would ever accept that as reality. Maybe it’s a religious symbol pointing to something.

The third thing I wanted to bring up – and I probably have mentioned this before, but it just comes to mind, and since we’re talking about history this is a good place. You may or may not remember a TV series called Xena: Princess Warrior. During her many adventures, Xena encounters the Trojan warriors fresh from Troy, Julius Caesar going about his conquests, and Joseph and Mary leaving Bethlehem with a baby.

She does no time traveling, she just randomly meets all kinds of people because 1) the producers probably figure no one’s going to care, or 2) no one knows that these people lived in different times. You’d like have to have a history degree or something, so it’ll fit just fine, and 3) don’t they all belong to the world of myth and legend and ancient times? You know where this is going with me.

Bible times, Bible places, Bible people.

Bible people, Bible stories, which the evangelical and fundamentalist Church, even Reformed churches, have often been guilty of when we don’t tell the Bible stories as a continuous story in order with historical sequence, we don’t attach it to a chronology, and we don’t explain how one story leads into the next. One week we get David and Goliath, the next we get Noah and the flood, the week after that Jesus is stilling the tempest, and the week after that Paul is being let down in a basket.

Children hear these, and these are nice cool stories, with no conception that there is a sequence here and a meaning. It’s like watching clips from Star Wars randomly generated in order. “Here’s some cool fighting scenes, and here’s some cool spaceships fighting each other, and here’s some more of those kooky robots running around.”

“Yeah, did you know that this is part of a movie and there’s actually a storyline here?”

With The Phantom Menace that’s debatable.

Better The Phantom Menace than whatever came after it – Clone Wars?

Attack of the Clones.

Yeah, worse.

So as we talk about history, let’s keep those things in mind. First of all, the Bible is a historical book. Many people who have never read the Bible will find that a little surprising. They know that there are stories that Christians think are historical, but what they don’t generally realize is the whole book is set in the context of history.

Almost all the books are dated in terms of the reign of such-and-such a king, either a Jewish king or a Gentile king, from empires we know – Babylon, Persian, Greece, and Rome – or they’re tied to a chronology – so many years from Adam, so many years from the Flood, so many years from Abraham’s entrance into the land to the Exodus, so many years from the Exodus to the building of Solomon’s Temple, the 490 years, 70 7’s from the decree of Cyrus to the coming of Christ, and all kinds of other chronological data along the way that says, “This is a real story that has a sequence.” Not only does A follow B, but we know generally by how many years or decades or centuries that A follows B.

We can see, “Okay, enough time for these people to move here, enough time for this person to have children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, enough time for this nation to come into existence and suddenly be a threat.” We can see a historical unfolding, and the books subconsciously point this out, usually in the first few verses.

I’ve got the quote from Luke’s gospel. Luke is a superb historian, and this comes in the third chapter.

In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar—when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, Herod tetrarch of Galilee, his brother Philip tetrarch of Iturea and Traconitis, and Lysanias tetrarch of Abilene— during the high-priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness.

We know most of these people from secular history. We know the geographical districts over which they reigned. We know facts about how they were administered. We know where Judea is. And it’s not just sometime during the reign of Tiberius, but the fifteenth year in. It’s very exact. The Bible is like this. We’re telling true history.

“What about all the other books? There are history books, but then how about the Psalms?”

The Psalms generally, for instance, are describing a particular event in the life of David or some other psalmist. Sometimes the titles tell us exactly what it is, but even if they don’t, we can read the psalm and say, “Oh, this person was undergoing this kind of crisis, this kind of difficulty, or this kind of blessing, and this is coming out,” or the psalm itself is recording history in a poetic form, but it’s still history. The fact that you’re putting it in poetry doesn’t make it untrue. It just is a more beautiful thoughtful way of talking about it.

You get to Paul’s epistles. “They’re not history.”

Yeah, they’re written to real historical churches with real historical problems, and we’re getting a snapshot. What do historians love as source documents? Communication between two different people. That’s just great, especially when it references times and places and culture and customs, and the whole Bible is like that.

Now, you can pick up some Hindu literature or some American cult literature and sometimes you can’t even read through the syntax. It’s about on the level of Lewis Carroll –

‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe.

What does this even talk about? “Oh, that’s religious language.” Well, see, there we go again. Religion takes us out of the phenomenal, out of that which we can discuss with words, that which has historical grounding, and takes us to some other plane, some other dimension. But that’s not what the Bible does. The Bible always grounds us in a physical reality.

About 2,000 years ago, a man named Jesus of Nazareth, who was also the eternal Son of God, went to a specific cross on a specific hill outside Jerusalem, and died, pouring out specific drops of blood while people taunted him, and he gave his soul a sacrifice for sin.

Three days later he physically, biologically, medically, and physiologically rose from the dead so that he was no longer dead, but he was actively alive, as we said, with pumping heart, nerves and synapses firing and all that, so that when he walked out of the tomb he left imprints in the sand. He was really there. If you reached out and touched him, you would have felt warm flesh. He’s that alive. The story is that real.

Something you said earlier, Emily, is we’re part of that story, and that’s the thing. If we’re going to teach history to our kids, that’s the thing. The story is not over yet. There’s a line in Lord of the Rings when Sam and Frodo are taking a rest. I don’t remember what Sam is looking at, the stars or something, and he says, “Oh, that reminds me of this story about prying the Simaril out of the crown of Morgoth. But wait, the light from that is the light in the phial you’re carrying. We’re part of the same story! Don’t these stories ever end?”

No, they don’t. Tolkien knew that when he wrote The Lord of the Rings, that he was simply building on The Silmarillion, which he hadn’t even written yet.

We look back at the Bible and say, “That’s our story. We’re part of this.” One day we’ll all get together and we’ll tell our parts to one another, and probably be surprised at a good many things. “Wait, you mean you’re the daughter of….?” “Wait, you knew so-and-so…” “Wait, you picked up that book from…” “Wait, you were the one who did that just before I went in, which made it possible for me to go in, so that…”

God has an incredibly complex story, and I’m sure he’s smiling thinking, “Wait till they find out what a coincidence that is – ha ha.” There’s so much we don’t know, but it’s not an accident. It’s plot. Plot is deliberate. Plot is intentional. Plot moves forward on some level.

The action often may seem to be retarded, that is to be backward, but in the process the characters in their character move forward. We grow. We learn to trust God more. So there’s always some kind of forward motion in God’s story. God never rewinds and gives us a second chance in that sense. The second chance comes as a new chance, not the old chance rewound. Everything is always new as we flow toward the future and the future flows toward us.

We do have to be careful, I think, especially in American history. Sometimes there’s a temptation to say, “Ah yes, God has a story and I understand exactly how it’s flowing, and isn’t God clever? Look at his providential founding of the United States, and these documents are definitely inspired, right?” Let’s not do that.

I used to work for a gentleman who was a leader in the America’s Christian history movement. He was a good man. He really truly was a gentleman, but I was forced by my connection with him to hang around with some of the people who took on that kind of attitude, and it was at times embarrassing.

Yes, there were interesting things that God did that stood out that helped the colonists, and part of the problem here is people say, “See? That’s providence.” Yes, and when the Americans lost battles, that was providence. And when George Washington’s doctors bled him to death because it was the thing to do, that was also providence.

This man had two sons that passed through my class and I asked each of them in turn, in light of their father’s ministry and his emphasis on providence, “What is providence?” First of all, they could not answer that, which was interesting, given that this was something their father pounded on a lot. But when I kind of gave them a hint and said, “Do you think it’s like…” and I wasn’t giving them the right answer, I was feeding them a false answer, “Yeah, it’s like when God comes in and does really nifty things in history.”

No. Providence is God’s total control of all things – “the everywhere present power of God whereby, as it were by His hand, He upholds and governs heaven, earth, and all creatures, so that nothing happens by chance, but by His Fatherly hand.”

Obviously that just means most things.

Some, most things, some important things.

I was talking to a young college student a couple days ago and he had this very question, and he was a young man. He hadn’t had all the advantages that we had, I think, as growing up in Christian schools, but he was struggling and trying to figure it out. He put this question to me quite seriously, and he listened for a real answer.

He said, “God can control everything. God is in nature sovereign and he could rule everything, but does he choose to do so?”

You’ve got to think about that.

What is the alternative?

Yeah, how many things does it take for God not to control before he loses control completely? How about if there’s this little bacteria he doesn’t control? What if there’s this asteroid heading toward Earth that he doesn’t control? What if he doesn’t control that one moment when this man and woman get together and conceive a child, or fail to conceive a child because they have a little tizzy fit at each other, and history is altered forever?

For God to be the storyteller, for God to be sovereign and in control, for God to predestinate, he must also actively bring to pass everything he’s planned.

“Isn’t that fatalism?”

No, because God uses secondary causes. He creates us to be the sort of people we are, and we choose to be the sort of people we are, so that when the time comes and he needs X to happen in the story, “Wow, look at this! We’re the people who absolutely would choose X and would not have it any other way.”

How does God do all that? I don’t know. I don’t know how God created heaven and earth out of nothing, either, and that’s usually what I come back to. I think that’s what I said to this young college student. “You explain to me how God made heaven and earth out of nothing, and then I will solve for you the mystery of man’s freewill and responsibility versus God’s predestination.”

There’s a reason that Genesis 1:1 is Genesis 1:1. It’s the first verse in the Bible. Once you accept that God does things for real that we can see the consequence of, and we have absolutely no conception how in the world you would do that, then so much just becomes easy from there on out.

Do we know? No. But we can believe what the Bible says, that man’s choices are meaningful, that man in responsible, that God holds him accountable and there’s nothing unfair about it because man is choosing to be what he wants to be. He’s acting out of his own heart, and yet God has a plan from eternity and he actively brings it to pass, and there’s no contradiction there.

“I don’t get that!”

“Exactly. You’re not God.”

“Will we understand it all one day?”

“No, because you’re still not God.”

“Farther along we’ll know all about it, Farther along we’ll understand why.” I don’t think so.

Not necessarily.

Not necessarily. “Some day God will explain it all!” No, he’ll probably explain a lot because he likes to tell a story and think about it, but there’s going to be some things that he can’t explain because we’re finite and he’s infinite, and we have to be okay with that.

We have to accept that God is a storyteller who has multiple goals for us, but the chief one around which everything spins is he is conforming us to the image of Jesus Christ, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers, and thus he causes all things – allll things – to work together. There’s that storytelling thing. We’re bringing lots of different things together into one storyline, for our good, that we might be conformed to the image of Jesus. Thus is predestination.

So again, as we look at Christianity, we’re looking at a religion that’s grounded in history, in which God himself reveals himself in history and through history, real historical events in which he not only governs our history, but himself in the person of his Son comes into our history and thus becomes a historical character forever. The incarnation did not end when Jesus ascended.

God stands outside of time. Jesus, according to his human nature, is within time, and always will be from here on out. He will always be our flesh. He will always be true man. So now he gets to enjoy the ride of the story too, which has got to be a kick of its own kind of thing.

Author inserts have been happening for a long time.

You know, I never thought of it in those terms, but that is so accurate. What if Shakespeare made himself show up in Hamlet?

Tom Bombadil?

It’s just fun sometimes, that’s why.

It’s just fun. It’s a little more than fun in God’s case, but it was at least fun for him.

At times. It wasn’t all fun, for sure.

Yeah, there’s the whole cross thing, but ultimately even that was a joy. Jesus, for the joy that was set before him, endured the cross, despising the shame. Joy carried him through it, even though physically it hurt literally like hell, because that’s what he endured on the cross when God made his soul an offering for sin.

And yet the greater joy of what it was accomplishing carried him through all that – his love for us, his desire to see his seed, both by omniscience as he hung on the cross, and one day in person when we are all together at the climax of the story that passes into the next great story, as Lewis would say. So when we start teaching Christianity we find ourselves teaching history.

The first major creed of the Church is the Apostles Creed, which is all about history. God created history, Jesus came down into history, born to the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate – a particular civil ruler of a particular Roman administration district at a particular time in Earth’s history – crucified, dead, buried, rose again physically and literally from the dead.

The Church operates in history and the issue then is not Gnostic realization, but the forgiveness of sins because we’ve broken the law of a God who has revealed himself. The Church, which operates in history, then finally the resurrection of the body into everlasting history.

Sometimes we talk about, “Well, history ends.” Redemptive history ends. It’s the day when the Church is saved, but time flow continues. A lot of people seem to get the idea that we will live outside of time. There’s that old hymn, “When the trumpet of the Lord shall sound and time shall be no more…” that’s a misunderstanding of a phrase in Revelation, the idea of – “He swore by him who lives forever and ever that time will be no more.”

Time is up, is what Revelation is saying. There will be a time when the cry of the martyrs God will answer. Time will be up. No more delay.

“Pencils down, please.”

Yes, exactly. Blow the whistle, call the game, but life goes on afterwards, and eternal life goes on, well, eternally. So the story in that sense never never ends. We will always be telling the old, old story for endless ages.

Now there’s something to think about when we start pondering eternity, that it will be a real eternity. It will not be an upper-story experience that we label eternity because we’re lame and can’t come up with anything. We will have real bodies, real fingers and toes and feet, and however our eternal organs will be arranged at that point so that they’re immortal. We’ll see with our eyes and hear with our ears and sing with our voices, and it will be a real renewed creation.

Our feet will touch earth.

Our feet will touch earth. We will breathe air. It will be a real planet in a real solar system or something like that. We’re not told all the details on how God will arrange it, but there will be stuff to do.

My suspicion is that a lot of young men, especially the virile manly “I need to go out and throw something” type, are turned off on Christianity because what they see of heaven is sitting around in an eternal worship service listening to a preacher or singing songs they don’t like, and who wants that?

An infinite white field with a hazy filter over it.

Yeah, you’ve seen that, too. That kind of thing.

And you’re wearing a dress.

“This is a dress.” Rather than seeing it as a real world where you can’t die anymore. So this is what my students ask, “So does that mean if I got in like a Lamborghini and ran it as fast as I could straight into a stone wall I’d survive and it wouldn’t even hurt?”

“Yeah, pretty much.”

“I so want to do that!”

”Good, there you go.”

I can climb Half Dome and jump off, for the heck of it.

Oh, that would be so fun. I’m not into skydiving, like I don’t want to jump out of a moving plane, especially a perfectly good moving plane, but I love heights. Jumping off of something high sounds cool.

Let’s talk a little bit more about history as part of a corporate and individual identity, because we see that even with American history. Even those of us who have come into our American identity not by way of the Pilgrims, somehow our story still starts with the Pilgrims or before. There’s this specific train that is really important to our understanding of what it means to be an American, even though my family came over in the 20th century. It’s not my story in the sense that I’m descended from them, but somehow it still is my story.

It’s your story in that you entered into a covenantal corporate existence that goes back far beyond your lifetime, and that of your parents and grandparents and great-grandparents. America had its own story going and you’ve joined the cast. Isn’t it always great when someone leaves and someone new comes on the cast and you say, “Eh, I don’t know if I like this person or not. I wonder what kind of chemistry they’re going to generate here,” and we start questioning the writers and the casting director’s choice.

This happens all the time in real life. It happens with nations and happens with families. “I didn’t even know this guy and now I’m marrying him and we’re going to have a story together, but my story goes way back before I even met him, and how does that….??” Because God does that. He blends multitudes of storylines and plot lines together to create a greater story.

When you come to America, America does have a story and God has been active in our story, and that story includes some very decided Christian roots planted by very strong Christian people with very good theology, and then some strong Christians who had not so great Christian theology, and some very weak Christians who had no theology to speak of whatsoever, and some flat-out heretics. Then there are the apostates who said they were Christians, or tried to imply that, but actually never were.

All of this is feeding into our institutions, our culture, the way we speak, our cultural allusions, and assumptions we make. Americans have a vision, at least until this generation, and even in spite of everything that’s happened. We have a vision of what America is for.

We talk about liberty and freedom. We talk about our responsibility to others, to the nations. We talk about America as a sanctuary and a city on a hill, a light to the world. We fought wars to make the world safe for democracy, so we said. We can look behind the curtain and see what was really going on, but if they had not used those phrases and those images, they couldn’t have sold World War 1 and World War 2 nearly so easily, or the Spanish American War, or the westward expansion. They had to borrow Christian concepts and Christian words, because that resonated with people. That’s part of us.

And those words were incredibly powerful.

Yeah, and that same thing wouldn’t have worked in, say, Italy or Egypt. Now Scotland – Scotland had and still does have a very decided view of its own heritage, starting with giving England a black eye and a bloody nose, but then England also has its vision that it’s a special people, but theirs manifested itself as empire and the white man’s burden and all that. But other countries are good to just say, “We are the final…” – think of Russia before the Marxist takeover – “We are the final order. We are therefore the final expression of the kingdom of God on earth. We’re it. Come join us and submit to our glory.”

They were the third Rome – Rome, Constantinople, Moscow. They saw themselves as a continuation of that story, and it shaped their consciousness.

And Rome is a continuation of Troy.

Yes, Rome is a continuation of Troy, so identity. There’s an episode of Babylon 5 which I would recommend to you if you know anything about the series. Our heroes are being tested by the Powers That Be to see if they’re worthy to carry on the great responsibility, so an inquisitor appears, who takes them to a dark place in the bowels of the ship and simply begins asking them the question, “Who are you?”

At first our heroes don’t know what to make of that, and they give their name. “No, that’s your name. Who are you?”

“Well, I’m the son of…” or “I’m the daughter of…”

“That’s relationship. Who are you?”

In that universe and that storyteller, he’s trying to get at something internal in the heart, and yet the answers were not bad answers. The Bible is covenantal. Who am I? I am the husband of Kate Uttinger. I am the father of Emily, Hayley, and Maryellen Uttinger. I am the friend of…” and I could start listing all of my friends.

I work with you people. I work for this school and these people. I was the student of…I am a member of the congregation in this place that meets at this time, and these are the elders and these are my pastors.

That’s true meaning. That’s true identity, because I’m unique. There are other people who have done some of these things and are some of these things, but that’s my story and it is defined in terms of relationship. I am an American and I’m not ashamed of that.

So as we talk about identity – Who are you? I’ve asked the same question of my kids at school and do regularly year by year, and they too generally are flustered. “I don’t know what that means.”

“Okay, wait till I ask you the next couple questions in the series. Where are you going? What do you want? Whom do you serve? Whom do you trust?”

These are relationships, and the historical flow means something. If I lose the historical order – this is not me but some hypothetical character says, “Well, I’m recovering from amnesia but I remember something about a war, and I was wearing a uniform and firing a gun, so I must have been a soldier in a war.”

“What war?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where?”

“I don’t remember.”

“What was your rank?”

“I don’t know. But then I also remember being married.”

“Were you married before or after the war?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did you have children?”

“Yeah, I remember holding a little baby in my arms.”

“Boy or girl?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did you hold the baby before or after you got married?”

“I don’t know.”

When we start losing historical sequencing, when we lose our story, we lose our identity. We are characters in a story. Some of the elements are big and easy to talk about, some are little finessed things that we rarely share with anybody, but God knows and that’s the story he wrote for us as we find our story rooted in his bigger story – “I’m a Christian. I’m a servant of Jesus Christ. I’m an agent of his kingdom.”

My wife once asked the girls, “Ask your dad why he teaches,” and my answer was simple. It’s always been the same one, although hardly anyone ever asks. “Why do you teach? Why do you do this?”

“I’m fighting for the life of the world.”

That may seem grandiose and full of hubris, and it doesn’t mean that I’m the only one doing it or that I’m a big player in this, but that’s simply the battle. “Go make disciples of all nations. See all nations blessed. God so loved the world. You should too,” so that’s what I’m doing, according to the gifts that God gives me.

What we’re doing here is part of that. A little part? I don’t know what God’s going to do with it. He could do great things or he may do seemingly nothing, although at least some of the people who listen tell us it is a blessing and they’ve grown, so that’s good.

People out there listening, please invite other people to listen. I’d like 1,000 listeners, not so I can boast, “Hey, we have 1,000 people listening,” but because I think touching 1,000 lives with the truth of the gospel is a worthy goal. And if God only gives us a couple hundred, great. If he gives us 10,000, great. God be praised.

When you’re in a story, you see where the story is going and you’ve got to go. In a mystery story you want to solve the mystery. In a war story you want to win the battle. In a romance you want to win the girl’s heart and marry her.

The goal of my story is to see the world embrace the truth of the gospel, and I will not live to see it all, but the more we can pass this vision to others, the more the kingdom will come day by day, however small or large our parts may be.

That is a good note to finish on. Do you have any recommendations for us this evening?

I have one, I think. I may have made it before, but I don’t know. The author is William Kirk Kilpatrick. He’s Roman Catholic, although he never mentions it, but it becomes obvious if you read the book. The book is Psychological Seduction: The Failure of Modern Psychology.

There are a couple chapters – looks like it’s 8 and 9 – that talk about some of what we’ve been talking about, life as story, and the idea that sanity, mental saneness, rests in finding your place in the story. If you’re disconnected, if you’re rootless, if you have no relation to other people and other things, then of course your life is meaningless. You’re thrown back on existentialism, where you by your own choices are creating yourself day by day. That may sound all heroic and all, but it’s really dumb and it’s self-destructive. Once we understand ourselves as characters in God’s story, then meaning returns, and man needs meaning.

When I was in college I was in a class on existentialism and I read a book, Man’s Search for Meaning, by Viktor Frankl. It recounts I believe his own experiences in a German prison camp. Life was so meaningless, and he found that the people who survived the prison camps were those who had a sense of meaning. Have you read the book, Bryan?

I read it late last year. It’s phenomenal.

Meaning makes all the difference. It gives you sanity. It grounds you in reality and it gives you hope to go on. If there’s no meaning, then why not just kill yourself, really. We live in an age when a lot of young people have lost meaning and they’ve lost hope, and suicide rates are horribly up. Losing community, particularly during quarantine and all that’s followed, has not helped any because we need community. We need relationship. That’s part of the meaning. I cannot by myself create meaning for myself. Ultimately, I need God, but God has people. The whole book is really worth reading.

There’s one kind of flaky chapter that you can skip over, and you’ll figure out what that is easily enough, but the other stuff is good. It’s well-written. The kids I’ve assigned it to have generally enjoyed it. It’s not an uphill trudge. So that’s Psychological Seduction. It’s not about seducing people. It’s about how psychology seduces us away from the truth that’s in Christ, or can, under the wrong circumstances. The author himself is a psychologist, so he sees benefits.

Maybe I misheard which book you were talking about. Is that the name of the book?

That’s the book I recommended, but I could recommend Man’s Search for Meaning too, since I mentioned that one, which is also phenomenal.

Oh, thank you, yes. I was talking about Man’s Search for Meaning.

I know, and I had gone there and you echoed it. Emily, how about you?

I actually want to recommend a beverage. David made us some delicious hamburgers earlier this week and we enjoyed them while sipping this sort of coffee beer that Guinness has put out. It’s a cold brew nitro-infused what-not. I don’t have it anymore because we drank it, so I can’t read the can to you, but if you go into a store that purveys such goods I’m sure you can find it. It’s kind of anticlimactic after a wonderful episode about the scope of history.

Now I have one, which will help. We can make it less anticlimactic. I’m going to recommend acts of service, because they’re a wonderful way to let people know that you care about them, especially if the act of service you are performing is one that they don’t like doing.

Such as cooking, when my husband does it. It warms my heart.

One thing that my fiancée hates doing is washing dishes, so when I go over while she’s at work, I let out my dog and take him for a walk and then I pretty frequently just wash her dishes for her as well. I love doing it because I know how much it stresses her out.

That’s awesome. Thank you, David, for editing this part and making it smooth. I think that is all we have for this evening, so thank you both so much for this conversation. It’s been a joy.

Thanks also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband. If you’d like to send us an email, you can do so. Our email address is [email protected].

You can check out our show notes and transcripts. If you prefer to read the podcast rather than listen, you can do that. You can find those on our website at anchor.fm/haltingtowardzion.

Tell a friend about us. See you next week.