Emily Maxson: 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 our friend
Bryan Broome, and we’re going to introduce
ourselves because we haven’t done that in
a while.
I’m Emily. I am a writer. I have a degree
in history and I like music and lots of other
things. Who are you, Greg?
Greg: I’m a teacher. I’m a husband and
a father. I’m a writer and I’m a nerd,
or so I’m told.
Emily: I can testify. I’ve known you long
enough.
Greg: I think the best way to find out who
I am and who you are and who Bryan is is to
just to listen to us for a while, because
none of these words really means a whole lot
until you hear us talk.
So Bryan, having said that and ruined your
introduction, who are you?
Bryan: I feel like Jesus-juking everyone and
saying, “I’m Bryan. I’m a Christian
and no other identity matters.”
Emily: Oh! I was just so out-spiritualed!
Bryan: No, here’s the real introduction.
My name is Bryan. That part wasn’t a lie.
I’m also a nerd. I love theology and dogs
and enjoy partaking of whiskey on occasion.
I used to think that I was writer until I
realized I was more of a reader really. I
actually have an Associate’s degree in music
and make a hobby out of talking about theology
and music and all those things that interest
me.
Emily: Awesome. We’ve been doing this for
several months now and we’ve talked about
everything from theology proper in the simplicity
of God, to the Trinity, to origin myths of
different pagan religions. Today we’re going
to talk about ziggurats, because they are
relevant.
There are ziggurats on every continent dating
back to ancient days. The word ziggurat is
actually of Sumerian origin or Akkadian. It’s
an Akkadian word, but we see these pyramid
structures all over the world in pretty much
every pagan culture. So what do ziggurats
or pyramids represent to us? Why are they
important?
Bryan: They’re the best way for rocks to
not fall down after a long time.
Emily: That’s a valid point.
Greg: There is an engineering aspect to this,
no doubt.
We go back to the garden of Eden. God made
a mountain. I’ve been asked, “Where does
it say that?” In Ezekiel where it calls
Paradise the Mountain of God, but besides
that, water runs downhill and there’s a
river that comes out of Eden and splits into
four heads and they go out from there, so
obviously we’re on high ground with water
going down.
God put his own sanctuary there. We’re told
that God made Adam and then he planted a garden.
God was the first gardener. Trivia – Adam
was not the first gardener, God was. Adam
watched God do this and then he was placed
in the garden and told to dress and keep it.
This was also Adam’s home and it was God’s
sanctuary, where he planted the sacramental
trees and where he came to walk and talk with
man.
Just on the simplest level of imagery, why
do you climb a mountain?
Bryan: To get higher.
Emily: Closer to heaven. To experience mystical
experiences? Is that what you’re going to
say?
Greg: It is not an accident that the phrase
“get high” is often associated with various
sorts of mysticism, because we understand
innately that God is, in some sense, up. Heaven
is up. God is higher than we are, and mountains,
like trees, are ladders to heaven. This is
imagery that carries all the way through scripture.
Eden was a mountain that God created and from
which eventually man was banished as he came
down past the garden gate into the valley
below to the howling wilderness.
As men look back to Paradise, they look back
to this mountain that you could climb back
up to and get to God. Oh wait, there’s these
cherubim guardian things that are scary monsters
and have a flaming sword. There are monsters.
There are gods in the mountain. It would be
nice if we could get past them and reclaim
Paradise again, but God doesn’t seem to
want us to do that.
Wait, wait – what if we did it ourselves?
What if we constructed our own mountain that
symbolically and magically would let us back
into heaven, that would let us reclaim the
Paradise we’ve lost?
The first attempt that we have recorded for
us in scripture – there may have been others
before the flood – but the one that the
Bible draws to our attention was at Babel
in the land of Shinar. After the flood, 150-200
years or so, men got together since they moved
east and said, “Go to! Come on. Let’s
make a city and a tower whose top shall reach
into heaven,” (King James), but if you look
at the italics it really just says “a mountain
whose top is unto heaven.”
The idea was not, “We want to create something
so tall that we actually can physically scale
the skies.” They weren’t stupid. We’ve
been talking about their technological expertise.
Nor does it mean that they wanted to build
something that was so high that, if another
flood came, they would be above the waters.
The ancients repeated both of those ideas,
and so have moderns, but what they were creating
was a piece of magical technology, a Star
Gate if you will, something that would allow
them to step into divinity, to become gods
themselves by counterfeiting Eden, by creating
their own man-made mountains – not something
that God would make and that they would be
subject to, but something they would build
on their own terms, and it was the center
of a community.
We often look at the reference to the tower
and forget that first they’re going to build
a city, and the heart of the city is this
magical structure that will place them in
the very heart of heaven, and this will be
their unifying factor.
It’s at this point then that we should probably
go back and think about the pagan doctrine
of continuity of being.
Emily: Before we get there, I have a question.
When I was a kid I always pictured the Tower
of Babel as the Tower of Pisa, except maybe
straight, but there’s this whole history
when we actually look at the account of Babel
of seeing that as a ziggurat, as a stepped
pyramid. Where does that come from?
Greg: At the beginning of the 20th century,
archeology was just becoming a thing, thanks
to Henry David Layard’s pioneering work
in Nineveh, where he dug and found, “Hey,
there was a Nineveh and there were Assyrians
and they were real people. All of these mounds
you see scattered all over the place? There
are probably cities buried beneath them.”
“Really? No. The Bible was simply wrong
and made all that stuff up. Oh wait. You’re
shipping things back to England and they’re
huge and magnificent. Huh! You mean if we
just started digging in the Middle East we’d…wow!”
There was a chap, and before we started the
podcast we were debating how to say his name,
so Bryan is going to tell me how to say it
again.
Bryan: Koldewey.
Greg: He lived from 1855-1925 and he did archeological
work in what is now called Iraq. In the process
he uncovered the foundations of an ancient
structure that seemed to match with historical
records described as a tower of some sort,
some kind of stepped tower. He speculated
that it might actually be the foundations
of the Tower of Babel, and if not, at least
more or less the site where the original Babel
may have stood, having been replaced once
or twice along the way. The ancient world
knew these things and, as you said up front,
throughout the world we keep discovering them.
We think first of all of pyramids and, since
they are so out in the open, not being surrounded
by dense jungles or covered up with sand,
our first thought when we start thinking about
steps to heaven is something pyramid-like,
but most of the pyramid-like structures that
we’re finding throughout the world are more
of a stepped nature, suggesting the gradual
increase as one moves from one level of experience
to another, up towards the gods.
There are also some historical descriptions
that speak of these things as containing at
the top temples where the god could appear,
and places where he could lie with his bride
and things like that. They were centers and
focal points of worship and they were common.
Every city in the Near East, as far as we
know, had one.
It’s only when we get to Egypt that they
begin to take on a very different form and
they begin to multiply in the same location.
Egyptians had a slightly different take on
all this, but the idea of a stepped pyramid,
of a ladder to heaven, is very common.
For instance, the ziggurats of Mesopotamia
had names like “The temple of the mountain
of the universe,” “The temple of the mountain,”
“The temple of the link between heaven and
earth,” and thus we come back to this idea
of continuity of being between the earth and
deity.
These things, both symbolically and, more
importantly, magically were the link between
heaven and earth, holding the two together,
that allowed men to ascend ritually, magically,
spiritually, mystically into divinity, to
become gods. They were symbols of the social
order, but they were key elements within the
social order. That’s what we’re looking
at as we look at the Tower of Babel and these
other copycats throughout the world.
Emily: That brings us back to your point from
earlier, which is the continuity of being,
that there isn’t a Creator/creature distinction,
that man is qualitatively different from God
but that there’s only a quantitative difference,
that man is by nature what God is, but God
is more.
Greg: This is simply paganism, from Satan’s
come-on in the Garden of Eden forward, “You
shall be as gods, deciding for yourself good
and evil.” Yahweh, the trinitarian creator
God as he presents himself, Satan says, is
inconceivable. “It’s impossible. No such
being could exist. That would imply things
like total sovereignty, in which case we would
all be meaningless and lose all of our individuality
and freedom. We would just be cogs in the
machine and we’d be left with bare fatalism,
so rationalism ensues. That, of course, is
obviously unacceptable, so Yahweh is obviously
lying.”
Satan never said there wasn’t such a being
as Yahweh, just that he was highly exaggerating
who and what he was.
Emily: “Rumors of his ultimate deity have
been greatly exaggerated.”
Greg: Somebody obviously had come and talked
to them, but he couldn’t be that. He might
be very big, very powerful, but he could not,
in the nature of things, be sovereign. Satan
was willing to allow that maybe this Yahweh
person was a god of some sort, because he
promises that Adam and Eve could be just like
that. They could be gods and, by implication,
he’s kind of hinting that maybe he’s one
of those too, but he doesn’t draw their
attention to that. He never claims to be the
sovereign creator.
First, he knows he’s not, and all the demons
in his army know he’s not, so that would
be kind of dumb. But he’s stepping away
from that into what is, on the one hand, a
pantheism – “All being is one being…
– but at the same time a polytheism – “but
that oneness has many manifestations which
rise out of the oneness in a chaotic fashion
and are resolved back into the oneness,”
unity ultimately being the supreme thing here,
which leaves us with relativism. Every god
is the power in its place for the moment,
but all gods can pass away, have their hour
and leave the scene and be supplanted by other
gods who are more relevant for our time and
our needs.
We’re left with pluralism of various sorts,
both religious and political. Every god has
his day. Every god has his law. Every god
has his law for his day, but nothing stands,
nothing is sure. There are no permanent over-arching
truths. There is simply the flux that is reality.
So Satan was an evolutionist and a magician.
He argues both as a rationalist and as an
irrationalist, because if all of this is relative
then we have no over-arching reason, although
we’ve been arguing from it, so we’re left
with something that pulls the scattered irrationality,
the chaos, together. In the ancient world
that was magic and the ancient world was drenched
in it, something the textbooks will not tell
you.
They may acknowledge a belief in totems and
amulets, particularly in the primitive tribes
in what were third-world countries, but our
ancestors – particularly if you’re Greek,
so their poets – wrote about the Olympian
deities and such, but they were naturalists
and scientists. No, they weren’t. They worshiped
their dead ancestors and they were frightened
of them, and their basic protection and remedy
was magic.
It’s not an accident that Christianity pretty
well obliterated magic from northern Europe
during what we call the Middle Ages or the
Age of Faith. When the Renaissance scholars
went back and began to read the Greeks and
Romans, what’s the first thing they did?
They started practicing magic. The second
thing they did was then argue for an all-powerful
State that could rule everything, but let’s
get our priorities here.
Emily: That brings us back to something we’ve
talked about before, the chaos/order dialectic,
that the State comes in as the mediator, if
you will, to bring order to the chaos of the
world through these sacrifices. You have the
priest/king often making the sacrifices at
the top of the ziggurat. You have this political
structure intertwined with the religious structure
of the day.
Greg: And the priest/king often bore the title
Son of God or Son of the Gods or, in Egypt,
Son of the Divine Sun, Son of Ra, because
in him deity becomes incarnate. Being god
while king on the earth, all of his subjects
are automatically his slaves and there is
no appeal beyond his authority.
He is necessary because, without the order
he provides – and again, his chief weapons
are his army, his bureaucracy, and magic – if
he can’t pull off some kind of order with
these things, then he’s going to fail. Some
usurper will take him out, some kind of coup
will happen, or their nation will be destroyed
by plague or famine or war or some such thing.
The common people looked to this Son of the
Gods, this priest/king, to make things work,
to bring order in the face of chaos, and yet
chaos was also basic because that’s where
things return. The underlying oneness of all
reality was all the unity that was guaranteed.
Any kind of formal unity – a community,
a civil government, a civil order – was
constructed in the face of chaos. As today,
people simply turned to the State and said,
“Save us.”
There was no thought that man could stand
up against the vagaries of chaos. There was
no personal God to beseech, a God you could
walk with and fear and trust to save you.
The only one who could save you was the State,
personified in a god/emperor. If he should
fail, everything fails.
So these cultures were inevitably Statist,
all the way down to our precious Greeks, whose
city-states, whose poleis, were all built
around the worship of dead ancestors, heroes,
kings of a past age. If you did not worship
this dead ancestor, you were not one of the
people. You were not human.
When Aristotle said, “Man is a political
animal,” what he was saying is man is an
animal who lives in polis. Man is defined
as man by being the social creature who lives
in terms of this particular political construction
based on the worship of this ancestor. If
you’re not one of them, you don’t count.
The Greek city-states, having various ancestors,
didn’t get along very well. The textbooks
tell us to look back to this time of Greek
hegemony and peace and tranquility and science
and all this, and you look at one generation
that for a little while scraped by with that,
but most of the time they fought each other,
tyrannized over each other, and eventually
fell victim to the Persians because they couldn’t
get their act together.
We’ve been lied to left and right about
the Greeks and about the pagan world in general.
A good source to turn to here, and should
go in our recommendations, is Saint Athanasius’s
On the Incarnation of the Word. He looks at
how the pagan world was before Jesus came,
and his analysis is that this was a world
that was terrorized by demons, by oracles,
by witchcraft and magic, and the world was
terrified.
Who was the Romantic poet who said, “If
only I could see Triton rising from the sea
and blowing his horn. Wouldn’t that be so
much better? I’d rather be a pagan suckled
on an outworn creed,” basically rather than
be a Christian.
It wasn’t because that would be a demon
rising out of the waters and people running
away screaming. They didn’t say, “Oh,
how lovely. My heart is just melting with
butter because of this experience.” They
were afraid of the world they lived in.
Lewis tries to get at this, I think pretty
well, in the Psyche story, Till We Have Faces.
He knew enough of the ancient world that he
was able to show what magic was like in the
older traditions that dominate the storyline.
He then a little less accurately portrays
the coming of Aristotle’s philosophy and
logic, but he does show us that even what
that comes, the true Greek, the fox, the teacher,
is unable really to shake himself free of
the older traditions. He says he’s beyond
them, he says it’s superstition, and yet
he’s just as terrified by these gods as
anybody else. That’s really what it was
like.
Emily: And Lewis wasn’t a Christian when
he re-told the story. I think he went back
and edited it.
Greg: Oh, did he?
Emily: That’s my understanding of it.
Greg: I don’t know. I would have to look.
I know that when asked about who Psyche is,
he wrote to one lady, “Psyche is a saint,
a noble pagan,” unfortunately.
Emily: We love Lewis, but he had some problems.
Greg: He had some problems occasionally.
So as we look at that world and we look at
ours, we see a lot of the same things. We
see the chaos of the world, and here you can
follow Marx, this whole revolution through
chaos into a brand new order. We ignite the
social conflict, we put the kindling underneath
it and heap the fires high, and it burns down
the old civilization and out of that, by our
wisdom and social planning, we create this
new order that will be so much better, until
the next time the cycle comes around.
At each point we call upon the new State,
which is so much better that the old State
for some reason that is completely unclear.
Oh yeah, it’s because they know us and love
us better than the others did, apparently.
Bryan: Meet the new boss, same as the old
boss.
Greg: Yeah, and we keep hoping that the State
can save us. This is a good time to talk about
this. I don’t know when this will play,
but right now we’re in the middle of the
coronavirus scare, and people are turning
to the State.
I don’t know how things are in your half
of the world. In California, we were remarkably
slow to start issuing orders. The mayor of
Sacramento and the governor were very slow
to say, “You shall not.” It was more like,
“Guys, could we maybe do it this way?”
I don’t how much of that was wise conservatism
and how much of it was, “These are Californians.
They’re not going to do what we say anyhow.”
Having gone out a little today, I’ve noticed
that we’re not doing what they say anyhow,
even though it has now become law.
Bryan: Oddly enough, having a state filled
with people who love to party and break rules,
doesn’t mean they listen to you. How weird.
Greg: And yet that’s what we have. So we
expect the State to fix it, even when we break
the rules, because of course we’re beyond
the rules personally. Everyone else should
listen, but I know better. When it all falls
apart we’re going to blame the State. They
should have done something.
We’ll look at the president. We’ll look
at Congress. We’ll look at this agency or
that agency and we’ll want to know why they
didn’t save us, because that’s what we
expect of them. Isn’t that what God is supposed
to do?
We can think here also – and it was a thing
more in my generation than yours – of this
old antique horse called the United Nations,
which grew out of the League of Nations. It
was this attempt to create a world court,
a world government, where we could talk out
all of our disagreements, all of our legal
challenges.
Within countries, counties, shires, and states,
they don’t go to war. They just appeal it
up to a central authority who solves all their
problems, and everyone nods and, maybe with
a grunt or a sigh, goes home and everything
works. Why can’t the world be like that?
It’s so easy. We would just hand over all
our national sovereignty to some world court
and it would be really great, and there would
be no more war.
After the first World War you may remember
there was an attempt to outlaw war, the Kellogg-Briand
Pact. Everyone signed this thing so, “Yes,
war will now be illegal.”
Emily: Why can’t we do that to crime?
Bryan: That worked so well for murder and
theft.
Greg: Yeah, we just do that. When the League
of Nations spectacularly failed to check first
Japan, then Italy, then Germany, eventually
people gave up on it and said, “All right,
that didn’t work but if we give it a new
name, a new building, put in more Soviet agents
up front, and get the United States on-board,
we could have this new thing. We’ll call
it the United Nations and it will save us.”
These member-states of the United Nations
determined to save the world from war, the
charter says, and it sets about setting forth
a philosophy of sheer humanism, where all
religions are equal in that they’re all
equally unimportant, and man is the reigning
god who can fix his problems if he will just
trust us and give us all the power we need
to make all this work.
Back in the 50s and 60s when this was a big
deal, lots and lots of Christians saw this
as the Babel in in the book of Revelation,
or a step toward the coming of the anti-Christ
or whatever. I don’t know that anybody is
that terrified of the United Nations these
days, but every now and then someone with
a conspiracy theory will tell us how all power
is about to transfer to their hands and we’re
about to lose all our freedoms.
Bryan: Which is very ironic, considering the
fact that no one follows the recommendations
of the UN anyway now.
Emily: Right, because what they can do, if
you make them upset, is they’ll come and
give you a talking to and say, “You’re
a really bad person for doing that.” That’s
what they do. Don’t get me started.
Bryan: “I will write and form a strongly-worded
letter sent directly to their head of state,
or if not them, their immediate subordinate.”
Emily: This is in fact the entire diplomatic
history of the UN.
Greg: We could use it as a platform for humiliating
this or that nation in front of the other
heads of state, but if head of state A is
completely immune to such abuse, he may laugh
it off and go home, and then we look stupid
for trying to humiliate him when we should
have known it wasn’t going to work.
This whole diplomatic history of what works
and doesn’t work – the truth is, very
little works because we’re stubborn and
sinful and willful.
Emily: And that’s also why we live in different
countries. We have separate nation-states
because we don’t get along.
Greg: Which is why the whole Satanic rebellion
has its problems, because here you have a
bunch of demons, all of whom want to play
God, saying, “Let’s play nice together
and accomplish a goal together.” Right,
that’s going to work really good. See The
Screwtape Letters and That Hideous Strength
and any other number of sources.
Bryan: Everyone’s got their own motives.
Greg: The mention of conspiracy theories brings
me back. One of the many problems with conspiracy
theories is that it gives assent to Satan’s
philosophy. Yes, man can be god. He can be
an evil, ugly, horrible god, and this guy’s
about to pull it off. Oh no, it’s the end
of the world! Rather than saying, “Wait,
and he’s got how many friends, exactly?”
Let’s say there’s five.
“So what’s really going on here is you’re
saying this guy and five others all want to
be God? Do I need to point out this is not
going to work and it’s going to be self-destructive?
Of course I do, because you’re so terrified
in believing that a man can be god, rejecting
basic Christian theology in the name of Christ,
that you tremble in your boots and don’t
get anything done except scare everybody.”
Again, having lived through the 50s, 60s,
and 70s, most of the Christian sources I knew
were oriented toward conspiracy theory and
were constantly telling us how the world was
going to end, how the Soviets were going to
take over, or how the United Nations were
going to take over, or the Illuminati was
going to take over, or fill in your favorite
conspiracy because, no less than the humanists,
they believed that man is god and capable
of ruling the world, and the true God is sitting
back wringing his hands, being not sovereign
but one more player in the field who hasn’t
been doing too well lately. He needs to work
on his end game.
Emily: Well, you know he’s a gentleman.
He doesn’t infringe on our free will.
Greg: Yes, there’s always that, and when
you’re Arminian in your theology and you
think that either God can’t or won’t,
because he’s a gentleman, interfere much,
then we’re kind of left on our own. And
yes, in spite of the fact that we somehow
expect people to come to Christ of their own
free will, we notice that they don’t and
that there’s a lot of really wicked evil
people out there who don’t trust Christ.
It’s getting worse and worse, and obviously
nothing could turn this around because, I
mean, it would take an act of God. Oh, he
doesn’t do that, does he?
Bryan: Not without our permission.
Greg: Yeah. Election: God votes one way, the
devil votes another, and I get to break the
tie. That’s election. That’s a definition
that goes back into frontier history in America.
It’s the way Americans have thought for
a very, very long time. Man takes precedence
over God, because how dare he not – and
that was the argument in Eden.
As time goes on, we become more epistemologically
self-conscious, self-aware in how we approach
things. It’s only been, what, half a generation
since the Southern Baptists were confronted
with open theism, where God not only did not
control the future, but God didn’t even
know the future, because since the future
didn’t exist yet and human choices were
so many, God couldn’t possibly know what
hadn’t happened so he’s waiting like we
are, like a good Dungeon Master or storyteller
waiting for his players to make the next decision
so he can go on.
He may have his game plan and his ideas of
where he’d like it to go, but those of us
who have done any role playing know that good
players can often completely upset the ideas
the of the Game Master or storyteller and
completely change the story line, so God’s
in this with us, cheering us on, because again
God is not sovereign. God is not God.
The constant fear is that if we were to admit
that God is God, then somehow we lose our
individuality, our significance, our freedom,
and we become puppets. We become characters
in someone else’s storyline, and that’s
something our pride is not willing to wrestle
with and that our logic can’t handle.
We cannot conceive of a God who can decree
the end from the beginning, and yet do it
in such a way that we act out of who we are
in a way that makes us wholly accountable.
We cannot face that, so we opt for rationalism
or irrationalism, for total unity or total
disunity, for complete chaos or complete order,
because the God who is actually three-in-one
is beyond our faith.
Bryan: Which ties back into the earlier point
about the way that these ziggurats were a
magical totem, because all magic is the will
of a man or men trying to make the universe
do their bidding instead.
Emily: To manipulate the forces of nature
in order to accomplish their own ends.
Bryan: Exactly.
Greg: At which point nature becomes purely
natural. It is a thing, and yet not so disassociated
from us that we can’t reach out and touch
it and bend it to our will. The spirits that
inhabit nature are just like us. The forces
that move the world are forces that move the
world.
I’ve actually had to explain this to Christians
far too many times. I will go to people and
say, “This is a trick question,” so I’m
playing fair. “True or false? God created
the natural forces that run the universe?”
and virtually every Christian I’ve ever
asked that of has said, “Of course.”
Now, what they’re hearing is “God created
the universe.” They’re not listening closely.
“Yes, as opposed to evolution, we like this.”
“No. There are lots of people in the room,
and 6-day creationism and generic evolution
are not the only players here. I’m asking
you if there are natural forces that run the
universe, and God simply initiated them.”
This is called deism, and yet every time I
get Christians agreeing with me. I’ve had
young Christians understand and catch it and
say, “Oh, what you’re saying is….”
I remember doing one for the Association of
Christian Schools International. I was doing
a lecture that I call “Faeries and Photons,”
and I spelled faeries the way it’s supposed
to be spelled. It was the earliest of the
lectures and I had about 25 people, which
is unusual because people generally didn’t
want to get up, and most of them were 20-ish.
The first thing I said, “I’m glad to see
you all. How many of you came because of the
way I spelled faeries?” and most of the
hands went up, so that was good. But as I
worked through this with them and tried to
get them to understand what the sovereignty
and providence of God actually means, that
although God most certainly makes use of secondary
causes, he’s the one who makes the connection
happen and is the one who orchestrates the
secondary causes as well, he makes the rain
to come, the sun to shine and so on.
Bryan: I was going to draw that back to the
garden of Eden itself, where Satan comes to
Adam and Eve and basically says, “If you
eat of this tree you will not surely die.
God is a liar.” He treats basically the
fruit of this tree, or the tree itself and
the fruit is a byproduct of it, as the magical
totem that grants them God-hood.
The eating of the fruit may have been something
that God allowed Adam and Eve to do after
their period of probation, but it would not
have been the fruit itself that had a causative
relation to their enlightenment – using
the term loosely. It would have been God’s
enabling of their minds through a means.
Greg: Yes, and the means was ethical. “Will
you obey the word of God? When you have obeyed
the word of God, amazing things happen, like
you’re wiser because you’ve learned to
submit your thinking to what God has said.”
So thank you, good point.
Back to where I was going with this, and this
may tie in there. As I was trying to explain
this, there was one young man who obviously
had never heard anything about the sovereignty
of God, and he was taking all this very seriously.
There was a paradigm kind of shift going on.
He says, “But wait. Then if there’s evil
in the world, how can God be God?” and we
went off on what, from my point of view, was
a complete tangent because I was trying to
do a workshop on physical science and he wanted
to talk about basic theology and the problem
of evil in the world, not in an argumentative
way but because suddenly he was seeing from
the Bible, as I was quoting it and making
reference to it, he was seeing the Bible which
reveals God as something a whole lot bigger
than he had ever thought, and it challenged
everything.
I hope I helped him, and I hope that the other
people who were there profited. One or two
of them came back later and said that I did,
and at least I didn’t get any arguments.
So I’ve had all kinds of interesting feedback
when I point out that no, the Bible is not
a deistic book.
Satan was offering a form of deism. “Yes,
there is this God person, and behind him even
something else that has structured the universe,
but it runs on its own. There are natural
forces at work here, and they are natural.
They are not personal. They owe no allegiance
to Yahweh. They are not his tools. They are
not his servants. They’re just natural and,
in that sense, neutral and abstract. Anybody
can manipulate them, and that’s what magic
is.”
Going back to the garden of Eden, “The tree
is one magic item that Yahweh has discovered
and he’s trying to keep you from it. But
if you eat the magic fruit, you will be wakened
from your current state of mortality and ascend
up into glory or whatever.”
What God was really saying is, “I’m putting
you to an ethical test. Don’t eat that.”
That’s the point. The problem was not with
the fruit. The fruit was not magical. It wasn’t
poisoned. There was no DNA-altering substance
in it. God simply made a promise tied to their
obedience or disobedience. If they would obey,
greater blessings would follow to them. If
they disobeyed, then they’d fracture their
covenant relationship with God.
The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge.
If you don’t fear God, if you abandon yourself
to sin, you will not think straight. You will
have a reprobate mind. See Romans 1. You will
have a culture where you can not distinguish
a block of wood from God, where you cannot
distinguish a piece of tissue from a child,
where you cannot distinguish a man from a
woman or seven other genders that you have
created.
We think this is great wisdom, but the Bible
calls it sheer folly. The smallest child can
normally make these distinctions, and yet
once we refuse to obey God and submit to his
will, this is the kind of stuff we end up
thinking, and we call it great wisdom. But
when we submit our thinking to what God has
said, to the blessings and the curses of his
law, then we find wisdom. We find it in humility
and recognizing God as God.
Emily: This paganism is not dead and gone.
I saw a bumper sticker just the other day
that said, “As above, so below,” which
is a Wiccan phrase. This is on the streets
today. It’s even becoming a trend if you’re
on Instagram or Pinterest. Allie Beth Stuckey
did a whole episode on this on her podcast
Relatable, which I’ll link in the show notes.
It’s back and it’s big and it’s trending,
like using smudge sticks.
We’ve talked before about Marie Kondo and
how she really believes that every item that
you have in your home has a spirit, and you
want to be friends with the spirit. We just
did spring cleaning. We borrowed the Marie
Kondo method, minus the Shintoism, but it’s
a Shinto thing and that is trending, and so
is Wiccanism and all of these things. These
are not distant past issues.
Bryan: No, not at all. I’ve had several
friends who have turned aside and embraced
Wiccanism after being raised in believing
Christian homes. From my knowledge of them,
they were not the best of home situations,
but this is still something very present and
very much a temptation. It speaks to the very
center of our sinful nature.
Greg: “You shall be as gods, knowing good
and evil.” There is a church that shall
remain unnamed, but in my younger days one
of my best friends attended it, so I attended
some of their Christmas programs and things.
It was a good church. It was not my theological
stripe, but they were people who loved the
Lord and were serious about doing what his
Word said, as best they understood it. Today
it promotes what is virtually white magic,
and I’m being kind at this point.
It was interesting that when the whole coronavirus
thing started going wild, they called back
their healing squads from the hospitals to
avoid contact. This is also a church that
tried to raise a dead body for an extended
period of time, until they finally had to
blow the whistle and say, “Well, God has
failed us this time.”
Emily: I think I remember that story. That
was really tragic. It was a young girl, right?
Greg: Yeah.
Emily: Oh gosh, that was recent.
Greg: It was very recent, but if you tried
to say, “This is magic,” there’s no
reference for people. They think of magic
like something out of an old Disney movie,
or something really gross and creepy they’ve
seen in Friday the 13th or something like
that. They don’t understand what magic actually
is. Magic is manipulating God. It’s manipulating
the universe, either using the name of God
or of whatever god you happen to be able to
name, or whatever power or force you can claim.
God simply becomes your servant. The Holy
Spirit becomes something at your beck and
command who is bound to do what you ask because
God said he would. Our prayers and claims
are simply binding him, the way magic bound
the spirits of old.
Bryan: There’s a character in the Marvel
movies, Dr. Strange, that in the comics version
is the perfect encapsulation of this. He can
do fantastic magical things and rewrite the
fabric of reality, but it’s not because
he has something cool within him that lets
him do that. Every time he does something,
he’s actually making an oath to some type
of phenomenal cosmically-powered being in
an itty bitty living space. For him, at the
very least – and I think according to the
lore of Marvel – he will have to pay that
back at some point. It is not something that
is innate in him. It’s essentially the example
of chaotic cause and effect.
Greg: Now that you mention that, this is similar
to the idea of karma in Hindu theology. I
came across the same thing when I was studying
Greek religion, the original religion behind
the religion. The gods or spirits were effervescences,
bubblings up of something from below, but
every moment of existence of independence
or of individuality they obtained cost them
something in the end, and they would have
to pay it back.
The universe was displeased at them for having
assumed individuality for a little while,
and they could not sustain it. There was also
a pull back into the chaos.
Bryan: Which we also see now in evolutionary
cosmological theories. Sure, you have some
people who think that the universe’s expansion
will just continue forever, but you have another
growing school that essentially says, “Well,
maybe the universe will expand outward for
another 14 billion years, and then over the
course of another 20 billion years it will
collapse down back to that same single point
and explode again, and then we’ll have a
new universe.”
Greg: Yeah, oscillating universe. All this
has to be paid for.
Emily: Before we finish the conversation here,
which started with the Tower of Babel – just
to remind us where we came from; we’ve come
a long way – we should take a look at the
city of Babel in contrast to the Heavenly
City, and the judgment of God that fell at
Babel, with the blessing of Pentecost – spoilers.
Greg: We’re pursing the theme of the Heavenly
City throughout all these discussions, so
when we come to Babel, they were trying to
create their own version of the Heavenly City
but the passage is full of irony and sarcasm.
First of all, these people are saying – as
the King James renders it – “Go to! Go
to!” or we would say, “Come on! Come on!”
When the persons of the Trinity talk, they
say, “Come on!” so they’re mocking their
language.
These people are going to build a tower whose
top is in Heaven, and God says, “Let’s
go down and see if we can even see this thing.”
Emily: It’s like getting down to see an
ant hill.
Greg: Yeah. “Let’s bend way down to see
what it is they’re doing down there.”
And it’s mentioned in Isaiah in passing,
but finally in Revelation 21 and 22 we see
the Heavenly City with all of its gold and
gems. This thing is made of mud and slime.
It’s not that impressive and God makes fun
of the whole thing.
Again, all our conspiracy theory friends worry
and fret about the New World Order or the
next step toward world unification. Unbelief
tried that once. God thought it was hilarious
at the time. He mocked it.
The Heavenly City is not like the cities of
men. It is the product of grace and of the
gospel, and not of social engineering. That’s
another theme we’ll pursue as we go along.
But God, of course, stepped in and confounded
their languages, and we could do a whole discussion
here, beyond my own skill level for sure,
of the nature of linguistics, but in looking
at them for another project a little while
back I found that evolutionists by and large
around the early 1900s were still trying to
figure out how the speech patterns or the
noise-making patterns of animals did the leap
through human intelligence into human voice,
and they still thought they could find one.
After a dozen things were on the table and
quickly discarded, they finally decided, “You
know what? This isn’t going anywhere, so
we’re going to table this discussion and
no one’s allowed to bring it up for a really
long time because, well, you know, we’re
not going to say it but…you know.”
There have been one or two attempts I guess
to try to revive it, but there’s such a
huge chasm, a great leap between how animals’
brains work, how their noise-making capacities
work, and what the human brain does in simple
speech.
The Bible tells us where speech came from.
God spoke and then God made Adam to speak.
Then when it came to Babel and men were conspiring
against him, he shattered their languages,
not so that they were all wholly unlike one
another’s, but sufficiently so they couldn’t
communicate anymore. This was a judgment upon
man but, as so many of God’s judgements
are, it was also a blessing.
First of all, the kind of unification, this
new world order they sought, would be impossible.
Secondly, they’re not going to get along
so they’re going to scatter. God’s program
to exercise dominion over the whole planet
is going to be moved along. The flood has
changed the world, so as people settle in
new lands they find they have new resources.
“I’ve got iron.” “I’ve got lumber.”
“I’ve got squirrels and racoons.” Hey,
racoons were a big deal in the 1700s.
“We all have stuff! We could trade.”
“We could go to war.”
“We could. It would be a lot less messy
if we just traded.”
So men are forced to play nice. I mean sure,
war is always a possibility, but if you’re
going to engage in war to get the other person’s
resources, you better be sure you can win,
and win for the long term.
Emily: And win without depleting all of your
wealth that you’ve built up.
Greg: Your wealth, and scorching the land
so their wealth is gone. It’s a touchy thing.
It’s so much easier to engage in international
trade. From the dawn of human history men
have engaged in trade, precisely because God
interjected at this point and scattered them
so they couldn’t all be together in the
same room at the same time, getting along
wonderfully. God knew what he was doing.
But when we come to the book of Acts and the
Spirit descends upon the church, the miracle
there is fascinating because our first thought
would probably be, “Well, now everyone’s
going to speak the same language again,”
but that’s not what happens. God puts his
gospel in the mouths of all of these language
groups. All of these people who were born
speaking a different language now speak the
Word of God in their language.
The very thing that was a judgment now becomes
a tool, not only for spreading the gospel
in new ways, but each language has its strengths
and weaknesses, and that allows us to do translation
in different ways so that this language will
highlight that, this language highlights that,
this language highlights that, and we can
see more of what God is saying when he originally
spoke. It becomes a symphony rather than just
a single note.
When we come to the book of Revelation, however
you want to read it, we see all nations and
peoples and language groups standing before
the throne. There’s no notion that the language
group thing is going to be undone – probably
we’ll all understand each other somehow
– but God delights in the diversity that
he’s created, even though sin was the instigating
cause.
Of course, once you look at the cross that
should be no surprise. God delights in the
cross, even though sin was the instigating
cause, but it’s one more example of how
God takes that which is bent and makes something
beautiful out of it before he’s done.
Emily: Amen. With that, we should switch to
recommendations. Do either of you have one
handy that you wish to share?
Bryan: I do. It’s right here next to me.
Last week I began reading a phenomenal book
by Carl Trueman, who is my boi.
Emily: Isn’t he Baptist?
Bryan: No, he’s OPC.
Emily: Oh. Not that I hate Baptists.
Greg: He’s from across the water.
Bryan: He is, yes. I love the way that Carl
Trueman deals with things, but anyway he wrote
this wonderful book about the necessity of
having written creeds called The Creedal Imperative.
So far I’ve finished Chapter 1, because
that’s what my life is like, but just this
first chapter draws out some really important
factors of the modern culture that tend towards
disfavoring an objectively written out creed
and form of what we believe, citing things
like rampant individualism that we’ve been
dealing with for the past 6,000 years.
Emily: Especially in America.
Bryan: Especially in America. It is our besetting
sin, I would say. Also ideas relating to what
we’ve covered in the past few episodes about
evolution, this ever-onward personal march
of progress. He mentions technology and consumerism
as instigating factors, where we don’t want
old things. Old things are out of date and
you can’t use them. They’re not functional
anymore. We need something new.
I’ve noticed there’s a lot of push towards
that in the area of creeds in the Christian
church as well, where people are writing new
statements on this issue. That doesn’t mean
they’re wrong. It means they’re functionally
declaring that the statements from the history
of the Church aren’t sufficient anymore,
and that they somehow do not address our problems
as much. But I got off-topic – The Creedal
Imperative by Carl Trueman.
Emily: There’s an interesting point that
I’m going to take a tangent off of your
tangent and say that there are always new
battles to fight, and the creeds do not say
everything that will ever need to be said.
Scripture is the only sufficient thing, but
yes, we don’t want to try to supplant things
that have been shown to work pretty well for
hundreds of years.
Greg: Of course, the people who disagree with
you are the very people who don’t believe
what the creeds say.
Bryan: Or they’ve redefined the words to
such a degree that they bear no resemblance
to what they actually meant.
Greg: Right now there’s a push to get rid
of the filioque clause from the Nicene Creed.
This is a really sad thing.
Bryan: Who’s doing that?
Greg: Go online and type in “Shall we eliminate
or shall we drop the filioque clause?” and
see what turns up. I’m a high school teacher.
I should not be the only Western theologian
out there writing articles in defense of the
filioque. I may not be, but sometimes it feels
like it because I know that my name keeps
getting quoted as “Reformed ‘scholar,’
Greg Uttinger.” I don’t even know what
that means.
Bryan: It means you’ve read more than five
books.
Greg: I guess. The problem is, as you say,
the voice of the church. “We don’t believe
what you think the Church said.”
“We know that. That’s your problem. Thank
you for pointing that out very clearly. And
no, I’m not trying to change your minds.
I’m trying to make sure that our side stays
on our side, because it is a thing worth fighting
for.”
In that light, and in the light of Bryan’s
recommendation, how can I not recommend R.J.
Rushdoony’s The Foundations of Social Order:
Studies in the Creeds and Councils of the
Early Church. A good deal of what you’ve
heard me say in the last hour or so comes
at least in some form from that, as he borrowed
also from Dr. Van Til and others. It walks
us through the history from the Apostle’s
Creed, the Nicene Creed, the Council of Chalcedon
and so on, and discusses both the theological
implications and social and political implications.
Yes, he has a chapter on the procession of
the Holy Spirit, one of the few books on theology
in 20th century America that actually did
that. The Dutch are pretty good at it. The
Dutch theologians, possibly because they live
on the continent, have had more interaction
I think with Greek Orthodoxy.
Bryan: I was going to ask, did Berkhof cover
that?
Greg: He mentions it in passing, I believe.
The Presbyterian theologians, I think primarily
because they don’t see Greek Orthodoxy as
an issue, or didn’t in the 1800s, and for
obvious reasons don’t spend much time with
it. So there’s my recommendation.
Emily: Since Bryan recommended something against
radical individualism, and Greg recommended
something about – well, he didn’t say
that it was about this, but having read the
book I recall that it is very much about the
one and the many – I am going to recommend
something that is against radical collectivism,
and that is the Preface to Whittaker Chambers’
book Witness. The Preface is called “Letter
to my Children.” If you can read it at midnight
in some really cool place, that’s really
the best way to do it, but just read it. It’s
short and it’s delightful. Whittaker Chambers
was a Russian spy who turned against Russia
in the 1950s.
Greg: Well, he was an American spy working
for Russia. He was an American, is my point,
not a Russian, but he worked for the Communist
Party until one day he had trouble believing
that evolution could be true.
I have not read the book, unfortunately. I’ve
heard about it since I was a kid. I’m told
that at one point his little daughter had
splashed oatmeal all over herself, and as
he moved to wipe it off of her ear, he looked
at this perfectly beautifully formed ear and
thought in his soul, “There is no way that’s
happened by accident,” and that began his
conversion to Christianity and his rejection
of Marxism.
He played a key role in stopping Marxist influence,
although he bore the heat for it for a long
time and is largely forgotten today. But don’t
just recommend the Preface. That’s a good
starting point, but recommend the book. It
is one of the key points in conservative history.
Emily: Right. I can recommend the Preface
because I’ve read it. I intend to read the
rest of it but, like I said, I’m in the
middle of Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago.
I’m still in the middle of it after all
this time, so the next book I’m going to
pick up is not going to be Witness by Whittaker
Chambers, because it’s like 600 pages. But
I do mean to get to it in the next two or
three books I read.
Thank you so much for this conversation. It’s
been so fun. Thanks to David, our producer
and my lawfully-wedded husband. Thanks to
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