INTRO
In this series we will look into the distant past to see how a famous Religious movement unintentionally helped marginalize God and fragment our contemporary lives.
Over the course of 500 years, we will watch theology and money, power, science, and human creativity drift apart, then go to war with each other.
Not just because tracing this disintegration helps us understand contemporary conflicts.
Not just because of the strange beauty that can be found watching things fall apart.
And definitely not because we think some long-lost glory days held all things in perfect harmony.
We do this to give you permission
to pay attention to the deep intuition telling you the things we seek to understand and use when we do things like science and politics, economics and art, really do want to belong together, to help you see that we cannot know and use these things well if we continue to ignore their desire for belonging.
We do this to fuel an imagination for wholeness.
So for us, this peek into the distant past is not really about the past,
but a future integrated in Christ.
This time - Luther, the First Amendment, and our loneliness.
STORY
Loneliness is deadly.
Nobody likes it. I'm sure you agree it's bad. But you should know we're not just talking poetically or figuratively. We're talking physiologically - loneliness is deadly.
According to a 2015 study by BYU researcher Julianne Holt-Lunstad, loneliness increases your risk of death by 26%, social isolation by 29%, and living alone by 32%.
Other recent research has explored and developed our understanding of how the causes and effects of loneliness are not just mental, but extend to our larger biological systems. In fact, a study carried out in 2010 established that loneliness is just as likely to lead to an early death as smoking cigarettes or abusing alcohol, and that loneliness is actually more dangerous than physical inactivity or obesity.
And it's not like only a couple of people here and there are experiencing loneliness.
In early 2021, a report from Harvard indicated that 36% of all Americans - including 61% of young adults and 51% of mothers with young children - feel "serious loneliness".
Some of this increase is undoubtedly due to factors related to the covid 19 pandemic, like school closures, people working remotely and alone, and social activities taking place over zoom. Yet, the pandemic is not the root cause. It has only cranked up an on-going trend.
So if it isn't the pandemic, and if we've known for over a decade now that loneliness is as deadly as smoking cigarettes, then why are the rates going up and not down, especially when we have so many new technologies and products offering connection?
Well, perhaps we've been trying to treat the symptoms instead of the root disease.
Our argument is that our epidemic of loneliness really goes back to some theological and societal shifts that took place during the Reformation. And that these shifts unintentionally facilitated the rise of individualism and a radical disintegration of community. For the full argument, make sure to reference Brad Gregory's The Unintended Reformation which we've linked in show notes.
But here are the key points:
Throughout the Middle Ages (pre-Reformation), it was implicitly understood that Jesus did not tell his listeners to believe whatever they wished to believe as individuals, or to follow him only in their private thoughts and feelings. On the contrary, Christianity simply was a shared, social life, one that sought virtues like faith, hope, love, humility, patience, self-sacrifice, forgiveness, and generosity.
So, Western Christianity was irreducibly communal and social. It was not just another religious option, but rather all of life lived in a certain way. It influenced politics and economics: how people organized and administered cities and how goods were distributed and used.
Now, for many years the Roman Catholic Church had maintained this common life by exercising regional authority, but already long before the Reformation secular authorities were gaining power over ecclesiastical leaders. Then, when the Reformation hit, it only accelerated this process.
As a result of the Reformation, the Church became the churches, and doctrinal differences were written into rival institutions which were composed of mutually exclusive bodies of Christian believers. Therefore, church leaders, of all divisions, Lutheran, Reformed Protestant, or Roman Catholic were compelled to rely on secular authorities both to promote their rival views of Christian truth and to protect themselves against their enemies, both religious and political.
And the governmental rulers realized that the Reformation's doctrine of sola scriptura - which taught that Scripture alone held real authority - had already fueled the rebellion of local Peasants in Germany, and could potentially undermine all political hierarchy and social order if left unchecked. So the secular rulers understood it was in their best interest to control religion.
In the middle of all of this we have one of the most famous Reformation figures, Martin Luther. Besides emphasizing sola scriptura, Luther also made a very important contribution to our current understanding of political authorities, which played a decisive role in shaping society as we know it today, loneliness and all.
Noticing the potential for widespread chaos, Luthr attempted to find a way to preserve both the Reformation's commitment to sola scriptura sola scriptura and some form of social order. In 1523 he published a treatise titled On Secular Authority: How Far Obedience is Owed to It, Luther hoped it would provide a path forward that would eliminate on one hand, the abusive exercise of ecclesiastical power by the Roman church, while, on the other hand, granting the secular authorities the power they needed to prevent anarchy. Luther interpreted Jesus's words in Matthew 15, ("render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's"), to mean that all human beings belonged to two entirely different kingdoms, each with discrete and respective jurisdiction over bodies and souls. Luther argues that "Secular government has laws that extend no further than the body, goods and whatever is external on earth. But God cannot and will not allow anyone but himself alone to rule over the soul".
Now, it's no surprise that secular authorities backed Luther's interpretation. It gave them full reign over the day to day interactions of the people and left "spiritual" issues to church leaders. Luther did indeed curtail abusive exercise of power by ecclesiastical leaders, but perhaps not in the way he hoped. He curtailed it by handing over that authority to secular rulers, who were then left as the sole stewards of human bodies.
By the late 1600s, Christianity was completing its transition from a worldview to a subjective, interior, and compartmentalized social option. It began to be conceived as one wedge in the pie of an individual life, a matter not of shared obedience to the Word incarnate with eternal life in the balance, but of preference. What people believed and how they worshiped was simply a matter of indifference to others. This lack of bonding on the levels of deep meaning and religious longing festered and devolved into the forces that eventually gave rise to radical individualism, the erosion of communal life, and (in turn) our epidemic of loneliness.
To the Reformers, Sola Scriptura initially seemed to be a source of unity. But they quickly learned that if given only Scripture, many different groups would come up with many different interpretations. By 1789, the unintended, open-ended Christian pluralism that resulted from sola scriptura, which was in turn institutionalized by confessional regimes and cemented by more than a century of European conflicts in the Reformation era, would also be the deep historical context for the First Amendment to the United States Constitution: which states that Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.
When the United States institutionalized the privatization of religion in the first amendment, it also rejected confessional Christianity as a shared way of life. This decision, made largely to avoid confessional disputes that had been so costly in Europe, unintentionally laid the groundwork for the potential erosion of the church's influence on the nation's citizens.
The privatization of religion left Americans to be the arbiters of their own truth, free to choose what to believe and how to act. It thus became an option for people to claim the Christian faith while opting not to engage in social outreach or charitable actions. It would be their legally protected freedom, if they so chose, to live for their own desires while ignoring the needs of others and still claiming the name of Christ.
Such a life would bear small resemblance to the teachings of Jesus, who preached the opposite:
"If anyone wants to follow me, they must deny themselves, take up their cross, and follow me" (Luke 9:23).
By contrast, lives geared toward the pursuit of individual, self-determined enjoyments would look more like the embodiment of the ideas of the Enlightenment philosophers like Thomas Hobbes, who wrote about the insatiability of human desires, or of David Hume's views about the power of avarice.
And yet, a truly embodied Christian faith has always come from and produced a concrete human community, not merely a group of individuals who keep their private views to themselves and live as they please within the laws of the state. Without this concrete community, it is unclear how one might learn to actually live as a Christian, as opposed simply to learning how to spend a Sunday morning or what to think on the occasional moments when your mind explicitly turns to God.
So, the state controlling the churches by granting individual freedom of religion unintentionally created institutional structures that left 'the world' to itself. But what would happen if churches and families, precisely because they were no longer immersed in a sea of faith but plunged into an ocean of capitalism, consumerism, advertising, self-interest, and popular culture, failed any longer to generate virtues conducive to the flourishing of a democratic society?
Now, let's be clear. Religious freedom is by far preferable to state enforced compliance. But when the state says as long as whatever you believe stays private and personal, go for it, but also reserves for itself the power to determine what is and is not legitimate religious practice, religious freedom is not possible.
And the religious message becomes one that says you are your own authority, so choose what to believe, pursue your own interests, and satisfy your own desires. So long as you obey the laws, you are free to believe or not to believe whatever you want, no matter how bizarre or demonstrably false your convictions.
For instance, have you ever heard of pastafarianism?
Now, this obviously has ties to issues of morality and economics, and we'll explore those in a later episode. But now, let's make the link to loneliness and our lack of community. The Harvard study we referenced earlier also discusses potential solutions for our loneliness epidemic, saying that, quote, "perhaps most importantly, taking on loneliness means taking on another problem–a deep moral failure–that has reverberated destructively through many aspects of American life. For decades, critics and researchers have decried Americans' focus on the self at the expense of attention to others and the common good." End quote. The elevation of self-concerns and the demotion of concern for others is one root of many other problems now besetting our country, not least of which is loneliness.
While Luther's distinction was and still is politically convenient, when taken to an extreme and directed by individualism, like we see at times in the United States, it can have very damaging, even if unintended, consequences. We can't idolize individual choice and hope to sustain any sort of community that extends beyond a superficial niceness and apathetic un-involvement that leaves us feeling very alone in a very scary world. So, in the conversation that follows, we discuss what real community requires, and how our Christian faith might provide resources to help us recover it, at least to some degree.
DISCUSSION
Julius: Thanks for listening to All Things—this is Julius and Wil, and today we're picking up and we're making the claim that during the Reformation, there's a couple of key moves: I think there's the, I think the splitting of the body and the soul, and the splits and the institutionalization of doctrinal disagreements led to a fragmentation that we feel even now, like on a personal level in our inability to truly engage with each other as a community.
Wilson: We are lonely. Thanks, Luther.
Julius: [laughs] Dang really. I know, but it— thanks, Luther. But also I think in this story, we're a little generous to, to… Luther didn't mean for it to get this bad.
Wilson: Definitely was not his intent. And it was definitely much larger than him for sure. But, but…
Julius: Totally.
Wilson: You can't come up with a… you can't tell the full story and be quippy.
Julius: Yeah, it's true. Nevertheless, so we've already kind of covered in our story, talking about stuff like the loneliness epidemic and how we're facing, just like on an unprecedented level, in some ways like just a growing experience of loneliness in our culture, especially during the pandemic, but not exclusive to just this time.
So outside of that, what does this— I guess the way that the Reformation ripples out and inhibits our ability to engage in community— how else does that look and feel like, and maybe ways that don't seem as apparent to us as like this loneliness epidemic thing.
Wilson: Right. Yeah. It's like, if we've, if we've given the bird's eye view or the centuries summary of, of the ripples and the effects.
It's like, okay, maybe… but like, but does that really shape how I live? And I think w- I see it every time we go to Starbucks or any kind of coffee shop, or just about… so we used to, you know, we lived in kind of a neighborhood that, where like the San Diego Union Tribune, and even the LA times named at one of America's best—that’s that's quote “best” their category “hipster” neighborhoods.
Julius: Oh my gosh.
Wilson: And just like that, you could not, you absolutely could not calculate how many stores as part of their marketing used the word “community.”
Julius: Community. Yeah.
Wilson: is. You know, you moved to this neighborhood because you want community with your kind of people. You want, you want, you know, the same sorts of, you know convictions or whatever, and then you'd go, you go shop and you… and you visit these stores because you want community and, and every place it's like, if you just looked at that, at their marketing, you wouldn't know if they sold clothes or handmade journals or organically-sourced dog food— these are actual, these are, these are not random. I have specific places in mind right now.
Julius: I know which ones you're talking about, dude.
Wilson: …or coffee, like you wouldn't know from their marketing. If I were to go in this store, I would find clothes or journals or pet food or a coffee shop because all of them are marketing “community."
W-and this is one of those where I think the way we feel it is we feel this strong need for it, but our, but our structures and our institutions can't provide it. But, but we all know we want it. And because we all know we want it. And this is what consumerism does, is it taps into our desires, right?
And this is a very strong felt, need, and desire is for community. And. tap into that with our marketing, because it gets attention because we want it. And I don't think they’re… I do not think these places are being like intentionally manipulative. I don't think this is a bait-and-switch. They're not sitting here going, “Yeah, I'm really just about profit and dog food, but I know people are going to buy community.”
Now, I do think there are a few corporations that that's absolutely what they're doing… but these, but these places I don't, I don't think are bad people intentionally doing that. I think they really would love to help provide community. But what we don't see is you- as much as we might think conceptually, about the difference between our ideas in our, you know, our thoughts about individual freedom and and our local grocery stores and our local coffee shops— as much as we can conceptually separate our ideas and our institutions, you can't actually separate them.
Julius: Yeah.
Wilson: What drives so much of what actually happens is how we do things day in and day out. And the structures, the institutions are set up for buying-and-selling and fragmentation and loneliness. And so I don't think people are, are being manipulative with their marketing. I think they're naming a desire.
They want to do something to combat it. As long as we keep doing things day in, day out the way we've done them, it’ll-it'll remain nothing other than, well, at this point, this is maybe with, with Shema in our, on our like business side of the org-organizational side of thing, we've found it super helpful.
We took this from a guy named Patrick Lencioni, who’s a, who's a consultant and a, you know—you’re always have to have a core value, and core values drive who you are, but he was super helpful saying I think, each, each group needs to be really discerning and honest with itself about what's genuinely a core value—meaning this actually shapes what we do and how we do it… this is, this is core and to integrate. How we think and how we act pulling those things together. What we do with our spirits and what we do with our bodies are integrated in genuine core values…
But he says, but you also need to name your aspirational values. Meaning we long for this, we want this, we think it would be good for other people, but we have to be honest, we're not nailing it.
We have to figure out how to believe in this, think about this, and practice it—and that becomes a goal for us to strive for. And I think what we need to name is: across the board, at best, community is an aspirational value. Like we want it, we long for it, but we've got to close the gap between what we long for, how we think about it and how we actually set up our structures and our institutions for day in, day out life.
Because how we do life day in, day out is implicitly, you know, at this point, it's going to undercut any sort of desire or, or longing for actual community.
Julius: Okay. Yeah, that's that's spot on. I think that's, that's exactly one of the things I wrote down in preparation for this was talking about that commu- I mean, you… you just said it verbatim almost, that community, I think, especially in a lot of the way that organizations/companies/brands and stuff, like they’re… they are touching on a very real need and a hunger, especially like on this side of like, a couple of years into this pandemic that just like highlighted our isolation…
I think we're all hungry for community. So I know that that's like a real thing. But yeah, at best it is aspirational, and the— just to name it, these institutions that have formed us, are institutions of like of capitalism and hyper-individualism and leaving too much to the privatized choice… and to connect that straight back to—we kind of hinted at this in the last episode too, is this, on this side during the Reformation, like as a church, we kind of institutionalized these doctrinal differences and kind of forced to look for what does the past tense of forsake, “forsook”? “Forsooketh”?
Wilson: That's that sounds borderline dirty.
Julius: Oh man. Well, it is because… but forsaking, the kind of commitment to work things out together we, we decided to institutionalize: “well, we're gonna, we're gonna draw the line and this is. This is our side. This is like our camp.”And we like habituated fragmenting and splitting-off rather than like trying to work things out and see the harmonies…
And so here we are on this side of that, like centuries after that, and that has become ingrained into the institutions that have shaped us, the cultures that have shaped us. And as much as our desire for community is, like, maybe real and genuine… I think so many of us grew up not knowing how to, how to truly embody what it means to be a community and to be in relationship with people on, on deeper than like these surface levels of… I think at best how we understand community is like, it’s it's only as good as our shared interests.
Like, that we build community insofar as we share the same interests and viewpoints on stuff. And so, as long as things are good on that surface level, it feels like community because it all feels good. But I think that we're missing a step. And part of that gap is, so many of us haven't been shaped in how, what happens when we start to disagree.
What happens when the- the more that you deepen in relationship, that like intimacy calls us to confront these differences. And I think so many of us don't have that training and that formation to know what to do with the disagreements, especially now that we're picking up from a tradition that was like, “Ooh, I don't think we can harmonize these… Let’s just keep splitting off.”
Wilson: Right.Yeah. Community takes virtue.
Julius: Yeah.
Wilson: Another one of our key ideas— aspirational values— is cultivating virtue, you know, and here at… and community absolutely takes that, community cannot simply be aspirations. You know, aspirations are not virtues. Aspirations might lead to… but, but virtue is the actual ability to carry out.
So. Good, you know, it's something internally good to, to what we're doing. And so community requires of us certain virtues that, you know—so think of it this way. There are certain virtues involved in any skill that we may not—I think this shows a fundamental misunderstanding of “virtue” and the role that actually plays in how we feel and act that we don’t immediately recognize that virtues are involved in things like playing an instrument or a sport.
Like there there's a virtue to guitar playing, that there's a level of virtue that Julius has that I do not. I aspire to be able to do some of the things on the guitar that Julius can and to, and to do things in a band with a guitar that I can't, because I don't have the virtues… because I don't understand like what holds the band together as far as the music and how to just jump in yet.
And now that's one of the things I'm, I'm remedying by putting myself in an uncomfortable position and saying: here's a really good band… will you guys let me play with you regularly? I can get up to speed with that, but it takes that kind of practice. It takes developing the abilities, same thing with like basketball. It's one thing to aspire to be able to move like LeBron or Jordan. It's another to be able to get on the court and play the game with nine other people on the court.
Julius: Yeah,
Wilson: Once you have nine people on the court with one ball, if everyone's going in, in their own direction, there is no game. Right? And that's actually a pretty good metaphor, right? T-to get together and play a game, takes virtue.
We're just, we're not going to develop those as long as we just keep saying—well, and this is where it gets tricky. Those are virtues and skills that involve your heart, your spirit and your body.
Julius: Yeah.
Wilson: Right. We talk about music is such an ex- as a, as such a spiritual experience is, but there is no music without physical bodily activity. And, and if the, if the mo- like I've got all the, I've got all the passion and I've got all the inspiration, but I, I do not yet have the ability to express that in music, in a way that others could connect with, because I don't have the virtues yet.
And so, as long as our thinking shapes institutions where the—and this is a tricky word, maybe we'll unpack this the second half of this conversation— where the authority is totally severed, totally… separated between the spirit and the body. Then all we will be left with is certain aspirations, but no value. No virtues that we'll be able to enact them, right.
Just like I've gotta… I’ve gotta be able to involve my body in the virtues of God, I've got to, I've got to learn how to take that and put it in my fingers. Right? And be able to plant myself in a place and, and, and think about how physical it is to just… physically to, to, to poke or, or prick some strings and make them move so that the air moves in a way that's in harmony with six other musicians, and in time with six other musicians, and in a way that will tap into the desires and the hearts of the people listening it's body and spirit.
And as long as we're severing our thoughts are our thinking our practices between the body and spirit, we're going to be left with this sort of like deep longing for, for things that really are good and it matters, but none of the virtues of the abilities to pull it off.
Julius: That’s, that's great. I think that that makes a lot of things click for me of… I think what we're, what we're talking about here is that a disembodied Christianity leads to like, a shallow everything… but especially like community of like… it's like, if, if, if we, if we start to think that Christianity only involves matters of the spirit and the abstract, it’s like— to bring it to the, to the music analogy— it would be like, if we only focused on like theory, but never picked up the instrument, and we don't know what to do with our hands.
And that's what we're left with as the church is that like… we love to talk about the spiritual and abstract “Forgive one another,” like… you're like…
Wilson: “Bear another's burdens…"
Julius: Yeah. Hmm.
Wilson: “Care for the sick and needy.”
Julius: Yeah, on an embodied level, we don't know literally what to do with our hands. And I was, and so I’m—
Wilson: You raise them when the leader tells you to…
Julius: It may be not even that [laughs] oh man, that's a-another, a side thing… but I've been thinking a lot lately, I think last week, praying through the hours I, I found myself midday praying through the Lord's Prayer and was really struck by the “Lord forgive us as we forgive those who trespass against us…”
Or, “Forgive us as we forgive our debtors.”
And there was something in praying it that day that made it click that the way that— first of all, the way that, that’s spoken, like kind of the tense of like, forgive us as we also forgive, like it's, it's like assumed that it's a part of… it’s habitual, it's habituated. It's it's a rhythm. It's it assumes that that's something that a community practices regularly…
And At that moment, I realized kind of what you're talking about, how that's such an embodied thing and that forgiveness. I think I'm learning the more that I kind of dive deeper into relationships and friendships and learning how to be vulnerable and pursue like true intimate relationships with people is that I think I always used to receive that line of like, “as we forgive others” as kind of like a really shallow, like… “Just like let it go. It's, it's fine.” Kind of like, I'm ignoring, ignoring the hurt without kind of addressing it kind of forgiveness.
And I'm, I think something in that day, praying through it. Pulled me towards maybe a deeper understanding of like, maybe as we forgive those who trespass against us doesn't mean just like a shallow letting go. But that is sometimes it takes the really hard conversations and having to work it out. It's the stuff that Jesus lays out in the gospels of talking about like, if a brother sins against you and then talks about like embodied steps of like talk to them or like talk to And I think that that's something of like what forgiveness looks like.
And that's a virtue that we, that virtue itself is something that as communities, we don't really know how to engage in that. And that is such a bodily thing. Like for me, I feel emotions super, very strongly, and it's a palpable embodied thing to like, To sit someone down for the sake of like wanting deeper communion with them, like, and moving forward from, after being hurt or after hurting someone that it's an embodied experience to sit with a person, to look them in the eyes, to feel the things.
If you're either, if you're the one who is hurt or if you're the one who did the hurting that… there, it brings up a lot— like your heart races, your palms, sweat, you feel the anxiety in your body, you feel the tension.
Wilson: Body and soul, yup.
Julius: And you have to— we have to embrace that. But I think as our, our understanding of community, I don't think so for so many of us, I don't think it gets down to that deep level of embracing that kind of stuff…
Wilson: Okay, so circling back around and trying to, to pull some of the threads together, we started off by telling a story about a certain abuses of authority leading to, I mean, some sort of necessary action, some sort of necessary reform— but that reform turning into a rebellion. Right. And then pretty quickly the reformers Luther exemplary exemplified in his own secular authority starts to realize, okay, Rebelled against that authority, but also have set the framework for like our own authority and, and actually really all authority ever to be totally undercut, but that we don't, they're not intending to create total anarchy.
So they try to back up and, and create some sort of framework for understanding. Now on the other side of this rebellion how do we still hold some kind of authority? So he sets up these spheres between the body and the soul. So we're talking about like bodies, souls, and authority and, and how this.
Idea of this separation. Right. See how it, how it mirrors, how it, the, the severance and the disintegration is. And then that getting institutionalized is a pattern that is mirrored in every topic that we talk. Right throughout this series, we're going to look at, and there's a lot of overlap here with economics.
We can look at that here and morality, you know, but looking here in community, just like it used to be, there was this authority that it was, yes, let's be honest. It was imperfect. It needed to be reformed, but still for a long time, it was the thing that kept people in the same room and made them work it out. And so now when, when the actual institutional split happens between Rome and the Protestant churches, what's now been institutionalized there. W-w-what, what is embodied in the practices is the thinking of like two separate words.
Instead of understanding, no, there, there has to be in, there is one. We be, we better learn to live into it. They now institutionalized. No, let's just set up different worlds for us to live in. And you see that move mirrored when Luther realizes, oh shoot, we've got a problem here with authority. What do I do? Well, let's mirror that same move and just set up two different worlds. And that sets the pattern for how we handle conflict.
Let's just set up different worlds, set up different worlds. And so now instead of the virtues of community, we have, you know, this. What's now like just, it's almost in our DNA, right. It's, it's definitely in our institutions. It's definitely in our philosophies and it's in our bones to just this instinctual move now to like, well, let's just set up different worlds and those worlds just keep getting smaller and smaller.
Right? So the piece here, that's the scary thing, but I just think this is, this is what good community does is give us community and some encouragement and a safe and encouraging and challenge. Place to, to face the scary stuff. And what we've got to look at is authority. And in some way, a huge piece, if there's going to be any kind of recovery, if there's going to be a move towards genuine community, we need to find a kind of authority.
That's a healing, good, healthy authority. And what we've set up in other episodes. And again, not that I'm the perfect dad. Definitely not the perfect dad, but one of the places where I look back on something that was scary for me and hard, but I look at it and instead of feeling like, “Heck yeah, look at that. I nailed that as a dad,” I look back on it and it's like… that was really good. And in my reaction is gratitude or there's moments where I'm able to be that presence that keeps my kids together and they actually work the problems out instead of just going to their own rooms, literally, and metaphorically and harboring the resentment for.
Julius: Sure.
Wilson: And so we need some kind of, and that's, that's the picture we're putting up there. And I know it's scary because we've seen bad authority and there is, there are plenty of authorities that it's Right, and good to rebel against to critique. right.
But that, again, they're another part of our aspiration.
Needs to include a healthy kind of authority. The kind that is strong enough, that is healing enough, that it loves, that loves all of us enough to hold us together, to hold the tension, but also create an aspiration for life together. That would be a strong enough desire and love that we would work through the difficulties to develop the virtues, to actually be able to live together.
Right. And So,
I think what we've up to this point and maybe the best thing I can think of. Is no, I don't think the answer is just to go back and, you know, institutionalized religion from the top down it's to name. No, no, I mean, this is, this is what good healthy religion does. And this is what a good healthy authority can do is hold us together.
It creates the conditions for us to be able to become the kinds of people to practice and in practicing to become the, kind of like a musician you can play to become the kind of people that. Participate in community and there's gotta be some authority that pulls me out of my frustration, my anger, my fear, and my immediate desires Right.
now that might work against that.
And so, no, I don't, I don't think we'd go back to just getting the church in the state totally in bed with each other and, and having someone, you know, claiming the authority of God and just telling everybody what to do. But. Maybe maybe a good first step is for those of us who consider ourselves Christians to open up our aspirations and to long for that healthy kind of authority.
And for us to, instead of looking for some external source to be the thing that would enforce it. How about we collectively as a community open up to the idea that, that this authority could be internalized in that. And so from within us, we could submit to it an authority that is, that is big and strong and loving enough to hold us together and teach us to be people that could live together.
Julius: Okay, got two questions.
Wilson: Yeah.
Julius: One of them is kind of just like a clarifying… this authority that you speak of that can hold things together… I have a hunch what that might be, but in my head, I'm like—I think that's, I think that's just, Jesus?
Wilson: That would, I mean, yeah, that would be the ideal. Right. And, and this is, I mean, look at our story again. If claiming to be Christian, it's not a personal kind of piece. Look at our stories. What did Jesus do? W when the expectation was as Messiah, you're going to gather an army and go fight Rome, but he doesn't do that. He gathers together the Jewish community.
That can't be a community together anymore. Instead of going and fighting Rome, he gets people who keep fighting it. And breaking each other apart from the inside and says, all right, first step is you all come around me, the zealot, you that you've stuck a dagger in tax collectors, but because they're collaborators with the empire and the enemy, you and zealot and tax collector, both of you Pharisee and process. right. The one, the one that has been stoned and the one who has thrown the stones, you guys get together and fight. And this is what he does for the first several years of his ministry is just teach the people of God to live together in community centered around him. And if we really have internalized Jesus as our savior, Lord Messiah, I mean, how can we not internalize that kind of authoritative call to learn to live together?
MEDITATION
Julius: And so we've kind of talked about how the Reformation was a real, like a lot of it wasn't like a response that… I think we want to, um, what's it… validate some of the concerns, and a lot of these concerns were over abuses. And that's the caveat where I'm curious, like what— cause I’m… I start to sit with the…
The deeper you go into this kind of, um, working-it-out in a relationship, and the more and more that the kind of hurt that needs to be forgiven crosses varying thresholds of, um, magnitude… like let's say…
Okay. Uh, I, I just think of the situations where in relationships, um… that things can get so toxic, that the healthy thing is to, to have distance.
And I start to think and empathize with people who have had like…have been abused by people in authority. And I am extremely hesitant… of, of like putting people who have been abused by people in power in the same room with their abusers.
Um, what do we do with that? And is it just—and is that one of the virtues that needs to be cultivated, of like discerning where and when that kind of distance is necessary and good?
Wilson: Yeah, that is a big one.
Julius: Hmm.
Wilson: Um and so… vast topic, right? For sure, that to, to actually deal with w-with the appropriate, uh, sensitivity and depth would, would, would need a vast response… but keeping it focused on the topic of community, I think, um…
Two resources I think of for that are: we have a model in in South Africa and Rwanda with leaders like Desmond Tutu, uh— the, the recently late Desmond Tutu— and some of the leaders in Rwanda, and how they handled that, exactly that kind of reconciliation and did get to a point where they have the, the abusers and the victims in a room together, but in a way that ended up becoming redeeming for the victims.
But what we'd need to learn from them is not… what we want is to jump to, “Okay, so what's the method. How do we fix all this?
“Um, oh, you guys put them in a room together?” and not seeing the decades long work that went up to get to that point where they felt like they could do that in a way that would be redemptive and healing.
And that takes lots of… it takes lots of breakdown and repentance on the part of the abuser before it’s time. And, and a lot of work for the victims before they would be the ones that say: “I am ready, and this would be good for me.” “This is the next step in my healing is to face it.” Right?
And they, and that's the part. Is we want to jump to the tea-the tidy redemption without looking at— but no, no, no. The actual model they gave us is that long, difficult process of learning to, like Jesus says, you know… to bring down the oppressor and raise up the poor… to lower the mountains and raise the valleys. To, to have that happen so that, that encounter in the room could be healing and redemptive. Um with, with, you know, the genocide and, um… uh, apartheid in South Africa.
I would look to there, and then I also think of…and maybe, maybe it'd be better. Maybe let's just flip it up and, and kind of put this on a, instead of an individualized, you know, because implicitly the, the meditator at best are very personal, but they also, you know, it could end up in this point being just yet another individual exercise and in sustained desire.
And so maybe just the best way we can, uh, be honest about the limits of a podcast for community, right?
Cause that's the other thing is like— listening to us is not the same thing as being part of the body of Christ. We hope that it would help and equip you and plant some desires, you know? And so maybe, maybe this one, we'll just let it be a little more off-the-cuff and say, um.
Let’s, let's look to that… um, as resources. And, and if we're serious about closing the gap between the aspirations and the core of who we are and how we live, those would be great models for us to look at.
And especially that those come from more communal countries and how they responded to the influence of a very individualistic outside force moving into their cultures and then responding with healing and reconciliation there.
And then, uh, book-wise I think of Miroslav’s Volf- Miroslav Volf’s—his good book… Um…
Julius: [laughs]
Wilson: Oh shoot that was a, that was a shot [laughs]… but this one is a very, very, very good book called Exclusion and Embrace. Where he talks about the reality, where at its best there, there is a time—for real healing— there’s a time for exclusion. For real healing, there’s a time to make visible and true, right, that the community has been broken.
That it doesn't lead to the restoration of community if we act like community is happening, when it's not actually happening.
Julius: Wow. Yeah.
Wilson: And that there needs to be a severance first before the embrace is possible. And goes through a lot of the theological, psychological, emotional, the nuance of that in a in a very helpful and in-depth way.
Julius: Hmm. That's great.
Wilson: So do your homework. Cultivates your virtues. We'll see you in church.