Voices In My Head Podcast Episode #309: Hank Spaulding and The Just and Loving Gaze of God With Us

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Welcome back to Voices in My Head. As always, I'm your host, Rick Lee James, and I'm very glad that you could join us again this week. My guest this week is Henry Walter Spaulding III, or Hank as he is known. He's an adjunct professor of Christian ethics at Mount Vernon Nazarene University, Ashland University, and Nazarene Theological Seminary. He's also a senior pastor at Shepherd's House Church of the Nazarene. He is author of several journal articles and publications such as the Wesleyan Theological Journal, Studies in the Literary Imagination, and the Journal of Youth Ministry. Today we are discussing his new book, and it's his first book I should add, The Just and Loving Gaze of God: with us. Hank Spaulding, welcome to Voices in My Head.

Oh, thanks for having me, Rick. Thanks for having me.

Well, I'm so glad to have you here. It's kind of interesting to be talking to you and calling you Hank because that's what we kind of all affectionately called your father whenever I had him as my religion prof at Trevecca. And I had systematic theology and, and, uh, let's see, what else did I have with him? Philosophy. So yeah, yeah. He was always, you know, I'm sure he always thought of me a much better songwriter than a metaphysician, but I always appreciated everything that he had to say, for sure.

But he was always very complimentary of you. He gave a lot of compliments, so he thought very highly of you.

So, well, I'm glad to hear that. But I'm glad to have you on the show today and talking about your great new book. And I had just enough time to actually pretty much get through it, you know. Oh, good, good. I did some reading. I had it on my phone. I listened to it some with the voiceover feature, and I got through it as much as I could. I need to go back and reread parts because it's a very deep and very well-written book. But let's talk about it today. I'm excited to have you here to discuss it, The Just and Loving Gaze of God, with us. So how did this book come about?

Well, it came about first and foremost because I needed to write a dissertation for my doctorate, and Curiously enough, I had had one already planned, but it kind of fell through because, uh, you know, for those of you who know the politics of, uh, doctoral work, you have to kind of put together a committee, a group of people who will read your big cumulative project, and they kind of need to be experts in areas. But all that fell through, and I'd always had this fascination with apocalyptic and Paul's apocalyptic since I was an undergrad. One of my professors had given— had written his dissertation on that and given me his book that he wrote on that, and I was I kind of gobbled that up. And it was also kind of around the time that the election, the 2016 election was starting to ramp up. I started writing this in the spring of 2016, that kind of thing. And so I was kind of noticing that there's a lot of political stuff happening that was kind of existential for me because I was really interested. People in my church and people who I had grown up loving and had such respect for on both sides of the aisle just like kind of devolved into a little bit of, you know, just kind of this very violent political rhetoric that I found very unappealing. And so, and a lot of them were using scripture on both sides and Paul on both sides of things. I mean, I think throughout the election, both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump quoted Paul a few times. I mean, Donald Trump's obviously got the more famous one where he says the whole—

2 Corinthians.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. So So I was just like, wow, this is a really interesting thing to think about. Like, how do you use Paul politically? What ultimately should be the guiding questions? And all of that kind of went into, yeah, this is something I really want to tackle. And then when I finished the dissertation, I was like, I think this might be a good place to publish this thing. Cause I think this is something that a wider audience might find appealing in these times.

Yeah. Well, and if I could interrupt you just a second too, because I remember that time. I remember how obvious it was that Donald Trump has probably never opened a Bible in his life whenever he was saying 2 Corinthians. And then it was also interesting, on the other hand, and the camps that we tend to divide into, which I think your book addresses in an interesting way. Because I do remember, like, and I was never a fan of Hillary, still not a fan of Hillary, to be perfectly honest. But I remember she was the one that actually had more, like, biblical knowledge, and her pastor would write her these devotionals every day. And I got to read a few of those devotionals. I was like, wow, this is some pretty solid, like, theology that's being passed on. And it's interesting the way that we'll tend to divide up camps and the reasons we would do that. And so I'm interested, as we talk about your book some today, I'm interested to talk some about how non-theistic philosophers are gravitating to Paul, and, you know, like political candidates are gravitating to Paul. We've always, you know, kind of gravitated to to God, and we'll have the Christian soundbite during a political, you know, whatever that happens. Oh yeah, yeah, it's almost never Paul. I mean, it's kind of interesting to have that. But before we get too deeply into that, and I just want to be considerate of the audience, and I know this book was written both for academia but also for the church, but there might be a few phrases that people listening, if they're not familiar with that word, we might want to unpack a little bit just for people listening today. And so I wonder if we could talk just briefly, um, or you don't have to be brief, but if we can, um, first of all, deal with the phrase apocalyptic, because you've already mentioned Paul's apocalyptic, right? And just kind of explain to our listeners, just in case they're not aware, what apocalyptic is, and then, um, what Paul's apocalyptic is and how it might help us to interpret our world.

Yeah, it's so interesting because I, I love this word, but it's because it's, uh, well, for a variety of reasons I love this word, but it's also like one of the words that does have like a popular like audience, right? Because when we hear the word apocalyptic, we think of like The Walking Dead or, right, uh, you know, Resident Evil, right? It's kind of this— it's a type of genre of literature that talks about the destructive end of the world and things of that nature. Now that comes in part from scripture, um, because the, the books of the Bible that are under like a genre of literature of the scriptures that's called apocalyptic. So for example, like Daniel, um, and, uh, you know, Revelation in the New Testament, things like that, kind of detail this like destructive or, um, these heavenly bodies that are battling with each other that kind of have these consequences and, uh, elements on earth and things like that. So it's a very interesting because when people hear that they think destruction, end of the world, that type of thing. But the word, the Greek word for apocalyptic just basically means revelation. And so like the Book of Revelation at the end of the Bible is— that's what it's called. It's just a— it's— I mean, the Greek word is apocalypsis, and it just means revelation. And so when I use apocalyptic in the book, I am talking about Paul's theology of, uh, Jesus Christ, uh, becoming incarnate in the world, uh, crucified, uh, died, buried, and ascended back to the heavens, right to the right hand of Father, and things of that nature. And what that signals for Paul is God overcoming anti-God powers. And so apocalyptic for Paul is a way to talk about how the world is encaged or basically embattled with forces that try and seek to do things contrary to the will of God. And Jesus coming to this earth and submitting to the powers, overcoming them in his life and crucifixion and resurrection, has created a new lordship of Christ under the world where we no longer follow the sinful fallen powers of the world, the anti-God powers, but we follow and are under the lordship of Christ and pursue Christ in all things and, and celebrate him in all things and work and serve people as a way to resist these sinful powers, uh, and that will ultimately like lead us toward Jesus's return and the resurrection of the dead when Jesus's lordship, which is now present clearly in the church, will be revealed and put on creation-wide display. So I don't know if that's— I hope that's clear enough, but the whole point is just basically the one sentence summary is that in the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ, the lordship of Christ has been put back on display in creation, and the church is called now toward a struggle against the powers until the return of Christ when these powers will be eliminated.

Sure. And I, and I always think it's very interesting too, when one of my pet peeves is when a Sunday school teacher or somebody at my church will say, talk about the book Revelations. And right, you know, and so like, no, the thing being revealed is, is exactly what you describe here. The revelation is Jesus and his coming, and it's not like a number of things. And they always miss this in the zombie movies when they, you know, yeah, it's not the same type of resurrection the dead. There's so much hope in it. And it's always interesting to me that we've made it such a— almost an embattled word that has to do with darkness and, and just all kinds of terrible things. And really, you know, I love the title of— several years ago, Michael Card and his pastor Scotty Smith wrote a book. It was a commentary on Revelation, and they just called it Unveiled Hope. And oh yeah, so it's really a I think Paul would very much see, you know, that's— it's a very hopeful apocalyptic that we are looking at. And so if we could just somehow get our mindset to turn, and when we have these conversations, again, when we— society talks about apocalyptic, it's thinking doom and death. What a beautiful thing to think that in Christ we actually can think of the word as an unveiling of hope. And I think, oh yeah, powerful thought. Well, tell us how the Apostle Paul might be helpful in helping us to interpret our world. I mean, you've talked a little bit about it, but go a little bit deeper.

Yeah, the thing that I really like about Paul and what he does, and I think this is essentially how the non-theistic philosophers, these, you know, these really helpful interpreters of scripture in the philosophical world, I think it's the same for them. Paul kind of really allows us to— and you mentioned earlier about the ways that we fall on certain political lines. Paul helps us to see that there is a certain commitment that is greater than our commitments to political powers, um, and ideological powers. And so one of the things I do in the book is, you know, when you talk about powers and principalities as Paul does, you think of kind of these angelic beings, and that of course is true, but Paul also uses this Greek word exousia, which is basically a Greek way to talk about, um, like ideology. So it's like the exousia, it's like the power that a king has to cause like a soldier. And I think about like, you know, David, right? David Bathsheba, you know, the, the guy that goes to the front lines of battle for King David in honor of, you know, the throne. Like that's, that's a power that, uh, that's an ideology that he's granted, right? And so those ideological powers are on display in our time. I mean, because when you think about it, if you go to a political reality— or reality, sorry, a political rally, uh, you're not—

it's the furthest thing from reality sometimes.

But yes, right, exactly, right? Like, I remember hearing a pastor talking about how he went with his daughter to a, uh, like a Donald Trump, uh, rally, and he had to like take her away, um, because it was— it was— it wasn't a rally, it was Kyrie Eleison, right? It was— yeah, it's, it's a, it's a worshipful thing.

Yeah.

Um, it's, uh, this Catholic theologian, Henry de Lubac, and I think I put his quote in the book, says that, you know, our problem in this kind of contemporary world is not that we don't have anything spiritual, is that we worship ourselves. And so the powers that Paul talks about, the ideology that Paul talks about, is on full display because the, the ways that political powers want to talk about, uh, like other people, like, you know, if you watch Fox News or if you watch, uh, you know, CNBC or something like that, or CNN or something like that, the way that they about each other kind of forms and shapes an imagination on which you're supposed to encounter— it's speculative, or it's highly suspicious of other people. It operates out of caricatures and deep kind of fetishes almost of other people that like, you know, you are here either to serve me or to get out of my way, or that type of thing. Or, you know, just these gross racist or sexist things that people say toward one another. So those ideological powers are very present in our world. They are dividing, and so Paul helps us because he says like even in his just very simple moral exhortations, he says you are not called to fall along one of these lines. I mean, his famous— the thing that he deals with the most in scripture is the division between Jew and Gentile. He's like, you're no longer Jew nor Gentile, slave nor free, male nor female. You're all one in Christ, and so we have to do things and act with each other in certain ways that make sense of that reality. We don't act like the rest of the world because we don't draw our meaning from these ideological powers that seek to define the world along this line, uh, whether you're either in or out or you're a caricature or so on and so forth. You, you are now one in Christ. And so, um, you know, the one of the profound things that I really discovered through my studies of Paul, for example, in his like discourse on idol meat, which today we just kind of discard because, you know, we don't really have that problem anymore. We, uh, for the most part don't deal with idol sacrifice in the ways that Paul is talking about. But really, the, the, the great insight that he gives there is that these people who have privilege must act in a way that does justice or acts well toward these people who are being harmed by your actions. And so when you're under an ideological structure, a power, or a principality the movement of the church, um, even inside of itself, is toward those who are most outcast by those powers. And so Paul's apocalyptic is so helpful because it really helps us locate that there are powers at work in the world. In our modern world, we tend to not think in those terms, but I think of Paul as re-mythologizing the world for us, that when we're looking at presidential candidates, we're not just talking or listening or looking at people but entire powers and structures that are working against the will of God in the world. And so you've got to, uh, work against them and struggle with them. And the site to do that is with the most vulnerable, those who are the most, uh, subject to violence of these powers. Uh, and so that's where the mission of the church is called to be, is amongst those people.

That's good stuff. Well, Hank, we're going to take a quick break, something we don't do very often on this show, but we have a quick message I'm going to insert here. And when we come back from that break, we're going to talk about Carl Barth and his view of nationalism. We're going to talk about Mr. Rogers and whatever else comes up in the next few moments. So stay tuned, listeners, we'll be right back.

This is Rick Lee James, and the music you are hearing is from my new album, Thunder. The title track, Thunder, is a never-before-released song by the late Rich Mullins. There are also 12 other tracks made up of original music, hymns, and readings to guide the listener on a journey. You can buy Thunder today on clear vinyl and CD, or stream it on Spotify Apple Music and almost every other music streaming service. Thunder, hear it today at rickleejames.com.

Well, welcome back. We are still talking with our guest today, Hank Spaulding. His new book is just released and it is called The Just and Loving Gaze of God with Us. It's his first book and it's excellent, so I want everybody to check it out. It's from, uh, WIA Is it W-I-F-P in stock? I always say it wrong.

Oh yeah, that's the way I said it forever until I met an editor from that and they're like, it's actually Wipif in stock.

Wipif, okay, that's Wipif in stock. But anyway, it's a very good book. So if you could real quick, sorry, my dog's barking in the background. He's not usually part of the show either.

It's a call-in question.

That's right, it's a call-in question. I may have to let him out after I let you talk to the guests here. But first, if you could, I'm curious, and I think our audience would be curious, to find out about some of the non-theistic philosophers who have been using Paul and, and why you wrote about them in the book. Talk about that a little bit, if you would.

Yeah, you know, the one thing that's interesting about, about them is that I would just randomly in seminary, somebody gave me a book by one of these figures, a gentleman by the name of Giorgio Agamben. He wrote this book called The Time That Remains, and I I found out that, you know, and these guys, you know, when you say non-theistic, it's hard to— like, it's not that they're atheists. I use the word non-theistic very intentionally because I don't know that they're atheists. It's just that their understanding of God is very different than like what a confessional Christian would understand, or even to some extent Jews and people of the Islamic faith as well. And so it's very interesting to hear about these figures who are engaging Paul without the felt need to really appeal to any type of confessional organization or church or structure or things like that, so yeah, I was given his, and then I was kind of led to many others, and I traced all the back. This has been happening for centuries apparently, uh, even like someone like, uh, I mean, this is like, yeah, you know, a little over a century now. They— someone like, uh, Friedrich Nietzsche was reading Paul, uh, and talking about him in ways that were, you know, in his own philosophy. And so, um, these, these philosophers are looking for a way, um, to, to escape, uh, certain narratives or certain, um I guess, like, certain literature that holds philosophy captive. So, you know, there's a long lineage of philosophy all the way back to like Plato and Aristotle that kind of leads up into the Western world today. And for them, those narratives have been very un— like, very unhelpful in talking about freedom and liberation because they're very interested in the political realities that I described earlier. Though they're coming at it from a completely non-confessional way because they see these ideological structures in the same way that Paul does, but they really just want to lead to like a better kind of social order that they can establish and conquer and those types of things as well. Sure. And so the reason why I turned to them is because they asked questions that I find that a lot of Pauline scholars weren't. They were placing Paul in conversations with fields of, you know, talking about politics in terms of either biopolitics, which biopolitics, all it means is like whenever biological life becomes synonymous with political life. And so that's the biopolitics. And so things like that. So, you know, the chief example of biopolitics that everyone always appeals to is Nazi Germany. The Aryan male is kind of the biological life that takes the center stage of politics. And if you don't fit within that picture or that biology, then you are condemned and can be killed and things like that with impunity because you are not, you're not one of us, so to speak, right? So yeah, so I mean, they talked about Paul in those veins. Which I found incredibly helpful because I think it brings Paul into a conversation that the theological academy wasn't ready to talk about yet, and I'm sure there's plenty of other books that do this, but these guys really do that for me. They bring it into conversations with political structures that I can see outside my window every morning, and for me that was a great opportunity to think about these things, and so like the great example, the great text of their system is when Paul says, you know, the Christ crucified is a stumbling block, right? It is— the word they use is anti-philosophy because Paul talks about how Greek wisdom cannot fully appreciate Christ crucified right there in 1 Corinthians at the very beginning, Um, and so they take that to mean that Paul is doing something that's not— fits within the Western canon of philosophy that leads to the problems that we have today. But Paul kind of carves out a new trajectory for them, a new starting place through his philosophy, according to them, which can critique biopolitics and critique all of these things. And so I thought that that would be a good place to start with their questions and offer my own theological interpretation with Paul's apocalyptic.

Great. That's fascinating to me. And I love how you pointed out that they're just asking questions that maybe some of our theologians were not asking and some of our philosophers were. And so I found that, I found that to be interesting because I've often thought, I wonder what people would get out of Paul if they weren't believers and followers. And your book answered a lot of that as they're coming into to study this. Let's talk about someone else, a theologian that has been highly influential, really, on a lot of people in our tradition now, Karl Barth. And you discuss Barth quite a bit in this book. One thing that I wanted to talk about, just because it seems like it's so prevalent in the news, and it's a word that gets thrown around a lot, it's the word nationalism, right? And, and Barth actually discusses that, and you quote it. And And in the book, it says this— actually, I believe it's a quote from Barth, and he says, uh, nationalism ultimately prevents the political because it excludes humans from a desired creaturely relationship with those that Barth calls distant neighbors. And so that was your quote about that. Unpack that a little bit for us and, and sort of, sort of what you view nationalism to be and what Barth is trying to talk about with with that view of it not being relational.

Yeah. And so this, I mean, this falls back in line with the general kind of problem that I see these philosophers that we were just talking about critiquing is that we are all invested with kind of these private self-obsessed interests. Like we really, when it comes down to it, prefer people who are like us. In a lot of ways, right? And all the ways that we kind of measure those metrics. And so the part of the book that you quoted that from is a part of my description of what I call private interests. And so there's private interests that are on 3 different levels. There's one that's just like me, I have my own private interest and gains. I would like to save up or have as many resources for myself and exclude my neighbors and things like that. There's a second level, which is communal-based. So me and groups. So like certain, I mean, you can think about this in terms of like, uh, you know, white supremacists and things like that. They prefer their groups and things like that over and against other groups. But then you would think when we got to talking about the nation, oh, there's no more private interest. We are one nation. Well, the ways that private interest works at a nationalistic level is that it recognizes, uh, certain things like, you know, America first or, uh, Germany first or Britain first or something like that. These, different types of ways in which even though it's a state, a nation state, it is to the exclusion and detriment of other countries. And so what Barth is talking about— I mean, Barth is writing, he's actually— that sermon that I quote from in that passage, he writes at a time right before, right around World War I. And he's kind of looking out his window and he's seeing kind of the nationalistic fervor that is kind of gripping his nation even before World War II, right? And so one of the things that's— this is kind of a popular story about Barth— when one of his professors, his former professors, Adolf von Harnack, signs the great document from the University of Berlin to the German government that says, "We are behind you. We want you to go into war with the rest of the nations because Germany is kind of the chosen nation. God is on our side, and so are we." That was kind a real crisis moment for Barth because he realized the kind of poverty of the theological education that he was— that all theological education was during that time was to produce German citizens. And so there was no world beyond that. It prevents, uh, for Barth this kind of shared creaturely life that does not recognize the borders of states. I mean, really, if you think about it, The crazy thing about nationalism according to Barth is that it takes, uh, all of God's creatures and it puts them into categories of either friend or enemy, and it's a— it like subjects them to a definition that God ultimately rejects. This is not a person that you have to kill for the safety and security of your own nation, which is ultimately where the nationalism of his his day is heading, but rather this person from this other nation is a fragile fellow human creature held deeply in the love of God, and so Barth is at that time in this sermon, and even in the parts where I talk about the near— the language he uses instead of talking about nationalism is near and distant neighbors, which I really like that language for Barth. He talks about That in the third volume of his Church Dogmatics. But so whenever we think about, you know, our people at our borders or people across the world, we're not talking about us versus them like Americans versus non-Americans. We're talking about fellow creatures and near or distant neighbors that we require— that God commands us to be in fellowship with. And that command supersedes the command of the nation-state. For Barth. And so nationalism for him, and the way I pick up on it, is still a private interest because it prevents the shared grace, the shared love, that overarching command that God gives to us to be in relationship with our neighbors both near and distant.

Still, you know, still one of the most chilling stories I've ever heard, and I wish I could remember the title of the book where I read this the first time, but it was a story. I think it was actually during World War II, and there was a story. It might have been like the Battle of the Bulge or something like that. I'd have to look it up. I hate to even paraphrase the story because I'm going to get details wrong, but it serves, I think, this idea that we're talking about. Everybody has to fall into either enemy or friend, and there was a German soldier, I believe it was, that was wounded.

And it was—

he was sitting by a tree, and there was an American soldier walking around and was just kind of putting everybody out of their misery that had been wounded, you know, walking around, not, not taking prisoners, just executing them.

Oh wow. Yeah.

And he saw one German soldier. He was wounded, but he wasn't fatally wounded, and he was sitting by a tree, and he had a Bible in his hand. And the man was a Christian that was the American, and he sat down with them and they actually talked for a few minutes and they prayed together and, uh, you know, seemed to enjoy a moment of fellowship together. And then the American soldier said to him, 'Well, I'll see you on the other side,' and then he pulled out his gun and he killed him. And oh my goodness, yeah, it's, it's like a haunting story of like, wow, how can we be so far off? And you know, even from the early church that said you, you either can't be a soldier and join, or if you're already a soldier, you have to take a vow not to to kill. It's interesting, like, in the times that we live in now, that nationalism seems to be almost propped up by evangelicals, you know, at least around our country. And right, stories like the one you just shared about Barth, it's nothing new. It's something that's happened again and again, and it's a danger if we don't find our identity in Christ. And why Paul's apocalyptic, as you have been talking about and as you wrote about in your book, I think is so essential for us to understand, is Christians that we are a new creation, and yeah, our citizenship is not of this world. You know, it's almost a trite cliché to say that anymore because we've heard it so many times, but it's not a cliché, it's the actual reality. And that brings me to something when we talk about this idea of new creation. And I was joking with you online, we're gonna have to go on tour with your book and my new album.

Oh yeah, yeah.

Because you write about Charles Wesley's Love Divine, All Loves Exceed selling in the book, and I recorded that on my new album Thunder, which I was excited about. I got to that part of the book, it was like, this is great, we're like on the same wavelength here.

Oh yeah, yeah.

But I think that illustrates kind of what you were talking, and so I'm just going to read a little bit from the book if you don't mind.

Sure, yeah, go ahead, go ahead.

Yeah, because it kind of relates both to the music I make and the book that you wrote together. But you say in the book, you say Charles Wesley's hymn, right, Divine all loves excelling, grasps how Paul can maintain this tension. Finish then thy new creation, pure and spotless let us be. Let us see thy great salvation perfectly restored in thee, changed from glory into glory till in heaven we take our place, till we cast our crowns before thee, lost in wonder, love, and praise. And you say that the new creation is now and available to those in Christ, but it still requires God's act of fulfillment. The new creation must be fulfilled and finished. This is not an activity of our doing, it is God's activity. Humanity can only live and act by means of supplication, which resembles the lost one lost in wonder, love, and praise. And I just really appreciated what you had written there, and glad that you brought up that particular hymn because it's become very special to me over the years.

Oh yeah.

Feel free to comment on that. That wasn't so much a question as just I appreciated that you brought that out in the book.

Yeah, well, it's funny that two things I want to say about that. One is an anecdote and one is just kind of my comments on why I love that hymn so much and why I love that that was something that Wesley decided to write about because I think it perfectly encapsulates what the vocation of the Christian is as we await the return of Christ, but the anecdote is that I remember that a lot of the people that I write and read about in the book— I read and write about in the book are Reformed figures. I mean, Barth's Reformed. Most of the apocalyptic figures are Reformed. I mean, you got a lot of Lutherans in there and things like that, and so I remember somebody telling somebody about that, and they're like, well, you gotta say something Western. Wesleyan if you're gonna be a Wesleyan. So, so I remember this is before I wrote a whole section on John Wesley in the second chapter, but I was like, oh, okay. I quoted a Charles Wesley hymn. My Wesleyan Nazarene due diligence is done. And so I can, I can move on. But yeah, the, the, the hymn there really encapsulates what I feel like is at stake in political life. And I know that I'm gonna have a lot of people that disagree with this, but I really— I honestly think that this is true. The problems that I saw when I first started embarking on this about many good Christians who were faithful and wonderful people becoming kind of swept up in this political curiae liaison, that type of thing, where now our job as Christians is to try and hold the most power either on the progressive or the conservative side of things. Our job is to kind of get into office the candidates who will help us become the most powerful or things like that. Um, and hold them— and the kind of the, the rejection of that idea means that we have to reject— because the problem that arises when that happens, when you, when you kind of, um, say, all right, our main goal is to get this person to office because they're going to help us achieve this end, is that you subordinate a lot of other values to that one. You sacrifice a lot of things. To that, and so your neighbor ceases to be your neighbor. They're now your opponent, or things of that nature, so especially Charles Wesley really, really digs at that point is that our job is to act in a way that is faithful, and to be faithful doesn't always mean that you're going to be effective. Effective in the ways like that. Like, I remember reading a story about how when the conquistadors came over to the Americas, they were writing home about like these mass conversions that they were experiencing. Well, that's because they were threatening them with death, right? They were saying, "If you don't convert, we're gonna kill you," and things like that, and so you can be effective in converting people, but is that a faithful way to convert? And so we might only in our lifetime only achieve these small moves through these various effective— I mean, through these various faithful kind of measures that we try and do, the witnesses that we try and engage in, but there's always a line that we cannot cross because it's not our job to bring about the new creation. We sing, "Finish then thy new creation," instead of, "Let us get there ourselves." Let us make it ourselves. And so the types of acts that we do are stubborn. They are faithful, but they ultimately reject certain tactics that might achieve the ends that we want, like violence and, you know, and those types of activities. I think that that's important because, I mean, you can see that in any type of election, the things that have gone, even though they've like certain— I think about like the people who have been outspoken advocates of presidents who have to kind of gloss over certain elements of their chosen candidates that are not really coming of the Christian faith. They're like, well, they help us achieve this end, so we're going to overlook it. It's like, no, no, no, no, we need to be faithful in all things and reject the things that are not faithful to who Christ calls us to be and recognize that our job is not to to bring about sweeping dramatic like historical, you know, to bring about the new creation for lack of a better phrase. Our job is to be faithful and allow God to work and to witness to these realities. I mean, there are some gains that will happen through our witnessing and our solidarity with the outcasts and things like that, but I mean, the large gains, the real transformation of history is up to God.

Yeah, well, and I think it's good that, you know, to quote an Andrew Peterson song, "Is He Worthy," where he says it's, you know, "Is it good that we remind ourselves of this? It is," you know. It's the whole idea that we have to keep rehearsing these things. And one thing that I think is very interesting when we have these conversations and we talk about the things that mold us and shape us— I grew up in the church like you did, and I think a lot of times I grew up being told, like, you know, stay away from, like, movies that have a lot of bad language in them because those will corrupt you and you'll start talking that way. Or don't watch things like soap operas, there's dirty things in there, we don't want you to be affected by that. And I don't, I don't think that's a false thing to say, but I think one thing that was never emphasized, which may be even more insidious and may cause more damage, is the way that we get into our bubbles with our news networks. And I want to say to people sometimes in the church, like, be careful what you're watching, because if your diet is CNN, or if your diet is Fox News, or you name one, MSNBC, whatever it is, and that's primarily what is shaping you and discipling you, you're going to have a completely distorted view of what it is that, for instance, Paul is talking about here. And right, it's, it's interesting that, you know, we we need to be mastered by something else. And you've written so much about so many topics, and I'd love to go so many places today, but that's just something that kind of strikes me as one thing that you said a few moments ago. And I think this will be a good segue, you know, is talking about how do we be good neighbors, you know, to our world.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

What's, what's the best way as believers, you know, it's probably not the best way to make true conversions by doing at gunpoint at a person's head, or, you know, right?

Yeah, yeah.

Um, well, and you had said whenever I invited you on this show— and we're going to move out away from your book a little bit, there's so much more to talk about, and I, and I want to recommend that book to everybody— but you had asked if we specifically could talk about, speaking of neighbors, Fred Rogers. And, um, I think you had asked that because I, I run the Mr. Rogers Say Twitter page And I don't know, I just spend a lot of time and have read a lot about Fred and have been changed a lot about him in my own life. As I was thinking of the words like of love divine, all loves excelling, or the different things that you've written about in your book and Paul's apocalyptic and Christian forgiveness and what it means to be the neighbors that God's called us to be in the world, which really— has everything to do with politics, the way that we structure ourselves. I can't think of anyone who maybe embodies the kingdom way more than Fred Rogers. Yeah, of someone who, who didn't actually have to preach it to live it, you know. Um, he was one that lived it first. And, um, I, I want to let you talk a little bit about maybe some of the ways that, that you find him important to you. But because you are one who teaches and you're one who pastors and you're one who writes a book like this, I just wanted to share one of my favorite Fred Rogers quotes with you. You've probably heard it before, but I think it's brilliant and it has a lot to do with the way we live in the world as believers. He said, the thing I— he says, the thing I remember best about successful people I've met all through the years is their obvious delight in what they're doing, and it seems to have very little to do with worldly success. They just love what they're doing, and they love it in front of others. And Fred also would talk about teachers in that way. He'd say some of the best teachers in the world are just those who love what they do, and they love it in front of other people, you know.

Yeah, yeah.

And, um, I, I, when I think of that, I think too, you know, part of this is, is loving our God with our hearts soul and might and loving our neighbor as ourselves, you know, loving God in that way that's in front of our neighbors. But talk to me a little bit about why you wanted to talk about Fred today. I'd love to hear more about what intrigues you.

Well, I, you know, it's interesting. I've been— I watched Mister Rogers' Neighborhood as a child, as most people did. And but it's fascinating. I was thinking about this in terms of my own, like, being like raising, like being raised, like, I mean, my favorite childhood show was not Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood. It was, uh, it was the Power Rangers, right? And I think about like the contrast between Mr. Rogers and the Power Rangers for kids, you know, like the, the Power Rangers for kids is like defeating the monsters and things like that. I mean, and very rarely do they ever like approach the topics that Mr. Rogers does, which is like humanizing, um the, the, the person that you most like are suspicious of. Mr. Rogers does such a great job in Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood of this kind of broad inclusivity of a whole variety of people. I mean, I mean, I'm sure that Mr. Rogers fervor kicked off recently really heavily because of that documentary that came in last summer, uh, which is just such a fantastic thing. As a teacher now, in every single class, I actually require all of my students to watch the documentary, uh, because I feel like— I mean, I feel like it's such an important documentary. I mean, whether you're studying church history or theology or, or if you're studying ethics, I feel like you all watch that, uh, that documentary. And there's this great phrase by the biographer, um, that, uh, that they interview in that movie where he talks about like Fred Rogers has this wide open Christianity that accepts thinking from all different kinds of places. And I remember getting very emotional in the movie theater at that point in time, uh, recalling my childhood, thinking about like how, um, Fred shaped me to think from a whole variety of different places, uh, even more so than my other childhood shows. And like, rearing kids is such a dangerous thing because you don't know what, uh, what kind of things they're being exposed to. You know, you talked about just like the things being exposed to— exposing children to Fred Rogers is such, I think, an important task because I think he does is he kind of shows that, and I, I find this is like a cultural fundamentalism that we only accept thinking from a few small streams like the CNN, like the Fox News, like you just said. Fred accepted thinking from all kinds of places, um, and especially in the church, we really struggle with that. We really struggle with that. And Fred opens us up to a new perspective. And, and just like the, like the humility at the end of his life to ask, you know, am I a sheep? Like, that's the famous— he said to his wife as he was on his deathbed, am I a sheep? And things like that. Um, you know, not to— go ahead, sorry.

Which was referring to the sheep and the goats scripture.

Yeah, yeah, right. Yeah, like him, him doing that is so— because we're all— the problem with with fundamentalists and many of the churches, that we are absolutely sure that we are right over and against everyone else who is wrong. And Fred, even at the end of his life, is open to recognizing, maybe I was wrong. But I think the comforting word that his wife gives to him, I think, is the right one, uh, which is the thing that he tries to get kids throughout his entire life to recognize about themselves. It's like, you know, you have value and worth in your own being. Try it. She makes him comfortable again in his own skin is what it sounds like by saying, "If there ever was a sheep, you're one," which I really enjoyed. And actually, like, since— I mean, I don't know how far it is from you, but for me, Latrobe, which is where the Fred Rogers Institute is and the, like, the museum and things like that, that's only about 3 hours for me. So I took a trek over there and spent some time touring that area, and it is just wonderful. To see all the different things, like, because they have all the puppets there and Fred's possessions and his cardigans and shoes and sneakers and things like that. And, um, it's just a very moving experience. And for me, Fred displays perfectly, um, that kind of Christian citizenship that I talked about, which is not citizenship to any particular nation, but it's a citizenship to something that is not yet, because he spends and busies his life, even though he was very famous, um, he, he's his life, you know, like with kids. I mean, the, the whole point of me bringing up the Power Rangers, I mean, the Power Rangers was an attractive, like, very flashy show that kept my attention for 30 minutes. I mean, Fred would oftentimes spend minutes just in silence staring at the screen, you know. Yeah, things like that. He, he taught kids a different type of reflex, a different type of understanding of time than did all their other shows. And, you know, you can say whether or not he was successful in maintaining the attention. I mean, that's the question I think someone asked at the beginning of the documentary, was Fred Rogers successful in changing culture? And I think in a lot of ways he was, not because he won over the political office or made all these laws, but because all along the way you hear these testimonials from these people. Whose lives he's changed. So he made a difference, but not in the way that we idealize as the difference that we should be making. He busied himself with this person one at a time for his entire life.

And he seemed to shun away from the big and the huge and the, you know, right, and kind of shun away from power. And they talk about specifically in his book how he would never jump on board political discussions and things like that because he just didn't find that to be helpful. It was very interesting to— I read several books about him, but he really changed my whole outlook on discipleship, I think, in a lot of ways, just reading about his life and even what it means to be disciplined. His prayer life was very, very John Wesley, you know, and he'd wake up early in the morning and he would be in prayer. And in the books it goes even more deep than it does in the documentary, just talking about the list of people that he had on his prayer list, and he would go over them every day and pray over them, and he'd study scripture, and then that would lead to his time where he'd go to the pool. And Gloria in excelsis Deo, he would sing before he would— no, sorry, it was Rejoice in the Lord Always. It was the Taizé song that he would sing as he would dive into the pool each morning, that his friend Henry Nouwen taught him these songs.

Yeah.

You find out amazing things about the man. And I have been fascinated, and I'm glad you wanted to talk about it, because I've found that theologians that have come on this show before— not always on the podcast, but they'll find out that I curate that Mr. Rogers Twitter feed— and they want to talk to me about Fred Rogers. And I think it's partially because the academy, and especially in the work of theology, What I think you good teachers are trying to do is you're trying to teach people how to pray ultimately, and you're trying to teach people how to be disciples in the world. And it doesn't always sound like that because some of the words are big and whatever, but it's always interesting to me when people in the academy want to talk to me just specifically about, oh, what a huge influence. If we could embody Fred Rogers, we've gotten it.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, I'm just so overwhelmed by the fact that like I think about the goals of a theologian, like an active theologian, someone who wants to write books. I mean, this is something that's always been placed out in front of me. Write books and, you know, write articles and present and do podcasts, things like that. But I mean, I look at— I mean, there's something far more attractive about the theological life that Fred lived, which is very different. I mean, it's still like, I— in that one of the biographies I read, the— they interviewed some of his professors and they were all like, yeah, he was one of our brightest students, which doesn't surprise me whatsoever. But, you know, I mean, and even on one of his— I, I think he, he took like a, uh, he did some type of trip over to France. He spoke fluent French. He was gonna take over— like, a lot of people thought he was going to run a French orphanage because he spent a lot of time when he was overseas in orphanages in France. So yeah, I mean, I just— he's changed what I think the goals should be of a theologian, and that's why I show him to all my classes because I think that— I mean, even though I think that like the desire to be an academic theologian the way the old guard thought of it is fading, I think that it's also a good way to be a pastor, right? You don't have to preach in a way, like standing over people, you know, asking them to repent, but you just play the Christian life in front of them in a way that's so attractive because there's something so attractive about Fred Rock that I hope and long for the church because I just, I love that beautiful shot. Again, it's all from the documentary, which is just in my mind. I think I've watched it like 20 times now, but when he's actually— that biographer's describing that wide open Christianity of Fred Rogers, there's this panning shot kind of up like a cathedral or some type of really large church to this stained glass picture of Christ on the cross. I can't get beyond that in my own imagination now, about this wide open Christianity that embraces everything and everyone. And I'm kind of stuck there, and that's thanks to Fred.

Yeah, well, that's great. And there's so much more that we could unpack with that too. But I think it's actually a good way to point back to your book as we close our conversation today with what we've just been talking about with the patience that I think we see Fred embodied. And, you know, it's one thing has been very interesting to me as I've been running this Twitter feed, and I forget how many people we have actively following it now, I think like 23,000 people or something. And so it's, it's a lot to where I'll post something and, you know, he used to have people come up to him and, and say things like, you know, I was in a hotel room and I was just about to end my life. I was on drugs and for whatever reason you came on the TV screen and it encouraged me to change my whole direction, you know.

Yeah, yeah.

And I'm sure he was he was probably just talking about, you know, colors or something that day, you know. Yeah, right. So, but I loved his answer, and I've tried to give this answer to people who will message me through that feed as well. I've always loved what he would tell people in those moments, is he would say something to the extent of, when you heard my words, that was the Holy Spirit speaking to you what you needed to hear in that moment, you know. So whether I said it or not, and he would always try to remind people that but if they found something like that, it was the patient God that he served that was shining out of him in those moments. And yeah, all that is to say, to bring it back around to this, you quote Alan Kreider in your book, and I think it would be a great thing if you don't mind, I want to read what you quoted from him.

Sure, absolutely, go for it.

But it's a great thing about the tactic of the early church, and as we again Everything is already ramping up with, you know, not quite 2 years to go till another presidential election. Oh yeah, everything is already just crazy. And it would be wonderful if we could remember this, what Alan Kreider says in his book The Patient Ferment of the Early Church. Says, this was the tactic of the early church. The Christians believed that God is patient and that Jesus visibly embodied patience, and they concluded that they Trusting in God should be patient, not controlling events, not anxious or in a hurry, and never using force to achieve their ends. And I, I love that quote. I'm so glad that you shared it from one of my favorite books.

Yeah.

And, um, and I want to refer everybody who's listening back to your book again. There's so much in it. We, we barely even skimmed the surface of your new book today. Again, the title is The The Trust and Loving Gaze of God with Us. We're going to put links to that on my website at voicesinmyheadpodcast.com, so when you go to the show page, they'll be able to find links and where they can check it out. It's been wonderful talking to you today, and I'm so grateful that we had a chance to sit and discuss it. So, Hank Spaulding, thank you for being one of the voices in my head this week.

Thank you. It's been an honor. I really enjoyed our conversations today.

Thank you for joining me here this week on Voices in My Head. I hope you'll visit me on my website at rickleejames.com where you can find out more about me, get my music on vinyl and CD, follow my blog, and even schedule me for a concert or speaking engagement. Better yet, even a book signing in your neighborhood. You can find all that and more at rickleejames.com. Rickleejames.com. Also, it would mean a great deal to me if you could write a review of this podcast on iTunes. The more positive reviews that we receive, the more visible this podcast will be online. And now for the benediction: May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope. God bless you, and thank you for listening to Voices in My Head.