Latest / Ministry Minded / On Tolkien, Storytelling, and the Eucatastrophe of Grace with Sam Schuldheisz

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On Tolkien, Storytelling, and the Eucatastrophe of Grace with Sam Schuldheisz · Ministry Minded

• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: Hello and welcome to a brand new episode of the Ministry-Minded Podcast.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: a show that seeks to marvel at the mercy of God that meets us in our messy ministries.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: I'm, of course, your host, Pastor Brad Gray.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: I am the senior pastor of Stonington Baptist Church right here in Pax Sinus, Pennsylvania.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm so pleased to be sharing with you another enjoyable conversation,
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: one that I hope enlightens but also encourages you in your walk with the Lord.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: This one is one that I've been looking forward to for a while.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_00: I've been so eager to
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: share this conversation.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_00: It was such a delight to sit down with my new friend, Sam Schuldhuis.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: New only because we have known each other for a while just through the online
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: ministry of 1517,
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: but I was delighted to make his acquaintance in person,
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: in the flesh,
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: if you will,
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: during last year's Here We Still Stand conference back in San Diego.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: And
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: It was just a delight to get to know Sam,
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: but it's been a thrill to read all of his contributions to 1517's blog.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: If you haven't, I'm going to link to several in the notes for this particular episode, only because...
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: Sam has,
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: as we get into,
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: he's somewhat,
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_00: I would say,
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: carved out this wonderful little niche of talking about and investigating and
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_00: researching and kind of teasing out the theology of the Inklings,
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: which most notably would be the theology,
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: if you will,
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: that comes from the imaginations of C.S.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: Lewis and J.R.R.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: Tolkien, among others.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: In fact...
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: That's what his talk was on at last year's Here We Still Stand conference,
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: which was a thrill just to sit and enjoy,
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_00: but it's been,
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: it was just even more of a thrill just to sit and kind of talk more about these themes,
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: these themes of storytelling and how that,
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: how important that is when it is related to the gospel of Christ and how pertinent
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: and significant it is
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: this theme of eucatastrophe.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: And if that is a word that you haven't heard before, I invite you to listen to this particular episode.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: It was just such a joy to sit and talk with Sam and just riff about Middle Earth
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: and Tolkien and theology and all the things that kind of emanate from that.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: And the story of the gospel, as we get into, is one that captures our hearts and our imaginations and
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: compels us to faith and belief.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: And I was just so thankful to chat with Sam.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: So without further ado, I want to share this episode.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for supporting Ministry Minded, and I hope you enjoy and are encouraged by this conversation.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: So enjoy.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: Hey, Sam.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: It's so good to have you on the podcast today.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: I'm so glad that you could make some time for me.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: How are you doing?
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_01: I'm doing well.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_01: It's good to be with you here, Brad.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: I'm so happy that we can do this.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: I've read a lot of your stuff for a while, which we're going to get into, obviously.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: But I was so happy to meet you in person.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: It's always that – that's a very internet age thing to talk about.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: For sure.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: You feel like you know someone from a really far distance and then you finally meet them in the flesh.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it was cool.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_01: That was one of the great things about that 1517 conference there last October was just,
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_01: yeah,
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_01: people that we had seen or heard about or read about,
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_01: it's like,
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_01: oh,
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_01: yeah,
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_01: I've read stuff by Brad.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_01: And then,
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_01: yeah,
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_01: here we get to chat and hang out and listen to some presentations together and,
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_01: yeah,
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_01: get to know each other a little bit in the flesh,
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_01: in the person.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_01: That's always good.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: It always just really fills me just because you realize that,
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: hey,
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: there's a lot more commonality that you have with a person besides just writing for
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: the same parachurch ministry or something like that.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: There's a lot of singularity there that I just love.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: Anyways,
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: yeah,
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: I'm just really glad that we can do this and just riff about Middle Earth for a
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: while maybe.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_01: Definitely, yeah.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_01: That's the great thing is about it.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_01: Those kind of in-person connections help you realize like, oh, yeah, that –
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, the Internet's good.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_01: It's a tool.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_01: It's a resource.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_01: But,
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_01: yeah,
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_01: when you get down to meeting people and talking with them,
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_01: you get to find out those things you have in common with one another and sit across
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_01: the Internet table like this with them.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_01: There you go.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_01: Enjoy some good conversation together.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: So,
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: well,
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_00: why don't you introduce yourself,
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: kind of tell us about where the Lord has you and about what your ministry is like
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: and where you are in the United States.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_01: Sure, sure.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_01: So I serve at Beautiful Savior Lutheran Church.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_01: It's in Milton, Washington.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_01: And automatically people ask, where's Milton?
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_01: Where's that?
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_01: So the easiest way to describe it is we're kind of north and east of Tacoma, Washington.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_01: So we're south Puget Sound area, just far enough out of Seattle, at least from my comfort zone.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_01: So that's a good thing.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_01: And a beautiful northwest area.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_01: So other than this week.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_01: It's pretty beastly hot right now.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_01: It kind of feels like there should be some hobbits running across the door throwing
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_01: some rings in mountains or something around here.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_01: It's a little toasty.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_01: But usually it's pretty nice and beautiful and mild.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_01: I've got rain and trees and green and all sorts of good things that I enjoy.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_01: And yeah, I serve beautiful Savior Lutheran Church.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_01: I've been here, let's see, just it'll be six years exactly coming up on the 22nd of July.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, wow.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah,
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_01: I've been here six years and was in Huntington Beach,
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_01: California for 10 years before that out of seminary.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_01: And, yeah, I have a beautiful wife, Natasha, two wonderful kids.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_01: Zoe's 13 now, and Jonah is 10.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_01: So looking at 8th grade and 5th grade.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_01: And we've got pets.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_01: We've got Rabbit, Cleo, and Cat Tillamook.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_01: He's orange, Tabby.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_01: And then Mr. Normandy the hamster.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: You've got a full household.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, we've got a little zoo here and a wonderful parsonage that the church has for us to live in.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_01: It's got a nice cool basement I'm in today, so that's good.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_01: And just good people here.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_01: It was kind of a fun and interesting situation.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_01: They had had two pastors before we got here.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_01: And then within a couple of weeks,
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_01: that fall before I got the call here later in the spring of the next year of 2018,
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_01: both their pastors within a couple of weeks ended up taking calls different places.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_01: One went back to military chaplain.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_01: One went back to Southern California.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_01: And so then they were without a pastor,
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_01: and then their first call meeting came through,
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_01: and then I was on the call list and got here.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_01: And it's just been all around a good blessing for our family.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_01: It's been good being up here and good being with people here.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_01: Definitely.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_01: Kind of spread our roots and be…
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah,
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: well,
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: I'm – by the time this releases,
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_00: I will have been at my church for just a little over five years.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_00: Awesome.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_00: And so similar – somewhat similar timeframe, and I'm curious what is – as – if you can reflect.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_00: I don't want to talk about the year that shall not be named,
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: but if you reflect on the last like six-odd years –
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_00: What's something that you've noticed either that's changed within your ministry or
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: changed perhaps as your theology has developed or something like that?
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think just as a congregation, our people, I think...
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_01: I think we were pretty tight-knit together.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_01: One of the common things I heard from visitors,
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_01: even before 2020 and stuff like that,
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_01: was we feel very welcome here.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_01: We feel like it's coming home, and I think that's a good thing.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_01: I always am very thankful that people get that feeling,
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_01: and that's their takeaway when they come,
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_01: or at least one of the takeaways.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_01: But I think that's just increased more because I think people realized, like a lot of us did, that...
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_01: While online maybe Bible studies and things like that are fun for a little while or
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_01: maybe even just useful,
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_01: maybe not so much fun,
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_01: but they're at least a tool to use.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_01: They're not a replacement at all for gathering in person together.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_01: And so I think kind of getting back into –
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_01: normal routines and things at our own congregation really gave people a sense of,
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_01: oh,
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_01: yeah,
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_01: even just meeting together for whatever,
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_01: brats and sauerkraut in October or something like that,
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_01: or,
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_01: we're having like a pie festival coming up in August where the guys of the
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_01: congregation are going to make or...
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_01: make it Safeway or your local grocery store pies and bring them.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_01: So different things like that.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_01: I think it was there before,
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_01: but when you take it away,
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_01: you kind of realize how important it is and how special it is to be gathered together,
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_01: the body of Christ.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_01: Again,
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_01: sort of like our conversation and meeting together in the person,
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_01: in the flesh,
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_01: rubbing elbows with each other in the pews during service on Sunday morning,
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_01: receiving God's gifts together,
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_01: and then just taking care of the church grounds,
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_01: picking up trash,
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_01: trimming branches.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_01: throwing baby showers and eating food together and laughing,
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_01: crying together,
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_01: doing all the things that Christian families do with one another.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah,
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_01: that's,
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_01: that's kind of very much like,
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_00: uh,
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_00: not,
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_00: not to continue,
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: keep keeping everything on the nose,
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_00: but it sounds very much like some,
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_00: like a,
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_00: like something a Hobbit would do.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_01: It's very true.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_01: I kind of sympathize with Tolkien statement about,
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_01: uh,
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_01: I'm a Hobbit and everything,
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_01: but stature,
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_01: I've always sort of,
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_01: I kind of echoed that.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_01: It's like,
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_01: yeah,
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_01: I'm too tall to be a hobbit,
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_01: but I kind of like the rest of the...
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_01: Everything else about them,
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_01: I can totally jump onto.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_00: Before we continue down the road to Middle Earth,
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_00: it is interesting just what you commented on,
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: like this in-person corporate worship,
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: which I think hopefully for many other congregations,
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_00: but I know for mine as well,
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_00: and I think as you suggested yours as well,
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_00: which is just a renewed or perhaps a reinvigorated sense of importance of worship.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_00: That like the physicality of worship,
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_00: being with flesh and blood,
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_00: which I think is,
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_00: it's not just,
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_00: the sacraments.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_00: When we come to the Lord's table and we partake of those,
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_00: that's not the only part that should be,
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_00: quote unquote,
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_00: physical.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: But that is, of course, one of the most important.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_00: But the whole gambit of worship.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_00: It's this like physical embodiment with other believers as you are united under the
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_00: word of Christ,
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: which I think was for me one of the things that I've really drawn out of this quote
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_00: unquote season is the importance of that.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think so too.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_01: I know for our people that's the case.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_01: You know, worship is, our church is a very liturgical, some might say high church kind of church.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_01: So the senses and what you see,
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_01: hear,
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_01: taste,
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_01: touch,
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_01: smell,
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_01: those kinds of things,
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_01: right,
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_01: those are a part of worship on a pretty regular basis around our parts.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_01: But again,
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_01: to see that that's not just,
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_01: that's not,
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_01: real life in that way as a Christian isn't just the hour or whatever it is,
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_01: hour and a half or however much time you spend in church on a Sunday morning,
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_01: but it
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_01: It ought to extend out to the congregation life and into our daily life and our
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_01: homes and with our neighbors and friends and family and that kind of thing too.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_00: Well,
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_00: anyone who knows you and knows your writings on 1517 knows that you have a
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_00: particular niche that I think you've carved out for yourself,
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: which is somewhat of the Inklings expert,
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_00: I guess.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know how else to describe you.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_00: That's very kind.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_00: I don't really know either, but I just – yeah.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_00: Something like that.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_00: That works.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_00: We'll go with that.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_00: In fact,
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_00: yeah,
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_00: that's what – your talk at the 2023 Here We Still Stand conference was all about
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_00: the Inklings.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_00: And I would love just to like –
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_00: For any of those who might be listening that don't know who the Inklings are,
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: I would love to kind of dive into that a little bit but also some of the facets
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_00: that are born out of the Inklings obviously of course majorly being Lewis and
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_00: Tolkien and their friendship and kind of the literature that is born out of that.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, there's many others as you've detailed for 1517 quite well.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_00: But just can you kind of – for those who are unfamiliar,
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_00: can you kind of give a like a brief snapshot of when someone is talking about the Inklings,
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_00: what that involves and maybe you can't do this because your talk was like an hour long.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_00: It was.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe that's an impossible question.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_01: No, not at all.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_01: Not at all.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_01: It's –
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah,
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_01: it's one of those questions you can answer it pretty quickly,
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_01: and you can also take,
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_01: like the Ents in Lord of the Rings,
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_01: you can not be too hasty,
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_01: and you can take a long,
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_01: long,
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_01: long time to talk about who the Inklings are and all their things.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_01: I mean,
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_01: yeah,
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_01: kind of the short version of that story is that really it started,
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_01: there's a lot of ways you can start it,
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_01: but it started out of the friendship of Lewis and Tolkien in a lot of ways.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_01: And there are obviously obvious differences and glaring differences sometimes in
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_01: terms of their writing style,
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_01: their personalities were different.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_01: could not be different at the same time.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_01: But along with their differences,
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_01: they had a very unique kind of common ground,
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_01: sort of what Lewis later calls mere Christianity,
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_01: with things that we share in common with different branches of Christian faith,
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_01: different members of the same household of Christ.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis and Tolkien had that with...
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_01: with things they liked, like stories.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_01: So the Inklings grew out of their love for a few different things,
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_01: writing and reading,
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_01: and then telling stories and hearing stories,
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_01: and writing about words,
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_01: using words,
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_01: and then talking about words with words and sharing words with friends,
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_01: too.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_01: It really is quite fascinating.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_01: And then out of that grew this group called
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_01: It kind of began informal, and it continued to be somewhat this kind of balance of formality.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_01: They had certain things they did all the time.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_01: They smoked, they drank, they met.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_01: It takes place in Oxford, and they meet in Oxford into the mid-late 1930s is when they begin dating.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_01: Into 1949 or so is when kind of the official end of the Inklings meetings,
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_01: as they were properly known and defined kind of fits.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_01: There were, I think, about 19 of them total, and people that would come in and out, come and go.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_01: Some were more regular and faithful.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis and Tolkien obviously were very much involved in that.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_01: Charles Williams was another one that came along later.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_01: Owen Barfield was instrumental in the founding of that and a lot of the ideas,
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_01: especially with the language and metaphor and the use of metaphor in language and
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_01: use of poetry and imagery.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_01: And that was influential both for Tolkien and Lewis.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_01: And so these guys got together and, again, they ate, they drank, they smoked.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_01: They argued.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_01: They talked sometimes into like the wee, wee hours of the night.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_01: There was one instance before Lewis, C.S.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis comes back to the Christian faith where Lewis and J.R.R.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_01: Tolkien,
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_01: it's in September of 1939,
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_01: and Tolkien and Lewis and their friend Hugo Dyson are walking along Addison's Walk
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_01: right outside of Magdalen College there in Oxford.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_01: And that's where this story takes place is in Oxford.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_01: and around this historic university town with fairy tales and church spires and academia.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_01: It almost seems like it's written in a fairy tale book, but it's a real place at the same time.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_01: So this is the setting,
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_01: and Lewis and Tolkien and Dyson are walking along this Addison's Walk along the river,
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_01: and Lewis is still kind of grappling with...
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_01: with things of the Christian faith and wrestling with theism,
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_01: and he likes a lot of things he's heard about the Christian faith,
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_01: but he also has this,
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_01: he's got a few intellectual and imaginative kind of hang-ups,
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_01: and he doesn't quite know exactly how,
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_01: like,
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_01: okay,
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_01: well,
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_01: what good does a dying God do for me?
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, maybe it's truthful, but what does that mean?
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_01: What's the meaning of it from a couple thousand years ago, right?
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_01: How does that impact me?
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_01: And
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_01: Tolkien and Dyson after – well, they talked until like 3 in the morning.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_01: Tolkien finally went home.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_01: Hugo Dyson and Lewis continued back walking and back to his rooms at the college
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_01: for another couple hours.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_01: They went to bed.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_01: Woke up and enjoyed breakfast together and kept the conversation going the next day too.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_01: And one of the main things about that conversation was that Tolkien and Dyson got
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis to see that his intellect and his imagination weren't like two kind of things
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_01: separated by this huge chasm.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_01: but rather that in the Christian faith you could see both of them together as
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_01: complementary rather than contradictory.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_01: And so the thing that united it was to see that Tolkien said to Lewis,
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_01: well,
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_01: look,
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_01: Jack,
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_01: you love all of these stories about dying and rising gods.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_01: Basically, what if that actually happened once?
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_01: What if it was true?
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_01: What if there was a story that had all the things that you liked about good stories,
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_01: the things you read in Norse mythology and Edmund Spencer's fairy tales and George
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_01: MacDonald's book Fantasties was a huge book for Lewis and
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_01: and Tolkien and the Inklings.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_01: What if that actually happened?
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_01: What if there was all the things you liked in those books
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_01: was also in the Gospels, and yet the Gospels were true.
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_01: And this story is the...
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_01: So Lewis came out with this,
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_01: and Tolkien taught this to him,
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_01: so did Dyson,
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_01: that Christianity is the myth became fact.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_01: It's the one true myth.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_01: And they use a different word,
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_01: or a different understanding of the word myth,
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_01: which is probably important to mention for a moment too.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_01: We usually think of myth as...
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_01: Something that's false,
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_01: something made up,
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_01: something that's contrived,
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_01: and sometimes maybe even intentionally so.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_01: Up in the Northwest here, we have the big myth of Sasquatch.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_01: And there's different versions of that around different parts of the country or even in the world.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_01: But Lewis and Tolkien understood myth quite differently.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_01: For them, it was a vehicle of truth.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_01: It was a way of communicating through a story fundamental, truthful things.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, things like courage, honor, hope, grace, mercy, love, those kinds of things.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_01: The things that are...
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_01: transcendental, that are above us, transcendent, bigger than us.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_01: So that was their understanding of myth, and it was different than ours.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_01: So when they say Christianity is a myth, they're not saying, oh, it's false and made up.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_01: They're actually saying,
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_01: no,
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_01: this is the true story,
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_01: and it also is history,
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_01: and yet it also has these qualities like we find in a good story.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_01: It's hopeful.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_01: it speaks to the reality of sin and death in the world.
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_01: It explains it, and yet also doesn't try to explain it away in the way that maybe some myths do.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_01: It doesn't try to put us in a logical box.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_01: And at the same time,
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_01: it also has things like happy endings,
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_01: which is where that word eucatastrophe comes in that Tolkien quoted and coined and
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_01: spent a lot of deal writing about.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_01: That's the short version of the Inkling story there.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_01: Sorry about that.
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_00: No, no, it's great.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_00: There's so much involved,
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_00: and I just love,
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_00: as you detailed in your talk,
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_00: which I'm going to link to,
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_00: by the way,
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_00: but I think it's amazing just to see the really...
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_00: It's this big kind of conglomerate of characters.
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_00: It's not like this one defined type.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_00: Like, the Inklings don't necessarily have a type.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you can't fit it into like a box kind of thing, right?
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_01: It's...
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_01: And it's crazy how unique those guys were, you know, different vocations.
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, a lot of them were professors, but there was a doctor, right?
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_01: There was a lawyer, Owen Barfield and things.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_01: So – and even within being professors, a lot of different disciplines, different areas of expertise.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_01: So it was, yeah, anything but a –
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_01: You can't find like a single definition of, OK, this is an inkling in the dictionary kind of thing.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_00: Except perhaps maybe they all like to smoke pipe weed.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_01: Again, yeah, food, right?
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_01: Good food, good drink, whether it was tea or wine or beer or cider.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_01: Apparently the bird and the baby, right, the eagle and child is where they met often on Tuesday mornings.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_01: And then Thursday evenings is where they met in Lewis's rooms typically.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_01: And apparently Bird and the Baby,
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_01: the Eagle and the Child was known for its draft cider for a while,
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_01: at least till the war and then rationing and messes start.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_00: It is interesting how almost inherently – I don't know.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe I should say this.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_00: But almost how like inherently British –
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_01: the description of hobbits is it really is yeah yeah i mean even down to the shire
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_01: right the place you got worcester and you got all these different shires around
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_01: england yeah well yeah i think um i think it was i think i read this recently too
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_01: that uh so one of the inspirations for samwise which is
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_01: Obviously somewhat biased here,
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_01: but my favorite character,
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_01: I think,
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_01: out of all of the characters of Tolkien's.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_01: Rightly so.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_01: He was – definitely.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_01: He was inspired by kind of the common British soldier for Samwise.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_01: So this sort of rugged –
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_01: looking out for everybody else around him kind of guy, could do it all, handyman, right?
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_01: He's a gardener.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_01: He can cook.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_01: He can take care of the home.
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_01: He's constantly looking out for others over and above himself,
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: selfless,
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: sacrificial,
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_01: loyal,
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_01: humble,
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_01: just beautiful,
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_01: wonderful characteristics to have.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_01: And he saw that in his fellow soldiers in his own time in the war and wanted to, I think,
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_01: in some ways, pay tribute to that a little bit, as well as his own country.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_01: I mean,
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_01: that was one of the reasons he wanted to write Lord of the Rings,
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_01: too,
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_01: was to give England a mythology of its own.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_01: He saw that they were kind of missing that,
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_01: so he tried to fill in that gap,
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_01: and I think he did it successfully.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_00: It is interesting just to kind of take one step back a little bit,
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_00: which is just the fact that there's this incredible crossover that happens within
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_00: all these conversations as they're conversing about literature or poetry or some
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_00: sort of philosophical discipline.
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_00: They also touch on – even though they're approaching it from different theological dispositions perhaps –
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_00: They almost always invariably end up finding themselves talking about some sort of big,
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_00: grand theological concept,
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_00: which I think speaks to – and you alluded to this in your talk,
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_00: and I think it's worth exploring,
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_00: which is just this idea of –
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_00: Understanding the gospel as revealed in the scriptures through storytelling and
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_00: through the – we could say the ubiquity of stories,
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_00: which I think is relevant,
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_00: especially in terms of looking at the Bible as a piece of literature.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_00: You can also understand it as this –
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_00: Like,
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_00: yes,
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_00: divinely preserved collection of stories that have this incredible through line,
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_00: wherein the one who authored and inspired all of it is,
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_00: I think you even said this in your talk where like this storyteller comes and puts
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_00: himself within the story.
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_00: Which is just – it brings so much resonance to the way in which we share this piece of good news, right?
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_00: It's not just this evangelistic device or apologetic tool.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_00: It's this grand overarching story that actually has the traces of every story within it.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_01: Right, right.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_01: That's one of the cool things about when you look in,
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_01: I mean,
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_01: Old and New Testament,
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_01: it doesn't really matter,
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_01: but especially when you go and you look at what Jesus does,
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_01: if he wants to talk about,
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_01: like,
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_01: the word love or,
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_01: if he wants to show grace,
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_01: he doesn't flip out his Oxford Dictionary,
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_01: though he certainly could do that.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_01: He has all wisdom and knowledge and all these things, and yet what does he do?
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_01: He tells a story.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_01: So God's love, how do you want to know God's love?
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_01: He tells you the story of the two sons in Luke 15.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_01: Or if you want to know God's grace, how do you look at God's grace?
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_01: Well, he tells you the story of a shepherd who goes and runs after a lost sheep and rescues him.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_01: So Jesus,
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_01: more often than not,
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_01: he does a lot of teaching in kind of that strict didactic sense that we think of teaching,
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_01: Sermon on the Mount and others.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_01: but he also spends a great deal of time within those teaching moments and
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_01: discourses using imagery,
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_01: poetic language,
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_01: imagination,
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_01: storytelling,
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_01: And he does that,
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_01: I think,
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_01: in part because I think that's who God is in part of who he is,
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_01: part of how he reveals himself.
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_01: But that's also how he's wired us.
• 25:27
  SPEAKER_01: We're storytelling people.
• 25:29
  SPEAKER_01: That's the reason even silly things like 140 or whatever the character limit is on
• 25:35
  SPEAKER_01: Twitter X,
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_01: whatever the heck they call it.
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_01: I don't use it.
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_01: but people do.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_01: And that's, that's a very short form, but it's, it's a form of telling stories to people.
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_01: We do this all the time.
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_00: It's yeah.
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_00: It's kind of part of our nature to share stories.
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_00: And I,
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_00: and,
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_00: and there,
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_00: this is kind of like one of the things that I have found so fascinating,
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_00: especially if you like go back and read the old Testament and,
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_00: And read it from the standpoint in which all of these incredible truths that we
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_00: would know as and we would define as the gospel,
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_00: but this story of a redeemer that is carried forward from Adam's generation onward.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_00: It's transmitted through stories.
• 26:21
  SPEAKER_00: And granted,
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_00: it's not explicitly said because there's no like Bible passage where it's like
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_00: Abraham is sitting around with his kids telling them a story.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_00: But we infer from all of those little sections that that promise of a redeemer –
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_00: That was traced all the way back to,
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_00: that Genesis 3 and the promise of the seed of the woman is being carried forward
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_00: all the way through to all these subsequent generations,
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_00: which again is leading to that ubiquity of story,
• 26:55
  SPEAKER_00: but that ubiquity of good news that kind of fills those stories.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_01: We had a good example of this in our Sunday morning Bible class just this last Sunday.
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_01: We're going through the book of Romans, and we're in Romans 4.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_01: And Paul,
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_01: at the end of Romans 4 there,
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_01: he spends a lot of chapter 4 talking about how this gift of God's justifying of the
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_01: ungodly by faith through his grace.
• 27:19
  SPEAKER_01: That's all, it's nothing new in one way.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_01: because it was already there in Abraham.
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_01: And then he goes on to say that it was Abraham who believed this and credited to this.
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_01: And then, oh, by the way, this isn't written down just for his sake alone, but for yours too.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_01: So it's this continuation of the story that what God did and said there back to
• 27:39
  SPEAKER_01: Abraham is also what he says and does for you.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_01: And he's bringing you into the story too, which is why...
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_01: the parables are so much fun sometimes because Jesus sometimes ends them on a cliffhanger.
• 27:51
  SPEAKER_01: Like,
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_01: oh,
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_01: he's actually bringing us and he's drawing us in in a very intentional way into the
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_01: story of his saving us,
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_01: which is just a cool,
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_01: it's a beautiful thing to behold and kind of fun to,
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_01: it's just fun to,
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_01: once you kind of see that that's how God writes the scriptures all along,
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_01: it's like,
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_01: oh yeah,
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_01: it's everywhere.
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_00: That's so true because not only is there a bunch of stories within a scripture but
• 28:17
  SPEAKER_00: scripture itself is one big story.
• 28:19
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's great.
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_01: It's both at the same time.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_00: Isn't that cool?
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_00: That shouldn't be so like earth-shattering but it actually is.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_00: It's actually this wonderfully earth-shattering news that this whole thing is one
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_00: big story that – and in fact as you hinted at that –
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_00: God himself,
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_00: the storyteller himself is inviting you to be a part of,
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_00: which in so many ways is such a compelling way in which to understand the word of
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_00: promise that we share.
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_00: It's not just a theological discipline.
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_00: It's not just a doctrinal treatise that we get to share.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_00: Actually,
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_00: it's something way more heartwarming and affecting,
• 29:03
  SPEAKER_00: which is a story that we can tell,
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_00: which I think also speaks to something that I've noted,
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_00: too,
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_00: is that what is amazing about Scripture,
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_00: at least in terms from a storytelling standpoint,
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_00: is just the fact that
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_00: It is so deep that theological scholars and professors are still publishing
• 29:24
  SPEAKER_00: academic and peer-reviewed papers about it.
• 29:27
  SPEAKER_00: And yet at the same time,
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_00: a five-year-old can receive that word of promise and receive it in a way in which
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_00: they understand all of its facets.
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_00: They understand its significance.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_00: which, again, speaks to that way in which story drives a lot of how we understand Scripture.
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, there's a great illustration of that in Chronicles of Narnia.
• 29:51
  SPEAKER_01: So I think it's later in the—oh, where is it?
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_01: With Jill Pohl and Eustace later on towards the end of the Chronicles.
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_01: Well, you're bigger than last time we saw you, Aslan, when they were in Narnia the first time.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_01: He said, yeah, that's true.
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_01: Basically, every time you see me, the older you get, I'll continue to be even bigger.
• 30:14
  SPEAKER_01: And that's how,
• 30:16
  SPEAKER_01: same thing with the imagery and analogy of Scripture being kind of deep and also at
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_01: the same time powerful.
• 30:23
  SPEAKER_01: you know, like a kid pool, right?
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_01: You can kind of, or those cool zero entry pools, right?
• 30:27
  SPEAKER_01: You can come and tiptoe in a little bit.
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_01: And yet at the same time,
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_01: you can,
• 30:31
  SPEAKER_01: you can go and you can jump into the deep end and never reach the bottom and never,
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_01: never find the end of God's grace in the,
• 30:39
  SPEAKER_01: in the story that he tells us throughout the scriptures.
• 30:41
  SPEAKER_01: Um, it's, uh,
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_01: That's kind of how Lewis depicts Aslan.
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_01: He's always bigger than you think,
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_01: and yet at the same time,
• 30:51
  SPEAKER_01: he may not be safe,
• 30:53
  SPEAKER_01: but he's very good,
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_01: and that's good for us.
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_00: Obviously, the two most famous inklings are Lewis and Tolkien, at least coming out of them historically.
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_00: And they have this almost like mythical or legendary bond at this point,
• 31:11
  SPEAKER_00: which,
• 31:11
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 31:12
  SPEAKER_00: true enough,
• 31:12
  SPEAKER_00: they were very close.
• 31:14
  SPEAKER_00: And it's interesting to see the crossovers within their own stories,
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_00: but also it's interesting to note how Lewis published an allegory and Tolkien had
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_00: such a strong aversion for allegory.
• 31:27
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, he did.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_01: And Lewis – it's funny.
• 31:29
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis will even say things, which is funny.
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_01: I dislike allegory,
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_01: which is funny because his first fictional book is Pilgrim's Regress,
• 31:39
  SPEAKER_01: which is very much an allegory.
• 31:43
  SPEAKER_01: I think part of what he's getting at there is a –
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_01: Again, slightly different definition of allegory.
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_01: He despised kind of the really blatant,
• 31:51
  SPEAKER_01: obvious one-to-one correspondence like the troll under the bridge is obviously very
• 32:01
  SPEAKER_01: evil kind of thing,
• 32:02
  SPEAKER_01: right?
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_01: And so even though he used elements of that in his story,
• 32:06
  SPEAKER_01: I think especially when you get to the Narnia Chronicles,
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_01: For Tolkien, yeah, it was too obvious, it was too on the surface, and it was not detailed enough.
• 32:18
  SPEAKER_01: Tolkien could never finish anything.
• 32:20
  SPEAKER_01: And if it weren't for Lewis, he never would have finished a whole lot of things either, which is funny.
• 32:25
  SPEAKER_01: So Tolkien ends up bringing Lewis to the Christian faith.
• 32:28
  SPEAKER_01: He's the instrument God uses there, among many others.
• 32:31
  SPEAKER_01: And then
• 32:34
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis ends up being the instrument God uses to bring about Tolkien's great works of
• 32:38
  SPEAKER_01: Hobbit and Lord of the Rings.
• 32:41
  SPEAKER_01: Kind of funny how that kind of comes around in a circle.
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah,
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_01: for Lewis,
• 32:46
  SPEAKER_01: his definition of allegory is a little bit different than probably Tolkien's,
• 32:50
  SPEAKER_01: and they're both kind of working with a different definition of allegory than a lot
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_01: of people might think.
• 32:55
  SPEAKER_01: It's not so much the...
• 32:57
  SPEAKER_01: A to A, B to B correspondence of things.
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_01: But at the same time,
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_01: there are some very clear,
• 33:01
  SPEAKER_01: there's some very clear,
• 33:03
  SPEAKER_01: well,
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis calls it supposals in Narnia,
• 33:06
  SPEAKER_01: right?
• 33:06
  SPEAKER_01: So suppose there was a world with talking animals and they needed redemption.
• 33:11
  SPEAKER_01: What would a savior in that world look like?
• 33:15
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it would look like, Lewis finally came, it would look like a lion.
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_01: It has to be a lion.
• 33:21
  SPEAKER_01: King of the jungle and lion of the tribe of Judah out of scriptures and
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_01: And there you go.
• 33:27
  SPEAKER_01: Tolkien was much more... He kind of preferred the deep myth, the long, drawn-out, heavily detailed...
• 33:36
  SPEAKER_01: which fits his personality.
• 33:37
  SPEAKER_01: Again, that's how he wrote.
• 33:39
  SPEAKER_01: He wrote very detailed.
• 33:41
  SPEAKER_01: For Lewis, the Narnia Chronicles kind of bubbled up out of pictures in his head.
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_01: He had a picture of a faun carrying a package of books and things with an umbrella
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_01: in the snow,
• 33:51
  SPEAKER_01: and that picture was a very early picture in his head,
• 33:53
  SPEAKER_01: in his imagination.
• 33:54
  SPEAKER_01: And he had a picture of the queen in a sledge for a while, too.
• 33:58
  SPEAKER_01: And so these images kind of got bubbling up in his mind until he finally put a story to it.
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_01: Tolkien worked kind of the other way.
• 34:04
  SPEAKER_01: He worked from the language side of it.
• 34:05
  SPEAKER_01: He created his own language and then built a story and a world around where that
• 34:09
  SPEAKER_01: language would make sense and would work,
• 34:11
  SPEAKER_01: that language being Elvish and Sindarin and all those fun things that are super nerdy.
• 34:18
  SPEAKER_01: I have an Elvish grammar upstairs on my shelf, by the way.
• 34:21
  SPEAKER_01: I haven't looked at it too much other than kind of thumbing through it, so I can't speak fluent Elvish.
• 34:27
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe one day I will, though.
• 34:28
  SPEAKER_00: That'd be fun.
• 34:29
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_00: That would be fun.
• 34:31
  SPEAKER_00: I have to confess it's been a little while since I've read The Lord of the Rings,
• 34:36
  SPEAKER_00: but I've been in the midst of seminary classes that have deterred me.
• 34:40
  SPEAKER_00: But on my to-do list for next year is to reread them all, which I'm very much looking forward to.
• 34:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's always enjoyable.
• 34:49
  SPEAKER_01: I reread them.
• 34:50
  SPEAKER_01: I try to reread them often.
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_01: Not as often as I'd like, but...
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_00: There's something though that I would – I want to go back to,
• 34:57
  SPEAKER_00: which is just this idea of – you mentioned it,
• 35:03
  SPEAKER_00: but just the idea of the myth become fact,
• 35:05
  SPEAKER_00: but also the use of the mythological,
• 35:08
  SPEAKER_00: if you will,
• 35:09
  SPEAKER_00: within these stories,
• 35:10
  SPEAKER_00: as you said,
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_00: as a vehicle of truth.
• 35:13
  SPEAKER_00: We,
• 35:14
  SPEAKER_00: as you mentioned,
• 35:15
  SPEAKER_00: we understand myth as like a tall tale,
• 35:17
  SPEAKER_00: as like a fable,
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_00: as like Paul Bunyan and his ox or whatever.
• 35:21
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 35:22
  SPEAKER_00: Um,
• 35:23
  SPEAKER_00: but it,
• 35:24
  SPEAKER_00: in terms of Tolkien's and Lewis's use of myth,
• 35:30
  SPEAKER_00: how can you kind of explain or kind of tease out how someone who is thinking
• 35:38
  SPEAKER_00: theologically can understand their use of myth,
• 35:41
  SPEAKER_00: at least in terms of as it relates to scripture and why that's so meaningful?
• 35:47
  SPEAKER_00: Um,
• 35:48
  SPEAKER_00: And perhaps maybe where we could find some of those crossovers, if you will.
• 35:53
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 35:53
  SPEAKER_01: So one of the great ways of looking at this is – so before – when Lewis and Tolkien
• 35:58
  SPEAKER_01: first meet,
• 35:59
  SPEAKER_01: it's before Lewis comes back to the Christian faith,
• 36:02
  SPEAKER_01: before he becomes a Christian again.
• 36:04
  SPEAKER_01: And at the time when he meets,
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_01: he enjoys reading mythology,
• 36:08
  SPEAKER_01: and he had for a long time,
• 36:09
  SPEAKER_01: for most of his life.
• 36:11
  SPEAKER_01: But he had this idea that myth was a lie breathed through silver.
• 36:15
  SPEAKER_01: It was kind of this pretty picture, but it really was just a bunch of false, made-up stuff, anyway.
• 36:20
  SPEAKER_01: And Tolkien, he writes this famous poem called...
• 36:24
  SPEAKER_01: What's it called?
• 36:25
  SPEAKER_01: Mythopoeia is the poem.
• 36:27
  SPEAKER_01: And he writes it as philomythos,
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_01: him being myth lover,
• 36:32
  SPEAKER_01: to misomythos,
• 36:33
  SPEAKER_01: kind of myth despiser or myth,
• 36:36
  SPEAKER_01: not quite hater,
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_01: but someone who kind of looks down on myth.
• 36:40
  SPEAKER_01: And that was Lewis at the time until...
• 36:43
  SPEAKER_01: much later in their conversations and time together, right?
• 36:47
  SPEAKER_01: So Lewis moves his opinion and position on what myth is changes.
• 36:53
  SPEAKER_01: He goes from seeing it as,
• 36:54
  SPEAKER_01: again,
• 36:55
  SPEAKER_01: this kind of pretty thing,
• 36:56
  SPEAKER_01: a lie breathed through silver,
• 36:57
  SPEAKER_01: to realizing that,
• 36:58
  SPEAKER_01: oh,
• 36:59
  SPEAKER_01: actually,
• 36:59
  SPEAKER_01: this can be a vehicle for truth.
• 37:03
  SPEAKER_01: a story that we tell about the fundamental reality of things around us.
• 37:08
  SPEAKER_01: And St.
• 37:09
  SPEAKER_01: Paul does this very well, kind of a good way to see this in connection in Acts 17.
• 37:14
  SPEAKER_01: So Paul takes pagan myths and pagan poets and not only quotes them, but kind of he...
• 37:21
  SPEAKER_01: The whole story he tells about God and creation,
• 37:25
  SPEAKER_01: up until the point he gets to the resurrection,
• 37:27
  SPEAKER_01: he steals it entirely from pagan poets and from pagan mythology,
• 37:33
  SPEAKER_01: which is kind of Paul's way of doing what Lewis and Tolkien later did was,
• 37:37
  SPEAKER_01: okay,
• 37:38
  SPEAKER_01: you don't have to toss out everything in,
• 37:40
  SPEAKER_01: let's say,
• 37:41
  SPEAKER_01: the pagan Greek Roman mythologies and things.
• 37:45
  SPEAKER_01: You find what is true in there and see how that is a...
• 37:49
  SPEAKER_01: sometimes Tolkien described it as sort of shards out of glass or fractured pieces of a mirror.
• 37:54
  SPEAKER_01: They give you a little glimpse of the truth,
• 37:56
  SPEAKER_01: just kind of like you could tilt it a little bit and they'll give you a glint of light.
• 38:00
  SPEAKER_01: They'll do that.
• 38:02
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis talked about myth being kind of like an isthmus that connects,
• 38:06
  SPEAKER_01: let's see if I can remember the exact quote,
• 38:07
  SPEAKER_01: that connects the peninsula of reality with your,
• 38:12
  SPEAKER_01: I think,
• 38:12
  SPEAKER_01: with imagination and storytelling or something to that effect.
• 38:15
  SPEAKER_01: But it connects things for us together.
• 38:18
  SPEAKER_01: And so when we come to the Christian faith and see that, Paul is a good example of using that.
• 38:22
  SPEAKER_01: He uses pagan myths in the sense of the stories,
• 38:27
  SPEAKER_01: and he told what was true about them,
• 38:28
  SPEAKER_01: but took what was true to point to what is also true,
• 38:33
  SPEAKER_01: and yet true in reality.
• 38:35
  SPEAKER_01: So in the pagan world,
• 38:38
  SPEAKER_01: Greek and Roman mythology,
• 38:39
  SPEAKER_01: they have all these wild stories about,
• 38:41
  SPEAKER_01: even to the point of dying and rising gods.
• 38:43
  SPEAKER_01: The problem is they don't actually happen in reality.
• 38:45
  SPEAKER_01: They happen in this sort of
• 38:47
  SPEAKER_01: mythical world.
• 38:48
  SPEAKER_01: They happen only in story.
• 38:51
  SPEAKER_01: When you come to Christianity, and Lewis and Tolkien are
• 38:54
  SPEAKER_01: brilliant on this is that when you come to Christianity you have all the things
• 38:58
  SPEAKER_01: that make a good beautiful story and then there's this great exception that it
• 39:02
  SPEAKER_01: actually happened it really took place it's grounded in history Christ is crucified
• 39:09
  SPEAKER_01: under Pontius Pilate not in a galaxy far far away not in Never Never Land not even
• 39:16
  SPEAKER_01: in Middle Earth or Narnia but in our own human time and history
• 39:21
  SPEAKER_01: Under Pontius Pilate, well, he was born.
• 39:23
  SPEAKER_01: Caesar is in power.
• 39:26
  SPEAKER_01: Quirinus is governor of Syria.
• 39:28
  SPEAKER_01: And so there's these time stamps.
• 39:30
  SPEAKER_01: There's geographic stamps.
• 39:32
  SPEAKER_01: And Greco-Roman theology doesn't have that.
• 39:34
  SPEAKER_01: It has this sort of mythical netherworld of things.
• 39:38
  SPEAKER_01: It's a different place in time.
• 39:39
  SPEAKER_01: It's not even the real place in time.
• 39:42
  SPEAKER_01: When you get to Christianity, you find, again, the author writing himself into the story.
• 39:47
  SPEAKER_01: You find,
• 39:48
  SPEAKER_01: like Stan Lee used to do in his Marvel movies,
• 39:51
  SPEAKER_01: he makes a cameo,
• 39:52
  SPEAKER_01: except it's a really big cameo.
• 39:54
  SPEAKER_01: We call it the incarnation,
• 39:55
  SPEAKER_01: where he takes on human flesh,
• 39:57
  SPEAKER_01: and he puts himself onto the human stage in our own humanity.
• 40:03
  SPEAKER_01: And so that was,
• 40:04
  SPEAKER_01: for Lewis and Tolkien,
• 40:05
  SPEAKER_01: really kind of the key,
• 40:06
  SPEAKER_01: the incarnation,
• 40:07
  SPEAKER_01: the death,
• 40:08
  SPEAKER_01: and resurrection of Christ.
• 40:09
  SPEAKER_01: That separated Christianity,
• 40:12
  SPEAKER_01: while it's a story and it's a narrative,
• 40:15
  SPEAKER_01: it's also true and it's history and it happened.
• 40:18
  SPEAKER_01: And those things are wedded together for Lewis and Tolkien especially and then in
• 40:22
  SPEAKER_01: the Christian faith in particular.
• 40:27
  SPEAKER_00: That good news that,
• 40:28
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 40:28
  SPEAKER_00: as you've defined and described,
• 40:30
  SPEAKER_00: but also as like Lewis perhaps defined as the myth become fact,
• 40:35
  SPEAKER_00: is this incredibly powerful,
• 40:38
  SPEAKER_00: I think,
• 40:38
  SPEAKER_00: way in which to understand what we're talking about.
• 40:41
  SPEAKER_00: This myth that has come down into the world of fact,
• 40:46
  SPEAKER_00: into the world of,
• 40:48
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 40:48
  SPEAKER_00: flesh and blood in order to show forth and reveal all of the ins and outs of that myth.
• 40:55
  SPEAKER_00: of that myth, if you will, that myth is a vehicle for truth.
• 40:59
  SPEAKER_00: I think you were referring to the conversation with Dyson,
• 41:03
  SPEAKER_00: but also I think Lewis has an essay in God and the Dock called Myth Becomes Fact.
• 41:07
  SPEAKER_01: He does, yeah.
• 41:08
  SPEAKER_01: And there he kind of draws out the things that he learned from Tolkien and Dyson.
• 41:13
  SPEAKER_01: And then you can tell by that time he writes that essay, he's fully on board.
• 41:19
  SPEAKER_01: He's all in.
• 41:20
  SPEAKER_01: And really from the moment of that conversation on Addison's walk,
• 41:26
  SPEAKER_01: And from the time he's converted to Christianity,
• 41:28
  SPEAKER_01: just a couple weeks later after that conversation,
• 41:31
  SPEAKER_01: or less than that,
• 41:33
  SPEAKER_01: he's all in.
• 41:36
  SPEAKER_01: All the chips are on the side of Christ and of Aslan at that point.
• 41:43
  SPEAKER_01: I think it was Walter Hooper,
• 41:45
  SPEAKER_01: one of his estate editor,
• 41:47
  SPEAKER_01: and edited a lot of his books posthumously too,
• 41:49
  SPEAKER_01: said he was the most converted man he ever met.
• 41:52
  SPEAKER_01: That kind of just...
• 41:54
  SPEAKER_01: That Christianity and the Christian faith just seeped into everything he did and
• 42:00
  SPEAKER_01: everything he said and everything he wrote.
• 42:02
  SPEAKER_01: And it's kind of interesting when you look at his writings, that definitely bears out.
• 42:05
  SPEAKER_01: His poems that he writes before he becomes a Christian,
• 42:08
  SPEAKER_01: they're not so great,
• 42:11
  SPEAKER_01: and they didn't really get much traction.
• 42:15
  SPEAKER_01: He was not the atheist war poet that he wanted to be, but Christ, like he did with St.
• 42:21
  SPEAKER_01: Paul, turned him around and turned him into something much, much better in the end.
• 42:27
  SPEAKER_01: And poetry was part of that,
• 42:28
  SPEAKER_01: although a lot of writers and commentators say,
• 42:31
  SPEAKER_01: well,
• 42:32
  SPEAKER_01: his prose in Narnia and other things was better than his poetry.
• 42:35
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, maybe, but...
• 42:35
  SPEAKER_01: His poems after he becomes a Christian I think are pretty fun too.
• 42:39
  SPEAKER_01: I think enjoyable, especially if you're a Lewis nut.
• 42:43
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 42:44
  SPEAKER_00: You've mentioned this a couple of times,
• 42:46
  SPEAKER_00: but I think it's worth kind of exploring a little bit just because perhaps – I
• 42:50
  SPEAKER_00: don't know if the quote-unquote everyday Christian would think of these terms,
• 42:55
  SPEAKER_00: which is the fact that –
• 42:57
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 42:57
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 42:57
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 42:58
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 43:21
  SPEAKER_01: Sure, sure.
• 43:21
  SPEAKER_01: So I think one of the places that that always comes home is there's this great book.
• 43:27
  SPEAKER_01: We're using the Holocaust.
• 43:29
  SPEAKER_01: Viktor Frankl, he wrote a book called Man's Search for Meaning or Man's Quest for Meaning.
• 43:33
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that's – every day and age kind of has their –
• 43:37
  SPEAKER_01: The thing that they're looking for or some of the big questions that we tend to try
• 43:42
  SPEAKER_01: to take off and tack on.
• 43:43
  SPEAKER_01: And one of them in our age that we live in right now is definitely, I think, that question of meaning.
• 43:49
  SPEAKER_01: What is life all about?
• 43:50
  SPEAKER_01: Who am I?
• 43:51
  SPEAKER_01: Who is God?
• 43:52
  SPEAKER_01: If there is one, people might ask.
• 43:54
  SPEAKER_01: But that question of meaning is really important.
• 43:57
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that's where...
• 43:58
  SPEAKER_01: obviously the Christian faith has a lot to say about that.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_01: We have both true things to say,
• 44:06
  SPEAKER_01: truth,
• 44:06
  SPEAKER_01: and capital T with Christ himself,
• 44:10
  SPEAKER_01: and we also have meaningful things to say,
• 44:12
  SPEAKER_01: and those things go together.
• 44:13
  SPEAKER_01: You can't have one without the other.
• 44:14
  SPEAKER_01: You can't have truth without meaning, and you can't have meaning without truth.
• 44:18
  SPEAKER_01: It's kind of similar to balancing things like our reason and our imagination,
• 44:22
  SPEAKER_01: and if you have one or the other,
• 44:23
  SPEAKER_01: you need both to really to be
• 44:27
  SPEAKER_01: it's not just a balancing kind of thing,
• 44:28
  SPEAKER_01: but it's,
• 44:29
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 44:30
  SPEAKER_01: reason without imagination is kind of dead and wooden and incredibly boring.
• 44:35
  SPEAKER_01: And imagination without reason in our intellect is pie in the sky and it's listless,
• 44:42
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 44:42
  SPEAKER_01: and it just kind of,
• 44:43
  SPEAKER_01: it wanders too and doesn't have an anchor point.
• 44:47
  SPEAKER_01: But I think one of the things that we tend to maybe err on in our
• 44:52
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know,
• 44:52
  SPEAKER_01: the last decades or so,
• 44:53
  SPEAKER_01: is that we maybe sometimes neglect our imagination and God's gift of that.
• 44:59
  SPEAKER_01: And so finding that these two things,
• 45:01
  SPEAKER_01: again,
• 45:02
  SPEAKER_01: in Lewis and Tolkien,
• 45:03
  SPEAKER_01: are complementary,
• 45:04
  SPEAKER_01: not contradictory,
• 45:05
  SPEAKER_01: our intellect and our imagination.
• 45:07
  SPEAKER_01: God's gift of reason and also his gift of creativity.
• 45:12
  SPEAKER_01: We shouldn't see these things as two opposite poles of like a magnet,
• 45:17
  SPEAKER_01: but rather,
• 45:17
  SPEAKER_01: again,
• 45:20
  SPEAKER_01: much more connected.
• 45:22
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe more like tree roots that combine and end up helping nourish each other with their sugars.
• 45:28
  SPEAKER_01: and nutrients that they supply to one another.
• 45:31
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's really how we ought to see reason and creativity or imagination and intellect.
• 45:37
  SPEAKER_01: Both God's gifts,
• 45:38
  SPEAKER_01: and certainly because we're sinful fallen people,
• 45:40
  SPEAKER_01: both can and do quite often go astray.
• 45:43
  SPEAKER_01: And so there's repentance in that too.
• 45:45
  SPEAKER_01: And being Lutheran, we talk about our Christian life as one as saint and sinners.
• 45:52
  SPEAKER_01: Well, our imagination and our intellect is like that too.
• 45:56
  SPEAKER_01: We're saint and sinners in our imagination and intellect.
• 45:58
  SPEAKER_01: But that doesn't mean we should ignore or neglect God's gifts of reason or imagination.
• 46:05
  SPEAKER_01: So, yeah, I spent a lot of time reading and writing and just exploring God's gift of the imagination.
• 46:10
  SPEAKER_01: For one, because it somewhat started selfishly because I find it fascinating.
• 46:14
  SPEAKER_01: And it's intriguing to me.
• 46:15
  SPEAKER_01: And I've spent I don't know how many hours in life reading different books and
• 46:20
  SPEAKER_01: fantasy and fairy tales and science fiction.
• 46:21
  SPEAKER_01: And I just try to find good stories.
• 46:24
  SPEAKER_01: I love reading stories.
• 46:26
  SPEAKER_01: And then I found out that,
• 46:27
  SPEAKER_01: hey,
• 46:27
  SPEAKER_01: there's something...
• 46:29
  SPEAKER_01: Not only did these good stories end up just being edifying for a lot of different reasons,
• 46:34
  SPEAKER_01: but many good stories,
• 46:35
  SPEAKER_01: in fact,
• 46:36
  SPEAKER_01: point you in some way to the great story of salvation,
• 46:39
  SPEAKER_01: which is what I found in Lewis and Tolkien especially.
• 46:43
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that can be a good, helpful thing for people, for their own Christian faith.
• 46:48
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, one of the things that I did at seminary a lot was...
• 46:52
  SPEAKER_01: every night I would read something non-theological.
• 46:55
  SPEAKER_01: And by that I don't mean like I was trying to avoid theology,
• 46:58
  SPEAKER_01: it's just I had to read something different.
• 47:00
  SPEAKER_01: I'd been head deep and neck deep in exegetical theology and systematic and
• 47:04
  SPEAKER_01: historical stuff all day,
• 47:05
  SPEAKER_01: and so I'd pick up something like Lord of the Rings or,
• 47:08
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 47:09
  SPEAKER_01: whatever kind of fiction book I felt like reading at the time.
• 47:12
  SPEAKER_01: And then,
• 47:13
  SPEAKER_01: of course,
• 47:14
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis and Tolkien reminded me multiple times that,
• 47:18
  SPEAKER_01: well,
• 47:18
  SPEAKER_01: hey,
• 47:18
  SPEAKER_01: just because you're reading a story doesn't mean it's not theological,
• 47:20
  SPEAKER_01: which is true.
• 47:22
  SPEAKER_01: And that was kind of a fun thing to learn along the way as well as I learned it
• 47:25
  SPEAKER_01: from other professors and friends in high school and college and things too,
• 47:28
  SPEAKER_01: but...
• 47:29
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah,
• 47:30
  SPEAKER_01: it was a way to exercise a different part of the brain and to meditate or kind of
• 47:36
  SPEAKER_01: reflect on and explore other gifts of God in addition to reason.
• 47:40
  SPEAKER_01: So, again, not putting these as either or, but a both and kind of situation.
• 47:45
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 47:46
  SPEAKER_00: I think that's so helpful too,
• 47:47
  SPEAKER_00: especially when understanding,
• 47:50
  SPEAKER_00: like for instance,
• 47:50
  SPEAKER_00: the thing that the parts of scripture that obviously came to my mind were the parables,
• 47:56
  SPEAKER_00: which in a way,
• 47:57
  SPEAKER_00: if you wanted to like retranslate them in a modern way,
• 48:00
  SPEAKER_00: you could use C.S.
• 48:01
  SPEAKER_00: Lewis's suppose to like start every one of Jesus's parables.
• 48:06
  SPEAKER_00: Totally.
• 48:06
  SPEAKER_00: Suppose there was a man who had two sons.
• 48:08
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 48:09
  SPEAKER_00: And in the same way then,
• 48:10
  SPEAKER_00: we understand that the parables themselves are not allegories.
• 48:15
  SPEAKER_00: They're not allegorical tales.
• 48:16
  SPEAKER_00: They are actually, you know, to use, I think Tolkien's word from the preface is they're applicable.
• 48:23
  SPEAKER_00: And he much more argued for applicability rather than allegory,
• 48:27
  SPEAKER_00: which makes it then,
• 48:30
  SPEAKER_00: yeah,
• 48:30
  SPEAKER_00: way more universal,
• 48:31
  SPEAKER_00: way more timeless,
• 48:32
  SPEAKER_00: but also way more resonant in terms of the way in which it impacts and influences
• 48:38
  SPEAKER_00: and can indeed change.
• 48:40
  SPEAKER_00: change the reader change the listener and I think that's a really helpful way to
• 48:46
  SPEAKER_00: understand Tolkien and Lewis's works are kind of cruciform or we could say
• 48:51
  SPEAKER_00: Christocentric in the way in which you know just the way in which they're
• 48:55
  SPEAKER_00: structured the way in which they're inspired even if it's not quote unquote
• 48:58
  SPEAKER_00: inspired they're drawing from that technique that obviously Christ displays in such
• 49:05
  SPEAKER_00: masterful fashion
• 49:08
  SPEAKER_01: I remember the quote from Augustine comes to mind, too.
• 49:12
  SPEAKER_01: He says, you know, our hearts are restless, O Lord, until we find our rest in thee.
• 49:17
  SPEAKER_01: And I think one of the things that stories do so well is they help,
• 49:21
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 49:21
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis and Tolkien,
• 49:22
  SPEAKER_01: especially Lewis,
• 49:23
  SPEAKER_01: had this sense of longing.
• 49:25
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis drew on the German word of Sensucht, of this kind of inconsolable longing.
• 49:30
  SPEAKER_01: It was almost inexplicable.
• 49:31
  SPEAKER_01: And at the same time,
• 49:33
  SPEAKER_01: he found that that longing wasn't fulfilled in anything he could...
• 49:36
  SPEAKER_01: As soon as he would get a glimpse of it,
• 49:37
  SPEAKER_01: like in a story or a conversation or a book he read or something else,
• 49:41
  SPEAKER_01: it would be gone.
• 49:42
  SPEAKER_01: It would always be fleeting.
• 49:45
  SPEAKER_01: But he finally found it in the person of Christ because he found out joy was not just...
• 49:50
  SPEAKER_01: It really wasn't within himself, this longing that he had.
• 49:53
  SPEAKER_01: It was answered in Christ.
• 49:55
  SPEAKER_01: And good stories,
• 49:56
  SPEAKER_01: whether they are like Lewis and Tolkien's kinds of stories or other similar,
• 50:01
  SPEAKER_01: I guess,
• 50:02
  SPEAKER_01: similar genre,
• 50:03
  SPEAKER_01: similar even just worldview kind of stories,
• 50:06
  SPEAKER_01: right?
• 50:07
  SPEAKER_01: I just read a mystery book by a Roman Catholic fellow,
• 50:11
  SPEAKER_01: and it was very much a modern mystery,
• 50:13
  SPEAKER_01: but at the same time you could tell within the story it was written by a Christian
• 50:17
  SPEAKER_01: and it had Christian themes in it.
• 50:19
  SPEAKER_01: even though it's not in the Christian book section.
• 50:22
  SPEAKER_01: You won't find it at a Christian bookstore, probably.
• 50:25
  SPEAKER_01: But it very much was a Christian mystery in some ways.
• 50:29
  SPEAKER_01: In some ways, it was just a mystery.
• 50:32
  SPEAKER_01: But Christian wrote it, and their Christian faith kind of couldn't help but bubble up through it.
• 50:36
  SPEAKER_01: And that's kind of the cool thing.
• 50:38
  SPEAKER_01: Tolkien and Lewis both spoke that way, especially Lewis a little more directly.
• 50:41
  SPEAKER_01: He said, you know, our...
• 50:43
  SPEAKER_01: I never really set out to write a Christian story here.
• 50:45
  SPEAKER_01: I set out to write a story that said the things I wanted to say and told the story I wanted to tell.
• 50:50
  SPEAKER_01: And the Christian faith just kind of bubbled up in through it.
• 50:55
  SPEAKER_01: It couldn't help but do it.
• 50:57
  SPEAKER_01: Tolkien kind of had a similar thing too.
• 50:58
  SPEAKER_01: He's like,
• 50:58
  SPEAKER_01: well,
• 50:59
  SPEAKER_01: it was probably unintentional there,
• 51:00
  SPEAKER_01: my Christian faith being a part of the Lord of the Rings.
• 51:03
  SPEAKER_01: He said, but in the review and in the edits and things, then it was very intentional.
• 51:08
  SPEAKER_01: Wow, okay.
• 51:10
  SPEAKER_01: That's kind of fascinating.
• 51:12
  SPEAKER_01: Which,
• 51:12
  SPEAKER_01: for me,
• 51:13
  SPEAKER_01: that kind of confirms a lot of the things that I've heard and read and thought
• 51:17
  SPEAKER_01: about it,
• 51:17
  SPEAKER_01: too.
• 51:17
  SPEAKER_01: Like, well, okay, I see these things there, but am I just making it up?
• 51:21
  SPEAKER_01: No, no, they're actually there.
• 51:22
  SPEAKER_01: So good stories like those can,
• 51:24
  SPEAKER_01: again,
• 51:25
  SPEAKER_01: help to not so much fill that longing we have,
• 51:28
  SPEAKER_01: but point us to the one,
• 51:30
  SPEAKER_01: right,
• 51:30
  SPEAKER_01: to Christ.
• 51:31
  SPEAKER_01: who does answer that longing and gives us meaning along with truth,
• 51:37
  SPEAKER_01: gives us beauty along with things that are tangible and touchable and real and kind
• 51:42
  SPEAKER_01: of brings together those two things of creativity and reason and imagination and
• 51:50
  SPEAKER_01: our intellect too.
• 51:53
  SPEAKER_00: This kind of brings us to...
• 51:55
  SPEAKER_00: We've circled around it and hinted at it,
• 51:56
  SPEAKER_00: but we should probably dive into it,
• 51:58
  SPEAKER_00: which is that theme that I would say is perhaps the undercurrent of definitely
• 52:05
  SPEAKER_00: Tolkien's writings and perhaps even
• 52:07
  SPEAKER_00: C.S.
• 52:08
  SPEAKER_00: Lewis's,
• 52:08
  SPEAKER_00: even if he wouldn't use the same terminology,
• 52:10
  SPEAKER_00: but that is this undercurrent of eucatastrophe,
• 52:14
  SPEAKER_00: which we can define.
• 52:16
  SPEAKER_00: But I think, correct me if I'm wrong, I think Tolkien coined this in his essay on fairy stories.
• 52:22
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's correct.
• 52:24
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, correct.
• 52:24
  SPEAKER_00: Can you just kind of like explain the background to perhaps that essay,
• 52:29
  SPEAKER_00: but also to Tolkien coining this term and how it relates to the gospel?
• 52:34
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 52:35
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so the term itself comes from Greek.
• 52:38
  SPEAKER_01: It's you, good, and catastrophe, of course, being something bad, destructive, bad.
• 52:43
  SPEAKER_01: violent even sometimes.
• 52:45
  SPEAKER_01: So it's beautiful.
• 52:47
  SPEAKER_01: It's such a paradoxical term.
• 52:50
  SPEAKER_01: It's the kind of word that only a philologist could really make.
• 52:52
  SPEAKER_01: And that was Tolkien's training, right?
• 52:54
  SPEAKER_01: He's a word guy.
• 52:55
  SPEAKER_01: He loves studying language.
• 52:57
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, he knew Icelandic and could speak it fluently, which is just kind of crazy.
• 53:02
  SPEAKER_01: And so he'd read Norse mythology in its original...
• 53:07
  SPEAKER_01: And he'd read Old English and Beowulf and all these cool things, right?
• 53:10
  SPEAKER_01: So language was his thing.
• 53:12
  SPEAKER_01: Words were his home.
• 53:14
  SPEAKER_01: And so he makes up a word,
• 53:16
  SPEAKER_01: and he coins a word to describe something that really is kind of hard to describe,
• 53:19
  SPEAKER_01: which is,
• 53:20
  SPEAKER_01: okay,
• 53:20
  SPEAKER_01: so you've got these two Greek words smushed together,
• 53:22
  SPEAKER_01: right?
• 53:22
  SPEAKER_01: A good catastrophe.
• 53:23
  SPEAKER_01: It sounds like it can't mix together.
• 53:25
  SPEAKER_01: And yet it is.
• 53:26
  SPEAKER_01: It very much does.
• 53:28
  SPEAKER_01: He calls it the good catastrophe or the joyous sudden turn of things.
• 53:32
  SPEAKER_01: So it's just when things look hopeless and are hopeless from perhaps it's in a story,
• 53:37
  SPEAKER_01: the character's point of view,
• 53:39
  SPEAKER_01: or perhaps it's in real life.
• 53:40
  SPEAKER_01: It's from our own point of view.
• 53:42
  SPEAKER_01: It's at that point when something from outside of you.
• 53:46
  SPEAKER_01: and it turns.
• 53:47
  SPEAKER_01: There's a joyous sudden turn in the story,
• 53:49
  SPEAKER_01: something you didn't see coming,
• 53:50
  SPEAKER_01: something you didn't expect,
• 53:52
  SPEAKER_01: certainly something you don't deserve,
• 53:54
  SPEAKER_01: and something that was really just this unconditional blast of grace from outside
• 54:02
  SPEAKER_01: of you.
• 54:02
  SPEAKER_01: And so Tolkien talks about it in his essay on fairy tales or on fairy stories,
• 54:07
  SPEAKER_01: and it was originally given as a lecture at St.
• 54:09
  SPEAKER_01: Andrews.
• 54:09
  SPEAKER_01: He was invited at St.
• 54:11
  SPEAKER_01: Andrews University to give this lecture on literature,
• 54:14
  SPEAKER_01: and that was the essay that he presented.
• 54:17
  SPEAKER_01: It's a really wonderful essay.
• 54:20
  SPEAKER_01: He outlines a whole bunch of things about his own approach and kind of
• 54:25
  SPEAKER_01: philosophy, I guess you could say, of what are fairy stories.
• 54:29
  SPEAKER_01: He defines what they are.
• 54:30
  SPEAKER_01: He defines how it's different than how people think of it.
• 54:33
  SPEAKER_01: He talks about,
• 54:33
  SPEAKER_01: especially my favorite part is towards the end,
• 54:35
  SPEAKER_01: where he talks about the Christian faith and fairy stories.
• 54:38
  SPEAKER_01: And so he talks about the eucatastrophe being not only the heart of a good fairy story,
• 54:43
  SPEAKER_01: the center of a good fairy story,
• 54:44
  SPEAKER_01: right?
• 54:44
  SPEAKER_01: When it looks like,
• 54:45
  SPEAKER_01: well,
• 54:45
  SPEAKER_01: in Lord of the Rings,
• 54:46
  SPEAKER_01: this will be a spoiler alert for anybody that hasn't read it yet.
• 54:49
  SPEAKER_01: But
• 54:51
  SPEAKER_01: Samwise and Frodo are on the edge of Mount Doom.
• 54:53
  SPEAKER_01: They've thrown the ring into the fire.
• 54:55
  SPEAKER_01: But, you know, volcanoes are erupting around.
• 54:58
  SPEAKER_01: Mountains are crumbling.
• 54:59
  SPEAKER_01: There's earthquakes.
• 55:00
  SPEAKER_01: It's death.
• 55:01
  SPEAKER_01: It's dark.
• 55:01
  SPEAKER_01: It's gloomy.
• 55:03
  SPEAKER_01: They have no hope of rescue.
• 55:05
  SPEAKER_01: They have no hope of returning home.
• 55:06
  SPEAKER_01: They desperately want to get back to the Shire.
• 55:07
  SPEAKER_01: But, of course, that looks like an impossible figment of a dream at that point.
• 55:13
  SPEAKER_01: And yet, then all of a sudden come these eagles, right?
• 55:16
  SPEAKER_01: And they swoop in and they grab them out of their kind of
• 55:20
  SPEAKER_01: I mean,
• 55:20
  SPEAKER_01: they're exhausted,
• 55:21
  SPEAKER_01: they're weak,
• 55:21
  SPEAKER_01: they're weary,
• 55:22
  SPEAKER_01: they've been walking for miles over months,
• 55:26
  SPEAKER_01: and they've been corrupted by the ring,
• 55:28
  SPEAKER_01: at least in some ways with Frodo.
• 55:31
  SPEAKER_01: And then the eagles come and rescue them and bring them home and take them back.
• 55:34
  SPEAKER_01: Well, not quite home yet, but...
• 55:36
  SPEAKER_01: take them back to Rivendell eventually.
• 55:38
  SPEAKER_01: No, they don't go there first.
• 55:40
  SPEAKER_01: They go to Minas Tirith, and they're put in the houses of healing.
• 55:43
  SPEAKER_01: They're resting, and anyway, they're rescued, and they're brought back.
• 55:49
  SPEAKER_01: And eventually they make their way to Rivendell, and they rest some more.
• 55:51
  SPEAKER_01: And it's just beautiful.
• 55:53
  SPEAKER_01: It's great.
• 55:55
  SPEAKER_01: That's eucatastrophe.
• 55:57
  SPEAKER_01: That's the good catastrophe.
• 55:59
  SPEAKER_01: In the Christian faith, there's a lot of examples in the scriptures.
• 56:02
  SPEAKER_01: And you could go from Genesis to Revelation and find tons of examples of it.
• 56:07
  SPEAKER_01: But the cross is the biggest one.
• 56:09
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it looks utterly hopeless.
• 56:11
  SPEAKER_01: It looks dark and gloomy.
• 56:13
  SPEAKER_01: The ground is even shaking.
• 56:15
  SPEAKER_01: Dead people are rising out of their graves.
• 56:17
  SPEAKER_01: And the Son of God himself is crucified and hanging dead on a humiliating,
• 56:22
  SPEAKER_01: shameful,
• 56:23
  SPEAKER_01: cursed cross hung by the Romans,
• 56:26
  SPEAKER_01: killed by his own people.
• 56:27
  SPEAKER_01: His disciples, they're gone.
• 56:30
  SPEAKER_01: They flee.
• 56:31
  SPEAKER_01: They're afraid.
• 56:32
  SPEAKER_01: And the Son of God is dead.
• 56:36
  SPEAKER_01: and buried in a tomb.
• 56:38
  SPEAKER_01: And then comes Easter Sunday morning.
• 56:41
  SPEAKER_01: And Mary, why are you weeping?
• 56:44
  SPEAKER_01: Don't weep.
• 56:45
  SPEAKER_01: I'm here.
• 56:47
  SPEAKER_01: Why are you looking in there?
• 56:48
  SPEAKER_01: He's not here.
• 56:49
  SPEAKER_01: Why are you looking for the living among the dead?
• 56:51
  SPEAKER_01: He's risen.
• 56:54
  SPEAKER_01: And you get this joyous turn when everything looks like it's going downhill.
• 56:58
  SPEAKER_01: And then all of a sudden, something turns in the story.
• 57:02
  SPEAKER_01: And that's eucatastrophe.
• 57:05
  SPEAKER_01: So Tolkien called...
• 57:06
  SPEAKER_01: The incarnation,
• 57:08
  SPEAKER_01: the eucatastrophe of the Christian story,
• 57:10
  SPEAKER_01: and then the death and resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the incarnation.
• 57:15
  SPEAKER_01: It kind of builds on itself of Christ's work,
• 57:18
  SPEAKER_01: of this beautiful,
• 57:19
  SPEAKER_01: joyous term that we didn't expect,
• 57:21
  SPEAKER_01: we never saw coming,
• 57:22
  SPEAKER_01: we could never have imagined it on our own.
• 57:25
  SPEAKER_01: It's a complete, unconditional, undeserved gift, and yet here it is.
• 57:29
  SPEAKER_01: It's also...
• 57:30
  SPEAKER_01: It's all those things.
• 57:31
  SPEAKER_01: It's beautiful, it's comforting, and it's true, too.
• 57:35
  SPEAKER_01: They always came back to that simple point as well, which is, again, it's grounded in fact.
• 57:41
  SPEAKER_01: So it's, yeah, myth becomes fact, and our faith is founded on fact.
• 57:45
  SPEAKER_01: And both things are there.
• 57:50
  SPEAKER_00: And I think what that does is you can see that – the ubiquity of the eucatastrophe,
• 57:57
  SPEAKER_00: you can see it within not just stories,
• 57:59
  SPEAKER_00: but as you mentioned,
• 58:00
  SPEAKER_00: like every fairy story ever ends with happily ever after,
• 58:04
  SPEAKER_00: which is itself –
• 58:05
  SPEAKER_00: a hint at the same theme,
• 58:07
  SPEAKER_00: but then also you can see this twist of fate,
• 58:12
  SPEAKER_00: if you will,
• 58:12
  SPEAKER_00: this twist of grace,
• 58:14
  SPEAKER_00: um,
• 58:15
  SPEAKER_00: as you mentioned within all of scripture,
• 58:16
  SPEAKER_00: of course,
• 58:17
  SPEAKER_00: culminating in the death and resurrection.
• 58:19
  SPEAKER_00: But then as you mentioned,
• 58:20
  SPEAKER_00: I think what helps make this so resonant is the fact that not only do we understand
• 58:27
  SPEAKER_00: Jesus's mission,
• 58:29
  SPEAKER_00: if you will,
• 58:30
  SPEAKER_00: Jesus's incarnation as one of eucatastrophe,
• 58:32
  SPEAKER_00: um,
• 58:33
  SPEAKER_00: We can understand our own regeneration,
• 58:37
  SPEAKER_00: repentance,
• 58:38
  SPEAKER_00: and justification as this twist of grace,
• 58:41
  SPEAKER_00: this eucatastrophe of pardon and absolution given to those who don't deserve it.
• 58:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 58:48
  SPEAKER_00: Also,
• 58:48
  SPEAKER_00: what is most hopeful is that this theme of eucatastrophe carries through to the
• 58:53
  SPEAKER_00: rest of time,
• 58:54
  SPEAKER_00: wherein,
• 58:55
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 58:56
  SPEAKER_00: maybe not to be so forlorn,
• 58:58
  SPEAKER_00: but perhaps we feel in our own present moment.
• 59:01
  SPEAKER_00: And I know perhaps many of us,
• 59:03
  SPEAKER_00: many in the world did,
• 59:04
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 59:05
  SPEAKER_00: a couple of years ago when everything looked like it was stopping and coming to a close,
• 59:09
  SPEAKER_00: that we felt like we were on the slopes of Mount Doom ready to be annihilated.
• 59:14
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 59:14
  SPEAKER_00: And yet the twist of grace is the fact that the providence of God persists and
• 59:21
  SPEAKER_00: pervades all of our moments,
• 59:23
  SPEAKER_00: which is to say that as much as we may feel and fear that we are the ones to be in
• 59:32
  SPEAKER_00: the end of days,
• 59:32
  SPEAKER_00: so to speak,
• 59:33
  SPEAKER_00: I think understanding grace,
• 59:35
  SPEAKER_00: the apocalypse,
• 59:36
  SPEAKER_00: understanding Revelation through,
• 59:39
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 59:39
  SPEAKER_00: the book of Revelation and what it contains through the lens of,
• 59:44
  SPEAKER_00: if I can say this,
• 59:45
  SPEAKER_00: eucatastrophic grace,
• 59:49
  SPEAKER_00: I think is the way,
• 59:50
  SPEAKER_00: and not to use Tolkien to interpret the Bible,
• 59:54
  SPEAKER_00: but
• 59:54
  SPEAKER_00: But I think it's helpful to understand I think what Revelation is trying to say,
• 1:00:00
  SPEAKER_00: which is there is this ultimate eucatastrophe that's going to occur at the end of
• 1:00:06
  SPEAKER_00: all things.
• 1:00:07
  SPEAKER_00: And it's bound up and protected in the one who has already died and risen again,
• 1:00:14
  SPEAKER_00: which is the most hopeful story of all.
• 1:00:17
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 1:00:18
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, absolutely.
• 1:00:19
  SPEAKER_01: I mean,
• 1:00:20
  SPEAKER_01: it's a,
• 1:00:20
  SPEAKER_01: it's this great,
• 1:00:22
  SPEAKER_01: that's what I love that word eucatastrophe because it's,
• 1:00:24
  SPEAKER_01: it's,
• 1:00:24
  SPEAKER_01: it's cosmic and at the same time it's personal too.
• 1:00:27
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 1:00:27
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, it's the whole story.
• 1:00:29
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, the whole scripture is, is the story of eucatastrophe.
• 1:00:32
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that's why Tolkien is so great to point that out that you just, that,
• 1:00:36
  SPEAKER_01: That's one of the big underpinnings of Scripture.
• 1:00:39
  SPEAKER_01: But it's also personal, right?
• 1:00:40
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, Paul had a eucatastrophe of his own on Damascus Road, right?
• 1:00:44
  SPEAKER_01: He didn't realize he was dead in trespasses, but he was, and he talks about that later, right?
• 1:00:48
  SPEAKER_01: And that's also very personal for us too, right?
• 1:00:51
  SPEAKER_01: God does the same thing when he calls us to faith, when he dunks us in the water, right?
• 1:00:55
  SPEAKER_01: When he splashes us with water, when he washes us and makes us new by water and the word, he's...
• 1:01:02
  SPEAKER_01: Well, he's bringing that eucatastrophe of the cross to us there, right?
• 1:01:07
  SPEAKER_01: And that also gives us a preview of the end eucatastrophe too, which is, I mean, I love that.
• 1:01:12
  SPEAKER_01: I think Revelation is the book of eucatastrophe if you had to pick like any of them
• 1:01:16
  SPEAKER_01: in the New Testament besides the crucifixion or I say in addition to that,
• 1:01:19
  SPEAKER_01: right?
• 1:01:20
  SPEAKER_01: It's Revelation because you've got, I mean, chapter after chapter of just horrible, terrible things
• 1:01:27
  SPEAKER_01: no good, very bad news.
• 1:01:29
  SPEAKER_01: It looks so bleak,
• 1:01:30
  SPEAKER_01: it's so dark,
• 1:01:31
  SPEAKER_01: and it's confusing,
• 1:01:33
  SPEAKER_01: it's mysterious,
• 1:01:34
  SPEAKER_01: it's frightening in a lot of ways for people.
• 1:01:37
  SPEAKER_01: And I always tell people,
• 1:01:39
  SPEAKER_01: you probably get this a lot too,
• 1:01:41
  SPEAKER_01: questions about the book of Revelation and stuff,
• 1:01:42
  SPEAKER_01: especially these days it seems.
• 1:01:44
  SPEAKER_01: I always tell people, okay, first of all, just take a deep breath and relax.
• 1:01:49
  SPEAKER_01: If you go in reading that book and you come out
• 1:01:51
  SPEAKER_01: and you don't find it's all about Jesus,
• 1:01:53
  SPEAKER_01: go back and do it again because you're missing something,
• 1:01:55
  SPEAKER_01: right?
• 1:01:55
  SPEAKER_01: And if you go in and you come out and it's not comforting,
• 1:01:58
  SPEAKER_01: you're also missing something too because that's the whole key at the end of it is
• 1:02:02
  SPEAKER_01: to bring you comfort in Christ in the midst of a world that is going the way of
• 1:02:08
  SPEAKER_01: Mordor or looks like the white witch is in charge of everything,
• 1:02:11
  SPEAKER_01: right?
• 1:02:13
  SPEAKER_01: So there's comfort.
• 1:02:14
  SPEAKER_01: There's that great and gracious sudden turn of the end.
• 1:02:17
  SPEAKER_01: I love that phrase, that twist of grace at the end.
• 1:02:20
  SPEAKER_01: Because that's revelation, right?
• 1:02:22
  SPEAKER_01: He's going to make all things new.
• 1:02:24
  SPEAKER_01: Even our own personal catastrophes,
• 1:02:26
  SPEAKER_01: whether they're physical,
• 1:02:28
  SPEAKER_01: mental,
• 1:02:28
  SPEAKER_01: spiritual,
• 1:02:29
  SPEAKER_01: all of them,
• 1:02:29
  SPEAKER_01: we have all of the above.
• 1:02:31
  SPEAKER_01: He's going to make that new too.
• 1:02:32
  SPEAKER_01: He's going to wipe every tear from our eye.
• 1:02:34
  SPEAKER_01: Death is going to be no more.
• 1:02:36
  SPEAKER_01: Neither mourning, nor pain, nor sighing.
• 1:02:39
  SPEAKER_01: Because he who is seated on the throne is going to make all things new.
• 1:02:44
  SPEAKER_01: And that's why it's such a cool word and such a good thing,
• 1:02:49
  SPEAKER_01: not only in stories,
• 1:02:50
  SPEAKER_01: but also in the one true story of the Christian faith.
• 1:02:54
  SPEAKER_01: And I think why that can help,
• 1:02:57
  SPEAKER_01: again,
• 1:02:57
  SPEAKER_01: not only our own Christian faith,
• 1:02:58
  SPEAKER_01: but that can help us communicate the Christian faith to others too.
• 1:03:02
  SPEAKER_01: Perhaps people going through similar things, you know.
• 1:03:06
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, man.
• 1:03:07
  SPEAKER_00: That's so good.
• 1:03:08
  SPEAKER_00: And it – yeah, it's just such a resonant way in which to understand the good news.
• 1:03:14
  SPEAKER_00: I know you have to go and I don't want to keep you up.
• 1:03:16
  SPEAKER_00: But I did – I have one last question.
• 1:03:19
  SPEAKER_00: It's probably the question everyone wants to know.
• 1:03:23
  SPEAKER_00: When it comes to Lord of the Rings, books or movies?
• 1:03:26
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, it's a very good question.
• 1:03:28
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely books.
• 1:03:29
  SPEAKER_01: I'm a firm believer of books first, movies second.
• 1:03:32
  SPEAKER_01: But I do like – I do enjoy the movies.
• 1:03:34
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:03:36
  SPEAKER_01: Peter Jackson did,
• 1:03:37
  SPEAKER_01: for a filmmaker who's not a Christian,
• 1:03:39
  SPEAKER_01: I think did a good job at capturing a lot of the themes of Tolkien's writings and
• 1:03:44
  SPEAKER_01: his work.
• 1:03:44
  SPEAKER_01: So I do love the movies.
• 1:03:46
  SPEAKER_01: I will say this,
• 1:03:47
  SPEAKER_01: I prefer,
• 1:03:47
  SPEAKER_01: this is probably the only,
• 1:03:49
  SPEAKER_01: one of the very few exceptions where director's cuts are better than the theatrical cuts.
• 1:03:54
  SPEAKER_01: because the director's cuts add more detail, which is kind of cool.
• 1:03:57
  SPEAKER_00: I don't even think you can watch the theatrical of the Lord of the Rings.
• 1:04:00
  SPEAKER_00: I don't even know how that's possible.
• 1:04:03
  SPEAKER_01: I did it once,
• 1:04:03
  SPEAKER_01: I think,
• 1:04:04
  SPEAKER_01: and the only time I remember doing it was when Return of the King came out in the theater,
• 1:04:08
  SPEAKER_01: because my friends and I did a little Lord of the Rings marathon first.
• 1:04:11
  SPEAKER_01: We watched the first two volumes in the extended editions,
• 1:04:15
  SPEAKER_01: and then we went to the theater and watched the Return of the King,
• 1:04:17
  SPEAKER_01: because we're big nerds,
• 1:04:19
  SPEAKER_01: and it was a lot of fun.
• 1:04:20
  SPEAKER_01: But since then, I think I've...
• 1:04:22
  SPEAKER_01: pretty much only watch the extended editions,
• 1:04:24
  SPEAKER_01: which is,
• 1:04:25
  SPEAKER_01: again,
• 1:04:25
  SPEAKER_01: totally different in some ways,
• 1:04:27
  SPEAKER_01: but as far as film adaptations go,
• 1:04:29
  SPEAKER_01: great.
• 1:04:30
  SPEAKER_01: And the music, I've got to say, is one of my favorite parts.
• 1:04:33
  SPEAKER_01: I have been known to regularly blast the Shire theme while I'm working on sermons
• 1:04:38
  SPEAKER_01: and Bible studies and I study at church and just let that baby rip because that's...
• 1:04:43
  SPEAKER_01: That is just good music for the soul right there.
• 1:04:45
  SPEAKER_01: It's great.
• 1:04:45
  SPEAKER_00: There is something interesting,
• 1:04:47
  SPEAKER_00: not to digress about cinema for a while,
• 1:04:50
  SPEAKER_00: but there is something interesting about those original three movies which have,
• 1:04:56
  SPEAKER_00: like the books themselves,
• 1:04:57
  SPEAKER_00: stood the test of time.
• 1:04:59
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:04:59
  SPEAKER_01: I think they will continue to do so too.
• 1:05:02
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, we're over 20 years removed since they first entered theaters.
• 1:05:06
  SPEAKER_00: And I know for certain,
• 1:05:08
  SPEAKER_00: because I think they just did this,
• 1:05:09
  SPEAKER_00: where you could re-release them and they would make Bank.
• 1:05:13
  SPEAKER_00: And I think not just because they were so well made, but I think...
• 1:05:18
  SPEAKER_00: they are well made and they convey the story that is like we've been talking about
• 1:05:23
  SPEAKER_00: that is so universally appealing and compelling um and i think they do it in an
• 1:05:29
  SPEAKER_00: excellent way and yes granted they make you know um they make changes and they make
• 1:05:35
  SPEAKER_00: at least in the original three sometimes it makes more sense cinematically even if
• 1:05:39
  SPEAKER_00: it's not as always faithful to the text but right um it it
• 1:05:43
  SPEAKER_00: draws in this it draws in perhaps it's more accessible for sure in some regards um
• 1:05:49
  SPEAKER_00: yeah but yeah anyways i i'm i'm a huge fan of both which is just to say i love both
• 1:05:56
  SPEAKER_01: no it's same here same here and i it's been a while since i've watched them but i
• 1:05:59
  SPEAKER_01: like i said i reread uh lord of the rings try to regularly and uh yeah like you
• 1:06:05
  SPEAKER_01: said it's it's a book uh like many others by the inklings that can stand the test
• 1:06:09
  SPEAKER_01: of time you know it
• 1:06:11
  SPEAKER_01: I mean,
• 1:06:12
  SPEAKER_01: my daughter's reading the Twilight series right now,
• 1:06:14
  SPEAKER_01: which I honestly didn't think would still be around by the time she was old enough
• 1:06:16
  SPEAKER_01: to read them.
• 1:06:17
  SPEAKER_01: But they're still around.
• 1:06:19
  SPEAKER_01: But in 50 years, they probably won't be.
• 1:06:21
  SPEAKER_01: And people, nerds and non-nerds alike, will be reading Lord of the Rings for a long time.
• 1:06:28
  SPEAKER_01: And same with Narnia.
• 1:06:31
  SPEAKER_01: There's something,
• 1:06:32
  SPEAKER_01: even through a movie,
• 1:06:34
  SPEAKER_01: which is being filtered through somebody else's imagination,
• 1:06:36
  SPEAKER_01: which is not always a bad thing.
• 1:06:37
  SPEAKER_01: That can be a very good thing.
• 1:06:40
  SPEAKER_01: There's something about those kinds of stories that reach down deep into who we are
• 1:06:50
  SPEAKER_01: and what we believe,
• 1:06:52
  SPEAKER_01: how we live,
• 1:06:54
  SPEAKER_01: what is true,
• 1:06:55
  SPEAKER_01: what is good,
• 1:06:55
  SPEAKER_01: what is beautiful to draw on those kind of ancient three things.
• 1:06:58
  SPEAKER_01: ancient three things and draw that out in a way that's,
• 1:07:02
  SPEAKER_01: yeah,
• 1:07:02
  SPEAKER_01: whether it's on the film or on the page or even audiobook.
• 1:07:06
  SPEAKER_01: Recently I listened to the Andy Serkis read The Hobbit, which is fun.
• 1:07:12
  SPEAKER_01: If you ever want to, I highly recommend that.
• 1:07:14
  SPEAKER_01: That's a lot of, that's great.
• 1:07:16
  SPEAKER_01: Talk about the voice of Gollum reading in The Hobbit.
• 1:07:19
  SPEAKER_01: It's next to having Tolkien read it himself.
• 1:07:22
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know if it could get much better as a Tolkien fan.
• 1:07:25
  SPEAKER_00: You're very right about that.
• 1:07:26
  SPEAKER_01: It's really, really cool.
• 1:07:27
  SPEAKER_01: So, yeah, fun ways to read, you know, again, a great story.
• 1:07:32
  SPEAKER_00: Well, Sam, thank you so much.
• 1:07:33
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for spending your part of the afternoon with me.
• 1:07:35
  SPEAKER_00: Hey, glad to.
• 1:07:36
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm looking forward to the next time we can do this.
• 1:07:38
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 1:07:38
  SPEAKER_01: I'd love to any time.
• 1:07:39
  SPEAKER_01: It's good to hang out and chat about some fun stuff together and share in the
• 1:07:43
  SPEAKER_01: gospel together and enjoy some good stories along the way.
• 1:07:46
  SPEAKER_00: Amen.
• 1:07:47
  SPEAKER_00: Hey, thanks, Sam.
• 1:07:49
  SPEAKER_00: Well, thanks for listening.
• 1:07:50
  SPEAKER_00: I hope you've been blessed by this episode.
• 1:07:53
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks so much for clicking play and subscribing.
• 1:07:56
  SPEAKER_00: If you haven't yet, make sure you do subscribe to Ministry Minded.
• 1:08:00
  SPEAKER_00: right here on Substack or on Apple Podcasts or on Spotify, wherever you get your podcasts.
• 1:08:04
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks so much for all your encouragement and your support.
• 1:08:07
  SPEAKER_00: I hope you've been blessed.
• 1:08:09
  SPEAKER_00: I hope you are enjoying the Lord as you seek to be changed and renewed and transformed by His grace.
• 1:08:18
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks so much for listening and commenting, and I hope to see you very soon on the next episode.
• 1:08:24
  SPEAKER_00: Blessings.