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The Man Who Probably Didn't Nail Anything to a Door · Theology Made Podcast

• 0:00
  [music]
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Theology Made podcast.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Jordan Vale.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: In today's episode, we're going to look at the man who probably didn't nail anything to adore.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: You already have the picture.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of Christians do.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: A monk in a black robe walks across a cobbled square in a small German town.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: It's a gray afternoon in late October.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: He has a hammer in one hand and a roll of paper in the other.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: And then there's a crowd.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: Because in the picture, there always seems to be a crowd.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: He stops at the north door of the church.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: He dramatically raises the hammer.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: He drives the nail through the paper into the oak,
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: and the sound of it carries across the square and across 500 years,
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_00: and the medieval world ends on the spot.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_00: It's one of a few images from Western Christianity that a lot of us can picture.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: It's on murals and book covers and the sides of church vans.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, maybe not that one.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_00: But there are children's cartoons of it.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: Now, here's the situation.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: We have no contemporary account of it.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: The man in the picture wrote a great deal about the events of that autumn
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: in letters, in prefaces, and in table talk recorded by his students.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: And he told the story of what he did in 1517 more than once in his later life.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: And in none of it does he ever say that he nailed anything to a door.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: Now there is one thing we can document about the 31st of October of 1517.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: It's not a hammer.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: But it is a letter sealed and sent to an archbishop.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: And the tone of it is so carefully written,
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: so deferential,
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: that if you read it cold,
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: you didn't know the history,
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: you would never have guessed that it was written by a man about to break Europe
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: in half.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: He was 33 years old.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: He was a professor of Bible at a new and unimpressive university.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: His name was Martin Luther.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: And on the day we now call Reformation Day,
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: the most radical thing he did was mail out the document.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: To understand what he was writing about, you have to follow the money.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: Because the Reformation begins with a loan.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: In 1514,
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: a young German nobleman named Albrecht of Brandenburg wanted to be Archbishop
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: of Mintz.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: Mintz was the biggest prize in the German church.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: Its archbishop was one of the seven electors who chose the Holy Roman Emperor,
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: which made the job as much political as spiritual, really probably more political.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: Albrecht though had two problems.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: He was 23, which was well under the canonical age, and he already held two other sees.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: Magdeburg and Halberstadt, which he had no intention of giving up.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: And Church law was clear, you could not stack bishoprics like that.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: However, cue up Jerry Maguire, Show me the money.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: Church law also was negotiable for a price.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_00: Rome agreed to the dispensation.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_00: The bill came to more than 20,000 ducats.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: Albrecht did not have 20,000 ducats.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: So he borrowed it from the richest men in Europe,
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: a banker in Augsburg named Jacob Fugger,
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: whose family had financed emperors and monument monopolies,
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: and he didn't lend money out of piety.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: So now, the Archbishop of Mintz owed a bank.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: The repayment scheme is where this stops being a story about ambition
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: and now becomes a story about theology.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: Pope Leo X was rebuilding St.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: Peter's in Rome,
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: a project that had been just swallowing money since 1506 And there was no end
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: in view.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: Leo authorized a special indulgence to fund it.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: Albrecht was given the right to preach that indulgence across his territories.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: And the proceeds were split down the middle.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: Half went to Rome for the Basilica, half went to Fugger against Albrecht's debt.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: A Fugger agent traveled with the preaching campaign and held one of the keys to
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: the strongbox so that the bank share never passed through anyone else's hands.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: The man hired to preach it.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: Was Johann Tetzel.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: And by every account, he was very good at his job.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: He arrived in a town with a procession and a papal bull carried on a velvet cushion.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: He preached about the dead.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: He asked his listeners to imagine their mothers and fathers in the fire
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: of purgatory,
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: calling out to children who could buy their release for the price of a few coins
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: and would not do it.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: The jingle attached to his campaign has survived five centuries
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_00: because it's unforgettable and because it's monstrous.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_01: Step right up, good people of Saxony, gather near.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_01: I got a deal from Rome itself, the only deal you'll fear to miss.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_01: Your mother screaming in the flames of purgatory night.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_01: But I hold the very paper that will set her spirit right.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: As soon as the coin in the chest rings, the soul from Purgatory Springs.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: Tetzel, he couldn't preach in electoral Saxony.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: Frederick the Wise, Luther's prince, had banned him.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_00: And the reason Frederick banned him is one of the better details in this entire story.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: So we'll come back to it.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: Frederick had his own indulgence business and it ran out of a church in Wittenberg.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: He was a serious collector of relics in the way that other princes collected paintings.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_00: By the end of his life, his collection ran past 19,000 items.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: A thorn from the crown,
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: straw from the manger,
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: milk from the Virgin Mary,
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: that's a story in itself,
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_00: a twig from the burning bush,
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_00: bones and fragments and vials cataloged and illustrated and displayed in
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_00: the castle church.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_00: Pilgrims came to view them,
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_00: and viewing them under the terms Roman granted took time off of purgatory.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_00: So the math on the full collection, it ran into the millions of years.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_00: And there was one day a year when the whole collection went on display,
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_00: when the pilgrims poured into Wittenberg and the church was full and
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_00: the town made its money.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: That day was All Saints, the 1st of November.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: Which means that whatever Martin Luther did or didn't do on the 31st
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_00: of October 1517,
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: he did it on the eve of the single biggest indulgence day in his own town that
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: the church was running.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: So the date was certainly intentional.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_00: Now where does the hammer come from?
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_00: In February of 1546, Luther dies at Elspen.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_00: He was 62.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: Within months, his colleagues at Wittenberg were assembling his collected Latin works.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: And the task of writing a memorial preface fell to Philip Melanchthon,
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: who had been Luther's closest academic partner for 28 years.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_00: And in the preface,
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: Melanchthon wrote the sentence,
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: And that sentence becomes the origin of the image and every painting descends
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: from it.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: Now, there's two things about it.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_00: Melanchthon was writing 29 years after the fact.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_00: And Melanchthon was not there.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: He came to Wittenberg in August of 1518 to take up the Greek chair.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: In the autumn of 1517,
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_00: he was a 20-year-old, not even in the same town, and he'd never met Luther.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_00: In 1961,
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_00: a German church historian named Erwin Eiserloh laid this out in public and argued
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_00: the conclusion, though true, takes away from the pizzazz of the story.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: He says, the posting of the theses.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_00: It's a legend.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_00: And his case is not just the Melanchthon problem.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_00: It's also the silence.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_00: Luther had talked about 1570 for the rest of his life.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_00: He described sending the theses to the bishops.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_00: He described his own state of mind.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: He never once described a door.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_00: Iserlo also pointed at the letter.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: On the 31st of October,
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: Luther wrote to Albrecht of Brandenburg,
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_00: enclosed a copy of his theses,
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: and asked the archbishop to look into what was being preached in his name.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_00: Again, the letter is deferential, almost uncomfortable.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_00: And Iserloff's question was simple.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: Would a man who had just spiked his complaint to a public door write like that on
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: the same afternoon before his own bishop had answered him?
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: And the reaction to this in the 1960s was loud.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: And part of the reason it was loud is that, well, Iserloff was a Catholic priest.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_00: Protestant scholars pushed back hard,
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_00: and some of that pushback was scholarship,
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_00: but a lot of it was also trying to reclaim territory.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: And it's worth saying that the confessional motives ran in both directions.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_00: A Catholic historian had reasons to enjoy dismantling a Protestant founding image.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_00: Protestant historians had reason to defend it.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_00: Neither of those facts settles what happens in 1517.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_00: But then, in 2006, the ground moved again.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_00: A researcher named Martin Troup,
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_00: working through holdings at the Thuringer State Library in Yonham,
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: found a handwritten note bound into a copy of the 1540 Wittenberg New Testament.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_00: The hand belonged to George Rohrer,
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_00: who had been Luther's secretary and who took down thousands of pages of his words.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_00: And Rohrer's note says that in 1517,
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_00: on the Eve of All Saints,
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: Luther posted theses about indulgences on the doors of the churches of Wittenberg.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_00: This is a second witness, independent of Melanchthon, written earlier.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_00: It is real evidence, and most historians now take it seriously.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: But look closely at what it actually says.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: Doors.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_00: Plural.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: Churches.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_00: Plural.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_00: That's not a description of a revolutionary act.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_00: That is a description of a man putting up notices around town,
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_00: which is what you did when you were a university professor announcing
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_00: a dispensation.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_00: The door of the castle church was Wittenberg's notice board.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_00: It was where the university posted things.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_00: The statutes required it.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_00: Somebody was tacking paper to that door most weeks of the term and nobody painted them.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_00: So the honest state of the question is this.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_00: He may well have posted them.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_00: There's now decent reason to think he did.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_00: What almost certainly didn't happen is a thing in the picture.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_00: There's no crowd.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_00: There's no thunderclap.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_00: Very likely no hammer at all,
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_00: since notices in that period were commonly pasted up with wheat paste.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_00: And possibly not even Luther's own hand,
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_00: since a university, think like TA, would ordinarily do it.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_00: Now read the document.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_00: Because the document doesn't cooperate with the picture either.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_00: The 95 Theses are in Latin.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_00: Latin was the language of the university and the clergy.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: Writing in Latin in 1517 was a way of addressing maybe 2% of the population.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_00: If you wanted to start a popular uprising, you didn't do it in Latin.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_00: So this is not a manifesto.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_00: These were debate propositions numbered in the standard format for an academic disputation.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_00: And the invitation attached to them is an invitation to discuss, to argue about it.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_00: The first one is about repentance.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_00: Luther says that when Jesus said repent,
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_00: he meant the whole of a believer's life to be repentance.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_00: That's the real foundation of the document.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_00: It's really a pastoral claim before it's a political one.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_00: And many of the middle theses are technical.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_00: Some of them concede things that would horrify a later Protestant.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_00: Luther doesn't deny purgatory.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_00: He doesn't deny that the Pope has authority to remit penalties.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_00: Instead, he's arguing about the limits of that authority and what the preachers are promising.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_00: Now, there are some sharp ones near the end where you can hear him getting angry.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_00: He asks why the Pope,
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_00: who is wealthier than the wealthiest Roman who ever lived,
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_00: does not build his basilica with his own money Instead of the money
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_00: of poor believers.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_00: He asks what a Christian is supposed to say when a layman puts that question to him.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_00: And here's the part that gets missed.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_00: Luther expected Rome to agree with him.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_00: He thought the Pope was being defrauded by his own salesman.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_00: He thought that if Leo understood what was being said in his name
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_00: in German market squares, Leo would put a stop to it.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_00: The letter to Albrecht is written by a man who feels like he's reporting an abuse up
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_00: the chain of command and assuming the chain of command will work.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_00: What broke that assumption was not a nail.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_00: It was the printing press.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_00: Somebody translated the theses into German,
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_00: and somebody printed them,
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_00: and within a few weeks, copies were circulating in Nuremberg, Lipsig, Basel.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_00: Luther had not authorized this and said afterward he was astonished by how far they went.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_00: He had written for a faculty room.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_00: But he found himself being read in taverns.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_00: And then in 1518, he did something with intent.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_00: He wrote a short piece in German.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_00: It was plain.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_00: It was hot.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_00: Called the Sermon on Indulgences and Grace.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_00: It was cheap.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_00: It was under 20 pages.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_00: And it went through edition after edition after edition.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_00: The pamphlet reached vastly more people than the Latin theses ever did.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_00: The Reformation did not spread because of an act of defiance on a church door.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_00: It spread because the professor discovered he was a naturally popular writer
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_00: in his own language.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: And because printers discovered, he sold.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_00: And if you want the moment, Luther actually crossed the line.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_00: It's documented with witnesses, and it's three years later.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_00: Through 1518 and 1519, things escalate.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_00: He was interrogated at Augsburg by Cardinal Cajetan in October of 1518 and refused to recant.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_00: He debated Johann Eck in the summer of 1519,
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_00: and under pressure,
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_00: he conceded that church councils could err,
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_00: which was a far more serious statement than anything in the Theses.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_00: And in Rome of 1520, Rome issued the bull...
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_00: Exergio Domini, condemning his position and giving him 60 days.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_00: On the 10th of December,
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_00: 1520, in the morning, outside the Elster Gate at Wittenberg, a fire was built.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_00: Students and faculty gathered.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_00: Books of canon law went into it.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_00: Then Luther walked forward and threw in the papal bull.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_00: He was excommunicated three weeks later.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_00: That's the act.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_00: That's the thing the painting should show.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_00: A middle-aged man burning a legal document in the cold in front of his students
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_00: with no way back.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_00: It's less dramatic than a hammer on a church door.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_00: And it took three years of failed negotiating to arrive at.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_00: And it doesn't necessarily fit on a church van.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_00: And while we're here, the other famous line has the same problem.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_00: At Worms in April 1521,
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_00: the earliest transcripts have Luther saying that his conscience is captive to
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_00: the word of God and that he cannot and will not recant.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_00: The ringing bit that everyone quotes,
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_00: here I stand, I can do no other, it shows up in the printed version afterwards.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_00: It may have been said...
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_00: It may have been improved.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_00: Typically, founding moments tend to get improved.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_00: In 1617,
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_00: Protestant Germany held its first Reformation,
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_00: celebrating the 100 years and the myth-making apparatus that went to work.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_00: That's roughly when a story started circulating about Frederick the Wise having
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_00: a dream on the night of the 30th of October, 1517.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_00: In the dream,
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_00: Frederick sees a monk writing on the door of the castle church with a pen
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_00: so enormously long that it reaches all the way to Rome,
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_00: where it knocks the tiara off the Pope's head.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody thinks that's history.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_00: It's a hundred-year-old commemorative culture reaching back to give itself
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_00: a better origin than the one it had.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_00: And the door itself.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_00: The wooden door Luther may or may not have used burned in 1760 when Wittenberg was bombarded.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_00: The door that stands there now,
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_00: the one in the photographs, the one people travel across oceans to touch, is bronze.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_00: It has the Latin text of the 95 Theses cast into its panels.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_00: It was commissioned by King Frederick William IV of Prussia and dedicated on
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_00: the 10th of November 1858, which was Luther's 375th birthday.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_00: So,
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_00: a Prussian monument cast three centuries later standing in for a door that burned,
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_00: commemorating an act that our best evidence says was probably
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_00: a routine academic notice on a night that mattered for a reason almost nobody else
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_00: at the shrine could tell you.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_00: None of that makes the Reformation smaller.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_00: The debt was real,
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_00: Tetzel was real,
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_00: the pamphlet was real, and the fire outside the Elster Gate was very real.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_00: It just means the thing that changed the world wasn't a gesture.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_00: It was a man asking a technical question in the wrong century and then in
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_00: the wrong language on a day he did choose carefully and then refusing
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_00: for three years to take it back while the pressure built up.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_00: Which raises the question about every founding story you've ever been handed,
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_00: including the ones about your own family, your own church, and your own conversion.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_00: Is there a hammer or there shouldn't be one?
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for listening to Theology Made Podcast.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_00: Again, I'm Jordan Vale.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_00: If you found this helpful and encouraging,
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_00: please like and subscribe on whatever platform you're listening on.