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Transcript

Neoorthodox Theology · Reformed Thinking

• 0:00
  Welcome to the Reform Thinking podcast.
• 0:03
  So I want you to imagine something for a second.
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  Imagine you are standing right in the center of a like a really
• 0:09
  grand European cathedral. Oh, like one of those massive
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  echoey ones, the huge stone pillars.
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  Yes, precisely. The architecture is just
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  breathtaking. And for, well, for nearly 200
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  years, everyone's attention in this cathedral has been
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  completely drawn to this one specific massive stained glass
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  window. And this window, it depicts a
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  very bright, highly optimistic view of humanity.
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  It's beautiful. So that window represents the
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  era of classical liberal theology, which basically
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  dominated the 18th and 19th centuries.
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  Yeah. And the theologians of that era,
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  they taught that human beings were, you know, essentially good
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  by nature. They taught that society guided
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  by a human reason, scientific advancement, it was inevitably
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  progressing toward this sort of utopian Kingdom of God on.
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  Earth like things are just getting better and better.
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  Yeah, the idea that human reason was the absolute measure of all
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  things, that the sun is just shining right through that
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  beautiful stained glass window. OK, so keep that image in your
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  head. The sun is shining, everything
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  is optimistic. And then the calendar turns to
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  the summer of 1914 and World War One begins.
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  Yeah. Everything changes.
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  Completely. We are not talking about a
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  subtle shift in thought here. We're talking about the
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  artillery shells of trench warfare.
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  We're talking about, you know, the introduction of mustard gas,
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  the whole mechanization of death.
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  Skill was just unprecedented. Right.
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  Unimaginable human slaughter and all of that hits that stained
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  glass window and just shatters it into a million pieces.
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  The bright optimism is just it's dead.
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  It was completely devastated. I mean, the intellectual and the
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  spiritual landscape of Europe was left in absolute ruins.
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  Yeah, the sheer scale of the casualties at places like the
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  Sum or Verdun, it literally broke the European mind.
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  Because how could you maintain that optimism?
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  You couldn't. You cannot stand in a pulpit and
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  preach this cheery message about the innate, unbroken goodness of
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  humanity when you are actively burying millions of young men
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  who have just slaughtered each other with these new industrial
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  weapons. It's impossible.
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  The reality of human evil was just undeniable at that point.
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  And the liberal theology of the 19th century, it had absolutely
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  no categories to deal with that level of darkness.
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  So that brings us to our mission for this deep dive.
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  Today, we are going to look directly at the intellectual
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  scramble to recover from that devastation.
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  Right, the rebuilding phase. The attempt at rebuilding, Yeah,
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  We're analyzing A theological movement known as Neo Orthodoxy,
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  and you might also hear it referred to as crisis theology
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  or sometimes dialectical theology.
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  We'll define all those terms for you as we go.
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  Lots of big labels. Oh yeah.
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  But basically, we're going to see how a specific group of
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  theologians looked at the rubble of their optimistic beliefs and
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  just desperately tried to recover historic Christian
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  doctrines. They were trying to find a
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  sovereign God again, right in the middle of a literal global
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  crisis. Right.
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  And because they were trying to rebuild a serious, robust view
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  of God, this whole movement got slapped with the label Neo
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  Orthodoxy, meaning a new Orthodoxy.
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  Which, and we need to say this right up front, brings up a
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  massive caveat. Oh.
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  A huge one. The term orthodoxy here is a
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  total misnomer. It's really quite misleading.
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  Yeah, it sounds safe, but it's not.
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  Right. While these thinkers definitely
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  took the Bible more seriously than the older liberals did, I
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  mean they realized human reason had failed them and they needed
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  a word from outside of themselves, a word from God.
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  A rescue operation, essentially. Yeah, but they retained the
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  exact same liberal assumptions. Underneath it all, they still
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  accepted higher criticism of the Bible.
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  OK, let's pause right there, because we can't assume everyone
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  listening knows what higher criticism entails.
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  If someone is, you know, listening on their commute right
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  now, how would you define that in plain language?
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  So higher criticism was a method of biblical study that gained
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  massive traction in Germany during the 1800s.
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  And instead of treating the Bible as the inspired,
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  infallible Word of God, scholars started treating it like any
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  other ancient, flawed human document.
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  Like it's just another old history book.
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  Yeah, and a bad one at that. They assumed the miracles were
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  myths added by superstitious people.
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  Later on, they chopped the text into pieces, arguing that Moses
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  didn't write the first five books.
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  Right, the documentary hypothesis stuff.
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  Yes, they said those books were just a patchwork of competing
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  authors over centuries. They basically stripped the
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  Bible of its divine authority. And the classical liberals loved
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  that approach. Oh, they thrived on it.
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  And the tragic irony of the Neo Orthodox movement is that men
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  like Carl Barth and Emil Brunner, they really wanted to
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  get back to a serious faith, but they refused to abandon the
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  skeptical view of the text. They wanted the fruit without
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  the root. Spot on.
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  They still rejected the idea of an infallible, historically
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  accurate Bible. So they were trying to build a
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  robust faith, but they were building it on the exact same
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  compromised bedrock that had just collapsed under the weight
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  of the World War. Wow.
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  OK, so to understand how we get to that fallout in the 20th
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  century, we actually have to rewind the clock a little bit.
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  We need to look at the initial spark that ignited this whole
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  way of thinking. Yeah, the philosophical route.
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  Right. And that takes us to 19th
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  century Denmark, to a man named CERN Kierkegaard.
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  CERN Kierkegaard is just a towering historical figure.
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  He lived from 1813 to 1855, and he is universally recognized as
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  the father of existentialism. Existentialism being the keyword
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  here. Yes, existentialism is the
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  philosophical bedrock rock upon which all of near orthodoxy
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  rests. But to grasp his theology, you
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  really have to look at his intense, almost tragic personal
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  background. Because it bleeds into
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  everything, he wrote. He colored every single
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  sentence. I mean, he did not have an easy
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  life physically or mentally. He suffered physically from a
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  crooked back. He had a noticeable limp, but
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  the psychological suffering was far heavier.
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  He dealt with severe recurring melancholic depression.
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  He inherited a large portion of that disposition from his
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  father. His father was a deeply gloomy
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  man who lived under this crushing, terrifying conviction
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  that he had committed the unpardonable sin against the
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  Holy Spirit. Oh man, imagine growing up in a
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  household where the patriarch, your father, believes he is
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  irrevocably cursed by God, just waiting for divine judgment to
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  fall at any moment. Right.
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  That casts a long, dark shadow over your entire concept of of
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  who God is and how you relate to him.
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  And Kierkegaard's personal life just kept reflecting that agony.
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  I mean, he actually fell in love, became engaged to a young
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  woman named Regine Olson, and then abruptly broke it off.
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  And not because he didn't like her.
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  Anymore. No, not at all.
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  His diary entries show he was completely tormented by the
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  decision. He broke it off because he felt
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  his internal burdens and his depression were just too massive
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  and he refused to subject her to that darkness.
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  He essentially sacrificed his own happiness out of, well,
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  almost a twisted sense of nobility.
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  Yeah, and after that he absorbed himself entirely in his writing.
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  But even then he found no solace.
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  He was routinely mocked and ridiculed by the local press in
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  Copenhagen. So he was kind of an outcast.
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  Totally. In fact, his writings were
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  largely ignored or disparaged during his lifetime.
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  It wasn't until around 1930, long after his death and right
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  when the world was ready for his brand of existential crisis,
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  that his work gained wide acceptance.
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  So he also studied for the ministry at the University of
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  Copenhagen, but he refused to be formally ordained.
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  Right. Yeah, He wanted total freedom
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  from the religious system of his day.
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  And that brings us to his fierce theological reaction, because
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  Kierkegaard was looking at the State Church of Denmark and he
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  was absolutely disgusted by what he saw.
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  To be a citizen of Denmark in that era was synonymous with
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  being a Christian. You were born a Dane, therefore
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  you were baptized, confirmed and counted as a Christian.
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  A. Cultural Christian.
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  Yeah, the state church was characterized by a dead
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  formalism. People would just show up,
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  engage in a cold recitation of creeds, listen to a dry lecture
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  and go home. Just going through the motions.
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  Zero spiritual vitality. It was an objective intellectual
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  exercise, totally devoid of any subjective passion or life.
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  He absolutely hated that cold orthodoxy.
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  So let's look at the core concepts he developed in
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  reaction to it. First, his view of God.
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  Because liberalism at the time was teaching the imminence of
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  God. The idea that God is near.
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  Right. Almost indistinguishable from
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  human progress, culture and nature, Kierkegaard swings the
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  pendulum in the complete opposite direction.
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  He says God is absolutely transcendent.
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  God is holy other. Yes, and because God is
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  absolutely transcendent, Kierkegaard argued that you
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  cannot prove God through objective arguments.
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  He strongly opposed the dominant philosopher of his era, Jordan
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  Wilhelm Friedrich Hagel. OK, let me jump in here.
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  We need to unpack Hagel because his shadow hangs over this
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  entire era. If you're listening and you're
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  not familiar with 19th century German philosophy, what was
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  Hegel's objective theory and why did Kierkegaard hate it so much?
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  So Hegel taught that human history and thought progress
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  through a rational, objective mechanism called the dialectic.
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  OK, you have a thesis, right? An established idea.
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  Then an antithesis arises which contradicts it.
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  The resulting clash produces A synthesis, a new and better
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  idea. Thesis.
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  Antithesis. Synthesis.
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  Exactly. And Hegel applied this highly
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  logical process to everything, including God.
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  He argued that we can reason our way to ultimate objective truth
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  by tracking this historical, rational process.
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  And Kierkegaard looked at that and was just appalled.
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  He believed that trying to put the Almighty God at the end of a
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  math equation or historical formula was insulting to the
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  divine nature. Kierkegaard.
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  Kierkegaard said. You cannot reason your way to
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  God. No math equations for the
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  divine. Right.
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  You cannot look at historical proofs or logical syllogisms and
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  arrive at the Creator. According to Kierkegaard, God
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  can only be discovered by giving him absolute obedience apart
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  from any certain knowledge of his actual existence.
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  Which introduces his most famous concept, the leap of faith.
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  Because if you cannot use reason and you cannot use historical
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  proof, how do you cross the gap to get to God?
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  Kierkegaard says you have to jump.
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  You jump and you don't jump from a place of intellectual comfort,
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  you jump from a place of absolute despair.
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  Hence his theology is often called the theology of despair.
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  That's the crisis point. In the middle of your despair,
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  you make this blind commitment. And for Kierkegaard, knowing
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  Christ is not about studying a past figure of history.
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  It's not about confirming the objective fact that a man named
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  Jesus walked in Galilee 2000 years years ago.
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  It's about right now. It's about an encounter in the
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  present moment. To encounter Christ, you have to
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  make the exact same blind leap of faith that the original
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  disciples made when they drop their Nets.
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  OK, let me throw an analogy at you for the listener.
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  To visualize what Kierkegaard is demanding here, imagine you are
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  trapped on the top floor of a burning building.
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  Terrifying. Right.
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  The smoke is thick, the heat is blistering, and that represents
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  Kierkegaard's concept of human despair.
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  It's an unbearable situation Now.
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  The historic Orthodox Christian approach would be like a
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  firefighter on the ground calling up to you, saying I have
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  a safety net right here. I have a reinforced, tested,
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  verifiable canvas net. You can see it.
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  You can trust the manufacturer. Now jump.
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  Because that relies on an objective reality.
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  Exactly. But Kierkegaard's view is
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  different. Kierkegaard says it is pitch
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  black outside the window. You cannot see the ground.
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  You have no verifiable proof that a net even exists.
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  Oh wow. But the fire is burning you
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  alive, so you hurl yourself into the darkness anyway, simply
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  hoping Annette is there. It's the passion of the jump
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  that matters, not the verification of the net.
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  That is a very accurate representation of his thought
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  process. The passion of the subjective
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  experience is elevated completely above the objective
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  reality of the situation. Existentialism teaches that
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  truth is found in the subjective experience of the individual.
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  But I have to push back on this on behalf of the listener.
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  If I am the person in the burning building, jumping into
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  the pitch black without knowing a net is there seems like a
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  great way to hit the pavement. It really does.
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  If the historical facts of Christ's life are discarded as
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  secondary, does the subjective encounter lose its anchor
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  entirely? Like how do you know what you
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  are actually encountering in the dark?
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  That is the fatal flaw in Kierkegaard system.
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  We can validate his desire for genuine passionate internal
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  belief. I mean, he was right to critique
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  a dead robotic recitation of creeds.
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  A vibrant faith requires internal conviction.
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  You. Can't just check a box.
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  Right, but his critique goes too far when he rejects objective
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  historical truth. Christianity is fundamentally a
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  historical religion. It is based on things that
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  actually happen in time and space.
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  Real events. Yes, the Apostle Paul himself
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  argued in First Corinthians 15 that if Christ is not
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  historically physically raised from the dead, our faith is
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  futile. You cannot have a legitimate
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  encounter with a phantom. If the events of the life of
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  Christ are not historically genuine, then any internal
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  experience you have is just a psychological event.
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  It's just a feeling. We need both.
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  We need the objective historical events and we need the
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  subjective internal experience of believing those events.
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  Kierkegaard's dark leap into the unknown sounds dramatic, but
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  biblical faith is not a blind leap into the dark.
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  It is a step into the light based on evidence.
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  And by divorcing the subjective experience from objective
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  history, Kierkegaard planted a seed that would grow into a
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  massive theological problem in the 20th century.
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  So Kierkegaard dies in 1855, and for decades his ideas just sort
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  of gathered dust. The world keeps rolling along
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  with its liberal optimism, believing things are getting
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  better and better. But then we hit 1914 World War.
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  The physical destruction of Europe created a theological
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  crisis. People were sitting in the
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  rubble of their cities, realizing that human reason had
• 13:56
  completely failed them. And Kierkegaard's existential
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  ideas, his theology of despair, suddenly resonated perfectly
• 14:02
  with a broken continent. And right in the middle of this
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  rubble, A bombshell goes off. The man who drops it is Karl
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  Barth. Karl Barth is arguably the most
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  influential theologian of the 20th century.
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  He lived from 1886 to 1968. He was a Swiss Reformed
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  minister, but what is really crucial to understand is his
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  educational background. He was trained by the most
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  renowned elite liberal theologians in Germany, men like
• 14:29
  Adolf von Harnack. So he was fully steeped in
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  liberalism. Barth soaked in their teachings.
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  Harnack famously taught the fatherhood of God and the
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  brotherhood of man. This idea that Jesus was just a
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  great moral teacher who showed us how to love each other.
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  Barth was fully equipped with this liberal theological method.
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  Then he hits the reality of pastoral ministry.
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  He takes a pastorate in a working town in Switzerland
• 14:51
  called Safe and Well, and he serves there from 1911 to 1921.
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  A very blue collar town. Yeah, this is a town of textile
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  mills and factory workers, and during his time there, World War
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  One breaks out right across the border.
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  He is standing in the pulpit on Sundays looking out at his
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  congregation. These are people whose lives are
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  being ravaged by the economic and human toll of the war.
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  They are losing sons in the trenches.
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  They're terrified, and Barth realizes that his elite liberal
• 15:19
  training has given him absolutely nothing to say to
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  them. Liberalism offered a message
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  based on human reason and the steady progress of mankind.
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  It was a man centered theology. Barth realized that telling a
• 15:32
  grieving, terrified congregation to just trust in human goodness
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  was not just useless, it was offensive.
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  Yeah, completely tone deaf. He realized he needed an
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  authoritative word from God, something coming from outside
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  the human situation, to interrupt it.
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  This crisis drove Barth back to a serious study of the Bible and
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  a study of the Protestant Reformers, particularly John
• 15:52
  Calvin, who had heavily stressed the absolute majesty and
• 15:56
  sovereignty of God. So he starts studying the book
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  of Romans and in 1919 he publishes a commentary on Romans
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  that changes the theological world forever.
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  The phrase often used is that it fell like a bombshell on the
• 16:09
  theologians playground. It was a complete paradigm
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  shift. In that commentary, Barth
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  violently stripped humanity of all its self righteousness and
• 16:17
  self-reliance. Just tore it down.
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  He took the focus entirely off of man and put it entirely back
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  on the absolute transcendence and grace of God, he echoed
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  Kierpregard saying God is in heaven and man is on earth, and
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  there is an infinite qualitative distinction between the two.
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  And how did the Liberals react? Oh, the Liberals were furious,
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  of course. They rejected it immediately.
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  But a huge segment of the theological world, desperate for
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  something solid in the wake of the war, rallied around him.
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  We should also point out his moral courage here.
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  He was teaching in Germany as Adolf Hitler rose to power.
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  When the Nazi regime demanded that professors take a loyalty
• 16:53
  oath to Hitler, Barth flatly refused.
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  He wouldn't do it. He was a primary author of the
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  Barman Declaration, Which stated that Christ is the only head of
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  the Church, not the state. That refusal forced him to flee
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  Germany and return to Basel, Switzerland, where he spent the
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  rest of his life. And his opposition to the Nazis
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  was a direct outworking of his theology.
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  If God is absolutely sovereign and transcendent, you cannot
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  pledge ultimate loyalty to a human dictator, right?
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  The state cannot dictate the conscience of the Church.
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  So he goes to Basel and he writes.
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  I mean he really writes. He produces his massive 12
• 17:28
  volume work called The Church Dogmatics, which is millions of
• 17:32
  words long. Huge undertaking.
• 17:34
  And this is where we have to look closely at his bibliology,
• 17:36
  his doctrine of the Bible, because this reveals the core
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  tension of Neo orthodoxy. Barth wrote this massive
• 17:42
  theological work based on the Bible.
• 17:45
  He rejected liberal philosophy as his basis.
• 17:47
  But then this is a massive but he rejected the concept of an
• 17:50
  infallible written scripture. He famously referred to the idea
• 17:53
  of an infallible Bible as a paper Pope.
• 17:56
  A paper Pope. Wow.
• 17:57
  Yeah, he believed that treating the physical text of Scripture
• 18:01
  as the direct, objective Word of God was a form of idolatry.
• 18:06
  To explain his view, Barth categorized the Word of God into
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  3 distinct realms, and this is where his dialectical method
• 18:13
  really comes into play. I want to walk through these
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  three realms carefully because if you miss this while
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  listening, the rest of the movement won't make sense.
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  OK, the first realm is the revealed word.
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  This is the actual event of God revealing Himself speaking to
• 18:27
  the apostles and prophets. For Barth, the ultimate event of
• 18:31
  revelation is the person of Jesus Christ.
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  That is the true pure Word. OK, that makes sense.
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  The second realm is the written word, and this is where Barth
• 18:40
  really diverges from historic Christianity.
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  Yes, for Barth, the written word, the Bible itself, is just
• 18:45
  the deposit of revelation made by fallible men.
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  The writers were simply recording their own experiences
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  of God's revelation. Their subjective experiences.
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  Right. And because flawed men wrote it,
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  Barth argued, the text contains historical and scientific
• 18:59
  errors. It cannot be directly equated
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  with the pure Word of God. So the Bible itself isn't the
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  Word. To him, the Bible is not the
• 19:07
  Word of God, it is merely a human witness to the Word.
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  Wait, let me make sure I'm grasping this.
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  If the Bible is full of errors and is only a human witness, how
• 19:16
  does the third realm, the preached Word, carry any
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  authority at all? If a pastor gets up to preach
• 19:22
  from a flawed document, why should anyone listen?
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  This brings us to birth's radical subjective twist.
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  He taught that when a person reads this fallible witness or
• 19:32
  hears it preached, God might choose to use it to breakthrough
• 19:35
  to them with His grace in a moment of crisis.
• 19:38
  A subjective encounter. Yes, and at that exact
• 19:41
  subjective moment of encounter, the Bible becomes the Word of
• 19:45
  God to that individual. Revelation is not a static truth
• 19:48
  sitting on a page. It is an event that happens in
• 19:51
  the present. I'm going to build an analogy
• 19:53
  here because we have to translate this into everyday
• 19:55
  life. Imagine you were driving down
• 19:57
  the road and you come to an intersection with a red
• 19:59
  octagonal sign that says Estopi. OK?
• 20:02
  In a normal, objective reality, that sign is the authoritative
• 20:05
  word of the traffic laws. It means stop whether you are
• 20:08
  paying attention to it, whether you agree with it or whether you
• 20:11
  feel moved by it. Right, it's objective if.
• 20:13
  You blow through it and get pulled over, you cannot tell the
• 20:16
  police officer. Well, that sign didn't become a
• 20:18
  stop sign to me because I didn't experience a subjective moment
• 20:21
  of conviction about Traffic Safety when I looked at it.
• 20:24
  The officer would write you a ticket regardless of your
• 20:27
  internal experience because the signs authority is objective.
• 20:30
  It resides in the law, not in the driver's feelings.
• 20:33
  Right, but Barth treats the Bible like a stop sign.
• 20:37
  That only legally means stop if you feel an internal crisis or
• 20:42
  conviction when you look at it. If the Bible is only a fallible
• 20:45
  witness until you personally experience it, doesn't truth
• 20:49
  become entirely dependent on the reader rather than the author?
• 20:52
  That is the devastating critique of Barth's bibliology.
• 20:55
  He wanted to rescue theology from liberalism by returning to
• 20:59
  the Bible, but by denying the inspiration and inerrancy of the
• 21:03
  text, he destroyed the objective standard.
• 21:06
  To cut the legs out from under it.
• 21:07
  If the Bible only becomes the word of God in a moment of
• 21:10
  subjective experience, you can never say Thus says the Lord
• 21:14
  regarding any objective doctoral proposition.
• 21:17
  You can only say, this is what I experienced.
• 21:20
  He confused the objective revelation of God with the
• 21:23
  subjective illumination of the believer.
• 21:25
  Oh, that's a key distinction. Scripture affirms that God's
• 21:28
  Word is objectively true, and the Holy Spirit illuminates our
• 21:31
  minds to understand it. Barth collapsed the two things
• 21:35
  together. And this subjective, dialectical
• 21:37
  approach completely warped his view of election too.
• 21:40
  We have to touch on this because the logical trap he walks into
• 21:43
  is fascinating. Barth wanted to emphasize God's
• 21:47
  sovereignty, and he used terms from John Calvin, but he
• 21:50
  redefined them entirely. Barth believed that Jesus Christ
• 21:53
  must be the beginning and center of all theology.
• 21:56
  So when he looked at the doctrine of predestination and
• 21:59
  election, he did not look at it as God choosing certain
• 22:02
  individuals for salvation and passing over others.
• 22:04
  Which was this historic Reformed view, right?
• 22:06
  Instead, he taught that Christ is both the electing guard and
• 22:10
  the elected man. Meaning that the eternal decree
• 22:12
  of election was aimed solely at Jesus, not at individual humans.
• 22:17
  God elected Christ, and because Christ took upon himself the
• 22:21
  reprobation, the judgment that all sinful humanity deserved on
• 22:24
  the cross, Barth argued that all humanities therefore elect in
• 22:29
  Christ. The judgement has already been
• 22:31
  absorbed for the entire human race.
• 22:33
  So he essentially wiped out the distinction between the saved
• 22:36
  and the lost. If I'm following his logic, he
• 22:39
  is saying that even those who vehemently reject Christ are
• 22:42
  still elect and reconciled to God.
• 22:45
  They just, I don't realize it yet.
• 22:47
  That is the logical conclusion of his system.
• 22:49
  He refused to categorize the non elect as essentially different
• 22:52
  from the elect. He even argued for the election
• 22:55
  of Judas Iscariot. Judas.
• 22:57
  Really. Yes, this inevitably leads to
• 22:59
  charges of universalism, the belief that every single human
• 23:01
  being will eventually be saved. And it is very telling that
• 23:05
  Barth never explicitly denied those charges when pressed.
• 23:08
  Because his system required it. His theological system demanded
• 23:11
  that outcome. If Christ is the only reprobate,
• 23:14
  then no human can finally be lost.
• 23:16
  So we have Barth dropping this bombshell, trying to point
• 23:19
  people back to a sovereign God, but doing it with a fallible
• 23:22
  Bible and a redefined view of salvation.
• 23:25
  As this movement grows, it starts to splinter.
• 23:28
  Theologians within the same circle start debating the
• 23:31
  mechanics of how God actually reveals himself.
• 23:34
  They start arguing among themselves.
• 23:35
  And that brings us to another pioneer of the movement, Emil
• 23:38
  Brunner. Emil Brunner lived from 1889 to
• 23:41
  1966. Like Barth, he was Swiss, and he
• 23:45
  was heavily involved in the early days of this dialectical
• 23:48
  theology. He was incredibly prolific.
• 23:50
  He wrote nearly 400 books and articles, and he traveled the
• 23:53
  globe lecturing. So he had a massive reach.
• 23:55
  He was a highly popular theologian who formally
• 23:58
  abandoned classical liberalism, but also consciously rejected
• 24:01
  historic orthodox Christianity. He and Barth Barth had a very
• 24:04
  public, very sharp disagreement over the concept of general
• 24:07
  revelation. I think Barth actually published
• 24:09
  a tract against Brunner simply titled 9, which means no in
• 24:13
  German. Yes, very subtle.
• 24:15
  This was a major parting of the ways.
• 24:16
  Karl Barth completely rejected the idea of general revelation.
• 24:20
  So no seeing God in nature. Zero, he said.
• 24:23
  That nature, the created order, is utterly incapable of
• 24:26
  revealing anything about God to man because the Fall corrupted
• 24:30
  human reasons so severely. God can only be known through
• 24:34
  the specific special event of Christ.
• 24:37
  But Brenner disagreed. Brenner looked at passages like
• 24:40
  Psalm 19, which says the heavens declare the glory of God, and
• 24:43
  Romans chapter 1, which says God's invisible attributes are
• 24:46
  clearly seen in the things that have been made.
• 24:49
  Brenner argued that God does indeed reveal himself through
• 24:52
  nature, history and the continuing experience of the
• 24:55
  Church. But even though Brenner accepted
• 24:57
  general revelation, he still shared Barth's premise that God
• 25:00
  does not reveal himself objectively in the written
• 25:03
  Bible. Brunner just took that premise
• 25:05
  in a slightly different philosophical direction.
• 25:07
  He brought in a new influence. Right.
• 25:09
  He leaned heavily on the work of a Jewish theologian named Martin
• 25:12
  Buber, who had popularized a concept called the Ivow
• 25:15
  relationship. This IVOW concept is the
• 25:18
  absolute centerpiece of Brenner's theology.
• 25:21
  Bober made a distinction between an I at relationship and an I
• 25:25
  DAO relationship. An I at relationship is when you
• 25:27
  treat something as an object to be analyzed, measured and
• 25:30
  studied. Like studying a bug under a
• 25:33
  microscope. Right.
• 25:34
  An I Dao relationship is an active, personal mutual
• 25:37
  encounter between two subjects. Brenner took this and applied it
• 25:40
  to God. He taught that you cannot know
• 25:44
  God through objective doctrinal propositions.
• 25:47
  Or no lists of doctrines? You cannot know God by reading
• 25:50
  facts about him in a book because that turns God into an
• 25:53
  it. You can only know God through a
• 25:54
  subjective, personal, conversational encounter and I
• 25:57
  thou relationship. He believed that God does not
• 26:00
  reveal Himself in truths or propositions.
• 26:03
  He only reveals himself in His person.
• 26:05
  I'm going to ask you to step into another analogy here to see
• 26:08
  the flaw in this. Imagine you were set up on a
• 26:11
  blind date. Your friends hand you a
• 26:13
  background file on the person you're going to meet.
• 26:15
  It has their name, their family history, their moral character,
• 26:18
  their legal record, their likes and dislikes.
• 26:20
  OK, a full dossier. Brunner's approach is like
• 26:23
  throwing that file in the trash and saying I refuse to read
• 26:28
  objective propositions about this person because that turns
• 26:30
  them into an IT. I will only know them through
• 26:33
  the spontaneous experience of sitting across the table from
• 26:36
  them tonight. That sounds highly romantic
• 26:38
  until you realize that without the objective facts in the file,
• 26:41
  you have no idea if the person sitting across from you is a
• 26:44
  generous philanthropist or an active serial killer.
• 26:47
  Exactly. I mean, if we reject the
• 26:50
  objective historical facts about God that are recorded in
• 26:53
  Scripture, aren't we just having a relationship with an idea in
• 26:56
  our own heads? We're just talking to ourselves,
• 26:59
  essentially. If God doesn't speak in
• 27:01
  propositions, if he doesn't say I'm holy or I require justice,
• 27:06
  how do I know the vow I'm encountering isn't just my own
• 27:09
  psychological projection? By the way, if you have ever
• 27:12
  heard someone today say Christianity isn't a religion,
• 27:14
  it's a relationship, they are echoing the ghost of Emile
• 27:17
  Brunner. It sounds great, but it creates
• 27:20
  a massive problem. It raises A vital question about
• 27:22
  the nature of truth. Historic Christianity says that
• 27:26
  God is a person, yes, but he is a person who has spoken
• 27:30
  objectively true facts about himself.
• 27:32
  We need those facts to ensure that our personal relationship
• 27:35
  is grounded in reality. Brunner separated the person
• 27:39
  from the propositions, which is intellectually impossible.
• 27:41
  You cannot know a person without knowing facts about them and.
• 27:44
  Because he jettisoned the objective truth of Scripture, he
• 27:48
  felt completely free to redefine humanity and sin.
• 27:52
  He looked at the book of Genesis and decided he didn't need the
• 27:54
  historical facts. Brenner dealt extensively with
• 27:57
  the topics of humanity and sin, but he rejected the historic
• 28:00
  doctrine of total depravity. He flatly denied that humans
• 28:03
  inherit A sinful nature. From Adam.
• 28:05
  Wait, did he even believe that, Adam?
• 28:07
  No. In fact, he denied the
• 28:08
  historical reality of Adam altogether.
• 28:10
  He said Genesis 3 is not a historical account of a real
• 28:13
  fall. Rather, mankind should just look
• 28:15
  at Genesis 3 as a psychological allegory for our own lives.
• 28:19
  So I'm trying to follow his logic.
• 28:21
  If sin is not an inherited nature from a historical atom,
• 28:25
  what is it according to Brunner? He defines sin simply as a
• 28:28
  choice of self centeredness. God calls humans to live in
• 28:32
  fellowship with Him and others. When we fail to do that, when we
• 28:36
  turn inward and become entirely self-centered, that is sin.
• 28:39
  It is an act of the will in the present moment, not a corrupted
• 28:43
  condition inherited from the past.
• 28:45
  It is a mixed bag with Brunner. You look at his theological
• 28:48
  output and you see some strong points.
• 28:50
  He did hold firmly to the incarnation and the actual deity
• 28:53
  of Christ. He believed in the resurrection.
• 28:56
  He brought back a serious discussion about the sinfulness
• 28:58
  of mankind, which the Liberals had completely ignored for a
• 29:01
  century. He recognized that humanity is
• 29:04
  fundamentally broken, but the theological deficits in his
• 29:07
  system are severe. Because he rejected the
• 29:09
  inerrancy of the Bible, he felt free to pick and choose what
• 29:12
  doctrines he would keep. A theological buffet.
• 29:15
  Yes. So while he affirmed the
• 29:17
  incarnation, he denied the virgin birth.
• 29:20
  He completely denied the reality of hell.
• 29:22
  He created a system that sounded somewhat conservative on the
• 29:25
  surface, but lacked the structural integrity of the
• 29:28
  historic faith. If you deny the virgin birth,
• 29:31
  you are denying the biblical explanation for how the Son of
• 29:34
  God entered human history without inheriting human
• 29:37
  corruption. OK, we've spent a lot of time in
• 29:40
  Europe. Let's shift the focus so Barth
• 29:44
  and Brunner are watching European cities get bombed into
• 29:47
  rubble. But across the Atlantic,
• 29:49
  Americans are not dealing with artillery shells, they're
• 29:52
  dealing with assembly lines. The Industrial Revolution.
• 29:54
  The physical destruction of Europe created one kind of
• 29:57
  theological crisis, but the spiritual crushing of the
• 29:59
  American factory worker created another.
• 30:02
  And that is where a pastor in Detroit enters the story.
• 30:05
  We're talking about Reinhold Nieber.
• 30:07
  Reinhold Nieber lived from 1892 to 1971.
• 30:10
  He was born in Missouri, the son of a German immigrant pastor.
• 30:14
  He went to seminary, but he openly admitted that he was
• 30:16
  bored by academic scholarship. He wasn't a library guy.
• 30:19
  No, he didn't want abstract theory.
• 30:21
  He wanted practical boots on the ground relevance.
• 30:24
  And he found it in his first and only pastorate in Detroit, MI.
• 30:28
  He was a pastor in Detroit from 1915 to 1928.
• 30:32
  Let's paint a picture of what Detroit was like in that era.
• 30:34
  It's the absolute boiling point of the American industrial
• 30:36
  machine. Henry Ford has introduced the $5
• 30:39
  work day and the moving assembly line.
• 30:41
  Thousands of immigrants are pouring into the city.
• 30:43
  It was the heart of the booming automobile industry.
• 30:47
  Nieber watched the rapid rise of the assembly line up close.
• 30:50
  He saw the noise, the relentless pace, the physical exhaustion,
• 30:53
  the human cost. And while he saw incredible
• 30:56
  technological advancement, he also saw the crushing poverty
• 30:59
  and grueling, dehumanizing conditions of the working class.
• 31:02
  He saw men treated as disposable cogs in a machine.
• 31:06
  He became heavily embroiled in the conflict between labor and
• 31:09
  management. He openly and fiercely attacked
• 31:11
  Henry Ford, viewing the entire capitalist system of that era as
• 31:15
  an oppressive machine that ground human beings into dust.
• 31:19
  This experience in Detroit did for Niebuhr what the trenches of
• 31:22
  World War One did for Carl Barth.
• 31:25
  Mieber looked at the liberal optimism he had been taught in
• 31:28
  seminary, the idea that humanity was inherently good and the
• 31:32
  society was progressing toward a utopia, And he realized it was a
• 31:35
  total lie. He saw that technology was
• 31:37
  advancing rapidly, but human morality was not keeping pace.
• 31:41
  Men were simply using the new technology to exploit and
• 31:44
  oppress other men more efficiently.
• 31:46
  They just built better tools for greed.
• 31:48
  Right. In reaction to this, Nieder
• 31:50
  initially embraced socialism and pacifism as the answers.
• 31:54
  He thought changing the economic system would solve the problem,
• 31:57
  but as time went on, especially with the approach of World War 2
• 32:00
  and the rise of totalitarian regimes, he shifted away from
• 32:03
  pacifism and developed what he called Christian realism.
• 32:07
  How did this Christian realism view sin?
• 32:10
  Because his definition is very different from Bartha Brunner.
• 32:12
  For Nieber, sin was not primarily a spiritual problem
• 32:15
  between an individual and a holy God.
• 32:17
  Sin was fundamentally a social construct.
• 32:20
  It was about corporate injustice, systemic exploitation
• 32:23
  and institutional greed. So salvation looks different to
• 32:26
  them. Therefore, the goal of the
• 32:28
  church, the goal of evangelism, was not to convert individual
• 32:32
  souls to save them from eternal damnation.
• 32:34
  The goal was to convert society, to change the social structures.
• 32:38
  He argued that the Sermon on the Mount should essentially be
• 32:41
  applied as a modern business code to regulate capitalism.
• 32:44
  He also completely redefined the concept of the fall.
• 32:48
  Just like Brenner, Nieber called the creation account and the
• 32:51
  fall of Adam a myth, but he offered a fascinating
• 32:54
  psychological explanation for how sin operates in the human
• 32:58
  race. It's very psychological.
• 32:59
  He claimed that sin originates in humanity's deep seated fear
• 33:03
  of change, decay and death. Because we are terrified of our
• 33:06
  own mortality, we desperately seek security.
• 33:09
  We use science, technology and economic systems to build walls
• 33:13
  of power around ourselves to feel secure against death, and
• 33:16
  then inevitably, we misuse that power to destroy or oppress
• 33:20
  others who threaten our security.
• 33:21
  It's a very sociological view of humanity.
• 33:24
  OK, think about playing a rigged game of Monopoly.
• 33:27
  You sit down at the board and the rules are completely
• 33:30
  unbalanced. One player starts with all the
• 33:33
  money and all the properties and the other players have nothing.
• 33:36
  The wealthy player keeps raising the rent and bankrupting
• 33:38
  everyone else. Nieber seems to be looking at
• 33:41
  the game and saying the primary problem is the rule book and the
• 33:45
  banking system. If we just fix the rules of the
• 33:48
  board to make it fair, the game will be righteous.
• 33:52
  He minimizes the actual greed and malice operating in the
• 33:55
  hearts of the players themselves.
• 33:58
  Let me ask you, if we make sin primarily a corporate social
• 34:01
  injustice, do we lose the concept of personal individual
• 34:05
  accountability before God? We absolutely do, and that is
• 34:09
  the tragic flaw in Hebrew's Christian realism.
• 34:11
  He was entirely right to decry social injustice.
• 34:13
  The prophets of the Old Testament fiercely condemned the
• 34:16
  exploitation of the poor. But biblical theology teaches
• 34:19
  that systemic social injustice is the fruit of the problem, not
• 34:22
  the root. The root is internal.
• 34:24
  The root is the personal rebellion of the individual
• 34:26
  human heart against a holy God. By rejecting the historic
• 34:30
  doctrine of original sin and individual depravity, neighbor
• 34:33
  tried to cure the symptoms without addressing the
• 34:36
  underlying disease. If the system is solely to
• 34:39
  blame, the individual feels no need for personal repentance.
• 34:43
  It is a subtle shift, but a massive one.
• 34:45
  Yeah, we are watching this movement evolved before our
• 34:48
  eyes. We started with Kierkegaard
• 34:50
  redefining how we know God, shifting from objective truth to
• 34:53
  subjective experience. Then we have neighbor redefining
• 34:57
  what sin is, shifting it from personal rebellion to social
• 35:00
  oppression. Now we're going to transition to
• 35:02
  a man who redefines who God is entirely, removing from the
• 35:06
  sociological approach of the Detroit assembly lines to the
• 35:09
  highly abstract philosophical approach of Paul Tillich.
• 35:12
  Paul Tillich is often referred to as the theologians theologian
• 35:16
  because his writings are incredibly dense, philosophical
• 35:19
  and frankly very difficult to read for the layperson.
• 35:21
  He lives from 1886 to 1965. Like Barth, he was a German who
• 35:25
  openly opposed Hitler in the 1930s.
• 35:28
  Which got him in trouble. Yes, which led to him being
• 35:31
  fired from his university post in Frankfurt in 1933.
• 35:34
  He fled to the United States, where he taught at prestigious
• 35:36
  institutions like Union Theological Seminary in Harvard.
• 35:40
  He wrote a massive 3 volume systematic theology.
• 35:44
  He claimed that he stood on the boundary line between classical
• 35:46
  liberalism and neo orthodoxy, trying to mediate between the
• 35:50
  two. But within this whole movement,
• 35:53
  he definitely represents the radical extreme arm.
• 35:56
  His theology is radical because he approached God
• 35:58
  philosophically rather than biblically.
• 36:01
  When he looked at theology proper, the doctrine of God, he
• 36:03
  stripped away all traditional orthodox definitions.
• 36:07
  For Tillich, God is not a personal being who thinks,
• 36:09
  speaks or acts in history. Wait, if God is not a personal
• 36:12
  being who thinks or acts, and if God does not even exist in the
• 36:15
  traditional sense of the word, I am completely lost as to what
• 36:18
  Tillich is actually describing. Is he just talking about a
• 36:20
  philosophical concept? What is God then?
• 36:22
  Tillich defined a God as being itself or the ground of being.
• 36:27
  He argued that all finite things like you and me exist.
• 36:30
  We have a beginning and an end. We are subject to the laws of
• 36:34
  the universe, but God does not exist in that finite sense.
• 36:38
  God simply is. OK, that's heavy.
• 36:40
  In fact, Tillich made the shocking statement that it is
• 36:43
  just as atheistic to affirm the existence of God as it is to
• 36:46
  deny it. He believed that to say God
• 36:49
  exists reduces him to just another being alongside other
• 36:52
  beings in the universe, which destroys his supremacy.
• 36:56
  I am listening to this and I cannot help but compare
• 36:59
  Tillich's concept of God to the Force in Star Wars.
• 37:03
  He is describing an impersonal energy field that binds the
• 37:05
  universe together, a philosophical ultimate reality,
• 37:09
  rather than a loving personal creator who knows the number of
• 37:11
  hairs on your head. It's very impersonal.
• 37:13
  Let's think about the practical application here.
• 37:15
  If God is just the ultimate ground of existence, how can
• 37:18
  anyone pray to that, let alone be saved by it?
• 37:20
  Yeah, you cannot ask an energy field to forgive your sins.
• 37:23
  You cannot. Not in any recognizable
• 37:26
  Christian sense. And that forces Tillage to
• 37:29
  completely redefine salvation and Christology to fit his
• 37:32
  philosophical system. If God is not a personal judge
• 37:36
  who issues moral laws, then sin cannot be a legal transgression
• 37:40
  of His law. So Tillage defines sin simply as
• 37:43
  estrangement. Estrangement from what?
• 37:45
  You're estranged from your true self and from the ground of your
• 37:48
  being. It is an existential feeling of
• 37:50
  disconnection. If sin is just me feeling
• 37:53
  estrange for myself, what on earth does Tillage do with the
• 37:56
  story of Adam and Eve? Does he just throw the book of
• 37:59
  Genesis in the trash? Essentially, yes.
• 38:02
  The fall for tillage is not a historical event involving Adam
• 38:05
  and Eve disobeying a command in a garden.
• 38:08
  It is what he calls a non temporal transition from essence
• 38:11
  to existence. That sounds like a physics
• 38:13
  lecture. It is a highly philosophical
• 38:15
  concept of moving from a state of unity to a state of
• 38:17
  separation. It happens to everyone, but it
• 38:20
  never happened in actual human history.
• 38:22
  If sin is just existential estrangement, what is salvation?
• 38:25
  How do you get fixed? Salvation is achieving what he
• 38:28
  calls the new being. It is an ultimate concern that
• 38:32
  overcomes the anxiety we feel about our own finiteness and our
• 38:35
  impending nonbeing or death. It is coming to a psychological
• 38:39
  realization that you are accepted by the ground of being
• 38:43
  even in your estrangement. Where does Jesus fit into this
• 38:45
  new being? Does tillage even need Jesus?
• 38:48
  Jesus Christ is not understood as a historical flesh and blood
• 38:52
  person who died on a Roman cross as a substitute for sinners for
• 38:56
  tillage. Christ is merely a symbol.
• 38:58
  Just a symbol. He is a symbol of the new being,
• 39:00
  a representation of someone in whom forces of estrangement have
• 39:03
  been completely dissolved. Therefore, Tillage explicitly
• 39:07
  and openly rejected the historical incarnation of God in
• 39:10
  human flesh and the physical resurrection of Jesus from the
• 39:13
  dead. Those historical events are
• 39:15
  irrelevant to him. You look at Tillage's analysis
• 39:18
  and you realize his modern allegorizing has done absolute
• 39:21
  violence to every single major historic doctrine of the
• 39:24
  Christian faith. He leaned entirely on human
• 39:26
  philosophy and reason, and in doing so he gutted the religion
• 39:29
  of its historical reality, used the traditional vocabulary, but
• 39:33
  changed the dictionary. That's a perfect way to put it.
• 39:35
  He used traditional theological words, God, sin, salvation,
• 39:39
  Christ, but he emptied them of their biblical meaning and
• 39:42
  filled them with abstract philosophical concepts.
• 39:45
  It is highly deceptive. But here's the thing.
• 39:48
  Tillich's work was incredibly dense.
• 39:50
  It was academic. The average person sitting in a
• 39:53
  church Pew on a Sunday morning is not reading a three volume
• 39:57
  philosophical treatise on existential ontology.
• 40:00
  So how did these radical, abstract ideas ever reach the
• 40:04
  masses? That brings us to our final
• 40:06
  figure, John AT Robinson. He was the one who took the
• 40:09
  ivory terror philosophy of Tillich and translated it for
• 40:11
  the general public, creating a massive cultural wave.
• 40:14
  Robinson was the Bishop of Woolwich in England, born in
• 40:16
  1919, and in 1963 he wrote a paperback book called Honest to
• 40:20
  God, which became a massive, controversial bestseller.
• 40:23
  Millions of people read it. Robinson took Tillich's concept
• 40:26
  of God as the ground of being and combine it with the ideas of
• 40:29
  other radical theologians. He borrowed heavily from a man
• 40:32
  named Rudolph Boltman. Boltmann argued that the modern
• 40:35
  scientific world needs to demythologize the Bible.
• 40:38
  Let's define demythologizing. That means stripping away the
• 40:41
  mythical husk of the text to find some kind of existential
• 40:44
  kernel of truth, right? Yes, Boltmann said that modern
• 40:47
  people who use electricity and radio cannot be expected to
• 40:51
  believe in the New Testament world of demons, angels and
• 40:54
  miracles. So you cut all the supernatural
• 40:56
  elements out of the Bible. Robinson loved that idea.
• 41:00
  He also borrowed from someone else, didn't he?
• 41:02
  Yes, from Dietrich Bonhoeffer's later prison writings,
• 41:05
  specifically his museums on a religionless Christianity, the
• 41:10
  idea that humanity has come of age and no longer needs the
• 41:13
  crutch of religious rituals. So Robinson puts Tillich,
• 41:17
  Boltman and Bonhoeffer in a blender and serves it to the
• 41:20
  British public. He publicly repudiates the idea
• 41:23
  of a localized God. He says the idea of God up there
• 41:26
  or out there is totally objectionable in an age of
• 41:29
  science, telescopes and space travel.
• 41:31
  Since the Russian cosmonauts went to space and did not see
• 41:33
  God sitting on a cloud, Robinson argued, we have to abandon the
• 41:36
  concept of a personal God residing in heaven.
• 41:39
  He suggested that the word God is completely interchangeable
• 41:42
  with the word universe. He promoted a view that leans
• 41:45
  heavily into pantheism, or process theology.
• 41:48
  We need to define those terms for clarity.
• 41:50
  What is the difference between pantheism and process theology?
• 41:53
  Pantheism is the belief that the universe itself is God.
• 41:57
  The tree, the star, the pavement, you and me, we are all
• 42:00
  literal parts of the divine being.
• 42:02
  There is no separation between creator and creation.
• 42:05
  And process. Theology, Process theology is
• 42:07
  slightly different. It argues that God and the
• 42:09
  universe are intimately linked and changing together.
• 42:12
  God is not a static, perfect being outside of time who knows
• 42:15
  the future. Rather, God is in the process of
• 42:18
  becoming, learning, and reacting to what the universe does.
• 42:22
  Robinson blurred the lines between these ideas, arguing
• 42:25
  that God is not a distinct creator separate from his
• 42:27
  creation, but rather an essence that penetrates the whole
• 42:31
  universe. Look at the full progression of
• 42:33
  this movement. I want you, the listener, to
• 42:35
  really see the trajectory here. We started with the Surin
• 42:38
  Kierkegaard in the 19th century, who desperately wanted a
• 42:41
  passionate internal burning fire for Christ because he hated the
• 42:45
  deadness of the state church. And we trace that line, that
• 42:48
  subjective line, all the way to a Bishop in the Church of
• 42:52
  England who's essentially saying Jesus never claimed to be God,
• 42:54
  who is rejecting the practice of prayer in favor of mere social
• 42:57
  work, and who is arguing that we should worship the universe At
• 43:00
  this stage, has the movement simply secularized Christianity
• 43:04
  out of existence? Yes.
• 43:06
  By the time you get to Robinson in the 1960's, the theology has
• 43:09
  abandoned the normal meaning of words entirely.
• 43:12
  It has abandoned all historical biblical interpretation.
• 43:15
  It is a total capitulation to secular modernism, cloaked in
• 43:19
  the fading terminology of religion.
• 43:20
  The movement aid itself. Let's.
• 43:22
  Synthesize all of this. We have traced the entire arc of
• 43:26
  Neo Orthodoxy. It is crucial to remember how it
• 43:29
  began. It began as a sincere, desperate
• 43:32
  and urgent attempt to rescue faith.
• 43:35
  Thinkers like Karl Barth looked at the shallow, man centered
• 43:38
  optimism of classical liberalism, saw it destroyed by
• 43:41
  the horrors of World War One, and rightly tried to bring the
• 43:44
  focus back to God's absolute sovereignty and humanity's
• 43:47
  absolute flaws. They wanted to hear a word from
• 43:49
  God. Their diagnosis of liberalism's
• 43:52
  failure was entirely correct. They recognized that man cannot
• 43:54
  save himself through science or education.
• 43:57
  But the prescribed cure was fatally compromised because they
• 44:00
  refused to abandon the liberal view of Scripture because they
• 44:02
  continued to deny its historical inerrancy and objective truth.
• 44:06
  They built their new orthodoxy on a foundation of sand.
• 44:09
  They relied almost entirely on subjective experience, the leap
• 44:13
  of faith, the encounter, the Bible only becoming the word of
• 44:18
  God in a moment of crisis. History shows us that subjective
• 44:22
  experience is not a strong enough container to hold the
• 44:24
  weight of divine truth. The movement inevitably
• 44:27
  fractured, drifting away from its conservative beginnings and
• 44:31
  sliding into the radical, unrecognizable secularism of
• 44:34
  Paul Tillich and John AT Robinson.
• 44:36
  It proves that you cannot maintain orthodox doctrines
• 44:39
  without an orthodox view of the Bible.
• 44:41
  Once you sever the theological concepts from the historical
• 44:44
  facts recorded in an authoritative scripture, the
• 44:46
  theology will inevitably collapse into whatever
• 44:49
  philosophy is popular at the time.
• 44:51
  Which brings us back to that shattered stained glass window
• 44:53
  in the cathedral. The liberals built a window of
• 44:56
  human optimism and the war shattered it.
• 44:59
  The Neo Orthodox theologians trying to sweep up the shards
• 45:02
  and glue them together using their own subjective experiences
• 45:05
  and existential dread. But a window held together by
• 45:08
  personal feelings cannot keep out the cold reality of the
• 45:10
  world. No, I can't.
• 45:12
  Here is a final thought to Mull over on your own.
• 45:15
  If you base your entire faith on a subjective internal crisis
• 45:18
  rather than external, verifiable history, what holds you up when
• 45:22
  your feelings inevitably change? If the bedrock is just your own
• 45:25
  experience, aren't you essentially building a religion
• 45:28
  where you are the actual authority?
• 45:30
  Thank you for joining us on this deep dive.