Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Well, welcome back to YouTube, theologians. I'm Pastor Brian Wolfmuther, pastor of St. Paul and Jesus deaf lutheran churches in Austin, Texas, with Dr. Gregory Schultz, who's joining us for the second of three. And who knows?
I'm suspicious that we might be more of conversations about, well, springing from the book that you've written, which is the anatomy of an implosion, talking about the effect of woke Marxism on higher education, specifically in the context of the Lutheran Church Missouri synod. Welcome back. A lot of reaction to our first conversation. I'm going to try to bring in some of that reaction a little further on, but I want to start with Heraclitus and the idea of the logos. So I'll quote it from the book and then maybe it'll be obvious in my own reading of it that I don't understand it. So then you can come along and help. By the way, welcome back, Dr. Schultz, good to see you.
[00:00:58] Speaker B: Thanks, brother. Good to be here.
[00:01:00] Speaker A: This is from fragments of Heraclitus. When is this, by the way? This is pre Aristotle.
[00:01:07] Speaker B: It is. Heraclitus is glibly referred to as a presocratic.
That's the warm up band for philosophy with Socrates, Plato and Aristotle and then western thought. So in the century BC.
[00:01:26] Speaker A: The logos, he says, holds always, but humans always prove unable to understand it, both before hearing it and when they have first heard it. For though all things come to be in accordance with the logos, humans are like the inexperienced when they experience such words and deeds as I set out, distinguishing each in accordance with its nature and saying how it is. But other people fail to notice what they do when awake, just as they forget what they do while asleep. And then in another fragment, for this reason, it is necessary to follow what is common. But although the logos is common, most people live as if they had their own private understanding. So help me dig into that a little bit, if you could.
[00:02:16] Speaker B: Well, sure. What a nice place to start with. Heraclitus got everybody's attention now, no doubt.
Let's just admit that the reason we're talking about Heraclitus is the fault of the apostle John. So in John chapter one, we are told in the beginning was the Logos. The logos became flesh and tabernacled among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory of the only begotten. So we know that big things are going on with this greek term Lagos. Let's think about Heraclitus as warming up the term that the apostle John is going to bring to full fruition. In the opening chapter of his Gospel. So Lugas, though frequently translated word, is word only in a derivative or kind of a secondary sense. It first of all means logos, as we know from working with our new Testament lexicons and stuff. Logos is actually from the verb lego, which, interestingly enough, means to put together or to gather.
In the 20th century, just incidentally, the philosopher Martin Heidegger, who we gather at some points was actually reading his greek New Testament pretty much every day. Not that he is doing a christian philosophy, but he wanted to understand what was going on. Then he actually talks about language being a collecting thing in echo of logos as language. I believe he got that from Luther. That's an entirely different interview. So the deal is this.
Half a millennium before the apostle John sat down, we think in Ephesus to be led along word for word by the Holy Ghost and write the Gospel according to St. John. Half a millennium before that, in Ephesus also, Heraclitus was taking a look at things. He's taking a look at the cosmos. He is not a biblically informed person, alas. He is just going on the basis of what honest thinking will observe. And in a time when you could be excused for thinking along with the greek nightmare that everything is chaos, constant change, nothing stays put. Heraclitus basically says, wait a minute, something is staying put.
Obviously, if you're aware that change is happening, something is staying in place, against which you're realizing that chaos and change. And to cut a long and I think, interesting story, kind of short, Heraclitus observes that there is a principle to the cosmos itself, such that we can say there is such a thing as a cosmos, even though there's a lot of change going on within the cosmos.
And he notes at the same time that he is a human being, a mindful human being who's observing the cosmos, and his mind is also orderly. So even though thoughts are changing and he's growing from young to old and so forth, something is staying the same and the something that's staying the same. In both cases, he names the logos.
Now, for Heraclitus, the term logos remains kind of a mystical thing that he's trying to ferret out. But he seems very confident that this is reality, reality outside of our minds. Reality has a constancy to it, called that the Lagos. And our minds cannot not think in an orderly way, call that Lagos as well. So Lagos is the major feature of reality, then.
[00:06:35] Speaker A: Can I just jump in here to add, and this might come in handy, or this also might be so fantastically wrong that you're going to struggle to not laugh at me. But there's an epistemology, how you know a thing and then kind of a metaphysical ontology, what is real and what it seems to me that this logos does is it presses them together so that they cannot be discussed apart from one another, so that this solid thing that is unmoving is of necessity for us to know anything at all.
I think this is what I was talking about before, about this kind of formal and material principle, the epistemology and the ontology, that they're kind of squeezed into one, because if you don't have something that's not moving, then you can't know anything about it anyway to begin with.
Does that seem to make sense?
[00:07:37] Speaker B: Yes. First I want to smile and just remind everybody that it was Pastor Wolfmiller who brought up the epistemology and ontology stuff. I didn't bring up the philosophical jargon here. We were just talking. All right, so the interesting thing, though, is right there in the language that you used, epistemology means the study of knowledge, and ontology means the study of being or kinds of being. Both of those terms end with logos, the luggi. So there is an assumption, an unavoidable recognition, if you will, that when thinking is going on, whether it's thinking about knowledge or thinking about being in existence, that there is a luggage character to the thinking and to the beings.
I mean, after all, the Greeks really did have nightmares about this notion of absolute chaos.
After all, as we've discussed in other discussions, when we go to bed at night and then go unconscious for a few hours and come back to consciousness, it is essentially the same world again, and we are essentially the same person, allowing for changes of age and experience and so forth. So there is a Logos character to all of this, and of course, that's the root for our word logic and all of that as well. But my contention is this, it's not accidental. Also, this recognition could not happen apart from Logos, as in language.
So if you were able to subtract language, there would be no ontology, there would be no epistemology.
According to Aristotle, there wouldn't be any human beings, because Aristotle, in politics, one defines the human being as the kind of being that's distinguished by Logos.
Luther picks that up, as you and I know, because we've talked about this. Luther picks that up in his 1536 disputation concerning the human being also, and he simply stipulates that from Aristotle before he goes on to do his theological work.
[00:09:59] Speaker A: This gets pushed forward. Maybe this is the framework that John is going to build on.
When he says the word becomes flesh and dwells among us, and now all of a sudden the word is understood not to be some sort of abstraction, but in fact a person who is God. And also for us, our christian understanding of the world, we're grabbing onto that Heraclitus sense that there is something that's unmoving, there is an arcade, but now we can say much, much more about.
[00:10:38] Speaker B: It or about him. Right. And I think that Heraclitus, who introduced Lugos and Aristotle, who made a lot of hay on Lugos, as in language, I think that those men would have welcomed John's gospel, I think, well, first of all, because it's God's word and it would be working on them, but they just don't have access to Old Testament or New Testament. Obviously, New Testament scriptures, New Testament hasn't been written yet, but the point is that they are not as pig headed as so many people are today who will not acknowledge the reality of it. If you're having a conversation, if you are a language being, it's not really that you have language as a tool and an implement and something that you can use or not use however you want to. It's rather the case that language has formed you to be who and what you are. It's the case that the language precedes your being.
[00:11:47] Speaker A: And this is going to be important because you're going to argue that the subtle effect of woke Marxism is the destruction of language, which is not just a destruction of language, then it's a destruction of being, of everything meaning.
But even worse, though, I mean, if that's not bad enough to destroy existence and humanity, et cetera, something more happens because the word made flesh, our Lord Jesus Christ, is going to bring to us justification through the word and never apart from the word. Now here's where not only so you have the kind of philosophical undergirding, but then you have our christian understanding, the incarnation. But I don't want to think of it as a layer cake, but just for the sake of the conversation here. Coming on top of that is a further insight by the lutheran theologians who say that God does not work in us apart from the word nisi per verbum.
The t shirt that you made, I.
[00:12:51] Speaker B: Didn'T make it, but I was somewhere there in the.
[00:12:54] Speaker A: Yeah, so talk about that, because Luther will say, look, anything apart from the word is the devil himself, that it's enthusiasm, the dragon, it's the root of all heresy. It's the word and the external word, the externum verbum, that is the means of the spirit to create new life in us. So maybe just connect those dots real quick. Take your time.
[00:13:23] Speaker B: Yeah, no, it's a big and a wonderful reality to connect and to put together. We notice that that word connect is Lego again. Right. So the reality of language. To respond to the first part of your question, the reality of language and the dependability of language and the indispensability of language, this does have a lot to do with how we and our children and our grandchildren are being manipulated by the woke Marxists and other evil people today.
I referred, in the quote you offered from anatomy of an implosion, I referred to the divine gift of language.
Now, this is not just an offhanded comment about the silliness of darwinian explanations of how language came about.
This is about the reality of, as you suggested already, how God has done things. And then while we're looking for a good metaphor in there with your layer cake stuff, what we do have to find some way to say is what you put right in the middle of this. There is no contact with God, nisi per verbum, as our Augsburg confession says, except through the word. Now, in the first place, this is Jesus himself, the incarnate logos.
In the second place, it's the very words of his word, from Genesis to the apocalypse, revelation.
And there's no other way.
All right, so I think that what we can say is that of all the attacks that Satan could be devising after the reformation, this is the nastiest.
He can't take away the word of God and he can't take language away. Nor, by the way, can these nasty Marxists take it away. But they're doing their best to convince everybody that language is not what it is, that it is not dependable, that it is not the means, the only means by which God deals with us, that it is not necessary to being human beings together.
This is the most glaring feature of contemporary secular and sometimes religious education.
This effort to get between us and the word of God, between us and language. It is demonic, it's satanic. It is really nasty. Now, the word cannot be destroyed. Christ can't be destroyed. The church can't be destroyed because his word remains. And, well, that sounds just like the battle hymn of the republic, doesn't it? The word they still shall let remain.
They have to. Satan can't get rid of the word, but he can destroy our confidence or our use of the word. And that's precisely what's happening. It's not just George Orwell, it's Satan, in what is quite possibly his absolute last stand. And people are dying because of this, and people are being mutilated, our own children, because of this. And education itself is becoming what is becoming the means by which we are kept away from the word. Not to mention the great western texts that largely revolve around the word of God.
[00:17:12] Speaker A: There's a line from Luther when he's talking about the enthusiasts against the heavenly prophets, and he says, look, if the word doesn't do anything, then why don't they just shut up? Instead of filling the world with their own words and ideas? But that's not an accidental insult, because the only thing powerful enough to undo the power of the word is the word. So that it's always this battle of what's being spoken, what's being said, what's being argued. Even people point out the irrationality of post modernity. There's no absolute truth is an absolute truth, and it must be, because that's the only weapon that exists to fight against the thing that the Lord has given, so that the devil has to always be antichrist. He can't be defined as something on his own, because there is nothing apart from the word.
Okay, so I want to get, then, a straight line to the doctrine of justification, because. And it was relooking at your text this morning that I realized this thing staring me down. It was staring all of us down. I don't know how we missed it. That there's an anti justification just like there's an antichrist, and that comes across in the language, even of justice.
So maybe let's put in place the right language of justification, and then once we've got our layer cake, then we can see how the devil's attacking it, I think.
[00:18:54] Speaker B: Sure. So maybe you'd like to set the table for that. But I just want to keep up our habit here of connecting things. So that phrase, nisi perverbum, that God cannot be treated except through the word, is from our lutheran confessions, Augsburg four. And that is about justification.
So we're not jumping all over the place here. We're talking about the means by which we know and are brought to believe in justification, God's saving work, and the wonderful, glorious gospel particulars about that.
[00:19:38] Speaker A: So, justification is the declaration and application of the righteousness of Christ, both passive and active, to the sinner that is brought to the sinner by faith, but accomplished by the death of Jesus on the cross. And the language that you're pushing beautifully and hard also is universal justification, which is to say that this promise of the forgiveness of sins is true before we believe it. It's true before the throne of God for all people. Now, to clarify that universal justification is not universalism, that's a key distinction that we want to make, but that it has to do with the speaking of God, even the speaking of the Son to the Father and the speaking of the Father to the Son, which is then accomplished by the speaking of God, the Holy Spirit to the sinful human being.
And in that speaking, taking away our sins by the forgiveness of sins and bringing to bear the righteousness of Christ so that we are righteous. And that word righteous is the same word, justification.
It's coming into the English through the Latin on the one hand, and through the German on the other hand. But it's the same greek word, same hebrew word being brought to us there through the word, so we are justified through the word. Maybe one more Luther quote against the heavenly prophets again, which is maybe the text that we need to go back to and study together. That would be fun. He says, look, once the Lord is determined to win the forgiveness of sins, it doesn't matter how he delivers it before, after, whatever. And he delivers that forgiveness through the word, the word, the word, the word, so that our justification is bound up to the external word of God being preached and brought to bear on each sinner. So maybe if you could just piggyback on that to make sure that we have all the things in place so we can see what tower the devil is attacking.
[00:21:52] Speaker B: Sure, I'll do my best.
I think I've probably done my better in the book, where people can look at the way I'm putting things and then go back and reread and double check me with the passages and so forth.
What we are facing today to keep our eye on the attackers, what we are facing today is an effort to change our confidence in the divine gift of language. So in the first place, let's say it again. I don't think we can say it often enough. In our generation, language is efficacious when we use very careful terminology for scripture, the stuff about efficacious, effective and so forth, that bubbles up pretty quickly in our more careful discussions. So language per se, I am saying, language per se, is the same sort of thing, the same sort of phenomenon that the word of God, the written biblical text is.
It's just that scripture is different in the sense that being word for word, breathed out or inspired by God scripture is infallible.
Normal, everyday language is also communicative and delivers reality and reveals us to one another as the persons that we are. That's how we do it in words. Now, the thing then is that with the contemporary attacks on language, there's an entirely different philosophy of language that's being crammed down our throats, whether it's mass media or, alas, in higher education, it would be helpful to have labels for these. So the two possible philosophies of language are what we could call the external efficacious means of grace philosophy.
That would be, I'm borrowing the terminology, as I mentioned in the book from Philip Kerry, by the way, who's not a Lutheran, the external efficacious means of grace, understanding of language. So I hope people won't get too upset without thinking this through. But you'd do better to say that language is a means of grace than to say that language is meaningless.
Now, we don't want to get this confused with the perfection of scripture, but it's the same kind of thing, except in the case of our daily language, the stuff I write, or that you might write, that's not infallible.
So the other is the expressivist, semiotic view of language. Semiotic means symbols and signs.
And as in expressionist art, where the big thing seems is the artist giving their feelings about something rather than showing something the way it is to everybody or something.
In that view of language, all it is is a bunch of people scrambling to make use of arbitrary symbols, letters, words, sounds, signs, scrambling to convey their inner mind to other people with more or less success, and vice versa. That's the crippling one here. Now, I would just hasten to add in that there is one thing that, in combination with this, makes this even nastier than simply miseducating people, and that is, those who will not be miseducated can be shut up.
So I think it's a counterpart to what we're seeing in the justice system in the United States today. People that you don't want to have, that somebody doesn't want to have around to make an argument or make a point or point to this in the Constitution or something, they get locked up, maybe even put in solitary confinement.
And that's kind of of a piece with this. So what you want to watch for is people who will not participate in the efficacious means of grace understanding of language, prize it, teach it, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest the scriptures. Seek this in all the great authoritative texts of the past. And present that sort of thing. And that's why what's happening in schools is not just a sad case of failing to teach people this, that, or the other thing. It's actually an assault on their very confidence in language and a way to shut them up. To shut people up. You can destroy a person's life, you know, early on when they are babies and infants, by not talking with them, by not allowing them to experience language. And then it does happen. This is a pretty subtle neurological brain science thing. It happens that these so called feral children, these terribly abused kids, hit their teenage years, and no matter what you do, they can't learn language anymore. And in a similar way, our human souls can be so starved for language in education or in society, in being imprisoned, that you are basically exiled from your humanity.
So there are those two possible things. But now the thing to hold on to in the middle of this is that the Logos language, just like the Logos capital l, Christ, God incarnate, these are not subject to defeat by Satan or by anybody else. So it's not that this is irredeemable or unfixable, though I think some of us will be forgiven for thinking that. It certainly looks like we're in the last throes of things and we've reached crush depth. And there has just been so much bad stuff piled on to keep us away from the text of the Bible and texts of western culture and just plain language among ourselves. Our students and professors are getting censored, right.
That you just feel this has got to be the end, and we just turn to the Lord and ask for judgment Day. Let God arise, right? That's where we kind of feel ourselves.
[00:28:43] Speaker A: And this might not be a good kind of a dead end path, but where does that language of expressionist symbiotics come from? Is that a label given to the postmodernist or something that they've spoken to themselves?
[00:28:57] Speaker B: Yeah. So that's a descriptive term that Kerry also used when he was talking about this kind of prevalent view, which does pop up here and there throughout western thought, but then used to be overcome primarily by scripture, but also by the reality of the trustworthiness and the necessity of language. So the notion of expressivist is the sort of thing that you hear in a lot of maybe almost all communication theory today. I have to get something that's in my private mind out there to somebody else's private mind. And the vehicle we use is encoding. That's the vocabulary encoding or handling signs in such a way that we do it. This is all very platonic, actually, and very gnostic and also very unreal.
So anyhow, that's what that is. What counts is what I want to make you get or make you see. And we can never really accomplish that. And you'll notice that if you carry that over when you go to church on Sunday, you're going to just be sitting there. If you swallow that nonsense, you're going to be sitting there thinking, well, that's just what the pastor thinks, or that's just what Ezekiel, that's all he could come up with. Do you?
[00:30:20] Speaker A: So just to kind of highlight the danger here, so that the logos is, first of all, the foundation of reality, of being. It is, second of all, Jesus. Maybe that's first of all, it is Jesus.
First of all, it is Jesus. It is second of all, then the very nature of the reality and the cosmos that he creates. And it is also our salvation. It is the forgiveness of sins which is brought to us in the word. So the three articles of the creed, the creation and redemption and sanctification, this is all a discussion of the word. It's the word, the word, the word. The word that shapes reality, the word that is incarnate and in our flesh and in our sin and in our place on the cross and in our grave and at the right hand of the Father. And the word which is brought to us, which forgives our sins, so that the anti word is anti God, anti creation, antichrist, antichurch, anti salvation, anti everything else, but it gives itself labels that cover it up.
And again, I really want you to lean in on this one, that the language of justice, and especially social justice, comes as almost an intentional mockery of the Lord's language of justification.
I don't know, maybe our hearts or our consciences or even our imaginations or our minds are shaped like a court because of the reality of the logos and the fact that things are declared to be good or bad. And so we all have an intrinsic thing of justice, and yet that's now been totally hijacked. To deliver anti justice, to deliver wickedness, that kind of mockery of justification in the language and in the activity of social justice, I'd love a reflection on.
[00:32:33] Speaker B: Well, let me give you what I can, and then, as usual, put me back on the point that you'd like me to address, if I can. So I have said this. I think I may have left some of this in the chapter on social justice being a replacement for universal justification when I was offering a commentary on Luther's 1536 disputation on the human being that we alluded to in passing before.
And I've been teaching this for a little while, but I think it's quite clear that the function of logos language in the first place, being language, creatures, is primarily for justification.
Now what I mean is, how do we use language? What are we generally concerned to target our language toward?
What projects is it for? And I think it's to justify ourselves. So when somebody asks me, what are you doing? I generally don't give them kind of a handbook list of number one, I'm doing this, number two, I'm doing that. I answer by saying, well, I'm doing something that my wife told me to do. So don't get on my case about this, right? I want to justify myself in a broader and more serious sense.
People are we as people, as members of the loga species are, I think, always looking to justify our ways to God and man.
Now, the glory of which is an undoable project.
We just can't accomplish that, which is why we keep on trying it, I suppose. Because if we could justify ourselves to everybody and ourselves, we wouldn't have to yammer on so much about this stuff.
But what we do have is this, and you set this up very helpfully by remembering that Jesus is the logos in the first place. Everything else is what it is because he is who he is. Creation is continual, right? Didn't just start things off and wait till the battery wears out or something. He's continually overseeing all of this. Well, that Lord took on flesh and blood. This is John one again. So the logos became incarnate.
Now that brings justification to the human race. In a way. It's there in a nutshell in the fact that God thinks of us this way or loves us this way, that he would send his only begotten son in the flesh, little bit of a step down, right?
So that he would do that signals the sort of stuff that Paul articulates in the opening of Ephesians, that even before laying the foundations of the world, God had purposed to send his only begotten son to redeem us all.
Now with Jesus being who he is and then God having told us all of this nisi perverbum, but only through the word. It's only in Jesus. It's only through the word from and about Jesus. Now language is supposed to be all about justification this time, not about self justification, but about the universal justification that God has declared for everyone.
Shouldn't there be some crying and some pausing there and some singing of psalms of jubilation, right? For everyone.
But now, what is going on with this attack on language? It is at the same time an attack on the conduit, the means by which the logos himself communes with us.
It's simultaneously an attack on justification. This way, this whole racial justice and so called social justice movement takes the attention away from our inability to justify ourselves and away from Christ and puts it on the next latest project for self justification.
Something that, as we said last time, really flows from marxist roots, set up mythological groups of people, judge them by, I don't know, their economic status, whether they're workers or owners, whether they have a certain hue to their skin, right? Set them up certain sexual predilections and set them against each other. Now, that's guaranteed to keep people pretty busy until they die and are damned.
I think that's the intent here.
So it's a distraction from distraction by distraction, as T. S. Eliot said of modernity, it is to stay very far away from another question from T. S. Elliott. Where is the life we have lost in living life? Capital L, that's Christ. The life from John one. Where's the life we have lost in living? And I'm going to add the next couple of lines. Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where's the knowledge we have lost in information?
I think we have to add a line. Where's the information we've lost in all these lies, all these centuries have taken us farther from God and nearer the dust.
So this latest attack, this attack on language, is like putting a plastic bag over the head of a victim and suffocating them.
It's an attack on our humanity.
It is certainly an attack on Christ himself, as useless as that always is. And it's an attack on God's word, which, again, is not going to pass away. But people can be convinced that there are other things to do. And then here is the foolishness of this. We've got a long standing textual tradition starting and featuring scripture, starting with and featuring scripture about justice. I can't tell you how silly these conversations about social justice look to anyone who has once read Plato's republic.
I mean, my goodness, this is all you've got. You think this is justice? And then how about this?
As I recommend in the book, and as I think is clearly the case, you alluded to this before, the pivotal descriptions of God as being righteous, and the question about his righteousness being credited to us in justification.
That word righteous, the sadiq in the Old Testament Hebrew, the decaya stuff in the New Testament that means both righteousness and justice. So when, you know, writes for us, this is the name by which Christ will be called the Lord our righteousness.
That can just as well be translated the Lord our justice.
And what a horrible, depressing, sad diminution of that term among us, that people think that justice means establishing some sort of racial quotas based on skin color or lack of skin color or what have you, and that's all they've got. And what they've got is also a means not just for destroying confidence in language, but as we know from recent history here in the US, sending college and university students out into the street screaming for justice, as in rape. A lot of people murder those babies, burn up those people.
This is justice. We are justice warriors.
[00:41:16] Speaker A: By the way, I need to go take a nap in order to kind of think because. And to let all this kind of settle. But I got to keep asking a question.
I feel like I'm trying to grab a hold of what you're saying, and I don't have a good.
So let me. Let me try this. And I want to do this heading towards the adjective of social. In social justice, like, what the function of that is to remove it from the classical idea of justice and why that's in there and where that comes from.
This attack on the word has the demonic wisdom of attacking everything good. Well, not just everything good, attacking everything.
And it attacks it in such a way that it assumes the thing that it's trying to destroy. So it's always this implicit, like the authority of the word that is denying the authority of the word, the righteousness of the one who is assuming the judgment of the sinner. So that if I take language to destroy language, it's like I'm assuming the authority of the language that I'm trying to deny.
If I'm accusing someone of being a disruptor of the peace or being the cause of injustice or whatever, I'm assuming the righteousness that belongs to them. So there's this transfer of the thing that is attempted to be denied, which I think is always the point with self justification. It's not just enough that I make the case of my own righteousness. I have to do it by proving that you're a sinner and that everyone else is also worse than me.
There's a transactional nature to this which I think shows up in the language of social justice.
Where does that language of social justice come from? Why not just say justice?
What am I intended to pick up when someone says, hey, we're social justice warriors?
[00:43:22] Speaker B: Well, I think actually it's an indication of a chink in the armor. So when people cannot and or will not speak clearly, they pile up adjectives.
Now, sometimes we do that to try to make things clearer when words have been abused for a long time or abused in the public discussions and stuff. But social is, of course, just a very cynical thing. There's nothing social about this. This is antisocial justice.
See, it's not social and it's not justice. But now let's also keep in mind as you're transitioning into that kind of question, that you're absolutely right to say that people who take this line, that language is meaningless, let's say, and then they want to win their point and describe it to us. You're absolutely right that they are contradicting themselves.
But there is something worse going on here yet, and that is these people will not enter into conversation at all.
That's why what I've referred to as the problems with academic freedom in our concordias and mine in particular, this is a very nasty thing. It's not just shutting up somebody, it's shutting up everybody.
People say things like, well, you've got to have policies against academic freedom to shut up professors who are saying things you don't want them to say. Well, come on. First of all, that's not being a university. Secondly, look at the cynicism of it. This is exactly what these woke social justice warriors are doing.
They are not even seeking faux justice allegedly for society.
They are intent on silencing those who would say, well, wait a minute, we have to talk about this.
Okay, so then what we do have is, you're certainly right, the language is unavoidable. I mean, unless you imprison somebody or kill them or find a way to silence them, language is unavoidable. But then the question is, how are we going to use language and use it as it's meant to be used? It may be that it's impossible to do that in american universities anymore, right? I mean, there's just a bunch of yammer going on and not any conversation.
Universities, as we know from Luther, right. Luther was very, very obvious in saying that education, for instance, at the university in Wittenberg was not supposed to be Education in the catholic system.
It was supposed to be the education of the individual to be able to read the Bible for himself and to think things through for himself, to create people who could be, well, Lutherans like Luthereth died of then.
I know I've drifted a little bit there. Let's say this, though.
Language can abuse people so much that they will not want to hear the word of God or anybody else's word or read any books.
And that's a major concern here. The way to respond to that is to do what we know we should do, and that is to use the word of God. So again, this is why, in my professional view, we are being extraordinarily unlutheran in lutheran higher education by not cultivating disputation, debate, and thoughtful conversation back and forth on this.
The people who want to push for the woke stuff or maintain the woke stuff in our institutions of higher learning don't want to debate. They're not writing books. They're not debating in scholarly articles.
And that says something.
[00:47:49] Speaker A: I'm writing down these little, just the little couplets, because it seems like there's contradictory things that are asserted, but that they must be asserted together.
And this is like the mystery of lawlessness or something like this. So these two statements, which are contradictory, but they're inevitable. There is no language or truth, and I only have words.
You can't have them. I only have them. Or there is no righteousness and sin. I only am righteous. There is no right and wrong. I'm right.
There is no creator. I am the creator. And there's something, again, it seems to me like the mystery of lawlessness, because words cannot be destroyed. They have to only be stolen. So it's like you have to steal something from the house and put it in your backpack and say, look, it doesn't exist, but you have it. And the very argument itself, it seems like self refuting. But that's the whole point, is that I don't know if that makes any sense.
[00:49:05] Speaker B: Well, it does, and I like your formulation of those couplets better. But I suppose so that we know as a couple pastors do all sorts of straw man arguing here, either. I think a very influential anti intellectual on this exact point is Jacques de Radat, the kind of the quintessential postmodern thinker.
We've talked about this earlier in discussions, too. So there's this meme. I'm sure it's still there online, as everything is, where it's a picture of Jacques de Radat as a young professor, and the caption is, is utterly convinced that language is meaningless, has written scores of books to prove it.
Okay, now here's Jacques de Radat, and you're not going to find this in his scores of books, but only in his interviews, where he's compelled to be relatively clear. When he was asked, what do you do with the Bible? In a couple interviews he said, well, he said, I reserve the right to interpret any of the texts from Moses and the prophets, however I want to, just like any text from Plato or what have you. And he doesn't quite leave that hanging. I think that you always hear this kind of suppressed conclusion.
So he gets to interpret any way he wants to. And that means, as you were just suggesting, and no one gets to tell me I'm wrong.
That is the scholarly root of this whole business. That's the postmodern tech. Language is meaningless. He can't avoid using language, but at every opportunity he is undercutting it in the minds of his readers or listeners.
And that's really, I think, what we're dealing with here.
[00:51:03] Speaker A: I'm going to shift a little bit because I want to respond to some of the responses that we got from our first interview, and maybe I'm going to bring up two at the same time and some of the other ones maybe we'll leave to next time. Just looking at time, especially, I want to talk to you about race.
There was a discussion about the sacrostanct text to the United States, but I think maybe we'll put those up to next because this is the one I really want to get to. There was, I'd say, sort of two clouds of responses that were both despairing about the state of the church and the synod, and one in a happy way, like, hey, go get them, kind of aggressive thing. And then another in a despairing like, this is my church. Do I have a place to send my kids to college, so forth? I think I'm more optimistic than you are, maybe by nature even, but I want to address that as this is something of a test case to say, hey, where are we? The reason I want to talk with you about these things is because we need to be aware of the poisonous ideas that are creeping in and that that awareness is in some ways an inoculation.
Maybe just I'll let you take those two clouds of despair and how you would bring your wisdom and counsel to address them.
[00:52:36] Speaker B: Well, I looked at the comments that your folks were good enough to post online from our first interview.
I'm not sure that I can handle a general question like that, other than I guess I would agree that as the young, vibrant Lutheran pastor you are and the elderly, besieged professor that I am, I would certainly admit that I probably have a more pessimistic view of things. What I think maybe both of us can do and then I'll see if you can prod me with a particular somehow in here. But I think we both can do something like this.
Luther reminds us that the Christian is an optimist, but an optimist only on the basis of Christ and the gospel.
I think I could invoke a statement from, of all people, David Hume at the end of his dialogues concerning natural religion when on his deathbed he said that the mark of a really educated person is to be a philosophical skeptic and when suffering to run to the scriptures.
So those were David Hume's last words. He went into a coma and died three days later. So what I am saying is by pointing out that neither Christ the logos nor his inspired words can be destroyed and adding that language cannot be destroyed because of the logus's creative work on us human beings. At the same time, that is what's under attack. And there is ground for pessimism, or at least very, very serious concern that people would be adopting that view of language, teaching it. I think I'm also going to say this.
It's also bad that we are not teaching the biblical external, efficacious means of grace view of language and everything that goes along with that. So there's a sin of omission and a sin of commission with that. So with that said, if you'd like to give me more particulars, I'd be happy to address those.
I think that my role is not to be shut up. And I think a professor professes surprise.
I am really, really concerned about indications of censoring and shutting up people who are raising questions, in my case, concerning our Concordia university or universities, in the case of people who may want to ask questions about what's going on in your world down in Austin with a concordia that appears to be seceding from the Lutheran Union down there. And of course this comes down to a concern that we all have, some of us for our own children. Where can we send them that we can trust and some of us for our grandchildren. That would be the more pessimistic group of us who are older, maybe, but we all love these kids and that's why we're concerned.
[00:55:57] Speaker A: Well, maybe I'm optimistic because I come around to these things late.
It's there in the Lord's word. And if we're holding to the catechism, we are already inoculated against this. But you start to see the variety of the devil's attack. So here's my sort of take on this. We need to understand the dangers we need to understand what's at stake. We need to understand what's going on. And this is fought in two different ways. I mean, number one, we're fighting against ignorance, and then number two, we're fighting against opposition.
I think there's a supreme amount of ignorance. At least that's the optimistic view. So Luther says, we console the child, we kick the dog.
How do I know if I'm dealing with a child or a dog? Well, let's just assume they're all children until they start biting your shoe or biting your hand, I suppose.
So to address these things and say, look, there's something more at stake than just being called mean or racist or whatever.
What's at stake is the very essence of creation and Christ himself and our life in Christ, and that's worth fighting for. And I think that understanding is.
It must be. Here's maybe the source of my optimism, that while there's people who are out there fighting against wokism, they don't have all the tools that we have as Lutherans. The Lord, I think, has uniquely equipped us for this fight. So now it's probably just time for us to jump in. So I appreciate your sounding the alarm, Dr. Schultz, in this text. So the book is anatomy of an implosion. This is the beginning of a conversation about it. We have one more scheduled next week, and we'll see where it goes because there's a lot more to cover, especially you mentioned academic freedom and the kind of theological roots of academic freedom. We'll take that up next, too.
[00:58:07] Speaker B: And there would be the question between ignorance and childishness. There would be the question about studied ignorance also, right?
I mean, it's not like this just popped up yesterday.
So there's a lot of analyzing, I think, to do or diagnosing for the sake of the treatment that you're talking about. And I want to say very clearly, I'm asking for repentance, not for abandonment or otherwise, I would have taken an easier something to do here.
So I certainly agree with you on that. And then for our next time or next two or three times, I'd sure welcome this, as I know it's helping folks in the church and in society to be led by your questions here.
[00:59:03] Speaker A: That's great. Thank you, Dr. Schultz, for your work, for the conversation today, too. I just looked at the time and I said, oh, no, I can't. Just goes, it flies. So thank you for this, and we'll look forward to the next conversation. The book is available on Amazon and everywhere else. I think christian news has it. I think I saw the note that christian news has it for the best price. Is that right?
[00:59:23] Speaker B: Yes, at the moment. Barnes and noble and everything. Thank you, pastor. Really appreciate this opportunity, too.
[00:59:29] Speaker A: It's always great. Thank you.
