Language is Truth (Wolfmueller w. Dr. Gregory Schulz)

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hey, YouTube theologians. Pansher Wolfmuller here with Dr. Gregory Schultz, who is the host of Lutheran Philosopher, teaching there all the time and also really enjoying teaching at the Lutheran School of Theology with Lutherans in Africa in Nairobi. When I was asking you, I said, are you going to be in the United States for this? Are you going to be in Africa? Because you're over there a lot. How's that going? [00:00:21] Speaker B: Oh, it's great. What a privilege to continue to be serving our Lord and in such a significant way with the African souls. You know, I think in a longer kind of conversation, you and I could probably talk about Luther saying about the gospel shower, moving on when people don't care too much for the gospel anymore. And a number of us have been watching to see what the. What the next country or population is to which God would be sending that gospel shower. I think it's. It's fair to say that Africa would be a good candidate for that. Not because it's easy there, but because it's hard. [00:01:00] Speaker B: You know, all of the poverty, all of the lack of education, and if, if only we can do things with integrity, you know, integrity with the word of God and our confessions in the first place, and integrity with our fellow African Lutherans. So I think the sheer project. This is just inspiring by itself, apart from the gospel work, even, but the sheer project of having a seminary that is destined to be handed over to the African Lutheran churches as soon as we can get a majority of qualified African faculty and a majority of African congregations doing the, the financing. This is. This is like nothing other, I think, on the continent right now. And I think you and I both feel kind of a. A similar pastoral shiver at the thought of. Of being a small part of something like that. So it is great. Thanks. [00:01:59] Speaker A: That's what I was talking to James May, our mutual friend and director of Lutheran Africa, yesterday. He. He came to visit and he said, brian, because he's trying to get me over there, man, I got a. And you are, too. I, I got to do it at some point. But he said, we're training the missionaries who will come to the United States in the next generation or training the men who will train the missionaries who will evangelize the United States. I. It's just incredible. Well, we want to talk about today hermeneutics, because that's seemingly what we're talking about. I had this wild conversation with Dr. Veltz, which was a follow up from one of our conversations when I was. We were criticizing his text. You're working on a Hermeneutics text. So that's what. So we'll talk about at least chapter one, the content, which is the atmosphere in which we live and move and have our being. I think it'll serve as a critique, but I don't think it necessarily needs to be a critique. This stands on its own as an understanding of. [00:02:56] Speaker A: The word of God as. And here. Dr. Schultz, I have to tell you that I don't know how long we've been having conversations. I mean, maybe 10 or 12 years or something, that we've known each other and been in conversation. And I think two months ago I finally understood something that you said, which was this is why you're. And you've always challenged me in a very sanctified way. And I think this is what this book is going to do, too. We'll talk about it. But that is that Jesus is the word of God incarnate. So reality must be such that Jesus is the word of God incarnate. In other words, you start with the saving truth of Christianity and that becomes your metaphysic, your ontology, your understanding of the world. And then at the level of the word. [00:03:49] Speaker A: Jesus forgives our sins. We're justified by faith. [00:03:54] Speaker B: So. [00:03:57] Speaker A: Hermeneutics and epistemology must be that the word of forgiveness is true. In other words, our philosophy and our understanding of language is basically backfilling what must be true because of the gifts of God. [00:04:17] Speaker A: And I think that's what you're doing here. So the atmosphere in which we. Which we live and move and have our being, which you start by definition, is the language is the word himself wording. And so. So let's. So maybe let's start there and see. Or maybe you want to tell me that I'm wrong about finally understanding what your project is. [00:04:38] Speaker B: I think it'd be risky to tell you you're wrong. It doesn't work out very much. I also do want to just slide this in. After that wonderful introduction to our conversation, I have another official reason for being with you today. It is to welcome you from the Grandpa Pastors association because you and Carrie have had your first grandchild. That's right. This is a mile marker. And there's much rejoicing to be done, much talking about gray hair. And that also gives me a chance to pressure you, I mean, encourage you further toward coming to share some of your teaching with our African students in Kenya. And you know, that is in Kenya, there is this wonderful saying, the old man sits. [00:05:26] Speaker B: This actually was the case. I'll spare your folks the long story at the beginning of our conversation, but there was an occasion when we had a few problems with James's vehicle. [00:05:39] Speaker B: The Toyota Rover that he uses to get us around. And we had a flat tire. We got to the very small village where I was scheduled to preach. This is. There is a story, a wonderful story there. But the most amazing thing was we were sitting with the elders and the women had brought out this. This very modest meal for us. And James and I kind of looked at each other, what we thought was the end of the meal and said. I said to him, we should probably get going on that tire. I said, I'll give you a hand. And he said, you're not going to be able to give me a hand. Because the elders said, the old man sits. And I was the older of the two of us, so I had to stay there and continue to enjoy the conversation and the food. The old man sits. [00:06:28] Speaker A: The trouble will be if we're there together, you'll be. You'll have the old man's death. [00:06:34] Speaker B: You'll still have to change the tire. But that's okay. That's okay. [00:06:37] Speaker A: Oh, that sounds wonderful. [00:06:39] Speaker B: Yeah. So back to our topic, right, with the book. So let me. Let me reinforce what you began with. And that is, there is nothing more we would say in philosophy, properly basic, nothing more foundational than language. But the reason for that is, amid all the confusion that we have over what language is, including evolutionary nonsense and the preposterous machinations of woke Marxism to tell us what words we can use and can't use and what language should be according to their agenda, language, as it turns out, is God's way of communing with us. So unlike the Muslims, unlike the Mormons, unlike everybody else, those of us who are people of the book, we know that the real God is the God who speaks. Now, for him to do that, to speak with us, this is the way he has set things up. In the beginning, he created, as you and I love to preach at every opportunity, he created by the word let there be. And there was at that same beginning, on the first Friday of our universe, God imparted the image of God, as we call it, to Adam and Eve and therefore to all human beings. And that image, I have been arguing, is language. [00:08:15] Speaker B: So what happens then is we can also bring in Luther for a quick and important moment. Luther says in writing on the Tower of Babel or the Tower of Babylon, that when God confounded the language to confound the very bad plans of the people in that time After Noah, that Luther says, please notice that God did not end, nor did he allow Satan to destroy the gift of language. [00:08:45] Speaker B: So we have the opportunity, if you'd like, to pursue it, to talk about language as the basis for everything, the metaphysics. I do argue that in the book, too. It's the, the ultimate bedrock of all reality to argue that that's what language is. But we can also talk about God's language, which is to say the inerrant words of Holy Scripture, the grammar and everything that he had his apostles and prophets and evangelists write down. And we can talk about that in comparison to what I call our everyday language. And so the problems that we're facing today is our failure to align our everyday language with the authority and concepts of God's inerrant Scripture. And I, I think that we can lay. [00:09:33] Speaker B: A great deal of the frustration that we feel as pastors, reaching people, preaching to them and teaching them, counseling them with God's word, and the frustration that we feel with our hypersec, secularized society around us. We can lay that at the feet of a language problem. And the problem is philosophy of language. So I think you're absolutely right that this has to be anchored in God and His Word, because as you started to mention, we've got John, chapter one. So Jesus is the Logos incarnate, and everything traced and traces back to Him. [00:10:18] Speaker A: Let's, let's go with that second topic that you mentioned, because I feel like it's going to warm my brain up to get me ready for the first topic. So let's kind of hone in, because. [00:10:31] Speaker A: So if the image of God is language, but then there's this. [00:10:36] Speaker A: Deficit after the fall where the, where the image is lost and not the capacity to speak, like, like Luther says about Babel. So language still exists, but it's not, it's no longer functioning in that pure way that it was intended by God at the beginning. And that provides this contrast for us now between our kind of human language and the divine language. So let's dig in there a little bit. What's a good place to start? [00:11:01] Speaker B: Well, maybe we could, could ask this question and then you feel free to, to move things over and find what you may think is a more direct route to what you're asking. But the question I think we can ask is, are. Are we fitted for language? And the, the answer is yes. But then what comes almost right after that is, so how come we're not talking in sync with God's word? What. What's that? Disconnect and the disconnect is profound. The disconnect is original sin. Now let's use some, some of our familiar. [00:11:42] Speaker B: Lutheran terminology. Bless you. Some of our Lutheran terminology for a second. When, when Adam and Eve conducted their insurgency against God at the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and they ate from that fruit against God's express command, what they brought on us was a loss of God's righteousness, not a loss of our humanity. So we didn't become brute creatures, though we seem to be very capable of acting that way. Right? We didn't become brute creatures. We still maintained. And here's the central feature for our discussion. Language. We still maintain language, but now we put language to the use of not proclaiming God's justification in Christ by nature, but self justifying ourselves by nature. We are willing and we, we exercise our capability to lie and deceive on the basis of God's gift, his divine gift of language. This is horrendous, but it, it's not just a superficial thing. It is a soul deep business. The original sin that you and I preach to our folks about all the time, because this is kind of a necros, a necessary prerequisite to the gospel, that original sin makes us, as our formula says, blind, dead and enemies of God. So there's kind of a parallel here, I think. And just to mention this very briefly for a kind of analogy that may help. It is true that no matter how much we may be suffering and want to exempt to terminate our human existence, perhaps by God forbid, suicide, we actually cannot achieve that. It is impossible for us to extinguish our own existence because human beings have been made as everlasting creatures. From the moment of our conception, there is no end. We're intended for life forever and ever in heaven. But because of that sin we were talking about, and for people who reject the universal justification of Christ, that also means everlasting hell. Now just as we can't get rid of, of the duration, the everlasting duration of our own existence, we can't really get rid of language either. It's not just that it's kind of a good idea, it's that it is the, the way that we fellowship with one another. And our point, the part we really love about this discussion, I think, is it is the way God fellowships with us. And by the way, there is no other way, there's no other way for us to fellowship with one another except through language. I, I'm sure that you would have a great deal to contribute to that discussion with all of your work at. In your congregation of deaf persons. Right. Language is necessary to our being human beings. And I don't mean just German or Latin or something. I'm. I mean language per se. And that language is the medium. It's the only one that's the medium by which God communes with human beings. So the effort to get rid of language is just as futile as the effort to commit suicide and think you can end your suffering by ending your existence. Those are not open to us, those options. So we were talking about the language as a necessary, we'd say in philosophy, unnecessary condition for human life. [00:15:38] Speaker A: What's occurring to me. And so I. And is it. Normally when we think of language, we think of speaking. But there's a sense that after the fall, the first thing that has to happen for us is we have to stop speaking. So this is Romans 3. Every mouth is silenced. And then Romans 10. Faith comes by hearing and hearing the word of God. So that it's not just that we have the capacity to speak, but maybe even more profound that we have the capacity to hear, to receive language. [00:16:13] Speaker B: It's the same capacity. It's the same capacity. So in the 20th century. [00:16:21] Speaker B: The. The philosopher Martin Heidegger, who was no Lutheran, but was majorly influenced by Luther's writings, I think he. You and I've talked about this in other conversations. I think he cribbed his. That is Heidegger's philosophy from Luther's Theology of the Cross. He secularized it and got what people thought was something brand new. But Heidegger says that only the human being can be silent. [00:16:46] Speaker B: Wow. [00:16:48] Speaker B: The reason. The reason is because we are the language beings. So the option to keep silent for us is the flip side of the coin of being language beings. How about that? [00:17:00] Speaker A: What. What was he talking about? What, like. [00:17:03] Speaker B: Oh, well, he was. He was endeavoring to give a. I'll say a kind of objective. It's really called phenomenological, but let's call it an objective view of the human being as the language being. And Heidegger, by the way, I think. I think this just kind of seeped into his thinking, whether he meant to or not, because he frequently read both Luther's works and the Greek New Testament. Heidegger was the one who said philosophy can be done only in one of two languages. In German, his language, or Greek. And he really honestly wanted to know everything he could about the Greek language. And there's the New Testament. So this is a very far. By the way. But that's actually the Case for a number of the 20th century philosophers in the area of phenomenology, starting with Edmund Husserl. At the very beginning of the 20th century, these guys read the Greek New Testament. I, I think it would be stretching it to say they read it referentially, reverentially, with fear for God, but they read it obsessively. [00:18:11] Speaker A: Huh? Yeah, this, no, now you've made this. I mean, our Heidegger conversations are most. No, no, no. I'm mixing up Heidegger and Wittgenstein, who had the idea that science has to, to stop. And so I was thinking about that silence like that. You have to know both what you can say and what you cannot say. That's right. That's Wittgenstein. That's. [00:18:30] Speaker B: Which fits here too. Which fits here too. It's just that Wittgenstein didn't have that quote that I was just using so. [00:18:37] Speaker A: Well, so, okay, I, I want to, I want to say more than that because I, I, I. [00:18:46] Speaker A: There's, I think there's some, some things to be gained here just on this, on this silence. I mean, Heidegger would not have connected it to Romans 3 as the, the, the quiet that the law works when it brings an end to our work of, to our, our kind of deceptive work of self justification. Heidegger, though, would say that. [00:19:16] Speaker A: That, that even just the discernment of. I don't know, I could, I mean, tell me a little bit more about what, what that means. Only the human being can be silent. Is it, is it pointing to the, to the freedom that's implied in speech? Like that every word is a chosen word, that, that it points to something more or. [00:19:36] Speaker B: Well, now that's true too. But I think that I really just kind of wanted to mention the Heidegger quote to say that there was some thinking going on about this, some great thinking in the 20th century. This is also from the book of Psalms and Scripture in the Old Testament overall, don't you think? So why did, why did God talk to Elijah when he was on the run from Jezebel and Ahab? Why did he talk to him in that small whisper, which, you know, some of us think could be just about translated, near silence? And, and why in the Psalms. [00:20:15] Speaker B: Does God teach us fundamentally to pray to him in his own words? [00:20:21] Speaker B: And then why did Jesus give us the Lord's Prayer? It's so that we learn what the right words. I'm following your lead here. What the right words are to use, what the right way is to approach him. That is on the basis of His Word. And then it does follow that things that are not from God's word are things that we shouldn't blather on about. [00:20:49] Speaker B: Right. So the, the first thing is that we are, I refer to this in the title for this new hermeneutics book. So I'm calling it Lutheran Hermeneutics, the divine gift of Language. Now language, both scripture certainly, but also everyday language. I mean to cover both of those by the divine gift. We talked about the fork after the insurgency and Eden, the fall into sin, but they both are language. So the, the thing here is to be sure that we not just understand but that we actually live out this reality. In the scriptures, God works. I know you like these words, so I'm going to get them in here. In the scriptures, God works. An ontological change in human beings. Ontological, as you and I have discussed in a number of enjoyable conversations over the years, technically means a study of different kinds of being. [00:21:57] Speaker B: So rocks are different from human beings. Animals are different from human beings. The difference is logos or language. Now what does God's language do? Well, you mentioned that, you know, you and, and James were, I gather, probably serving at the altar, both together yesterday in divine service. What do we do after the sermon? In the Lutheran service, we sing Psalm 51, or at least a little part of it. Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me. And what happens in the singing of that song? God creates a clean heart in us and renews a right spirit within us. So we poor miserable sinners are ontologically that the better word would be ontically in terms of our being. We are ontically changed because of course this is God's creative word. This is God's recreative work. And the reason that we do that right after the sermon is because yesterday it would have been my brother James. Usually it's you or your co pastors there. We have just preached and then we've heard the word of God. So God's word has been working on us and we are not just saying, oh I hope, I hope, I hope that God would work on my heart and my spirit. But it is a fait accompli. He has done that. He's been doing it and he'll continue doing it through His Word. This of course is why the shoddy hermeneutics, the holy unacceptable views of scripture that are getting currency among us are absolutely dreadful because they put something between us and this ontological working word of God. [00:23:54] Speaker A: This seems like a Response. I want to come back to the hermeneutic question, but this seems like when the Lutherans were accused by the Romanists of saying that if it's justification by faith, that it's a reckoning of righteousness, that it's a righteousness in name only. That was the accusation. In other words, your righteousness is only a word. Righteousness, it's not a reality. Righteousness. And here the response is, no, the Word is the real thing. Yes, that is reality. When the Lord says something, it's true. So when the Lord declares us to be righteous, we are righteous. If we don't look like it, it's because whatever this is, has it caught up to the reality of the word that God has spoken, or whatever. However you want to think of it, right? [00:24:43] Speaker B: It's because we're being. Because we're being enemies of God. We're falling back on our sinful nature. And of course, without the word of God there, Here. Right. Without the word of God, there is no hope. [00:24:58] Speaker B: Without the word of God, there's nowhere else to go. Because you and I have talked about this quite a bit too, and I know we've been. It's okay to let your folks know that we correspond about this stuff a lot, too. So that's what I've been calling that first principle of hermeneutics from the apology to the Augsburg Confession, the nissi per verbum stuff from the famous black T shirt. So the. [00:25:23] Speaker B: God does not want to be treated. He cannot be apprehended nisi per verbum, except through the Word. The Word is Christ, the Word is Scripture, and the Word is language. Logos suits all three of those meanings in that order. And verbum in Latin does the same thing. So apart from the Word, God is not speaking to us. [00:25:54] Speaker A: Or. Or working. [00:25:57] Speaker B: Right? Right. Same thing. Same thing. The speaking is his work. That's how he does his work. [00:26:02] Speaker A: And this has to do with what? The words that we heard from Jesus yesterday, which is that the heaven and earth will pass away. My Word endures forever. His Word is the eternal thing. [00:26:13] Speaker B: That's right. It's also the plural words there in that Matthew passage. [00:26:17] Speaker A: Thank you. [00:26:18] Speaker B: So my words will never pass away. And that's how we know. As I point out in chapter one, that's how we know that language is never going to end. Because if Jesus says my words will never pass away, Jesus is guaranteeing that language continues. [00:26:39] Speaker A: There's. Okay, so there's a. There's a deal. This is going to get us to. I think the two You've, you've dropped two threads that I want to pick up on, and I think I. I'll pull them and they're going to be connected to the same problem. You pointed to the distress that we all feel dealing with this confusion of languages, especially in wokes, Mark Woke Marxism. Also the kind of emptiness of the hermeneutic that's being sold in our circles, which is related to those two things. [00:27:09] Speaker A: And just maybe the third piece here is this idea of. [00:27:17] Speaker A: Maybe. Actually, let's start this disconnect between the word incarnate Jesus and the words scripture and preaching. And it seems like there's an attempt to disconnect those two things, and I didn't notice the plural. And that's really helpful. Jesus doesn't say the word endures forever so that you could make this move that guys like to make. Well, he's talking about himself. He'll endure forever. But the Scriptures, that's just black on a white. That's just ink on pages. That's not eternal or whatever. My words. No, this is the scripture. This is the preaching. That's the eternal words that will pass the fires of the last day and never, ever end. So is it good to, you know that move that guys are trying to make where whenever we talk about, like, the perfection of the word, they'll say, well, that refers to Jesus and not the Scripture. [00:28:10] Speaker B: Right. Well, then the response is, haven't you read John chapter one? Don't you think so? You know. [00:28:20] Speaker B: I think what we end up referring to a lot without having said it exactly out loud is the astonishing patience and steadfastness of God to put up with us in this. So, I mean, right, Genesis. Genesis, chapter one. God said and there was. God said and there was. God said and there was. And then he gives his word to Adam and Eve. Do this. Be fruitful and multiply. Don't do this. And they go ahead and they do what he told them not to do and didn't do what he told them to do. And then here we are today, right? And we have the Scriptures made more clear, as St. Peter tells us. We know that the Logos Christ, the eternal Lord, who is identified with the Hebrew word for language and word, right? We know that the Logos tabernacled for a while among us, and the apostle John reports as an eyewitness. We have seen his glory, the glory of the only begotten. And so what in the world is going on with this separation between language and Christ? How can a Bible reader do that? And the. The answer Is. Don't know, but it's. It's certainly a call for. For repentance. And by the way, I think this is. I think it's right to call this a fundamental heresy. If you're, if you're destroying the link between language and the incarnate Christ, you are a heretic. And in contemporary hermeneutics, alas, in our Lutheran circles, too, this was exactly what was going on with the historical critical method at the seminary in St. Louis. And this is exactly what's happening with the postmodern semiotic method that is also coming out of St. Louis and being accepted, apparently, at Fort Wayne. So that this is a very serious problem. And the problem, as I say again, is a foundational, fundamental problem. You and I are lamenting that as pastors here, aren't we? So how can. How can we possibly be putting up with the nonsense of methods put between our congregants, the people we are called by God to serve with the Gospel? How can that be allowed to stand as this Berlin Wall between Scripture and the people? And how can this be taught to our. Our sons and grandsons that we may be sending to seminary? How can this be taught to them to put up this. This great wall of China between them and the Scriptures when they're learning how to become preachers? And. Well, this is a term that's falling into disuse too, isn't it? Called Servants of the Word. Called Servants of the Word. [00:31:16] Speaker A: But this is. So talk about this distress, maybe at the. [00:31:23] Speaker A: So we have a lot of listeners who are not pastors and are not servants of the Word, but they're the hearers of the Word. They're God's people. They're experiencing this distress because of the. The air in which we live and move and have our being is being polluted by the kind of. By. Well, by the idea that you can't know anything or say anything, that there's nothing. True. Here's my analogy for it. Do you know this, this, this math problem where someone tells you, you know, you can never touch the wall? This is like all the middle school, you know, the eighth grader tells the sixth grader, you can never touch the wall. And they say, what. What are you talking about? Says, well, to get there, you have to go halfway, and then to get there, you have to go halfway, and there's an infinite number of halves and it will take an infinite amount of time to travel an infinite number of spaces. So you actually never get the wall. And, and the sixth grader, you know, Just to make sure, goes and says, well, that sounds right. But then he just, you know, touches the wall and says, well, it. It sounds right, but it must be wrong because I just touched the wall. And it seems like that's what this philosophy of language is doing. It's like it's applying something. [00:32:34] Speaker A: It's reflecting on some sort of reality that might seem true. [00:32:42] Speaker A: It's making an argument. [00:32:46] Speaker A: That tempts the mind to think you can't know anything. [00:32:55] Speaker A: But then there's just stuff that I know, so whatever it is, this can't be true. But it seems like that's the kind of thing that's happening. [00:33:04] Speaker A: Does that make sense? [00:33:05] Speaker B: Do you want it does. I think that there was a. A step before that, though, and the step before that was to internalize. [00:33:15] Speaker B: Reality. Now the. There. This does show up. So in. In watching, let's say, let's say philosophy of language or the view of language throughout Western philosophy, from the time of Socrates and Plato and Aristotle. [00:33:33] Speaker B: All the way through to our day, the. The problem generally was to internalize language and then say that language is reasoning. [00:33:46] Speaker B: And then the reasoning is only happening in our individual heads. So in one way, it's a profound kind of relativism which fits with Protagoras. Man, or the individual man, is the measure of all things, of things that are that they are, and things that are not that they are not. But on the other hand, it is philosophy. It's the direction that philosophy took to put the onus, the burden on the individual's thinking. Now, the reason that I'm using that analogy, which you notice that I borrowed largely from St. Paul in Acts 17, when I say that language is the atmosphere in which we live and move and have our being, I'm pointing out that it is not a private matter, but it is in the public domain. Now, I don't want to deny that we. We do think right and that. That we can think things through, as we say, in our heads, but I would caution strongly against making that the center of the discussion because it's wrong. Augustine fell into this, actually. So when Augustine talks about the inner person, he uses that far too frequently. He uses that as a substitute for talking about the external word of God. Now. Well, so as I was saying, what happens is. [00:35:19] Speaker B: We have been taught not just to privatize religion, which is a bad step by itself, but we've been taught to privatize our ideas. And ideas do not reside. They don't come from, and they don't reside in our little heads, in Our minds, the ideas are in the atmosphere of language. This is how we learn them. When our parents and everybody else. Right, Grandpa. Talks with us in language. [00:35:50] Speaker B: It's not just. You can actually trace this. I know just a little, little, little bit of neuroscience. You can trace the brain development, the physical and the activity of the brain development based on the continuing exposure to language. So that's important. It's vitally important. But for conversations such as you and I are having and for doubts such as your listeners may be suffering through, that's a fundamental categorical mistake. Language does not belong to us privately. It didn't come from our heads. It doesn't reside in our heads. Language is the atmosphere in which God has situated us. Now, this is doubly important and triply obvious when we go back to that nisi per verbum first principle. This is God. He deals with us only according to Christ. The Word, the Scriptures, the word and language, the Word, all of those fit together. And it is a great recipe for despair. In fact, it's an indication of mental health issues, isn't it, to try to live within our own minds and handle things there. If we try to do that, apart from language, it is going to lead to despair. Now, the antidote for that is. [00:37:18] Speaker B: First of all to be hearing and reading scripture, because scripture does work. It's not just comforting, you know, like a. A nice Christian card from Hallmark or something. It is actually doing the work of comforting our consciences, as the Lutheran confessors wrote frequently in response to those superficial Catholic authorities who claimed all sorts of things for language when they described the Pope as the Vicar of Christ and then denied it when the Lutherans were holding their feet to the fire of the words of Scripture. So this is the thing. So the antidote is not to go home and stay under the covers or turn on your screen and just get absorbed in that. The antidote is to get together, to get together with God's church, not because it's a nice, comforting place to be, but because it is the place where God dwells. Right. Means of grace. We understand the church's means of grace stuff, but if you cut yourself off from language, it's only going to get worse and worse. [00:38:35] Speaker A: You talk about two dogmatic attitudes that have to be rejected. I think they both come up in this conversation already, but maybe to just put a pin in them, the scientific method, which reduces language, and then the. And postmodern semiotics, which deadens words. So, I mean, I think scientific thing, we talk, we. Well, let's maybe let's kind of hit each one of those just to make sure that it's, we can see the danger there. [00:39:04] Speaker B: Sure. So the first one that I mentioned in passing is the historical critical method. [00:39:11] Speaker B: The historical critical method is still very much around. It is, I think from, from what I'm learning, it's the dominant hermeneutic throughout the so called seminaries or schools in Africa, or at least in the parts of Africa that, that I've got any tenuous connection to. So this, this approach to Scriptures actually traces back to, to the 19th century, which interestingly enough was the century in which the founder of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod left Germany when this was really all over the place there and came to America to preach, well, the word of God without any sort of methodology. Now the basic assumption is this, this comes from science, it comes from the social sciences, and it comes from the notion that the Bible is a text to be criticized scientifically. So you'll find this, I have a couple quotes in my book on it. But you'll find this in the words of the professors from Concordia Seminary, St. Louis when they, mostly historians when they said the Bible is to be judged as to whether it is true or false. Historically. This is silly and non academic on a number of levels. But the fundamental problem that I think most of our folks would see and notice is that it makes the professor in the classroom and it makes his students the masters of Scripture instead of the learners from Holy Scripture. They come in with the attitude that they're going to decide what is factually correct in Scripture or not. Now first of all, that's totally the wrong project and secondly, it really is the wrong attitude. It's showing that you're just not reading and preaching the Scriptures to begin with. So that's, I, I put that under a scientific mistake. The friend are. Well, I don't know if you want to say friend, but my friend Ludic Wittgenstein, also from the 20th century, he actually shows in his little book Tractatus what happens when you reduce the full gift of divine language just to what the scientific method would agree with. And you end up with a language that is so small the right word here would be reductive. It's so reduced that there's no room to be able to talk about God or the soul or ethics and so forth, the things that involve the human beings. Now I would, I would just hasten to add it is not so much the physics in science that's the problem here though it's the same method there. It's the social sciences, the sciences such as history, psychology, and so forth that are doing what are allegedly the studies of the human being and human beings, but they're doing it under the scientific method, mostly. And to bring the scientific method to scripture is where you get demythologizing, cutting out the JDP theory. Only certain people would write certain parts of this. It's not what it says it is. And it's a fundamental skepticism then, based on the scientific method, which, by the way, is not the be all and end all of knowledge. But that's another discussion. [00:42:40] Speaker A: We've. We have talked about that with our Wittgenstein conversation about that. So refer to that. I'll try to remember to put the link to that in the comments. Now, now to postmodernism. And we gotta. I. So, I mean, we have time to. To flesh this out, but not a ton of time. I want to make sure we talk about it. So you talk about how postmodern semiotics deadens words. It kills words. It steals the talk about the. What's the metaphor there? Where does it come from? [00:43:05] Speaker B: Sure. So to begin with, when I say that as. As we're leaving that topic of the historical critical method, that it reduces language, it doesn't really reduce language, it reduces language in the minds of its hearers and practitioners. Right? You see, so heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away. Now, the. In the postmodern semiotic approach, this approach deadens words to the professors, the preachers, the students, the lay folks who follow this. So it's intended to do the only thing that Satan can do, which is he can keep people away from the word of God and keep people away from the divine gift of language. So, so postmodernism in a nutshell is the effort to deny all stories, all narrative and all language. The word for that would be a quote from Jean Francois Leotard. I believe we've trotted the quote out before, brother, but I'll just mention it again here. Postmodernism is notoriously difficult to define. This is because postmodernism teaches and apparently believes that language is fundamentally meaningless. And if you believe that you are going to write in such a way as to prove your point, you're not going to do the three acts of the mind. You're not going to provide definitions. So you really want to watch out for teachers, professors, authors. I don't, I don't mean this just for us pastors, but I mean all of us to watch out for people who will not define their words and whose definitions sound conveniently weird and queer from what. What we learn and what we see words really mean. So postmodernism. Here comes that quote in. In post. To simplify to the extreme, Leotar says, to simplify to the extreme in postmodernism, we are absolutely incredulous of any meta narrative. Now, by the way, heaping up words that sound a little over on the fringe is another way of pulling a fast one. So be incredulous means to disbelieve. So our method is disbelief, and then of what? Of any meta narrative. Now, meta. [00:45:40] Speaker B: Grabbed by the Facebook people in Zuckerberg. But meta is the claim that this is everything, right? So a narrative that presumes to talk about reality, we are automatically disbelieving of that, and we remain disbelieving of it. Now, actually, in Leotard's writing, it's called the Report Concerning Knowledge. He's actually targeting science in there, which is a very strange thing. [00:46:09] Speaker B: But he's, you know, he's saying whatever universe the scientist is assuming exists, we disbelieve that. But then it also gets applied and is being applied in these hermeneutics we're concerned about. It's applied to God's word and to language generally. So postmodernism and semiotics, the postmodern attitude is, as you can hear, disbelief. Disbelief is not. [00:46:36] Speaker B: An attitude that you can live with. Right. This will work in mental health areas, really, with this. But then the semiotics is the view that language, especially written language, but language, is nothing but arbitrary symbols. [00:46:55] Speaker B: So if you treat the Scriptures as arbitrary symbols semiotically, and you follow a postmodern philosopher such as Jacques Dereda, then you look at the Bible as Jacques de Redat did, and he says, I reserve the right to understand these texts in any way that I see fit. [00:47:17] Speaker B: And. And it doesn't take a lot of digging, actually, just takes some reading. Though I'll admit that's pretty frustrating in David after the reasons I mentioned. Anybody who has read the opening of his book on Grammatology knows that he hates the Logos. [00:47:34] Speaker A: Yeah, you. I. I was interested in the quotation that you had in chapter one in the draft part. Part that I had, that he talks specifically about how the basis of Western culture is Christ, the Logos, and that that's racist and whatever. And whatever. It's. I mean, he's. He's explicitly fighting against the Lord Jesus. That's the. That's the point. [00:47:54] Speaker B: Yes, it is the point. And then it's almost as if he realizes he also has to take issue with logos as language. It's a fairly infernal kind of thing. But then these are all coming together. I mean, these are all there. And it's not just for those of us who do academic stuff or who are concerned about this pastorally, but it's for all of us, isn't it? I think I can speak to all of your, your YouTube theologians out there. It's affecting all of us. So you put this together and you've got the postmodern disbelief of language. You've got the woke Marxist use abuse of language to carve us up into imaginary groups by our races or our sexual preferences or what have you. And then you have these biblical hermeneutics to boot that seem to welcome this stuff in the front door. So the question then is where is a person supposed to go? And I think that's a very good question. But the answer is first of all to the Scriptures. [00:48:56] Speaker B: Pastor Wolfmiller and I are 100% behind the admonition in Hebrews not to give up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing. But these are not support groups. [00:49:07] Speaker A: Right? [00:49:07] Speaker B: These are, these are divine services. So we're saying the same thing. We need to find the place where the means of grace are being preached straight up. And I'll just add this too, Brian, that the. I think anytime somebody is proposing a method for hermeneutics, they're wrong. [00:49:26] Speaker B: There's no method for hermeneutics. There's the Scriptures for hermeneutics. If you must do something at, to sound to your PhD committee or to people like you're, you're creating something new, then you want to say the method is sola scriptura. [00:49:41] Speaker A: That's right. [00:49:42] Speaker B: Right. Anytime you've talked to the method, a scientific method, a God awful postmodern method, there isn't a method there. It's all destruction or a semiotic method. Good grief. These are all the things that our Lutheran fathers, right after the death of Luther actually called on us to call out as false doctrine and condemn it. [00:50:07] Speaker A: This is kind of right back beautifully to the beginning, which was that whatever we understand about language, it must be that Jesus is the word incarnate who says, do not be afraid, neither do I condemn you. Peace be with you. My word, I leave with you. [00:50:30] Speaker A: I have overcome the world. Be of good cheer. This is true. And Jesus wants us to know that. It seems to me as we're like, I'm reading some Lutheran theological stuff and it's always coming back to this point. What does Jesus want you to have? What does Jesus want you to know? Does he want you to be afraid that you're going to be condemned on the Judgment Day? Does he want you to wonder if you're the elect? Does he want you to go and chase after your own desires or what? No. He wants you to know that he's called you, that he's claimed you, that he's forgiven you, that he is coming back for you, that you'll be raised to live with him in the new heaven and the new earth. And whatever we say about reality, reality must be able to handle his words. This is my body given for you. This is the blood of God, which takes away the sins of the world. [00:51:21] Speaker B: Right. Reality depends on his words. Yes. So the creation isn't us. Something way back then, as we confess in the catechisms he created and still preserves. And that, by the way, is where that metaphysical thing comes in again. So how about this thought? [00:51:41] Speaker B: To. [00:51:43] Speaker B: Pastor and to be good friends too. If we're not pastors too, but to pastor and to care for one another, what we need to say is not so much what does God want you to know as what does God want you to be hearing? [00:51:59] Speaker A: No, thank you. [00:52:00] Speaker B: That's beautiful. [00:52:02] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah, that's exactly right. [00:52:03] Speaker B: Yeah. And then that's just what you were doing. You were quoting our Lord's words to us. I think we can also say for those who may. May feel, oh, man, these guys are just getting too harsh. I, I want to be friends with everybody. I want to be nice to everybody. And they seem to be calling out some people. Here we are. And the, the reason for that is God hates the manhandling of His Word. A good place to look for that is anywhere in the Old Testament. But. [00:52:32] Speaker B: I think to quote all the prophets. That's right, especially Isaiah and Jeremiah, by the way, the longer. The two longer prophets. But Jeremiah 23. Pastor Wolfmiller is recording this for us in Advent 2025. One of the passages that we love to hear and preach and recite with our children is about the. [00:53:01] Speaker B: Stump of Jesse from which Jesus the branch is growing. Behold, a branch is growing. That's Jeremiah 23 at the beginning. The most of the balance of Jeremiah 23 is the Lord expressing his outrage against the false prophets. People who are not speaking his words, but they're sharing their dream for things. Can we say their dreams of hermeneutics or the Bible. And then at the end of that, speaking about all the words belonging to God. And I mean, not Just the Bible, of course that. But also whatever words we're using in language, God actually says, here's a word I don't want to hear you use again or I will punish you. And it's a word that in modern translations is generally translated something like burden. So remember this, at the end of chapter 23, Jeremiah, I keep hearing you say, I have this burden. Don't say the burden of the Lord. Which sounds like a Pentecostal preacher. Right? This burden of the Lord to share with you. Nothing from Scripture, but I have this burden from the Lord. And God says, I forbid you to use that word burden again. It's actually the word oracle. [00:54:15] Speaker B: I think would be a better translation of that. So where else are you sending the people if not to my word? The oracle at Delphi, which I gather you've probably been at. Yeah. You know, to go to this. This man made, fluffed up, created man, created place to learn something from the gods or God. Shut up. God says, don't use that word. If you hear anybody use that word, what you tell them is, no, I want to know what the word from God is. What is the word of God? And that's what Pastor Wolfmuller and I are preaching about and talking about here today. That's where the comfort is to be found. Not strictly speaking, in your heart, not strictly speaking in your head, certainly not in your psychology. But it's to be found in God's word, which, as I think many people know, becomes part of our soul, our mind, and our heart, but only nisi per verbum, only through the Word. [00:55:23] Speaker A: So we don't say that God's word is true because, like, it matches up with some sort of conception of reality. No, God's word is truth. And, boy, the work of the Holy Spirit is to conform us to that word, to true us up in that way, to call us by the gospel and enlighten us with his gifts. That's beautiful. Well, Dr. Schultz, this is always a pleasure. I thank you so much for your time today. Chapter one. So that means, when is the book going to be published? What are we. [00:55:54] Speaker B: Well, thanks. So I can refer to it as forthcoming, because I do have a publisher. I have found that I need a little extra time to. [00:56:04] Speaker B: To write a shorter book. [00:56:08] Speaker B: You know how this goes. This is a Mark Twain quote we've used before. I would have sent you a shorter letter, but I didn't have time. [00:56:16] Speaker A: Yeah, right. [00:56:17] Speaker B: So this is. This is projected to be the first in a series of books that we're publishing from People associated with the Lutheran School of Theology. The plan, by the way, is in this series to produce the textbooks that are not being produced, but which. [00:56:37] Speaker B: The folks in Africa, because we are seeking to convert them all to Lutheranism, confessional Lutheranism, and a lot of people elsewhere. So our intent with my publisher is to publish a free PDF for all of the religious institutions in Africa, but to have a printed volume available, as my publisher's been putting stuff up on Amazon and all of that, to have that widely available. So I think the answer is, first, let me say, according to the Lord's condition in James, but I intend to have my writing done by mid to end of January because I. I have to go back to Africa and do some particular work there. And then it goes into the hands of my editors, who I already have. And I think that in Lent, certainly by Easter, it should be available. And if you and I want to have some more conversations, maybe make this a tease, maybe people don't have to read the book if they just hear. [00:57:42] Speaker A: Well, no, we're gonna. I want to read it, too. So I. Well, so we'll keep going and we'll lead up. This is the kind of part one of a launch party. Let's think of it that way. [00:57:50] Speaker B: So thank you so much. Yeah, yeah. [00:57:51] Speaker A: Thanks, Dr. Schultz. And thanks for everyone who's listening. Comment below. Of course, if you have questions about what we're talking about, put those down here. We'll try to address them when we come back to it. Thanks so much for listening, Dr. Schultz. Thanks so much for your time and all your work. [00:58:05] Speaker B: God's peace, very best, and his peace to carry, and your family and your folks in Austin, too. [00:58:11] Speaker A: Thank you so much.