[00:00:01] Speaker A: Hello, YouTube theologians. Pastor Brian Wolfmuller here, pastor of St. Paul and Jesus Deaf Lutheran churches in Austin, Texas. And I'm joined by Dr. Greg Schultz, who's professor at the Lutheran School of Theology in Kenya, teacher and professor there. Dr. Schultz, good to see you again. It's been too long. I'm sorry. That's my fault.
[00:00:17] Speaker B: Good to see you, brother. It is your fault and I'm so glad we're fixing that now. It's always a pleasure.
[00:00:24] Speaker A: We're going to spend some time on your essay SimonX 2.0, which puts forth this beautiful thesis that.
That the root of Simonex 1.0 was actually never identified. Well, it was identified, but maybe. But only by a few and not recognized. And that that root, that poison exists underneath, which is this assault on language. But maybe just to catch everybody up, we just finished celebrating the 50th anniversary of Simonex 1.0, which means that a lot of people might not know what that is. Could you very thumbnail sketch of what the issues were back then.
[00:01:00] Speaker B: Well, this is a little difficult for both of us. I'm trying to figure out our. Our relative ages. So I was in high school when the seminic stuff broke and you were a little bit younger than that.
[00:01:15] Speaker A: I was waiting to be born.
[00:01:17] Speaker B: Yeah. So I think the. The brief thing is there's plenty of stuff that people can look up online and in some worthwhile books that are not hard.
But Seminex took place at one of our two seminaries for the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, the one that you and I are most familiar with and where we have graduated from in one form or another is the one in Fort Wayne. The one in St. Louis, where our church body headquarters is located was the one where the Seminex happened. Seminex has become accepted terminology, but it was a little bit of a drama. Right. There was a lot of drama going on in the way this was handled by the people who were exiting from that seminary. And you know, when in doubt, if you can't give a lot of serious discussion to something and if you can't give yourself enough time to find a decent, decent couple of words to use, you end up with something like Seminex.
So it's the seminary exodus taken by people.
And feel free to. To flesh this out. Taken by people.
A majority of professors from that seminary, a large number of students.
So this would be seminary professors at St. Louis, students for the ministry at St. Louis with a. A great, almost papistic show of drama, left the institution in a huff as if The Holy Ghost were leaving because. And then here's pretty much the central issue, because the other people weren't following along with their notions of how to interpret, I'm going to say reinterpret how to interpret or reinterpret the biblical text.
And I think that's pretty close to the center of our concern. I know it's my concern with the essay. I don't have anything really to contribute to the historical stuff, but I'd like to be helpful on the philosophical, the analytical side of things. And that's why I think this thesis is urgently important.
[00:03:31] Speaker A: I do too. You identify. I mean, this is, it showed up for, especially for the lay people watching as the preachers were coming out and were saying things like the history of Jonah is mythological and there's the days of Genesis should be understood poetically and not historically. And this kind of higher critical interpretation of the biblical text, this is how that was showing up. But you point to a deeper explanation of it, and especially in this analysis of Dr. Markwort, my professor, and he's waiting for us to meet in the Resurrection, which is one of the things I'm looking forward to. But he, and I'm going to see if I can put it, put it on the screen here. He says it's important to see that. And you've highlighted this analysis a couple of times, and I think it's very, very helpful. It's important to see that the uncompromising supremacy of scientific reasoning in the critical method, so that's that way of reading the Scriptures which puts reason above the Scripture, is not an excess or an abuse which can somehow be tempered.
On the contrary, it is the essence of the method. So Dr. Markoward is saying, look, you can't say, okay, we can use a little critical method, but just don't use too much. He said, no, it's a completely different way of thinking, of imagining truth, et cetera.
And then he makes this profound point. Science has no room for privileged authority or sacrosanct texts.
And you've grabbed onto this profound insight from Dr. Marquardt and said that we just, we cannot move past that line so quickly. We, we have to understand what he's saying there. So can you, can you unpack that for us a little bit?
[00:05:16] Speaker B: Sure. So I think in, in referring to Professor Marquardt, I didn't have the opportunity to study with him personally, but I think we can speak of Kurt Marquardt, of blessed memory.
So he, he is somebody whose impact, as far as I can Figure out was not appreciated at the time, as often happens with, I think for some of us, with our very faithful pastors that we have, as, you know, young boys or girls, you just don't realize at the time how profound and wonderful and what a gift of God certain pastors and professors in particular are. And so I won't say it every time, but I, I think it's appropriate to talk about Kurt Marquardt of blessed memory.
Now, his analysis of Seminex was done not quite in real time, but very shortly after that overly dramatic walkout occurred.
And his, in my view, his analysis is as sharp as can be and was generally ignored by everybody, certainly after his generation.
Now the, the two things to mention that are right there on the surface of his quote are first of all, that he refers to the critical theory. Now this, this is going to slip by many of us because the term that's used almost all the time to talk about careful thinking today, you know, teaching careful thinking to the university students or doing careful thinking for whatever our topic is, people talk about critical thinking skills.
This is a bit of a lapse, actually, the term critical. And I think that Professor Marquardt caught part of this. He was, he was very well read. And if I, I hope this doesn't sound like an insult, he was very philosophically astute.
The word critical actually has been used since about the first third of the 20th century to refer to communist theory.
So from the Frankfurt School, critical theory, as in, and let's bring it up to contemporary times, as in critical race theory.
This is not good thinking. This is communist thinking, atheistic, methodical, Hegelian communist thinking.
So by, by quietly putting that in there, I think that Professor Marquardt was kind of reminding, you know, those of us with ears to hear that he senses that there's, there's some very deep stuff happening.
The other thing that he mentions in the quote, besides the historical critical method, and there's that word critical again, by the way. But the other thing that he mentions at the end of the quote you had up for us, is that science has no room for specialized or privileged authority there. We want to think about Jesus saying in the conclusion of Matthew's Gospel is where it's quoted, all authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth. Therefore here's what you are to do as my church, as my followers in the generations to come.
So Jesus is the authority that is left out of the natural sciences.
But he points out that it, it does not allow for sacrosanct texts either. And this is just an obvious thing. Anybody who doesn't acknowledge that just hasn't studied science or hasn't been awake for science class in eighth grade and high school. It does not have any room for sacred texts, especially the Bible.
Now the thing then is that I don't believe that Marcourt was talking about what we would call the hard sciences, though what he says is true of them too.
Physics has no room for privileged authority or sacred texts. But he was talking about what I, I think maybe he caught the development or the starting development of this, what we today recognize as the social sciences, psychology, gender studies, all, all sorts of things which have turned out to be quite a hole in the dike, no, probably a floodgate into American and also American Lutheran education for this kind of very thing that Marquardt was warning about.
So the hermeneutic, and let's, you know, define our terms, hermeneutic is fancy theological talk for interpreting, interpreting texts.
It's used, it has been used for a while for reading any text. Some people even talk about, you know, hermeneutics of body language is quite, quite distant.
But it was originally in theology.
Can we remind everybody that theology is not the same thing as reading the Bible?
So theology has to do with how we're going to organize our reading and teaching of the Bible. In other words, where we're seeing the doctrines, how they're taught, in what order, what structure. This is what you and I have in earlier conversations referred to as the Greek form of thinking that formed Western culture.
It forms our catechesis too, actually.
So the hermeneutics has to do with the biblical text in our conversation today.
And what Marquardt is saying is by using a critical and scientific methodology, these people who at least had the good grace to walk out of St. Louis eventually, these people were teaching a method that was antithetical to the Bible itself.
So it, it's breaking every, every rule and caution that we learn from the Scriptures in the first place. And we see distilled and emphasized in our Lutheran Confessions.
Scripture interprets scripture.
Social science is not apt for interpreting scripture. You can't come, as, you know, people used to say, you can't look through the lenses of psychology. You can't look through the lenses of cultural studies at the Bible and interpret the Bible through those lenses. The Bible speaks for itself and we need to have ears to hear. This is what is to be impressed upon the children in Deuteronomy 6.
So Marquart was not, I'm not saying just a prophet, but Marquardt was a sharp, pastoral, Lutheran biblical analyzer of the deep problem with what was going on at St. Louis. It's fundamentally a philosophy of language that profoundly affects the method or comes along with the method that Marquardt was calling out for us. In the quote you shared, I'm going.
[00:12:32] Speaker A: To look at three. I'd like to look at three paragraphs, if we could, in what you wrote that kind of highlights this because.
And maybe my own analogy that I'm thinking about is that if you. Just to give an example, if you have the seventh commandment, you shall not steal, there's two ways to break the commandment. One is to go and grab someone's stuff and take it. That's breaking the commandment. The other is to abolish private property.
There is no theft because you've actually broke the commandment. You didn't violate the commandment, you destroyed the commandment because you destroyed the thing that's under there. And I think that's what you're suggesting here. This is not a normal error like that's right or wrong. It's actually the destruction of the capacity to articulate right and wrong.
It's the rotting of. It's. It's this kind of corrosive element that takes away, well, human language as a gift from God.
That, that's at least the analogy that comes to my mind.
[00:13:32] Speaker B: It's a. It's. Even if we have to use our superlatives here, I suppose so it's even more profound than that.
It. In. In.
In talking about this, we could, I did, I think, refer to this in passing as a metaphysical error.
Now, in philosophical conversations, and I think we do this sometimes in just thoughtful conversations, if we say, you know, what is somebody's metaphysics? We're asking, what. Not just what is their worldview, but what's the foundation for their worldview?
What. What is the. The means by which you. We understand anything that we understand, right? What's. What's the basis?
[00:14:19] Speaker A: Right.
[00:14:20] Speaker B: And so this partakes of the way Jesus talks in the conclusion of his Sermon on the Mount to us all.
If you're building your. Your method, your approach, your philosophy of life, if you're basing this on a metaphysically flawed philosophy of language or understanding of language, this is as bad as it gets. Is as bad as it gets. That's because language is the very medium in which our Lord fellowships and communes with us.
Language is the medium.
It's also true that even if we step away from the lofty verbally inspired text of Scripture.
The language which is, you know, it's also language two, the language that we use to talk about the scriptures in theology or whatever.
This, this metaphysical fault destroys that as well.
So not only does it take away confidence in the word of God as the word, this foundational or metaphysical failure pulls the rug out from under the possibility of fellowship between human beings.
So we can't even understand, we can't even come to a, an understanding about what the problem is.
It's, it's like, it's like the, the Tower of Babel institutionalized, you see, that's it.
And I just, I just want to say one quick thing here so you can, can use this too as you see fit in our conversation.
Language cannot be destroyed.
So it's an interesting thing. I think, you know, maybe both of us just recently went through a study for Pentecost texts, you know, preparing for last week. And the Tower of Babel is in the one year, in the traditional one year pericope. That's the text from Genesis 11, when Luther talks about God coming down to frustrate the plans of people utterly to oppose him. He actually concludes that section after the Tower of Babel by saying, I know that most of us don't do this, but you should really continue reading in Genesis 11 into one of these lists of who was the ancestor of whom and whom came next and so forth. Because he said in this, God is showing us that he has not destroyed language.
And then when we, of course we can jump to the New Testament, which many of, of your listeners were thinking. I was going to say first, Jesus says heaven and earth will pass away, but my word will never pass away. I just offer this as a tie in to mention that a consequence of that promise of Jesus shows up in Luther's comment about the Tower of Babel.
God will not destroy language because he has to keep his promise. And I say has to because he wants to and has said so. He has to keep his promise that heaven and earth will pass away, but his word will never pass away.
So the problem is not reality. The problem is our massively flawed metaphysics, or to put it another way, an absolutely false anti biblical philosophy of language.
[00:18:02] Speaker A: You call it. This is, I think this is not the paragraph that I want to look at, but you call it, and I'm looking at on your website, lutheranphilosopher.com which is great.
My concern is with a powerful heresy targeting people, a heresy capable of miseducating people to such an extent that they despair of the meaningfulness of language.
So to identify this as despair, I think is really profound. But I want to, while we have the page up here, these 1, 2, 3 paragraphs I think would be great to walk through. What I'm arguing is that Simonek's heresy was not and is not just another instance of false doctrine. It was and is no ordinary explosion. It was a fire testing of a weapon of mass destruction that hit St. Louis in the 70s, a prototype of weapon of mass destruction that targets the very medium in which we read mark and inwardly digest God's word. As I teach regarding philosophy of language, language is what we would call philosophically a given, which is in reality a divine gift.
The foundational heresy aims to make us incredulous or disbelieving of the divine gift of language altogether.
So this thesis here is that what Simon X marked, what it was, was this foundational heresy working its way into the Church. And that foundational heresy is that there's an incredulity, an unbelief, and a despair of the gift of language.
And this is going to have profound effects not only on the way we, we read the Bible or look at the Bible, but all but the way that we think of ourselves, the way that we think of God, the way that we think of truth, reality.
It's just that profound.
And I think part of your thesis is that while Dr. Markwortz saw it, very, very few other people did. And so it wasn't dealt with at that foundational level.
[00:20:03] Speaker B: Yes, I'm also interested to pose the question how in the world could that be right? How could, how could such, such a foundational issue have escaped and, and been ignored all these 50 years.
How could that have escaped notice? And then you know that, that, that notion of despair is the reason that, that I referred in, in the initial essay that blew up in Concordia Mequon, I referred to the dysphoria at Concordia. So this kind of undercutting of language, which is part and parcel of woke Marxism, that's why this worked so well. Horrible to say why that worked so well today works so well in the U.S.
it's because of, of an acceptance of this metaphysically flawed notion of the divine gift of language. And I think too, just to add this in right about now, the, the, I would say the horror at the middle of this is that of all people, of all educational and theological institutions, we Lutherans, who are so well informed by God's grace of the means of grace, have not for apparently for over Half a century have not recognized that. What Marquardt was pointing out was that this, this basis for things is smart weaponry against the means of grace. If you can get rid of language, or since you can't do that, if you can get people to distrust and despair of language, then you can yammer on all you want about means of grace.
And what they're going to be hearing is that's just his interpretation.
[00:22:10] Speaker A: So I do not. This is the thing that we should be inoculated with. I mean, Luther himself says that the root and power of every heresy is enthusiasm, which is that move from the authoritative speaking of God's word to my own internal whatever, thoughts, impressions, the inside word. And so is the thing that we should be worried about.
So I. I can't answer for it, but I'm glad we're catching up. It took us 50 years. I want to.
[00:22:41] Speaker B: You go on to say, I wonder if we are. By the way, I. I'm. I'm grateful, as always, for the chance to reach the many folks that do listen to you, and I'm grateful beyond words for other people who are, you know, helping to put the word out on this. But. But we have not, as a church body, even been willing to hear this criticism from Marquart and then in a lesser but a more contemporary way, from me or anybody else.
[00:23:15] Speaker A: Well, I suppose, as the Lord wills. Well, we'll do. We'll keep doing our part.
[00:23:22] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:23:24] Speaker A: Now, this, by the way, this translation of Acts 17 is, in some ways, when I was looking at this, I thought we probably should spend a whole hour on this. But this goes back to some of the conversations that we've done before about.
About Aristotle's four causes and about Luther's theses on anthropology, which we're going to get into. But when Paul's preaching in Athens in Acts chapter 17, he says in him, we live and move and have our being. And in the Logos must be the original from the poem that he's quoting.
And so, and here's just this claim, plain translation, in language. We live and move and have our being, which is explicated. The atmosphere in which we live and exist as human beings is language. And you go on, and you've talked about this before, how Aristotle talks about humanity as the Logos creature, which means. So not only is our living and moving and having our being connected to language, but it is that we are also language people. This is. We are the Logos species. This is from Aristotle. And so this foundational idea that there is no meaning in language or that it is inaccessible to us is what you call here a heresy against humanity. Because it doesn't just strike at the word that is out there because we are worded creatures.
This is also the undoing of the reality of our, our own human nature.
And also that I was thinking, and I don't think you pressed this all the way, but I think it can be really quick here. It's the idea that language is part of our fellowship with God, which is in the next paragraph, which is so great that language is how the Lord comes to us. But when Luther says that man is justified by, by grace, that it is our capacity to be spoken to and of by God, that is our definitive reality and our doctrine of justification, it is our salvation.
And so all of those things are lost.
That we are created in the image of God, that we are true human beings, that we are forgiven and justified so that we can stand before the Lord on the last day. All of these fundamental realities are undercut when the Word and the what? When word is destroyed? When word is undone.
[00:26:11] Speaker B: Yes, Just a brief comment. I may not have written this as clearly as I thought I had the, I mentioned that I was paraphrasing Paul in that Acts 17 verse.
So the, the original is in him we live and move and have our being. And I was saying that's God, which we know because Jesus God is described as the logos in John 1. So that's why we could identify God as being the Logos incarnate. Now the, the line of thought that you're offering is of course, very helpful and very true. And I, I would just notice that our engaging in this conversation with you depends on our acceptance of the meaning of the words that we're using.
If, if I were to be sitting here, or if, you know, one of your YouTube followers were to be sitting or, or jogging along with the, you know, with the podcast here or something, and, and they were seriously thinking, well, language is meaningless. That would make you the background music to their running.
Right. It would not mean anything.
And this is the insidious character of it. Now, we can also say that wherever pastors like you are are, for instance, saying, as a called and ordained servant of the Word, I announce the grace of God to all of you and forgive your sins in the name of the Trinity, that that use of God's efficacious work is the antidote to this metaphysically flawed philosophy of language.
But now here's the, here's the rub.
If, for example, pastors are being taught to believe that language is meaningless, or it's just subject to what, however they want to interpret it, and no one gets to tell them they're wrong, then, you know, certainly the consequence is going to be they're not going to be using those words or using those words very much or using those words with the people who most need those in, let's say, private confession or after a catastrophe in the congregation and a given service.
So it's very difficult, it's very difficult to try to catch up to this after, what is this, two generations, 50 some years.
But my, my point is that this remains in the minds of a lot of people either unimportant to address or acceptable. And maybe that's both of those things are happening.
And, and so, you know, talk about shooting yourself in the foot.
And of course, it's much more serious than any metaphor I could come up with.
[00:29:13] Speaker A: It's, I always wondered why these liberal Bible professors, like at some point they have to realize that they're, they're, they're teaching their students that what they're saying doesn't matter.
I mean, it's just like, well, how long are you going to be able to sustain that? And I guess it's the same critique that Luther gives to the enthusiast. He says, they say that the Holy Spirit comes apart from the word of God. Well, then why don't they be quiet? Instead, they fill the world with their books. In other words, the devil uses words to fight against the word, which is the great irony. You argue, you track through this.
You have, oh, who do you have? You start with Descartes and you have Hume tracking down this postmodern move.
Hegel comes in there. But then you made the. And Nietzsche. But you made the really interesting point that in the late 20th century there is philosophers who are pushing back against this. You mentioned Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Gadamer, who I didn't know about.
If it's okay, I want to look at. That's a packed paragraph. Are you okay if we skip the Descartes and Hume stuff? Because I want to look at the anti. Descartes Hume stuff in this. And I also, and this is just a side note, for some reason my camera flipped sideways. I don't want anyone to think that it's like I'm doing this on purpose.
Do you see my face is backwards. I don't know exactly what happened. Oh, well, so here it says the oh so academic seminex professors who marched out of, who marched out of St. Louis Seminary were oh so ignorant of the powerful Case being made in the early and late 20th century against modernism's disdain of language. In the first half of the century, Ludwig Wittgenstein, a reader of the Lutheran existentialist thinker Soren Kierkegaard, dealt a body blow to modernism's dismissal of language with his Tractatus Logica Philosophicus, which is. Which we've talked about especially that last thing, that line that I remember where it says that science has to stop. What is the famous line that you would love to quote?
[00:31:25] Speaker B: So the line is whereof one cannot speak, thereof one ought to remain silent.
And I was at some pains to explain, and I know this is not the common interpretation, but this is the text that Wittgenstein is trying out in Tractatus to see if we can get at everything we need to humanly if we restrict language to scientific language.
So the. The way I explained we should be understanding that passage in context is the seventh and last proposition. It's the last sentence of that little book. Tractatus is then whereof one cannot speak of scientifically thereof one ought to shut up about scientifically.
[00:32:11] Speaker A: So good. And then Heidegger, who you have studied profoundly dutiful reader, the Greek New Testament, Luther's writer, he did not die in a couple much after Simonex, which I didn't realize that overlap he has his thesis language is the house of being of the human being.
[00:32:30] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:32:30] Speaker A: Is it. Can you even thumbnail that for us like what he was working on there?
[00:32:35] Speaker B: I can. And, and it's because I don't have to be rigorously argumentational about this one. It's more of a proverb.
So after, after his long discussion about this, he, he is.
Is saying for. For all of his work, especially in the first part of his career, but for all of his work on being. His first and most famous work is being and Time. You know that. Oh being. Lot of people think it's just about being. He actually in the second part of his work talked mostly about language. So language is. And here I'm going to give you a parallel as my explanation in a countryman of Martin Heidegger, who was a schmuck morally and politically. I'm just using Heidegger for some of his philosophy.
A contemporary of his was Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
So Dietrich Bonhoeffer a. A faithful Lutheran pastor and seminary professor and Lutheran martyr, Bonhoeffer says in the second chapter of his book Ethics that the concepts that were most important for Western culture, things such as what we today would call human rights and autonomy and, and so Forth.
They went homeless at the time of the Nazis, but they found there. And here's the word we need. They found their home in the church.
Found their home in the church.
So what. What I'm talking about here is actually a metaphysics of language.
Now language is absolutely necessary. So this is where I got my idea of saying language is the atmosphere in which we live and move and have our being.
What Heidegger is probably saying in this exact spot is that language is the place where we can take refuge as human beings. We're at home in language. I like mine because it's. Well, it can be a little more brutal. So if you don't want to depend on language, you know, you might as well go up into Earth orbit without any oxygen and see how well that works.
That's what we were talking about before with the dehumanizing of human beings by degrading their view of language.
[00:35:07] Speaker A: It's. I see this as an evolutionary move too. When you just say that human beings are beasts, advanced beasts, and there's no capacity for. For language there. It's just grunts and. And you are no longer human. I mean, that's. That's part of the.
[00:35:22] Speaker B: Yes, agreed.
[00:35:25] Speaker A: I do not know Hans Georg Gadamer. You probably mentioned him. I never was not paying attention. I don't think we've had a conversation. This is an amazing quotation, though. The cornerstone of Christian thought for our Lord's Incarnation is all the more important for us, because for Christian thought too, the Incarnation is closely connected to the problem of the Word.
So that you cannot have incarnation apart from Logos. It is only the Logos that becomes flesh and dwells among us. There's nothing else.
This is what's going on here. Now the broader argument that you're making is that, hey, so here our Simonex guys were a hundred years behind.
I mean, they were not paying attention to the philosophers who were realizing the emptiness of postmodernity. So they were grabbing it and then using it to corrupt and disrupt our theological thing. But can you like, tell me a little bit about Gadamer and what. How does he. What's he working on that this is his conclusion?
[00:36:30] Speaker B: Sure.
So just to say the obvious here, I feel that we are almost always thinking closer together every time we get together for a conversation. So I'm just going to tell you. I happen to have pulled up my copy of Gadamer's Truth and Method and I had it within reach here on my desk, just in case you would give me a chance.
So Truth and Method is is, I think, a wonderfully important book. What I, what I want to mention is I I believe, from what I understand, that the Seminex professors were having a bromance with the Romantic German theologians and philosophers from the 19th century. That's where the historical critical stuff comes from.
And what they seem to have failed to notice was the contemporary German scholarship, which I'm pointing to here. Now, I'm really happy to talk about Gadamer, but let me just offer this. So I recommend that folks be sure, first of all, to get the second revised edition.
It's more readable and generally better edited. So the second edition.
And then you just want to jump right to part three. If you're concerned about our conversation today, this actually does follow quite an investigation of hermeneutics generally. But in part three, it's called the Ontological Shift of Hermeneutics Guided by Language.
All right, so here with language there. And just listen to some of these headings. Okay, so language as the medium of hermeneutic experience, the development of the concept of language in the history of Western thought, and language as horizon of a hermeneutic ontology. I'm just going to skip the ontology for now. We'll talk about that some more another time if we want to. But under the development of the concept is where I took that quote from. And here are the three subsections under that.
Language and logos, Language and verbum, Language and concept formation.
It would have done a world of good assuming those professors were open to some instruction. It would have done a world of good for them and for their misguided students to have been assigned to read part two. Sorry, Part three, Section two.
Language and logos, which is what I quoted from, and language and verbum, which is the way our confessions talk about the logos, because verbum is the Latin term for logos and language and concept formation.
We almost certainly won't get at this today, but that there's actually a.
A way of talking about concepts as the metaphysical foundation within language.
So all of this is, I'm going to say, I think, pretty accessible.
And then, by the way, one of the observations that Gadamer makes, and it has to do with the context for the quote you were just sharing with us.
Gadamer says that actually it's a he didn't quite use the word providential in his term in his quote, but he said actually it's a very good thing that the Christians came on the scene as soon as they did for the sake of language, because the Greek Philosophers were starting to privilege private reasoning over public language.
And the Christians understood, because of the New Testament teaching us about the incarnation of the Logos, the Christians understood that language in itself, language in himself, if I can say it that way for a second.
[00:40:26] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:40:26] Speaker B: Wow. Language in itself is the big deal. It's not something behind it or underneath it or in our heads.
And. But see, so had they, had they only read, one would assume they'd be listening. Had they only read Gadamer or Wittgenstein or, you know, some of that stuff in Heidegger, they would have had an entirely different set of options.
[00:40:52] Speaker A: Oof, boy, there's two, there's. So there's two things that I'm working on that.
And you are bringing them closer together.
I just, I don't, I'm not.
Maybe I'll try. I'll throw them out there. So one is my unified theory of church history, which is to say that I don't know how fast I can get to this, but that we normally divide up when we look at the history of the church. Okay, super quick story. When I was a baby pastor, I was trying to do a conference with five different people coming together. So I had the Catholic priest, the Episcopalian lady pastor, Baptist, Calvary Chapel and me. We all went to Lupitas to have lunch. It was like a joke without a punchline. And the conference ended up happening, but the Episcopalian lady priestess asked, was asking about how long our sermons were. And the Baptist was like, ah, probably 45, 50 minutes. And the cavalry chapel was like, yeah, 50, 55 minutes. And the Catholic priest was like, ah, probably about four minutes.
And the lady was like, yeah, I'm about six or seven. And they looked at me and they, they said. I said, I don't know, maybe 22, 25, something like that.
And so this lady said, she looked at the, at the priest and she said, it's because you and I are from a sacramental tradition. And she looked at the other two and said, you guys are from a word tradition. And then she looked at me and says, I don't know what you are, actually.
So that concept in my mind of you have the sacramental tradition of the church and you have the word tradition of the church. And we Lutherans are like, no, you have word and sacrament. But here's the shift, the fundamental shift that I'm working through is that the essence of the East Orthodoxy and Catholicism is not that they have the sacraments, but that they don't profoundly have the Word.
So that they might have the sacraments acting ex opere operato their works. But the promise of the forgiveness of sins has been muted and diminished. And on the other side, it's not like the Catholics and evangelicals. I'm sorry, the evangelicals and the Baptists have the Word, but not the sacrament. They. Their essential thing is that they've minimized and muted the sacraments.
And the result is if you minimize the sacraments, you don't have the power of the Word. And if you minimize the Word, you don't have the efficacy of the sacraments. That these two things all go together so that the fundamental error that skews people off of our Lutheran church is the same.
It's to separate the Word from the element that's our sacramentum.
And then everything is lost. The efficacy of the Word is lost.
The benefit of the sacrament is lost. And so you have this sort of disembodied corpse of a church that's not really a thing. And so this idea that the Incarnation, the understanding of the Word such that it is incarnate, which is the.
Which is Christ for us is the life of the church, that presses forward. So I'm kind of working on that conception, and it seems like I would find some help in Gadamer. I don't know if you want to push back on that or if.
[00:44:11] Speaker B: Oh, I don't want to push back. I want to say, I think I'm hearing another series in the works here to put, to put another idea in your. Your knapsack of ideas for this.
Yaroslav Pelikan, who we know as quite the expert in Christian creeds from the end of the 20th century, he was called the dean of creeds. I've heard this. A former Lutheran, by the way, but that's a different story.
Yaroslav Pelikan said that he thought the entire history of the Mediterranean area could be done by giving a history of the olive.
Oh, now what I'm.
If that doesn't do anything, your listeners can just ignore it. I think that's a pretty provocative statement. You know, olive oil, olive, planting olive economically and, and how people prized or didn't price out how nutritious they are, whatever.
But I, I would say with our, in line with our conversation today, there is a, a book that's not all about this, but does touch on this by Richard Weaver called Ideas have Consequences.
Ideas have Consequences. This is on my very, very select little stack of books that we may use after. I have a reading group every week with. I call it the Lutheran Philosopher Readers Fellowship, where we are reading and talking about a book. So so far we're on our second book after three and a half, four years.
So this is a nice, nice slow, meandering discussion. We're reading Bonhoeffer.
It's likely we won't even finish him in 2026. But after that, one of the books I have on my get to this next stack is Richard Weaver's book Ideas and Consequences. Now here's what Weaver says.
Weaver says that you can understand a period of time when you discern what their philosophy of language is.
[00:46:29] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:46:30] Speaker B: So I'm thinking that this is an even bigger deal that probably within a study of various periods, you know, so what's important Platonic. In Platonic periods, this is what Greek philosophy was coming to, right, about the fullness of time.
What counts is only what's in the individual's head.
You know, ideas count or your, your technically your soul being in touch with ideas counts. This is, this is why Phil Carey in, in some passages we've mentioned in other conversations, this is why Phil Kerry, in writing about St. Augustine warns about a Platonic view of the scriptures, which is ties in with your sacramental and word thing.
If, if you hold a Platonic view that the soul matters not the body and the soul is somehow in touch with the idea of the good, for instance, then you don't care about the biblical scriptures, you don't care about the means of grace. Your name is John Calvin.
Yeah, see, so there, there may be something there, but this, this attention to how language, I'm going to say philosophy or metaphysics of language, this remains a critical, across the board, all the way down through history, relevant concern because of the things that you had been pointing out. I think Aristotle's right. Luther thought he was right to go by the start of his 1536 disputation concerning the human being.
As far as Aristotle got to say the human being is the logos being. That's why Luther can say to his congregation, what's the difference between you and a mule staring at the side of a barn?
That's what Luther's getting at. There were Logos beings act like a logos being. Right. Instead of a mule.
[00:48:30] Speaker A: I. Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to keep going.
[00:48:33] Speaker B: So, so this is, this is utterly huge. And from time to time, and we're in a mission critical time, we have to pull people back to repent of this metaphysical foundational error. The only way this can be done, of course, is through Scripture. And ultimately then I don't know if you want to pick it up this way.
But ultimately then the question is this.
Are our terms and our central concepts, for example, our theological concepts, our regular vocabulary too, are these tethered to Christ and His word or are they free floating?
And my argument, perhaps for another day, is that in the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod's administration, church words are untethered.
They're being used in the way the administration wants to use them. And this is worse than George Orwell. This is worse than George Orwell. It's worse because we should know better as means of grace people. And we do know better in our confessions and in the scriptures. But this is beyond irony.
This, this very worldly and anti logos philosophy of language is what we're practicing more and more and more.
[00:49:57] Speaker A: You and I, and I was trying to conceptualize this too. You, I mean you talk about this that we.
Heresy doesn't just.
Heresy is not something that you just use or say. It's something that takes you up into it.
[00:50:13] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:50:14] Speaker A: So, and this reminds me of the psalms that say the, the idols are mute and deaf and dead and those who make them become like them and so do all who worship them. That there's this, this sort of you become co opted into the heresy, maybe even that you're trying to fight against, but certainly that you confess it takes it up and it starts to use you.
I noticed this by the way. I'm trying to do some work against some of the racist ideology that's coming out online.
And my main thesis in these debates is that it's a reductionistic view of the human being. If you reduce a person simply down to their genetic code, then that's exactly what you've done. You've dehumanized them because now there is no longer any word.
And that the terms that the Bible uses, genos and ethnos and Laos and people and language, that these, they can have a, a natural element to them, but they also have a confession to them. Which means I can go from being gentile to being of God.
I can join myself to the people of God and now I am also of him, so that he gives us, he makes us a new Ganos, is what Peter says. And so this reductionistic view of the human being down to lineage and genetics is, has that fallacy of taking away this great gift that God has given, that we're Logos creatures.
[00:51:52] Speaker B: Right. So I love your, your Old Testament, your use of the Old Testament there. I was thinking, I think I said this in the essay, that the thing with heresy is that in The New Testament, it's often handled by the apostles as a middle passive concept. So that means, you know, there's. There's an element of it in which you, as the person doing it, are passive. You're being hit by something, assaulted by something, but at the same time, you're promulgating it. Right. So you get to the point then where the heretic.
The heretic is not just a victim, but is, well, a heretic. He's proclaiming.
He's proclaiming what he swallowed hook, line, and sinker.
And I like that grammatical warning. But, you know, your reminder from the Psalms and the prophets is huge.
[00:52:49] Speaker A: It's a pathogen, and you become the carrier.
You mentioned Carrie and this book, which I had not seen.
Is Carrie also the guy who wrote the Spirit of Protestantism or something like that? Do you know that text?
[00:53:05] Speaker B: He has a couple titles close to what. What Christians Shouldn't Worry About. You know, a couple popular things like that. I know him through his writings on Augustine and. Oh, and then, by the way, if people are still making use of this online resource that used to be called the Great Courses series, I'm not sure if they're using the same title. Carrie was the spokesperson for the series introducing people to Luther, and it's called Gospel Something. He's been at Fort Wayne as a speaker, so no doubt some things are on video from them.
And interestingly enough, he's not Lutheran.
Some guys have been telling him, well, you really are kind of a crypto Lutheran. But no, he's not. He's an American Anglican.
[00:53:51] Speaker A: I think he came up in a conversation with a Baptist pastor this week. It was actually amazing.
But here you have his idea that there's two philosophies that he identified. External efficacious means of grace and expressionist semiotics.
[00:54:09] Speaker B: Yeah, those are his terms.
[00:54:10] Speaker A: And then this, I think, is your thing. So it was amazing to me to see Aquinas and Luther together and then Augustine and Calvin. I guess it shouldn't be a surprise.
[00:54:19] Speaker B: But, you know, those pairings I learned from Philip ii.
And I think he's correct.
Yeah.
[00:54:28] Speaker A: The efficacious means of grace. This is what I mean. Wow. This is the recognition that biblical text itself is meaningful and effective. The text. We could say the text. What we say the sacrament of Holy Communion. There's a real presence here. God is present, speaking in, with, and under the text of Holy Scripture. It's infallible. Efficacious words of the biblical text are the means by which God himself does the work among Us.
This is so profound. And so I just don't know Aquinas well enough. But it's an amazing thing to say. Aquinas was there and then Luther. The opposite or opposing view. Expressionist semiotics. The view that the biblical text is nothing but signs to be decoded.
That what really counts as what's going on in each individual soul or mind.
This is the, I mean, Calvin makes this, oh, this really profound error that there's two kinds of calls, the external and the internal. And it's the internal that matters. And, and the Platonic.
[00:55:23] Speaker B: Platonic, yep.
[00:55:24] Speaker A: And the Lutherans say you do that, you make God a liar. I mean, and this is the division. Luther.
So it has to do with our individual inner convictions.
The Neoplatonic view. Here you say, so this is a, this is so helpful, Dr. Schultz, to just have these so right next to each other and say, okay, you know, choose this day whom you will serve. But you're saying, here's the Simon X error. We should be here. I mean, this is so obviously our confession, but we've slid down here. And I have a theory that, I mean, you point to the formula of Concord. The formula of Concord is our inoculation against Calvinism and all these things. And because we just have this, I don't know, especially in the mid century Luther revival that we started to despise the formula of concord. And it opened up our theological immune system to be vulnerable to these things. My pet theory.
So you have these two choices. And the church of the Small Catechism, the church of the Scriptures, recognizes the word of God as the efficacious means of grace. Which means not only is there no place for this despair on language, but it's the exact opposite. It's our hope, our peace, our joy is not only in the reality of language, but then the reality that the Lord speaks to us in such kind ways in the gospel.
So thoughts on the two ways that you put forth here?
[00:56:59] Speaker B: Anytime that you hear the word semiotics, you are listening to somebody who is holding to the foundational error.
And we, we do have. Actually, I think this may be the only hermeneutic biblical interpretation book officially available in our church body.
We do have a book and it's still being touted this way online. Nobody has refuted this called what does this Mean? That talks. And I, I would like to say a rather befuddled way about semiotics.
When you hear semiotics, you know that, that this person does not have a biblical view of language.
So Semiotics. And I, I like the way Carrie adds expressivist. It has to do with expressing your own perceptions, opinions, looking at things through this lens and that lens.
The very thing that the seminex professors and their followers and their still existing professors and followers were doing. And, and this has been carried over into a book, uttered into, uttered. Provided in two editions and not, not rejected, but celebrated in both of our seminaries.
[00:58:21] Speaker A: Yeah, I wonder what we can do about that. I remember I, I was supposed to read that by Dr. Veltz. What does this mean as a hermeneutics text? And I started reading this is not a Christian book. I mean, this. And so I, I didn't get past the first ten pages. I'm sure my, I didn't turn in a book review or whatever, but we, we should.
Yeah, we. There probably needs to be some action taken on this. And. Well, and maybe I always. My plan was to provide an alternative, which was to build a hermeneutics text based on Luther's exposition of the last words of David and say, here's how Luther teaches us to read the Bible and let's just learn our hermeneutics from that.
It seems better.
So are you familiar with this Mark Matty's text, Luther on Beauty?
[00:59:17] Speaker B: I think I heard about it. No, I'm not sure I heard about it, but no, I haven't. Haven't read it.
[00:59:22] Speaker A: So maybe we'll. That might be something to look over because I wonder if he provides a deep dive into Luther's philosophy of language. Well, maybe not a deep dive. He provides a dive into Luther's philosophy of language. And I think it's helpful and I think it's a good.
I think it's a good counterweight actually, to semiotics.
So your point is. Look, we have Simonex. All this philosophy of language creeps in there. We think we get rid of Simonex because they walk out. But we publish in 2000 a text that has the same problems in it. What does this mean?
And this is now showing up in all these practical ways, is that the texts are just being whatever I want to do with it, that's what I'm going to do with it. This approach to the text, rather than humble reception of the truth of the text and the prayerful thoughtfulness about what it is for us and what the Lord is doing with it. The text becomes a tool to, I guess, get what we want.
[01:00:27] Speaker B: It becomes an occasion for people to say whatever they want to say.
So to use the term, and maybe you had in Mind to bring this up in a little bit, but this is postmodernism, which was celebrated in that book we are lamenting from our church's publishing house and used in both of our seminaries.
So the notion of postmodernism is also a topic you and I have had a couple of good conversations on. This is not a period in history. This is a certain anti intellectual stance.
And the arch example of this is Jacques de Redat. Now, I quote him and I actually say this is what the foundational heresy is. Do you have one of those quotes there? You were getting set.
[01:01:15] Speaker A: I've got it here. First, I have no stable position on the text you mentioned. This must be an interview that he did.
[01:01:21] Speaker B: That's right. This is the only way you can hear Derrida actually saying things that people can follow. Because he's so serious about language being meaningless and being able to do whatever he wants with it. Nobody gets to correct him. That's the way he writes. Must have been a horror to be editing him, though. You could make a lot of money, so. That's right. Did you want me to read this or do you want to just read it for us?
[01:01:42] Speaker A: Yeah, for. For me. I'll. Yeah, you give it to us. That'll be great.
[01:01:46] Speaker B: So to say it again, this is derida. And this is during a United States lecture and round table discussion where he was asked and the interviewer insisted on an answer to this question. And you'll notice it's all about the Bible.
First, I have no stable position on the texts you mentioned, the prophets and the Bible.
For me, this is an open field and I can receive the most necessary provocations from these texts as well as at the same time from Plato and others.
In Specters of Marx. I try to reconstitute the link between Marx and some prophets through Shakespeare. Doesn't that sound like fun?
This does not mean that I am simply a religious person or that I am simply a believer. For me, there is no such thing as religion. Within what one calls religions, Judaism, Christianity, Islam or other religions, there are again, tensions, heterogeneity, you know, different things, disruptive volcanoes, sometimes texts, especially those of the prophets, which cannot be reduced to an institution, to a corpus, to a system.
Now it. You'll notice that what he's saying depends on us understanding the normal understanding of the terms that he's using.
[01:03:08] Speaker A: Right.
[01:03:09] Speaker B: That does not matter to him. And he's saying this about Scripture. So this is, you know, what Pastor Wolfmiller has been saying is self falsifying. But it's. And I don't care.
It's in your face.
I want the right to keep. I want to keep the right to read these texts in a way that has to be constantly reinvented.
Do we know of any text being constantly reinvented? How about the bylaws of the Lutheran Church, Missouri Senate?
Also.
Also how about the way that important documents about teaching and procedures at universities like Concordia University, Wisconsin?
How about those documents that include the mention that the policies stated herein may be adjusted at any time with notification or with no notification whatsoever by the administration or the Board of Regents.
It is something back to Der, which can be totally new at every moment. Then I would distinguish between religion and faith. If by religion you mean a set of beliefs, dogmas or institutions, the church, for example, then I would say that religion not only can, but should be deconstructed sometimes in the name of faith.
A quick note that may not be very important for, for many people, but I just want to mention it. Deconstruction is actually a.
A good device originally. So In German philosophy, 20th century German philosophy, to deconstruct would mean to get rid of the commentaries, the barnacles, the assumptions surrounding a text, and study the text itself and Gadamer talk about it. However, when French philosophers like Dera Da get a hold of this, it means to burn it to the ground. It means to exercise the nuclear option. It means to have a China syndrome and utterly destroy the text and rebuild what you want to.
That's the point.
So, yeah, so that's Derrida. That's his.
[01:05:21] Speaker A: Tell me, tell me about why this is. I mean, because this sticks out to me. I want to. Which I didn't notice the first time I was looking at. I want to keep the right to read it. So this is somehow about my own rights?
[01:05:31] Speaker B: Yes.
Isn't that interesting? I have a right to tell you whatever I want to tell you. Well, well.
So it's interesting that this comes from the nation of France, which doesn't actually have rights.
But.
So David says that.
And that's why I say there's an enthymeme here.
There's a. An unspoken proposition or statement as well.
I want to keep the right to read these texts and nobody gets to tell me that I'm wrong.
Right. So I can do what I want to do. And this is a major concern in the 21st century Lutheran churches of America, including our own church body, and that is the quashing and suppression of anybody who wants to point out that on the Basis of scripture and, oh, I don't know, the formula of concord, what is being done is wrong, and every resource is summoned to defeat the person who is bringing up that objection. For the good of the church.
We have hamstrung. No, we have paralyzed an entire generation of students in Lutheran colleges or universities now from being able to engage in disputation, in Lutheran disputation and to discuss reasonably and textually. This is true and this is false.
What. What Lutheran graduate from a Lutheran university would be able to stand up and talk for 20 minutes about any statement in Luther's 95 theses?
What? And you know what? Among us pastors, how many of us would be able to do that?
[01:07:26] Speaker A: Well, I could talk for a few minutes about my favorite where. Where Luther says, if the Pope can forgive people, get people out of purgatory, why doesn't he do it because he loves them instead of charging them all this cash.
[01:07:37] Speaker B: Yes, right.
And. And my favorite. Yeah, and I would. I'd be delighted. But that's.
[01:07:45] Speaker A: You're.
[01:07:46] Speaker B: Oh, man.
[01:07:46] Speaker A: I, I think I have talked for a couple hours about the 95 theses. But your point, your point is well taken. We don't, like, these texts are our lives and these. And it's not just life. These texts are our eternal lives. And that.
And that they.
They.
There's something more going on than just, you know, someone writing that we are shaped by these things that, that. I mean, this is who we are. Logos, creatures. So we cannot.
We cannot concede this despair that there's no word anymore. I. I had this picture of.
Oh, boy. Here's my analogy is that if one day we all woke up and there was no more words, like, physically, every word had just been erased.
And how you could survive for a little bit, like, you could get to church or get to work because you knew the way to go.
The stop sign still had the shape of the stop sign, even though it didn't say stop. So you would stop there and you would go. But then you'd go home on the way from the way home, and you'd buy dinner, but you're not sure. Like, did I get the.
Did I get cereal or did I get like, dishwasher fluid or whatever? Because it doesn't. It's not labeled. And I would. I think this is a 20. But the lady would say, it's a five. And then when I'd have to go to somewhere else, I couldn't read the street. And then you would start to. Everything would start to devolve and devolve and devolve. So the point is that when the word's erased, you can make it on the momentum of the word for a couple of days, but then it starts to devolve into pure chaos and into jungle rules.
And that I think this is seemingly what postmodernity has done. It's erased the words, but we're surviving on the momentum of the memory of the word. Like, I look at you and say man, and I look at someone else and I say woman. But post modernity, you know, wants to erase those words. I'm not supposed to think those things, but I still can recognize it. So there's some momentum, but it doesn't last for long. And it's headed towards the jungle.
And that's the, that's the great danger.
[01:09:51] Speaker B: Oh, we're in the jungle.
It, it can get worse, and it probably will. The, the, the, the lovely part that, that you're bringing in here is that we do not have to despair.
But the question is, what's the remedy? And the only answer to that is language.
And, and it's, and it's again, I'll just come back to that, what I've been working at for my Bonheur conversations.
If, if these concepts, words, if these concepts are homeless, politically homeless in terms of society, they, they do find a place in the church. But what if, if you want a real Stephen King version of your thing there, what if the church refuses to give a home to the biblical concepts?
What, what if the church doesn't want to stay tethered to Christ, who is the origin of language, who is the Logos himself, Right?
And this is the concern.
So maybe we should despair of institutions, but out of love for those institutions, if they can still be saved, and certainly out of love for Christ and out of gratitude to our Lord, who has brought us and made us his own in baptism, we need to use and share and teach the Word, the Word of Christ.
And then I'm going to add, if we're going to presume to be providing higher education and seminary education, we have to teach how language is tethered to our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, the Logos. And if you slip that mooring, if you slip that mooring, the things that we have mentioned, the dehumanizing of human beings, a crime against humanity itself, all of that, all of that takes place and the blood on our hands for that sort of thing, you see, because we're talking about people who are also, as churchmen or as church institutions are promoting this foundational heresy, right?
So How. How are we going to find anything to wash that blood off?
How can you do that?
So it's, it's a very serious thing. But let me come back to your main point.
We do not have to despair because as Jesus says, heaven and earth will pass away. But not my Word.
You use My Word, and this is where you'll find salvation.
[01:12:35] Speaker A: It's going to be, it's actually, I think, quite hopeful. If you can imagine my blurred world where the only place where you can see a word is when you go into church. And, and this now is a drawing thing and a hopeful thing. Well, may God grant. I mean, Jesus says this. My sheep hear my voice. They.
We know that not only do we know that the Lord comes to us as the Word and speaks to us in the Word, but the things that he speaks are unbelievably gracious and kind, and he forgives our sins. And that, you know, that word stands so well, may God grant it. Dr. Schultz, thank you for this. So lutheranphilosopher.com, the article is there. You make some.
I mean, just. It's wonderful. And there's links there. Except for the carry book is not linked there. This is my complaint about your web developer.
[01:13:27] Speaker B: All of that comes down to me. I've mentioned Carrie so much. He's pretty easy to find, I think. I think in the original of this, there were embedded links and I would be the one to blame for missing that. Editors catch some pretty obvious stuff that I do.
But I also wanted to mention that this is also available in a print copy on Amazon.
[01:13:47] Speaker A: Yeah, I have that Christian News Phil sent it to. I don't know if he sent it to everybody. He sent it to me.
[01:13:52] Speaker B: I think it's. It's being sent out pretty widely by Christian News, which continues to serve as kind of a Paul Revere or watchdog on things. And as far as, as I would say, a very welcome outlet to get word out to people who do still have ears to hear on these important issues.
[01:14:14] Speaker A: Yeah, it's good. I appreciate you working on this. Next time. We got this. How this shows up in our. Oh, boy, our church, the Missouri Synod, Inc. And the Synod missionary stuff. We'll talk about that, too.
But we'll hold that one off to next time and we'll rejoice that. Well, what. That here we are, we have an opportunity to talk about how language is sustaining and hopefully this conversation, all you YouTube theologians watching this, this conversation is sustaining and helpful for you as well. So any last thoughts, Dr. Schultz?
[01:14:47] Speaker B: Well, what a great exercise of, of hope in the midst of despair.
So your folks can tell that language is inherently meaningful and they can tell that we've been breathing in and out the Word of God as well with this.
So we do give thanks to the Lord. I'm just going to add this for myself.
We cannot let up and assume that all of this is going to sort itself out.
This will be happening, that is that the, the saving work of God is going to be done in pastors such as in congregations such as Pastor Wolf Millers, where you can plainly hear that the word is used all the time.
But I think there's good cause to worry about our educational institutions where, where things are put between the Word and our seminary students are between the Word and our university students and in some cases by people who are consciously or unconsciously very committed to the foundational heresy.
[01:15:56] Speaker A: Yeah, it's good warning.
Again, it's a good work for us to do to be thinking about this. Thank you so again, thank you so much for your work. And God be praised.
If you're interested in ordering the book, looking at the articles, joining the reading group, learning about the Theological School of Theology in Kenya, that's
[email protected] that's all there.
[01:16:17] Speaker B: God's peace be with you. Yeah, it'd be very easy to find lutheran philosopher or lutheranphilosopher.com or you can toss in Scholson, Lutheran philosopher. You'll find us.
[01:16:26] Speaker A: God be praised. Thanks again.
