Note: Can I Say This at Church is produced for audio listening. If able, I strongly encourage you to listen to the audio, which has inflection, emotion, sarcasm where applicable, and emphasis for points that may not come across well in written word. This transcript is generated using a combination of my ears and software, and may contain errors. Please check the episode for clarity before quoting in print.
Paul Thomas 0:08
It's more helpful to look at the spirit of it King Cyrus from Persia is probably the most underlooked, most important, human in the formation of all civilization in some ways. The innovation that he brought over Babylon and Assyria when you’re read in your Bible, these were extraordinarily brutal kingdoms-and along comes Cyrus. So the typical thing to happen when during a coup say or when you're a conquest maybe is the better word. You kill the king, you kill their kids, you convert people to your language to your religion, you force assimilation. And the innovation to empire that Cyrus brought was radical acceptance. In fact, as you probably know, he's the guy who freed the Jews from Babylonian exile (he) gave them a choice, you want to stay here, stay here. You want to go? Guess what, you can go back to Jerusalem, all open the Royal coffers, you can use my money to build rebuild the temple. In fact, we're going to have you know, cedars from Lebanon cut down. We're going to have Phoenician sailors bring the wood for you. He was like, you want to worship your God, you worship your God, ask him to bless me while you're at it.
Seth Price 1:42
Everybody, welcome back. I am Seth, this is Can I Say This At Church podcast. Very, very pleased you're here. I welcome back my good friend Paul to the show today. And we talk a bit about Christ and the Messiah and the titling of that. And I can promise you, you're going to hear some things that you're not used to hearing. And some things that I think will open some doors, at least they have for me, with the way that I view, really the prophets. It has been a word that I've been working through recently, it's been an apocalypse for me. So talking with Paul on some of these things, and the concept of Christ and the Messiah. Those are just huge, huge things. And so stay with me.
A little bit of editor's note here, Zoom had a bad day. I don't know what was happening. But you're going to hear a few fits and starts and stops. And I did my best to fix those up in the edit. But being that I'm not a professional. It just maybe didn't happen. So bear with me on that.
And then one last call. So this is the last week for anything sold in the store to go to benefit 100% #BlackLivesMatter. So if that's something that you felt like doing, do, please do so. Here we go with Paul Thomas Dařílek.
Seth Price 3:33
All right, here we go. I'm gonna try the last name Paul. And I'm gonna leave this in the mix because I want to be authentic and honest with people. So Paul Thomas Dařílek. Did I say it right.
Paul Thomas 3:41
You said it very well, almost as well as my grandma would have.
Seth Price 3:45
But did I say it correct though?
Paul Thomas 3:47
He did as far as I know. Now. People correct me on my own name. Grandma says it’s Dařílek. Daří means “good luck”. Lek means “he who has”.
Seth Price 3:58
Oh, I like that. Well, either way. Welcome back to the podcast. I think I've been begging you to come back on for like a year and a half. So I'm glad that we finally did this.
Paul Thomas 4:07
So glad to be here. It's good to see your face on this Zoom machine.
Seth Price 4:10
Yeah, thank God for Zoom. Right? Like that's the world that we live in, or things like Zoom? It's not what's the word that was gonna say Overton window. It's not that it's basically the window, though, for how people communicate. So it's definitely not the Overton Window though. That's a different thing altogether. But what have you been up to? So it's been like two years since you were on the show, what’s new?
Paul Thomas 4:28
Goodness gracious, what's new? I've mostly been trying to make a living and trying to be a good dad, good husband. I'm working on a book that I'm ghostwriting for somebody that I'm really excited about. And it's kind of fun to be doing it in this moment. It's a book about the global church. And as we were talking about before the call there's some things about this pandemic, as inconvenient as it is, that have accelerated certain aspects of being the body of Christ in potentially interesting ways. We're Gonna see what it's like in the long haul? That’s mostly been doing these days.
Seth Price 5:04
Yeah, ghostwriting, one of these days, people get to read what you've written.
Paul Thomas 5:09
My wife and I have agreed that 2021 is the year. I've got half written manuscripts of about five books near completion. It's gonna be fun when they all start coming back out. And I hope to be back for each of them Seth.
Seth Price 5:26
What do you mean you? Oh, you mean on the show? I was like, where would you go? Where would you go? Yeah, well, one of those and then just so thank you again, for sending a while back, you sent me one on the concepts of the Cosmic Christ. Now it was a PDF form. So it's formatted a little weirdly, but I found myself fascinated and both captivated with it. And I've tackled the cosmic Christ, and read a bit about it in different scenarios.
But it was different than what you approached with. So can you just, in brief, I want to talk to you a bit about the cosmic…in brief, we're talking about Christ..so when you say cosmic Christ, and when you've been writing about cosmic Christ, and knowing that no one has read what you wrote, well, few people probably have read what you've written. What are you getting out there when you say cosmic Christ? And kind of how does that relate to the way that we view Christ today?
Paul Thomas 6:17
The challenge here, Seth, is going to be in brief. (we both laugh) But to contextualize for the listener a little bit. The book i'd shared with you previous even to that one was a big book that I've been working on for a decade, The Butterflies in God's Stomach (listen that here), which is a poetic retelling of Scripture’s story, from in the beginning-to all things new. And that's been my labor of love that I've been working on it. And it's an adventure through Scripture following a stream of water that flows from Genesis to Revelation reflecting God's love all the way. And there are certain episodes that I took a very poetic approach to it. And a literary agent suggested she said, “you know, a lot of these poems might make interesting standalone books”. So I started pulling out some of those poems, and their poems on the big topics, incarnation, resurrection, Pentecost, and drawing them out; and cosmic Christ was one of them.
And so I had this cosmic Christ poem, but I wanted to also offer a more straightforward explanation of the concept of the cosmic Christ in Scripture, as well as a little unpacking of how that was seen through Hebrew eyes, Roman eyes, you know, most early Christians were converts. So what does this sound like to Greek ears? And at the same time, also, remember you may have read Richard Rohr’s book came out I was so I was super excited for that. I'm a huge Richard Rohr fan, love the man. What was it called…Universal Christ?
Seth Price 7:53
I have it, I've yet to read it. I own it. I just have not read it.
Paul Thomas 7:56
It's lovely. And it's written, I think of father Richard Rohr, as a true spiritual adept. It's kind of written by a dude who's 1000 steps along the way. That's not to say it goes over my head, it's a lot of things, I think, are very elementary to him that he didn't bother to unpack. So you end up with feeling like, you know, “I'm the Christ, you're the Christ, my dog is the Christ”! You can come out of it with a little bit of a “woowoo feeling”. And I'm not closed off to woowoo stuff. The book resonates probably great to for people who've just tried psychedelic mushrooms for the first time. And they're like, yes! But I thought that it just lacked a little bit of rootedness, um, that I would have liked to have seen. So I added that to the book that I bounced off of you and have since rewritten.
So I don't know how we want to look at that. But one approach might be just to unpack the roots of the term cosmic Christ, or the Christ and follow it all the way forward. And if we do that, I think that provides a interesting trajectory of what we mean when we say the Christ. But what we also mean when we say, when we talk about, Jesus of Nazareth, as Christ. Does that sound good?
Seth Price 9:19
Yeah, that sounds great. And if I remember, right, and it's been like, what a year? I feel like it was last fall when you sent that. I feel like that's what you did there to like, I think you went back to the concept of Christ and like, drilled it all the way back to like pre-Israel or pre… (you) drilled it all the way back in history. And pre-Israel's probably not right. So can we start there? Because I think that that concept is what fascinated me the most.
Paul Thomas 9:39
Yeah, it goes right back to the very roots of Israel. So Christ, as many listeners I'm sure know, isn't Jesus last name. It's our translation of the word that means “the anointed one” just means anointed. So the Hebrew word for the Anointed One, I don't pronounce Hebrew well, I just know if you put (sound of throat noise thingy) in there, some people will believe you. Messiah (pronounced this way). But it's the word from which we get the word, Messiah, the same word in Greek. So if you're writing in the New Testament writing Greek, the same word is Christós, it just means anointed. So the Christ, the Messiah, the Anointed One, they're all the same word. And originally, they just refer to the King of Israel.
When Israel, beginning in the beginning, there was an anointing with oil, a literal oil, anointing on the head, and then that is the anointed one that symbolizes God's favor. So then, in the time of David, you can read in your Bible, God promises Israel, that there will be an anointed one in the throne for all time. And for 400 years, that was the case. And so for all that time, the Anointed One, the Messiah, the Christ, just meant “the king”. It was, um, you know, a religious and political role.
But then, you know, 400 years later, along comes Babylon. And you know, the story, there's the whole exile. So in 589 BCE, Babylon invades Judah, they destroy Jerusalem, burn the temple, remove the Davidic King from the throne, gouge out his eyeballs, and torture his children to death, right in front of him, and then gouge out his eyeballs to make sure that's the last thing he's ever seen. So you can just imagine the crisis now of faith with God's promise that there will always be an anointed one. So certain streams of the Hebrew tradition, well they were trying to ask themselves, "how can we make sense of this now?” And this the focus shifts from Anointed One in the throne, to the coming of a future Anointed One of the Lord.
And as many know, that Anointed One of the Lord is announced by the prophet Isaiah, as King Cyrus. So a Persian king from Zoroastrian Persia is being proclaimed by the most prominent Hebrew prophet of the day, as God's Anointed One. There is a tangent, we could go down on that one because some people very inaccurately correlate that to Trump.
Seth Price 12:17
Yeah, really? Yeah, let's go…what! Say that again? Yeah, let's go down that.
Paul Thomas 12:23
You want to?
Seth Price 12:25
Yeah. What?
Paul Thomas 12:26
You know, in seeing some of Donald Trump's less Christian looking behavior, a lot of Christians, some strands of Christians, said, “Well, you know, the Lord can use anyone. Just look in the Bible. The Lord used pagan Cyrus for his ends”. And that is true, it's more helpful to look at the spirit of it. King Cyrus from Persia is probably the most underlooked, most important, human in the formation of all civilization in some ways. The innovation that he brought over Babylon and Assyria when you’re read in your Bible, these were extraordinarily brutal kingdoms-and along comes Cyrus. So the typical thing to happen when during a coup say or when you're a conquest maybe is the better word. You kill the king, you kill their kids, you convert people to your language to your religion, you force assimilation. And the innovation to empire that Cyrus brought was radical acceptance. In fact, as you probably know, he's the guy who freed the Jews from Babylonian exile (he) gave them a choice, you want to stay here, stay here. You want to go? Guess what, you can go back to Jerusalem, all open the Royal coffers, you can use my money to build rebuild the temple. In fact, we're going to have you know, cedars from Lebanon cut down. We're going to have Phoenician sailors bring the wood for you. He was like, you want to worship your God, you worship your God, ask him to bless me while you're at it.
And in that increased openness in that opening of borders in that accepting of other religious traditions, other ethnicities. It's that radical acceptance and wide embrace that made Cyrus who he was. Draw your own conclusions regarding whether or not the current administration is opening that embrace to immigrants and foreigners more or not.
Seth Price 14:44
Yeah. Well, and it also seems similar to the way that in the New Testament Rome as their conquering one, not necessarily in the New Testament, just in history. They would show up and be like you worship wherever you want to worship. It's just Caesar's also God, but you do what you want to do on the side just as long as we're cool, that I'm also God. You do what you want to do, wherever you want to do it.
Paul Thomas 15:01
Totally you can draw a line Rome inherits that from Cyrus. Yeah. In the epithet, the great, Alexander the Great took that indifference to his hero. Pompey the Great is the Roman conqueror who conquered Judea and then incorporated Judea into Rome. And he, you know, he took the same epithet as Pompey the Great an imitation of Alexander the Great an imitation of Cyrus the Great. So that’s Messiah for awhile.
Seth Price 15:30
Huh. So…
Paul Thomas 15:31
Go ahead.
Seth Price 15:32
So how does a messiah then get converted from a foreign King coming in liberating people, allowing them to worship, into a I'm going to have my own king that is not a foreign King? Like how does that get converted into that?
Paul Thomas 15:48
Right, right.
So really all they're saying all what Isaiah is principally saying is, here's the one…and by the way, the Babylonian prophets of Marduk were saying the same thing. There are similar Babylonian writings where the prophets are saying, “Here he comes! The liberator! The liberating king!”
Seth Price 16:09
of Cyrus.
Paul Thomas 16:10
They were saying this of Cyrus. Because word on the street was, and they would hear this in Babylon, which was everybody thought it was too big to fail, and too well fortified to fail. My favorite story how Cyrus got in was, Herodotus says that his men diverted the Euphrates River, they went in under left, the city walls gaping, went under, and took over the whole city while the King of Babylon was drunk. And there was no bloodshed whatsoever. You can always look to Herodotus for the most fun version of stories and when you know many were accessible to him.
So anyway, all they're saying at that point is here comes our liberator, he is anointed by God to liberate us. They're liberated. And then it kind of becomes a question of where does the tradition go from there? So Cyrus is the Christ, but in no way does it feel like our story ends there. And so we start to see, through the prophets, and through visions like those of Isaiah, we start to see, think of his wheels in the sky vision. Intersecting wheels that move at speed of thought, wherever his thoughts go, there it already is. And it's filled with temple imagery. And it's covered with eyes. It's all seeing all knowing it's in every way a symbol of God. But what's surprising about that to the contemporary hearer of the prophecy is that this is happening in Babylon in the land of Marduk. That's the strange thing. Previously, and you'll see this even among Hebrew people previous to the exile, the belief is a belief in regional gods. So Ra rules over Egypt. Marduk rules over Babylon here. And part of the meaning of Ezekiel’s prophecy is, no, I'm seeing a God who is the God of all and of the entire universe. And kind of that becomes what's unique.
So then, after Cyrus, the next big event in world history, you know, at the end of the day, Cyrus is just killed in battle. Again, you can look to Herodotus, for the most fun version of it, he says that the Queen Tomyris after a battle said, you know, “where is Cyrus's body” and then she wouldn't found it cut off his head and stuck it in a skin full of blood and said “you have your fill of blood!” That's the most colorful version of his end. What enemy King do you want to just die of COVID-19?
Seth Price 18:46
Before you go from there, so I know that you also listen to Dan Carlin's Hardcore History when he quotes Herodotus, he really has a good time with it. You can tell He's like, listen to me. Let me tell you what happened. It is so good.
Paul Thomas 19:05
Another, now, this might not be directly related to the term the Christ, but its formative in a lot of ways. After Cyrus dies, the next big, big, conqueror who captured the Hebrew imagination, and unless you know what you're looking for, you might not see this in the Bible, though it is there, is Alexander the Great. King from Macedon takes over Greece, takes over Asia for the first time. You know how in the Bible, Israel and Judah, they're always vacillating between the East and the West. Between Egypt and Syria, Egypt and Babylon, Egypt and Persia. And this entire history of the world for them is this like, “oh, which stronger power do we give our allegiance to?” You know, minus this very brief time of autonomous, semi autonomous, power under like growing under David and then coming to its greatest height under Solomon.
So then you've got Alexander the Great, who you know is said to have been the son of his Virgin Mother Olympias who was impregnated by Zeus. You know, there's a story of her husband, King Philip, seeing her sleeping with snakes as she did in devotion to Dionysus. And he catches her before they're married. And anyway, in Ptolemy and in other stories, you see the this colorful story of her impregnation before she was married to King Philip. And Alexander is said by some to be the son of Zeus. He's said to be the fulfillment of the prophecies of the oracles of his culture.
He comes in as a king and he unites east and west and for the first time, and he when he marched into Jerusalem, he was just welcomed. They threw open the city gates, and they just bowed to their new King Alexander. For the first time the dream shifts to a dream may be one king really can rule over all creation. And Alexander had this, you know, when he went to Egypt, he was greeted as a god and given the double crown of Upper and Lower Egypt. Everywhere he meant he seemed unstoppable. That's why a lot of people thought maybe this dude really is the son of Zeus, Achilles incarnate, Achilles, the war hero wrote from the Iliad. They also said he was an incarnation of Pericles.
And so anyway, the main thing here is the way in which prophetic imagination shifts rule of one king of kings who rules not only over Israel and Judah, but the entire world. So that starts to capture the imagination. So what is that King gonna look like? And everyone, as most Christians know, expected a king who would come and conquer in the way that all kings had. David, Solomon, I mean, Alexander, the Roman kings. You know, Tiberias, who, you know, was the king say, from like, Jesus teenage years on. And so anyway, Alexander captures the imagination in every way that any religious figure of the world ever had. He's deified within his lifetime. That's where you get the Roman tradition of deifying Kings. Within a year of Julius Caesar's death, his nephew, you know, steps into power, Octavian Augustus, and declares Julius a god.
There was this amazing comet that was visible day and night. And everybody said, “See, there's Julius joining the gods” and everybody just says, “I guess so”. And, you know, on the coins that Jesus carried in his pocket, they would say, Augustus Caesar, Divi filius, son of God. So then messianic expectation splinters. Some people think it'll be a political thing like all of these things. Others think it's going to be a great priest, and others still dared to imagine that this Nazarene who preached only love, who didn't fight with the sword, who relied fully on the father, that he was king. And that he was worthy of usurping all of those titles. King of King, Lord of Lords, Prince of Peace.
Some of those “King Kings, Lord of Lords”, that goes backwards through all the Roman emperors, through Alexander the Great, through Cyrus. Prince of Peace that was a title that went to Augustus Caesar, the king who was king when Jesus was born. Because he too, and he got in a fight with Mark Antony united, the east and west united .Mark Antony was ruling Egypt. He was ruling Rome he avoided Civil War, and there you go.
Seth Price 24:22
A question I have, and I didn't think about this prior, is there this and I don't want to say obsession lightly, but I'm just gonna use the word obsession because I can't come up with a better one, outside of like Israel, Hebrew, are the other civilizations at the time because you've referenced you know, Babylon and other Oracle's are they also always expectantly looking for a messiah or for a Christ type figure? Or does that kind of tail off as civilization moves pass that form of religion?
Paul Thomas 24:47
In my reading, and I'm not the world's authority on this, but the unique thing that Hebrew Scripture has is this amazing staying power. So if you go through a study of Babylonian literature it is completely over the moment Cyrus invaded-Babylon is no more. It had been for 1000 years and it's gone forever at that moment. And nothing made Hebrew culture be gone forever.
And I would argue it's the power of their literature, the power of their poetry, their poets and prophets and they don't need a throne all of the time. So what we do see, say in Babylon, is a political situation in Babylon, where a king who wasn't principally devoted to Marduk, the national god of Babylon, but rather to the sun god. He somehow becomes king. Babylon, you know, he's doing things like kings, do. Babylon’s fortunes then declines and people are saying, Oh, no, it's because Marduk is disrespected. And then they started looking forward to the liberating king who had set them free. But it's not an ongoing thing that keeps going millennia after millennia, because the culture doesn't. And when you're riding high you don't feel like you need a king to save you from your situation.
Seth Price 26:09
So how does that then zoom out to a cosmic version of the Christ like, where does that switch get flipped?
Paul Thomas 26:17
It gets switched, mostly climatically, in the writings of the Apostle Paul and the authors of the Johannine corpus; referring to the Gospel of John, the Epistles of John, and Revelation. And those are the places where you can see, and you kind of have to imagine Paul as an outsider. You know, I think we sometimes might forget, you know, he was rocking big theatres in Ephesus, like a real cultural hub of Greek culture. You know, when Cleopatra’s sister had to hide out she went to Ephesus. And it was home to the Temple of Artemis, one of the seven wonders of the world. And it's also easy for us to forget what a small voice some itinerant Jew would have been, you know. Though, in Rome, the estimates vary, I think I'm seeing like 7-8% in all of Rome was Jewish. Most of those were like Sadducees and Pharisees, they were kind of serving the Roman Empire. Rome was ruling through them. So is a tiny voice.
And they are making sense of the died and resurrected Hebrew teacher, prophet, rabbi, kind of trickster in a way that Jesus was. You know, you've heard me talk about, you know, the guerilla theater of the staging of Palm Sunday. You know, he's a public figure, but in a very theatrical way. And guess what I want to bring it home: so the consistent mission of the cosmic Christ is that the cosmic Christ refers to that aspect of God that pervades all of creation. So if you understand it that then you can, in light of Paul and John, then you look back and you go, which kind of Christ it is? You know, is it the kings and etc, or is it the love demonstrated on the cross that is going to be the Messiah, the anointed one, who's come to save us—meaning all of us. No longer meaning Jerusalem or Israel, but the entire planet!
And here's what I think makes it interesting. First, I've have just a personal Christian affinity for Jesus, the one who relies on love, no matter what, even as he marches into Jerusalem to be crowned king. The second person, you know, the next person like since Solomon to be crowned. But in Jesus’ day the recent memory of Jewish kings, they’d all go to Rome to be crowned. And it is said, this might be Herodotus too, that say, Herod, king of the Jews, was crowned king of the Jews, by Augustus Caesar, who was then Octavian Caesar and Mark Antony, on the steps of the temple of Jupiter. So even Jesus going to Jerusalem to go (and say) this is where a real King is crowned. He's the fulfillment of a promise of God that there would always be a descendant of David on the throne. He's going to his throne, little does anybody know that his commitment to a God who is love would necessitate that crown being one of thorns. His crowning is becoming the very symbol of self sacrificial love, the means through which God is at work today, saving the world through the body of Christ.
So when you say “cosmic Christ” and you zoom out, you're thinking about the widening trajectory. And when you do it through the lens of the words of Jesus, who says, whatever you’ve done to your brothers, that you've done to me”. When you do that through the lens of people like Paul, who just referr to the church, us, as the body of Christ, one body, many members. Oh, okay! From that cosmic perspective, we are to partner with God, the Creator of the universe, for the salvation of the world. And what makes it cool and fun in the 21st century is, dude, now we're talking about it in an era in which we actually have all the tools we need to end our whole story in death and destruction. Whether that's through nuclear war, environmental degradation, artificial intelligence run amok, a global pandemic—or we end our story in the vision that John of Patmos had in the vision, in the very last scene, of Revelation-heaven coming to join Earth and God and His Bride, who is the church are one at last. And all things are made new and restored to a God who is love. So you can see how important that trajectory is because it is just the visionary responsibility for people like us, we got to figure out how to save the world!
Seth Price 31:44
We do. So I want to pivot to that. So you said we had all the tools to possibly, you know, rectify things. And so when we spoke earlier, you talked about, or in a text message, talking a bit about framing this in a framework of the pandemic that we're in, and some of Phyllis Tickle’s stuff and etc, some of that stuff. And you said, you also wanted my input, which I don't get my input often on the show. So what were you talking about there?
Paul Thomas 32:11
I think that this endeavor of looking at these big picture things that I've kind of trained myself to do through the process of spending 10 years looking at the big story of Scripture, it becomes fun to then take that zoomed out bird's eye view. And something about thinking about this long view context reminded me of, you just mentioned of our departed friend Phyllis Tickle, who wrote a book called The Great Emergence. And she talked about these 500 year rummage sales that the church has. And just for listeners who might not be aware, she points out in that book, you know, 500 years ago was the Protestant Reformation. 500 years before that, in 1000, was the Great Schism, the split between the East and Western churches. 500 years before that Rome falls and Germanic tribes just come in. And whereas the church had been preserved through the machination of the Roman Empire. [But now] monastic communities had to take up the slack when Rome was gone so that they preserved the tradition through monasteries, and convents. And then 500 years before that is Jesus.
And reading that book, I thought, oh, interesting! I bet you could keep going and backwards by 500 year increments. So I decided to do that. So 500 years before Jesus is roughly when the Babylonian exile happens. 500 years before that, well, that's when King David ascended to the throne. That's a big, big milestone! 500 years before David, in so far as bothered to estimate these things, that’s roughly the time of Moses. And, you know, there's debate whether these things are oral traditions or historic ones but people who historically say, you know that's about where you'd find Moses. And 500 years before that is Abraham.
Now let's come back forward. A lot of these big shifts that happen in tradition happen as the result of communications revolutions. So in the time of David in the kings, that's when Hebrew culture adapts alphabetic language. So it's around 100 BCE that is when the Paleo-Hebraic alphabet emerges from a more symbol based on hieroglyphic like writing system. And so now you can start keeping things like legal codes that you see in the books of Deuteronomy and Leviticus, etc, etc. My mind just went a month with like three different things that people would protest right there and like three different dialogues split off. Anyway, around the time of the Babylonian exile there's another big communications revolution, or not the Babylonian exile, the next one, I guess I would point to is the one that's responsible for the birth of the Christian tradition in the first place, which is use of the Codex. So whereas texts used to be in scrolls, they started accordion style folding those scrolls and binding them and cutting off the edges; and this is the precursor to a book. And it was an inexpensive way to replicate written materials.
And it's in this form, that the materials that form the New Testament circulated. So without that wider ability for circulation, [that was] potentially aided by the Codex, who knows you would these epistles have gotten around? Would these gospels have gotten around? Would they have disappeared before they were put to writing? A lot of scholars attribute that communications revolution. And then, you know, we need not go deep into the Protestant revolution being potentially created by the printing press.
And here we are, brother, in the day of the internet, what is happening?! And there's a lot of speculation.
And I'm not sure, but I speculate that this COVID-19 pandemic is accelerating whatever we're in the midst of. And as a podcaster you're kind of a synthesizer of ideas. You're kind of a home to listeners who might not be able to say something at church and have these discussions. I guess, I'm a little curious how you're perceiving what's happening. Do you have any speculation as to what's happening with the church as a result of this the world we find ourselves in?
Seth Price 37:17
Yeah, um, I could speculate, I don't know that I'm qualified to but I'm happy to, but I don't think I'm qualified to So when I look at it of two minds, so I talk to so many people. And then I also get quite a few emails and private messages and Instagram messages, which I'm weeks delayed in answering because I'm just never on Instagram, you know. So I do talk with quite a few people. And from what I can see, both from the banking mindset, as well as being involved in my local church, like I was chair of stewardship for some time and that type of stuff. So like, and I used this in a past interview a few weeks ago, like the church is in hospice car. Like, pastors and ministers are basically, it's just palliative care for a dying form of institutionalized church. But that doesn't mean that the church is dying. It's just this institution of it is, and I think that unemployment compounded with fear compounded with idolatry of that fear and or of the buildings of our church. Those are all being, if it's going to take 100 years, I think it's only going to take 10 or 15. Like, there's only so much in endowment funds, you know what I mean? So, I don't know what the church looks like going forward. But I do know, like, I can go and read Ephraim, like, I can just go and in read some of the early Syriac church fathers. And I couldn't do that 20 years ago, they just didn't exist. The other day, I just read some of the sermons of George MacDonald, because I felt like it and they were free. You know what I mean? Like, I could just read those I can go read translations of Tertullian or all of these other things that didn't exist outside of seminaries. And so I think there is a radical shift overall of the consciousness of a youthful church, to ideas that are not bound to use your Codex metaphor, inside the binding of my 66 book Bible, if that makes any sense. I don't know what that means for the institution of the church, though. I have no idea.
Paul Thomas 39:19
Right!
Well, that totally makes sense. I mean, it's amazing. When you think about it, from Adam and Eve to the Renaissance people in our Hebrew Christian tradition, Judeo-Christian tradition, or whatever you want to call it, didn't even have access to the scriptures. Like it's only five hundred years ago, that printed Bibles, if some native tongues, even existed. Like how many 20 year generations is that? It's not very many. But then you're reading it through this, like, lens of, you know, indoctrination by what had been the institutional church until then. And it's only like, say, in my parents generation where, you know, you might start buying books to understand the Bible or going to seminary, but that's a really small (number of people). And then suddenly, in our lifetime, we've all got free online, searchable Bibles, and every translation we want. We’ve got Greek and Hebrew dictionaries, words, commentaries, cross references, we buy books with the click of a button on Amazon.,I mean I'm Facebook friends with some of the world's knowledgeable scholars, it's this planetary treasuring of thought from the whole world, and every age in the world is suddenly available at our fingertips.
And what I think you're seeing in a lot of your listeners are seeing, you know, among people who are deconstructing at his notion of like, suddenly, you could click and suddenly you have this audio book going wait a minute, this doesn't sound like what my pastor told me in Sunday school! And, you know, it causes in a lot of individuals, some real and trauma and we get tripped up over the whole process, which is kind of a tragedy, you know?
There's this period of deep pain and it seems like we are holding onto it and I just kind of wondered, you know, with, say, with pandemic, you know, there's the issue of like, yeah, the real estate; most churches are struggling to stay around. You know, you see the small churches and God bless them, you know. I do know, people are getting healed in those, and will they even be around? You’ve also got people missing church and finding out that they don't really miss church when they miss? Yeah and what do we do? And you see these nexus(es) of interaction online. How does that translate in this world? It really hard to see the truly novel innovations.
So before Facebook and Twitter existed, nobody's going “If only there was this page where I could have my picture and say what's on your mind?” Nobody was really looking at that. And it's not like when the printing press was invented, it's not like nobody said, “Oh, now there's going to be 30,000 Christian denominations!”, like the real big things are always so hard to see. So it is fun to speculate.
Seth Price 42:26
Yeah, I mean, every day, like I was just researching the other day, and I don't remember where I heard it, or where I read it, because I the amount of stuff I read, I honestly, sometimes forget. I what I remember what I read, but I have no idea who said it, which is really a dangerous thing. because I'm constantly afraid of plagiarism. So, um, but I read something and you referenced it earlier, like, you know, Jesus is being anointed as king in Jerusalem…and then it was in a conversation about the parables, it might have actually been on the Bible Project now that I think about it. But either way, they're talking about yeah, Jesus is telling a parable about a king that goes away, to become king, and then comes back.
And I never read it that way. And they were saying, well, it's just so subversive, because basically, what he's trying to do is the parables aren't about what we think about the parable. The parable is about what he's trying to do. So he's telling the story of I'm King here, not like the Kings that go away, to be anointed as King. I'm just King. I was like, I never thought about that context at all. So every day, it's like, there's new context to words that I read my entire life, which didn't exist 20 years ago for me.
Paul Thomas 43:36
It's really interesting. So for the early listeners of the oral tradition of that story there King, you know that there was great enthusiasm about being emperor of Rome during the lifetimes of Julius Caesar and Augustus Caesar. By the time you get to type Tiberius he's a little lukewarm about the role. He goes off and he's an absent King. He spends most of it on this island in the Mediterranean, you know, just kind of in this distant thing. Just got a message that my internet connection is unstable. Sorry about that.
Seth Price 44:13
(Through laughter)
That is true! That is accurate.
Paul Thomas 44:18
Darn! I don’t know what it is!
Seth Price 44:21
No, telling one of your kids is probably streaming Netflix it doesn't matter. It's fine either way. But um, but yeah, I don't know what the I have no idea what the church will look like for my children. I don't actually know what it'll look like 10 years from now. I know personally, how many churches stayed afloat with staff salary because of the Payroll Protection Loans that are quickly coming into the end of their two and a half months of getting them. And I don't know that the giving has ticked up in the last two and a half months because the unemployment rate is so high. Like it's literally just a mathematical equation. Which I kind of like that that type of institution of churches dying because it's forcing Christians to actually be Christians, as opposed to a social club. But I don't know that the church is ready for that. I don't know that the church, and by church I mean you and I, like I don't know that the church is ready for that confrontation.
Paul Thomas 45:19
That’s one of the hopes, you know, in that big literary effort, The Butterflies in God's Stomach, the idea of understanding Scripture as the love story of God wooing humankind to be his bride in a world where we've lost the plot. In my own personal thought the reframing there that is important is instead of understanding the Christ or Christianity in terms of church attendance. And I don’t mean to have a cynical view of the institutional church. I've had a blast inside churches of all denominations, and I've worked with all of them to help save the world. But at the same time, maybe it's time we question that the church is or ought to be a Sunday motivational speaking business. Which is not what it looks like. And I don't mean that you know, pejoratively, but if I have a legacy, I would love to reframe our understanding of what the Bible is, as a love story that we find ourselves in and get engaged. Everybody engaged!
And increasingly, my personal trajectory is to less and less see the church…I think traditionally people have seen the church as well, as it's the accumulation of all those people who go to those Sunday morning motivational speeches, right? Or professed Christians, if you accepted Jesus as your Savior, you're on the inside, everyone else is on the outside. The more I take, in some ways, a more literal view of Scripture, salvation, or soteriology, if you want to use the big word, it actually is for the salvation of the whole human endeavor with and through people partnering with the God who is love to bring that about.
So, you know, it's harder and harder in life for me to imagine God, you know, going like, “finally, this one's in! He accepted Jesus as Savior!” Maybe all along, we're supposed to be loving God back by caring for the gift God gave us, which is creation and each other.
Seth Price 47:36
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I think that's a good place to stop it for two reasons. I need to feed my children. And really, it's just that reason. I need to go feed my children. But yeah, no, I think that is right. But um, but yeah, I'm gonna hold you accountable to 2021. I'm just gonna keep releasing this over and over again in 2021. Every week, every episode is this until you publish the books.
Paul Thomas 48:02
Anyway is great! Just keep me accountable.
Seth Price 48:05
Yeah. Thank you so much, Paul. I really enjoyed it. Oh, I didn't ask you the same question that I asked everyone. Oh, my gosh, I almost forgot! Try your best, so when you say, Paul, to your children to your neighbor, hey, when I say God, is this? What words would you try to wrap around that?
Paul Thomas 48:25
I think I start with just a real big definition. And it is God is that upon which everything depends for existence. So I'm happy to start there. And then we have conditions through which we aim to understand that God. And I think it's noteworthy to note that the prophets and it's all traditions, there's not a lot that they agree on. But one thing seems that they do agree on is that every mystic who has a direct experience of God says that experience is one of them. And I think that's worth noting. I mean, hey, we’ve got it in the Bible. God is love. We got those words directly. It's worth noting that on a planet wide basis people noticed that. Listen, I like to start there. And then the rest is details.
Seth Price 49:25
Yeah, I like that. That it's Yeah, I like that. I'm gonna try to restate it but I can't do it better than you. Point people to where they should go to get in touch with you do all the things with you. Where do you want people to go if you want them to go anywhere?
Paul Thomas 49:41
If you want to go anywhere, you can find me on Facebook Paul Thomas Dařílek and other pages. Paul Thomas Author. If you want a free gift from me, you can get an old free gift that is the introduction and some sample chapters. So that book I mentionedThe Butterflies in God's Stomach, and you can get audio or in PDF on butterfliesbook.com. It's just my free gift. It'll be fun to listen to them so that you can hear how it changes when the real thing comes out next year.
Seth Price 50:14
Perfect. Perfect. Paul, thank you so much, very much. So I've enjoyed it, man.
Paul Thomas 50:19
Thank you.
Seth Price 50:23
Today's episode was brought to you from people like Josh and Patrick Antil patrons of this show, make it go. And so not only to those two, but to every single person that does that. Thank you. Thank you, thank you could not do this without you. If you haven't done that, and you get anything at all from the show, consider doing so. At different levels, you'll get different things. So some people get to see the video version of the show other people hopefully if I'm on my game, and lately with COVID and school, I have not been as on my game in all honesty. I'm so humbled by the support of so many people. So we'd love to count you among them. Huge thank you, to Salt of the Sound for your music again in this episode.
As we enter into fall. I really pray that your faith grows and stretches beyond measure and that you deal well with that pain and you find safe places to hold it. Know that your beloved.
Talk with you next week.