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Who thinks that they can subdue Leviathan? Strength resides in its neck; dismay goes before it. It is without fear. It looks down on all who are haughty; it is king over all who are proud. These words inspired PJ Wehry to create Chasing Leviathan. Chasing Leviathan was born out of two ideals: that truth is worth pursuing but will never be subjugated, and the discipline of listening is one of the most important habits anyone can develop. Every episode is a dialogue, a journey into the depths of a meaningful question explored through the lens of personal experience or professional expertise.
PJ Wehry (00:00.961)
Hello and welcome to Chasing the Viaduct and I'm your host PJ Weary and I'm here today with Dr. Matthew Lapine, Director of Equipping at City Light Church in Omaha, Nebraska. And we're talking about his book, The Logic of the Body, Retrieving Theological Psychology. Dr. Lapine, wonderful to have you on today.
Matthew LaPine (00:19.17)
Yeah, thanks so much for having me. Super fun.
PJ Wehry (00:21.601)
So, tell me, retrieving theological psychology, why this book?
Matthew LaPine (00:28.802)
Yeah, so this may be a little bit of a long story, but I had some personal relationships where there was significant mental health, and I was actually studying to go into ministry. And what happened at the time was I was learning theology, and I was also kind of on the job, you might say, learning how to help someone walk through especially obsessive compulsive disorder.
What ended up happening is there was a real tension in my theology and what I was learning about mental health. And I sat on that for about 15 years. At the time, what I was primarily interested in was epistemology and aesthetics. And so I kind of went on a journey different places across the country, reading about those things, loved history of philosophy. And when I got to PhD work, I realized that my interests were starting to
come together. So I was really interested in the nature of emotions had been tracking the conversation between philosophers and psychologists, and was quite annoyed, honestly, because, you know, philosophers tend to be cognitivist and tend to see that emotions have our sort of information rich. In fact, you people like Martha Nussbaum talk about emotions as movements of thought, you know, and so they tend to be very cognitivist and then psychologists on the other hand tend to be very
embodied, that it's the feeling of bodily changes. That's the classic William James definition. But it seemed to me that they were picking out different aspects of emotion and calling that the emotion. But actually, there was a fuller picture of what was developing. But I actually was more of a cognitivist. Maybe I'm jumping ahead and even saying it that way. Because I was a cognitivist. And then I had a friend come into the PhD program who had done a bunch of research on trauma.
PJ Wehry (02:15.263)
That's fun.
Matthew LaPine (02:23.662)
and I invited him over to my house and we had dinner and at dinner at about a two hour pretty intense debate about what the nature of emotion was. I was defending a cognitive view and saying, it's information dense. mean, there's so much here and he was really pushing on trauma and embodiment. And so what I ended up doing is I was like, I wanted to write on how the Bible was formative.
But then I was like, I don't even know what formation looks like and how emotions factor into that. And so was like, I need to just solve this divide that, and that ended up becoming my whole dissertation was trying to figure out what is emotion. But what it did was it actually revived some big questions that I had and the tension between my theology and what I had dealt with with mental health stuff. And so I was super grateful for the project because it solved both the personal question, but also
Just in feedback that I've gotten from readers around the country, it's really illuminated and clarified for a lot of people how they think about their own emotions and how they sort of work through them. And we can get into more of that practically as we go.
PJ Wehry (03:34.098)
It sounds like, if I understand you correctly, that that's not just a you thing, but that theology as a whole has a bias towards a cognitivist approach. Why do you think that is? Am I right in assuming that?
Matthew LaPine (03:46.338)
Yeah, I think that's true in the sort of circles of evangelicalism that I've been a part of. the story is probably more complicated. Just assuming that everything that I say, it's more complicated, then I don't have to keep saying that. But I think my insight was, as I was, I read Nicholas Lombardo's The Logic of Desire, which is the inspiration for the title of this.
PJ Wehry (04:00.392)
Generally is it generally is yeah, yeah
Matthew LaPine (04:16.68)
And I don't know why I did even. was, you know what? think it was Ken Dunnington's book on addiction really mentioned that book. So I was fascinated because I realized that Aquinas had a very, very rich psychology. And then I started thinking about it. I'm like, wait, I love Plato. I love Aristotle. I love the history of philosophy. And I'm like, wait, isn't this just the history of psychology?
And then I realized that what happened was when psychology became an empirical discipline, theologians kind of were like, OK, we'll leave that to the psychologists. this is why I so appreciated reading Herman Boving, because he's like, no, actually, I'm just going write a whole book on that. I don't think it's been published in English yet, but it has been translated. Maybe by now it has, and I just haven't seen it. But so it seeme d, what I realized, philosophy and theology always had a spot for psychology.
the study of the soul, the suke. But then once psychology became its own discipline, real disciplined, fruitful thought over psychology kind of dropped out of theology. But what came to be true is that there's a lot of sort of folksy ideas of what psychology is without really thought about it. And so the retrieving theological psychology is about retrieving psychology as a sub-discipline within theology.
because historically that was part of it.
PJ Wehry (05:45.724)
When you say kind of these folksy ideas, are we kind of referring to pop psychology or do you mean like something slightly different?
Matthew LaPine (05:50.914)
Hmm Well in some degrees it was I think it was a it was kind of frozen in time But in other in other ways it sort of morphed as as it went so I mean I like older New Testament scholars for instance if you if you read them Saw emotion as as something Sort of tangential to to to moral choice. I mean like that
Like there's been a movement more recently to see, maybe it's with Piper and the recovery of Jonathan Edwards and all that, to see affections as more central to spirituality, True religion consists chiefly of religious affections. So there's some tension and difference in terms of how people were treating emotion. But for me, as a guy who loved virtue ethics,
PJ Wehry (06:29.594)
Mm. Yeah.
Matthew LaPine (06:43.47)
I was just like, I don't know how any of this stuff over here maps with what I love in Aristotle and virtue ethics. And it seemed to me that there was some resonance with virtue ethics and mental health stuff. And I was like, those things actually should go together. I think they could go together. And so that was one way of looking at this. The book that I wrote is kind of like, let's talk about how virtue ethics actually fits into theological, the theological conversation.
PJ Wehry (07:14.272)
Feel free to just discard this question. You mentioned it. You talked about psychology, then talked about, well, it's suke, which is the word for soul. How does that etymology and that history, what is the connection between soul and this modern study of psychology?
Matthew LaPine (07:23.042)
Yeah. Yeah.
Matthew LaPine (07:38.86)
Yeah, well, that's a big question. Yeah, I mean, psychology, the word itself is relatively recent, but the first uses were about the powers of the soul. So that word just, it was a part of anthropology at the time the word was first used. so...
PJ Wehry (07:41.354)
That's a small question, right? It's not...
PJ Wehry (08:01.028)
Forgive me, when was it first used? Like, roughly. I'm not trying to get, like, know, specific dates or anything, but... I don't know, is it like, eighth century? Like, I literally, yeah.
Matthew LaPine (08:04.302)
you
Yeah. I think it would be.
No, I think it was 17th or 18th century. I should have, yeah, yeah, it was relatively recent. I need to go back and look at that. actually, these are one of those things where it, like, I spent like a day and a half on this in my dissertation and now I can't remember what I wrote. And it probably was just one footnote somewhere. I don't know. It's ridiculous. But anyway, yeah, no, it's relatively recent that that particular word was used.
PJ Wehry (08:16.349)
okay, so relatively recent.
PJ Wehry (08:29.139)
Totally fair, totally fair.
Matthew LaPine (08:41.642)
as a treatment of what they were studying. I, you know, I'm trying to remember what your question was here now. Yeah. I was going to go back and say, so one of the things that I'm doing in the first half of the book. So if you get a copy of the book, the first half is historical, essentially. So you got, it's 400, think, from 30 pages and almost the first 200 is historical. And so.
PJ Wehry (08:50.624)
So forgive me and a part of the reason this comes from good
PJ Wehry (09:09.908)
Yes.
Matthew LaPine (09:10.954)
What i'm in sort of three steps what i'm doing is i'm describing the psychology of thomas equinas and That psychology has some distinct features that i'm trying to bring back one of them is Somebody's called my book dual process theory for for christians, which I think is right. so in other words what I what I Okay, i'll explain i'll explain. Yeah
PJ Wehry (09:17.12)
Mm-hmm.
PJ Wehry (09:33.588)
I don't know what dual process is, so help me.
Matthew LaPine (09:37.294)
What I call it is tiered psychology where there's an upper tier and a lower tier. again, we're talking about powers of the soul, Aquinas thought that we at the upper tier are thinking and choosing creatures. That's rationality. So humans use words and images and symbols to think. And that's discursive. It's one thing at a time. It's logical, right? So that's your upper level.
And you're making choices like I'm going to do this or I'm not going to do that Underneath that he would say there are sense it there's sensory perception and sense appetite and so if you think of it like thinking and Willing there's a cognitive component and a volitional component and then on the bottom level there is a a sensing a perceptive component that's sort of the cognitive component and then there's also an appetite of component like a volitional component to the bottom and so
What basically what I'm trying to say is, is because there's two separate layers, those sometimes are in conflict with each other or there's a, there's a sort of dialogue happening between the two. So, I mean, an easy example would be like when, when we, when we're engaged in, in behaviors that we actually choose not to do, but we still do them. so, you know, yeah, it does sound Pauline and I think Paul is doing something. So I have actually have a chapter on that text.
PJ Wehry (10:56.202)
Sounds Pauline.
Matthew LaPine (11:03.438)
But one way of looking at it would be to say that there's some sort of psychological principle in me, which I've heard people say the white dog and the black dog. Satan and his demons are feeding thoughts into me about eating the donut. And then the Holy Spirit is saying, don't do it, or something like that. What I'm just trying to say is I'm trying to say we exist in a much more holistic way.
where actually that conflict is within our psyche, which doesn't mean that sin is not involved, because I think that's one of Paul's point in Romans six through eight, is that the flesh is our sort of, especially our body, body flesh members are all through that, it's a sort of our automatic functions are habituated to the practice of sin. So.
I'm following Augustine and Aquinas both in calling sin fundamentally a habitus. It's a second nature that's built into us. so, anyway, my point is, the donut example, for example, if I come and I choose not to eat donuts, but then I come into the room and I smell them and I see them, and all of a sudden my mouth is watering, there's something happening where my sort of
unconscious is saying, that looks good. And then my appetite is saying, you want that, you want to eat that. Does that make sense? But at an upper level, I might say, no, it's not good. Like it's bad for me and therefore I'm not going to eat it. And so basically what I'm saying is there's two sources of perception. I have a rational idea that actually I know what long-term consequences that causes for me.
And so I choose not to, then there's also this lower level that says, Ooh, that's good. it. Does that make sense? And so I'm not calling that like, I don't think that that's the same thing as our sin nature. think our sin nature gets wired into the whole thing. But my point is that we actually have a, slow system and a fast system. is Daniel common's language system one and system two. And yeah, thinking fast, thinking slow. Right. Yep.
PJ Wehry (13:08.799)
Yes.
PJ Wehry (13:17.514)
Thinking fast and thinking slow. Right, right. Yeah.
Matthew LaPine (13:22.126)
So that's what I'm talking about when I say dual process theory. So that's the first thing is Aquinas had a dual process theory. And I think he's exactly right. I get into that a lot more about why once I get to the constructive side. But the second thing that Aquinas does is he has a genuinely holistic account of how body and soul work together. So the history of psychology is the history of understanding where things go wrong, what it looks like to be rational.
How the how the soul manages the body and there's generally sort of the more platonic perspective which then calcifies into into Cartesian dualism, which is a really hard form of dualism I'm a thinking thing fundamentally, but then my body almost works mechanistically and Then on the other side of it would be the more Aristotelian Thomist view of body and soul which is that the the soul is what
PJ Wehry (13:59.339)
Yes.
Matthew LaPine (14:20.972)
what makes the body alive. So it's a composite, it's a hylomorphic unity. So there's form and matter that come together to make me a living being. And so on that front, my soul is not just responsible for thinking, but for all of my capacities. to be alive is to have a soul. And so what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to bring that back because I'm trying to step away from
I could say more about this too, but I'm trying to step away from a sort of dualism which can compartmentalize. This is soul stuff, this is spiritual stuff, and this is embodied stuff, this is physical stuff. So this is where morality lies over here in the soul stuff, and then health lies over here in the body stuff. And for mental health, that's, I think, just a huge disaster, because you're not accounting for a whole host of things which are just vital.
especially in the ways in which our autonomic nervous system, our endocrine system, and our immune system get impacted by our experiences. But I'm just teasing things we could talk about.
PJ Wehry (15:28.64)
Yeah, the oh, yeah. No, it's great. Like there's so many threads dangling. I don't even know what to pull on. Well, that's not true. I have an immediate I have immediate thing. There's this old and for me has always been fundamentally incorrect. And I think you see this distinction between there's a lot that you can tie in between Greek philosophy and Christian theology. But one of the ones that's always kind of been a very clear distinction is that
Matthew LaPine (15:35.134)
Hahaha
PJ Wehry (15:58.027)
for Socrates, really Plato, speaking through Socrates, if someone knows to do right, they will do it. so that sin is fundamentally a problem of education. Kierkegaard attacks this directly and he's concluding on scientific postscripts, but that sounds a lot about what you're talking about. It's like, well, if they just knew, if they just had enough knowledge and they understood
Matthew LaPine (16:10.126)
ignorance gap.
PJ Wehry (16:24.788)
how it all links together, then they would do the right thing. And it's like, that's not helpful, a helpful approach to mental health at all. It's like, if we just stuff more knowledge in people, and then they'll just like, just talk to them about it. They'll figure, like help them figure. And it's like, you clearly have never worked with someone who has something buried deep within them.
Matthew LaPine (16:47.564)
Yeah, and where it ends up is, so if you take away these levels, like there's not two tiers to psychology, then you're left with an account of emotion, which basically we sees it as something that's under your strong control. so changing your emotions might be like changing your arm. And so it kind of dichotomizes because you've got, or like raising your arm. Yeah, yeah. So, sorry.
PJ Wehry (16:54.781)
Mm-hmm.
PJ Wehry (17:10.366)
I'm sorry, can you, what do mean? Changing your motion is like changing your arm? right, I thought you were swapping it out. was like, okay, I'm tracking with you now. I'm sorry, that makes way more sense. Yeah.
Matthew LaPine (17:16.622)
Changing your own. Let me just disconnect this. Yeah, I raising your own. Yeah, yeah. But this kind of dichotomizes into people who think that we don't control our emotions in any sense, or we have maximal control of our emotions. And the truth is somewhere in the middle, that there are things that we can do actually that do bring about
change in how we perceive and feel. mean, the health is a great example of just like, do I like running? You know, well, you know, certain people will learn to love running. Or I didn't say I did. Or, you know, I heard this guy on radio the other day who hadn't had a donut in like 17 years. And he, you know, someone was like offering him a donut. He's like, that doesn't look good to me. You know, I've been through this with soda. Like I don't, I don't, this is
This is bubbly that I'm drinking. I don't like Mountain Dew. I used to love Mountain Dew. When I drink it now, I'm like, wow, that is so sweet. So there's both in terms of desire and in terms of emotion, there are things that we can do that actually do move the needle, but it's not dichotomized neatly the way that it is for a lot of people. so what you have to do is you have to know not just that there's tears, but how those tears are governed.
What I'm doing constructively on the second half of the book is I'm saying that we have thoughts and choices, which are basically symbolic. We think with words largely. And underneath that is a sort of unconscious layer of understanding. So our intuitions and our ways of seeing the world are both very smart and very dumb at the same time. So one of my favorite examples is that what the it's what I've given in the book.
I stepped out of the grocery store, I looked to the right and panicked. And the reason I panicked was because there was a guy with, there was a green van, the driver's door was open, that guy was standing in the door, sort of rummaging around inside. So I drove a green van, and that green van was parked where I always parked. But if you had stopped me 10 seconds before and said, where did you park? I knew exactly where I parked, it was right in front. But in that moment, my perceptive capacity,
PJ Wehry (19:36.234)
Right.
Matthew LaPine (19:40.894)
saw the situation as dangerous. It saw it as somebody breaking into my car. And so for a moment, I panicked, even against my knowledge of where I parked. And so again, I'm pointing out these two systems work independently of each other. But what happens with mental illness is that we can get into situations where that panic switch is constantly tripped. Our sympathetic nervous system is working overdrive.
When you get into deep patterns of that, no matter how many positive thoughts you think you feel really, really stuck in it. And so what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to give people pathways. the three tiers are your thought, your perception, and the way that that triggers your autonomic nervous system, sympathetic and parasympathetic. But that lower level is the sort of...
PJ Wehry (20:29.556)
Mm-hmm.
Matthew LaPine (20:35.416)
how those systems, sympathetic, parasympathetic, and endocrine system are keyed to perception. So it's really, really important to understand how these layers work because it illustrates how experience changes us. And the evangelical church has been so locked up into thinking. Thinking is what changes us, and it's true. But faith and practice are reciprocal. So if I...
Stop me, PJ, if I'm talking too much.
PJ Wehry (21:07.54)
No, I'm laughing because I literally just the last two weeks I've been teaching class on technology and theology and I've been talking about habitus. I've been talking about practice. Anyways, anyways, I'm literally teaching this right now. This is awesome. Yeah.
Matthew LaPine (21:12.91)
Hmm.
Matthew LaPine (21:16.813)
Yeah.
Right.
Yeah, yeah. No, that's good. Yeah. So basically, what you have, one of my favorite examples here is with my, I think she was six or seven at the time, I took my daughter to a science fair. And at the science fair, there was a whole table, like you could walk around the whole circle full of bugs that you could touch. So like, you could take the bugs on your hand and like when she started,
She was extremely fearful even of the the little harmless ones by the end. She was holding a hissing cockroach in her hand I was not doing that by the way But what I was telling her is is I was saying verbally to her so she's processing this cognitively it's not dangerous just try it and Once she's got it in her hand. What happens is the experience teaches her. Hey, it's actually not dangerous. It's just sitting here. It's doing nothing It's not biting me. It's not trying to
PJ Wehry (21:59.531)
Ha ha ha ha!
PJ Wehry (22:14.378)
Yeah. Yeah.
Matthew LaPine (22:19.33)
You know, crawl up my arm or anything like that. And so then she put it back and like for the next probably four months, my daughter is like the bug queen of our house. Anywhere there's a bug, she's picking it up. Does that make sense? And so you, is, it is possible with the interplay between our language and what we think, and then our experience to develop new patterns of seeing and new patterns of feeling. But, but I, you have to have a psychology which integrates.
the fact that we have neural pathways that are plastic and that our whole sort of capacities are bound up in our body and takes into account things like health. I think we were talking earlier just about like the physiology of depression. It's not always that you're a gloomy person who doesn't believe that God is faithful. Sometimes it's just that you're literally not healthy.
So that those are the big things that what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to say in the Going back to the original question in the history of psychology There have been thoughts that are more well developed than ours and I was trying to get to to to especially the reform tradition talk about up to cal Calvin how we got to the spot where We have this broken or disconnected psychology And and try and offer a new model
PJ Wehry (23:46.688)
And so you talked about the discursive layer and then you talked about the sensory perception layer and then you also talked about the sensory appetite. So you've talked about two layers, but it also, this seems like there's a third layer.
Matthew LaPine (23:52.163)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, well Well, no, it's it's it's intellect and will at the top and And they're not those are not in dialogue with each other. The will just is it is the is the intellect's appetite and and the intellect is just the wills information so so it's like this is the Thomistic view doesn't it isn't colored by the
PJ Wehry (24:03.058)
Okay, intellect and will.
Matthew LaPine (24:23.584)
intellectualism, voluntarist controversies. There's a whole chapter on that. But there's a cognitive and an appetitive part up here that we just experience as thinking. On the bottom layer, there is a perceptive part and an appetitive part, which when we see something, we don't think, that's good. I should feel this way. We just experience it as dangerous or as attractive. Does that make sense? So those are.
PJ Wehry (24:27.199)
Yeah.
PJ Wehry (24:50.878)
Is there ever any disconnect between those two? Between the sensory perception and the sensory appetite?
Matthew LaPine (24:57.998)
Not in how I'm framing it, no. So they're unified on both levels. So we experience them as one thing. I mean, this goes back to Kantian philosophy and the way that our perception is actually actively formed as we look at things, right? I mean, even the green van example, you can think of that for a second. That was against my understanding of where I parked my car.
PJ Wehry (25:00.905)
Okay, okay.
PJ Wehry (25:06.623)
Yeah.
Matthew LaPine (25:27.398)
And it was a really, really intelligent thing, right? It knew what a van was. It knew what color my van was. It knew how much I valued my van was and how much I valued possessions and how I estimated my chances in a physical alteration against this person. Like all of these things happened in a split second without thinking that were just assumed things that actually ran against where I knew I parked my van.
PJ Wehry (25:43.008)
Yeah. Yeah.
Matthew LaPine (25:56.074)
Saw that situation as dangerous without thinking about it. In fact, it the low road runs to my amygdala and and You know makes me do this startle before I even am aware what's happening and that's that's Joseph Ladew's neuroscience So so yeah, I'm saying those things those the the appetite and cognition they go together But but they can only be in in dialogue if it's separate systems and and I actually think that that's
It's a really important part even about understanding thinking. Thinking itself is searching the unconscious to try and make it explicit. then feeling, I would say, is my unconscious and my bodily systems in conversation. So if I...
PJ Wehry (26:41.536)
You don't need to make things explicit if they're working.
Matthew LaPine (26:48.096)
Right. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Yeah.
PJ Wehry (26:49.78)
Yeah, so I've just been working through, I don't know if you know the name, Vygotsky. He did developmental theory for psychology. But he had a partner because he was writing against very quantified, very structuralist psychology. And so the idea was to quantify everything. And then he had a partner who said, you know, I'm going to try and record every single behavior that someone does.
Matthew LaPine (26:58.157)
Okay.
PJ Wehry (27:17.406)
And he sat and he watched his wife for 20 minutes making dinner, which first off, anyways, I don't know what that says about him and his marriage, right? I'm like, I don't know if I like, I'm sitting here like observing my wife. Yeah. but in 20 minutes, he recorded 480 distinct by his own system. Nevermind how you could break it down. 480 distinct behaviors. And it becomes immediately. So part of what you're saying is like, we have to be able to
Matthew LaPine (27:24.462)
Yeah.
Come and
PJ Wehry (27:46.593)
critique, you know, problematic sensory perception and appetite. But we also need to recognize that it's doing good things too. And I think that goes back to you talk about people need to understand how it works. I just hit my mic. Nice. People need to understand how it works, but they also need to understand the value of each piece.
Matthew LaPine (27:59.061)
yeah.
Matthew LaPine (28:08.942)
There's a book called Strangers to Ourselves by Timothy Wilson, and he talks about just how much our unconscious is doing. Most of the information that we process is unconscious, the vast majority, like over 95%. And a lot of that is filtered out, like it never comes to our attention. But you can see this illustrated, like imagine someone who got mugged.
PJ Wehry (28:20.959)
Yes.
Matthew LaPine (28:36.322)
You know, the way that they walk down the street will be different than the way that I walk down the street not having been mugged. Does that make sense? Because unconsciously, I'm gonna be filtering out as irrelevant certain things that they're unconscious will say, that's relevant. You need to pay attention to that.
PJ Wehry (28:44.084)
Yes.
PJ Wehry (28:56.168)
Your examples are coming from like counseling and trauma, but for our listeners, this is just everything we do. So for instance, when you talk about pointing, like that's something kids just learn automatically. No one ever teaches them how to point. And even as I say pointing, if our audience is American, they're thinking of like this. But I had a missionary friend who was the first Westerner to go into
Matthew LaPine (28:56.866)
Good.
Matthew LaPine (29:00.29)
Mm-hmm. Yep.
Matthew LaPine (29:07.758)
Mm-hmm.
PJ Wehry (29:26.186)
Cambodia after the Pol Pot regime. And there it's very rude to use your finger. They point with their lips. Which of course is like, yes, I know. So I didn't realize how weird that looked until I was teaching about it and I did that and everyone started laughing. I was like, what? That's what they do, right? Like to them, they would be very offended if we were using a finger. No one, not a single person listening to this who has not been exposed to Cambodian culture was thinking of pointing with your lips.
Matthew LaPine (29:28.728)
Yeah, yeah.
PJ Wehry (29:54.197)
that would literally, you know what I mean? So it doesn't have to be traumatic, though of course trauma reinforces and builds these kind of structures very quickly. But it's just basic human psychology.
Matthew LaPine (29:54.702)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally,
Matthew LaPine (30:07.79)
And there's probably within the culture a sophisticated way of even reading how someone's using their lips that we would have no visual understanding of how to process, right? It would take years and years to develop that capacity. Behind the scenes of all of this for me is Michael Polanyi's personal knowledge and especially his understanding of the tacit and the from and to. People ask me, like, who's your
PJ Wehry (30:13.248)
Yes, 100%. Yes.
PJ Wehry (30:21.46)
Yes. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Matthew LaPine (30:36.152)
biggest philosophical influence is Michael Polanyi. But Michael Polanyi, I think it's clear that he's not talking about the unconscious, but I think he's talking about the unconscious. But the unconscious is one of those things that is really, really hard to talk about without thinking about Sigmund Freud. The modern adaptive unconscious, Timothy Wilson's probably the most accessible book on it, but we have so, so much knowledge that we can't say, that we can't put into words.
How do you know someone's face? Just go ahead and try and describe that for me. How do you identify someone by their face? You can't say, you don't.
PJ Wehry (31:14.612)
Yeah, are you familiar with Esther Lightcap Meek? Yeah, she's been a guest on the show. So when you said Michael Bolanya, I was like, OK. It's a lot of connections. Yeah, no, really enjoyed it. And of course, could immediately see, yeah, he doesn't call it the subconscious, but you're like, these are, you know, or unconscious, which that's a whole other thing.
Matthew LaPine (31:18.233)
yeah, yeah, I know her, her, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Now that's one of reasons I said yes here is that I was like, oh, Esther's been on it. That's great. Yeah. She's fantastic.
PJ Wehry (31:44.605)
I don't want to lose all our time here. want to talk about, like, we've talked around your book, but when you talk about what is the trajectory from Aquinas to Calvin, and how do you see that play out in modern-day theology? Well, excuse me, let me limit that. Modern-day Protestant American theology, because that's very different from Roman Catholic theology, which is still very thoroughly Aquinas. Yeah.
Matthew LaPine (31:59.48)
So I tried, yeah.
Matthew LaPine (32:05.442)
Yeah, I can tell you. That's That's right.
Yeah, yeah, and they're way ahead of us in psychology. I mean, just you look at Roman Catholic books and they've been down this path for a while. yeah, I would say, so what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to describe, well, I tried very hard not to sort of turn this into like a whodunit on virtue ethics, but it is kind of that. So.
I just noticed it in a, yeah, who murdered virtue ethics? Yeah. And it's not just one person, unfortunately, but that, so I was reading actually, so I had, I loved Aquinas' psychology and I was reading Calvin's psychology and I was like, this just seems like a total mess. I, so I was supposed to give a paper at a conference on Calvin's psychology. And I was like, I don't understand even who he's interacting with.
PJ Wehry (32:41.332)
Who murdered virtue ethics?
Matthew LaPine (33:10.414)
And so I basically started looking back into medieval psychology and trying to figure out who his conversation partners were. And that's what became a chapter. anyway, I'm wasting time. So I tried to identify four features in Aquinas that were really important for a virtue ethics friendly view that also makes sense of mental health.
PJ Wehry (33:20.798)
No, you're good. No, I'm fine. This is the best part. Not the best part. This is the good part.
Matthew LaPine (33:37.864)
One was that human nature is a composite, that there's plasticity in our physical bodies. Number two, that psychology was tiered. So I've talked about those already. Number three, that the higher faculties govern the lower. So actually this is interesting because Jonathan Haidt has done a lot of work in The Righteous Mind and he has some principles of moral psychology. He would be a guy who is doing almost the same thing I am.
PJ Wehry (33:58.987)
Mm-hmm.
Matthew LaPine (34:07.212)
but from a Humean perspective, David Hume. So for him, intuitions come first and thinking comes afterward. And my big critique on that is yes, in the moment, but overall we're governed by our thoughts. what I'm saying is the higher faculties actually do govern the lower because I can think things and I can make choices. And I think that's really important for Christian theology because God is a speaking God and we're listening and responding creatures. But then fourth is that humans can possess
PJ Wehry (34:10.143)
Mm-hmm.
Matthew LaPine (34:36.618)
imperfect virtues by common grace. And so, you know, if I work out regularly, the composition of my body is going to change. And health is a sort of imperfect habit that according to Aquinas, but it's also true. if I move towards the lowly and prioritize them and honor them and spend time with them, I will begin to see people differently and I'll begin to respond automatically differently. So that was basically
PJ Wehry (35:01.376)
Yes.
Matthew LaPine (35:05.706)
the what was happening there. What I tracked then was what happened in between was developments how body and soul were viewed. And in general, to summarize a long chapter, it moved away from a holistic kind of body and soul to a much more sort of dualistic sort of, it was well on its way to Cartesian dualism before it ever got to Calvin.
And I could talk more about that, but that's more boring stuff. But what eventually happened was these lower powers, these passions, they became downgraded as part of our irrational bodies. And so they're no longer in the realm of what's moral. And then,
PJ Wehry (35:50.484)
We're still in Aquinas with that.
Matthew LaPine (35:53.068)
No, that's in between Aquinas and Calvin. Yeah.
PJ Wehry (35:54.471)
in between Aquinas and Calvin. So this is people changing what Aquinas has said. Okay.
Matthew LaPine (36:01.154)
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, they're just, working through what the powers of the soul are. So how many forms are, this is, are there multiple, are there multiple souls within a person? Are there multiple forms within a person? What is the relationship between the soul and the powers? And then how do you defend the immortality of the soul from people began to think, well, Aristotle's too ambiguous on this. We need to go with Plato. And anyway.
There's a whole thing that you can look at there.
PJ Wehry (36:31.936)
Who are some names there, if you don't mind my asking, just so that we can...
Matthew LaPine (36:36.972)
Yeah, mean, probably the most important one is burden. There gradually came to be a sort of burden consensus as to how the soul interacted with the powers. So it was assumed that the soul just is its powers and then the powers have to simplify as a result. And then the things that used to be part of the soul's powers get relegated to the body. yeah, I think burden's the most important person. In the immortality debate, there's...
There's Alexandre ism and Avarism and and then Ficino I think that's how you say it he's He's advocating for a more platonistic view of the soul and so there's a platonic resurgence of the soul, but Really I could probably give you some book recommendations that would be more that would be more helpful Than just a few of those names. But the other thing that happened in between was
PJ Wehry (37:29.695)
Yeah.
Matthew LaPine (37:34.286)
It fundamentally changed how the will works. shortly after Aquinas, maybe it was shortly after his death, Aquinas's view of the will came to be condemned as too much like Socrates. Like reason captures the good and the will automatically moves toward it. I don't think that was Aquinas's view, but he was accused of being an intellectualist. And yeah.
PJ Wehry (37:50.452)
Yes.
Yes.
PJ Wehry (37:57.941)
Well, forgive me, in the middle of this too, because these are fundamentally theological debates because of the time period, the... Christology is gonna be an important, right? Like, there's like that heretic, it's like, well, you can't, like, there's a whole, there are whole avenues blocked off because it's like, well, that affects with the doc, right? Am I right in that? Like...
Matthew LaPine (38:10.114)
Mm. Sure. Yeah.
Matthew LaPine (38:18.03)
Yeah, that's true. And I don't get into any of that. But yes, yeah,
PJ Wehry (38:22.976)
Right, right, right, right, right, because they don't get into that. But it is important to know like, well, why didn't they think about this? It's like, well, there's the nature and the unity. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry, go ahead.
Matthew LaPine (38:30.008)
Totally, totally.
Yeah, is a, you know, is a, what's the status of a dead body? What makes it a body? You know, something like that, right? Yeah. Anyway, or whose body is it? Yeah. But the changes in the will largely, comes to, I think it comes to be seen as sort of like a homunculus, like a separate.
PJ Wehry (38:42.52)
Mmm. yeah. Yeah. Well, that's the immortality thing too, right? Like there's these there's these limitations because of orthodoxy. Yeah
Matthew LaPine (39:01.966)
almost like if you have conflict between the intellect and and and the will you're treating them both as if they have independent sources of the capacities of the other so a Will can't contradict the the inter intellect unless they both have ideas and A will can't war against the reason unless they both have desires So Calvin talked a lot about how our wills not a lot but sometimes about how our will and reason fight with each other
PJ Wehry (39:03.123)
Mm-hmm.
PJ Wehry (39:12.777)
Mm-hmm.
PJ Wehry (39:19.732)
Right.
PJ Wehry (39:24.447)
Yes.
Matthew LaPine (39:31.214)
And that assumes that they each have appetite and cognition. that was one of the, I think they turn the will into almost an entire, a whole agent. And the reason why they do is they want to say the will has the capacity to choose against reason. So reason identifies this is good and the will can say, nope, or yep. Does that make sense?
PJ Wehry (39:31.232)
Mm-hmm.
PJ Wehry (39:51.839)
Yes, do you think that they're taking the dual tier approach and they're just pushing it back up into the top tier? Okay. Yeah. Yeah.
Matthew LaPine (39:56.494)
Yep, yep, that's my theory, Yeah, so they're also expanding some of the powers of the will. So this is Anselm's two appetites, and Scotus was a big advocate of this. So there's sort of the natural appetite, and then there's the appetite for justice, which restrains the natural appetite. But probably the biggest thing that happens with the will is that the will comes to be seen as
The most important thing about the will is that it can freely choose And so they locate free choice entirely in the will And what that does is it basically eliminates any need for virtue. In fact virtue would be an obstacle to free choice So you basically what virtue was for Aquinas it was the quality, the habit
of the powers that made them together work well and easily toward a good choice. So when I see the donut.
PJ Wehry (41:03.55)
Yeah, it's kind of like an inscribed internal structure that like predisposed you.
Matthew LaPine (41:09.57)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That predisposes you to choose good. So I see the donut, I'm not overwhelmed by strong appetite because I see it with the eyes both of taste and moderation at the same time. And so then I can choose freely to not partake because I've already had three or something like that. But so my point is virtue is...
PJ Wehry (41:13.887)
Yes.
PJ Wehry (41:23.54)
Yes.
PJ Wehry (41:32.755)
That was not what I was expecting. Sorry, go ahead.
Matthew LaPine (41:39.15)
is the quality of the working of each of those four sort of aspects of our psychology such that the good choice becomes easy and the bad choice becomes hard and vice would be the opposite. So if the most essential characteristic of the will is that it can freely choose, then virtue and vice have basically no function to like in any particular moment of a virtuous habit or a vicious habit, I guess,
This is Ian Drummond's dissertation. I've forgotten the name right now, but virtue becomes a feature of the will and it sort of sets you up for the Calvinist understanding of the bound will is the one that's bound by sinful appetite and it requires the spirits sort of freeing up to choose otherwise. Does that make sense?
PJ Wehry (42:21.171)
right.
PJ Wehry (42:37.226)
Yes.
Matthew LaPine (42:37.4)
But the structure of the will is such that the will is its own chooser.
PJ Wehry (42:45.396)
Are you familiar with Jean-Paul Sartre being a nothingness? So he has this idea of like negative freedom. So I can explain it pretty quickly. The important thing for him was that we always have complete and total freedom because we can completely negate the past. Which I remember reading that thing, that's absolutely crazy. And I think he's kind of fallen off in part because he is having this volunteerist position as if at any moment he's like,
Matthew LaPine (42:50.638)
Yeah.
Matthew LaPine (43:02.562)
Yeah, Yep, sure.
Matthew LaPine (43:10.19)
Yep.
PJ Wehry (43:13.524)
People are afraid of their freedom, their ability to, it's like, it's that enlightenment idea of like the, like we have so much control and so much power when in effect, like if you're constantly changing what you're doing, you're like, like that, we know what that person's like, that person's annoying because they're like, I'm doing this today. I'm doing this today. And it's, it's the, the continual repeated actions and the, the, it cars for us that makes the difference.
Matthew LaPine (43:25.72)
Yes, yes.
PJ Wehry (43:42.194)
And so, I mean, that's kind of the ultimate expression of that. The complete denial of the past.
Matthew LaPine (43:42.316)
Yeah, so.
It's the freedom from or freedom for distinction, right? So, so I don't actually want to be free from all internal constraints. Like I would love to have some internal constraints, which are really healthy because I mean, I think about this in terms of like, um, I took three weeks worth of piano lessons and the only thing I can remember is three, four or five, one, two, four, three, three, four, five, one, two, three, one. And, um, but I, so I don't have the internal habits that allow me to play Claire de Lune.
PJ Wehry (44:13.695)
Yes.
Matthew LaPine (44:15.372)
So I am free from constraint in one sense, but I'm not free to do good in terms of on the piano. And I think that that's, I would love to see a deeper understanding of the fact that being enslaved to Christ is freedom, because it's freedom to walk in holiness and joy and to not be enslaved to all the vicious habits that we have.
have embodied in a deep way, just living in the world as sinful creatures.
PJ Wehry (44:49.344)
So we have these internal structures and you can call them habits, but it's really expansive, right? Like it's a lot of it's this whole internal structure.
Matthew LaPine (44:54.626)
Yeah. Habits of seeing habits, habits of reacting habits of thinking habits of choosing, even embodied habits like health habit, know, second nature.
PJ Wehry (45:01.764)
You mentioned Habitus, right? Like that's that whole... Yes. And so when we talk about putting off the old man and putting on the new, you see maybe not 100 % or would you? Like there's definite crossover there. Is that kind of what we're talking about? Is that Christ is re-inscribing new structures inside us?
Matthew LaPine (45:20.774)
yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think in Romans six, there's clearly two beats to Christian sanctification, which is we reckon ourselves dead to sin and alive to God. So there's a new way of framing. It's Romans 12 too. We renew our minds. So we think of ourselves different. We think of how we relate to God different and we're in Christ and we put on his life and we died with him in baptism, we were raised with him. But then we...
present our body parts, like literally our members, the members of our body as instruments of righteousness, which leads to our sanctification. And so it's that thought and practice duality, that sort of reciprocating spiral. But then obviously there's something missing because we see this difficulty that exists in us still as we try and do this. And you get to Romans eight and it talks about how actually the key here is that when you're in Christ, you have the spirit.
PJ Wehry (46:18.303)
Yes.
Matthew LaPine (46:18.444)
and the spirit is the one who brings our mortal bodies to life. if he can do that, like he raised Jesus from the dead, he can do that in our physical bodies also. But there's an already not yet expectation that we who have the first fruit of the spirit, we still grown awaiting the redemption of our bodies. So I think it's really, really, if you read six through eight and underline body flesh members, every time you see it, I think you get a much clearer picture of what Paul's doing.
It's a deeply embodied account of spirituality that he gives there.
PJ Wehry (46:44.576)
Hmm.
PJ Wehry (46:51.252)
Which, and of course the West has always struggled with understanding the significance of the incarnation apart from the cross. And so do you think part of what you're doing is re-appropriating the significance of the incarnation and Christ's obedience?
Matthew LaPine (47:01.347)
Hmm.
Matthew LaPine (47:05.345)
Yeah. Yeah, I think so. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't have fully developed thoughts on this, I really, I find Colossians fascinating because Paul's really, really leaning into this, right? The fullness of God was there in Jesus. And that fullness is also in us as we belong to each other. This is Colossians two,
like 17th through 19th where it talks about pushing away asceticism. And instead what you do is you hold to the head, which is Christ, and from whom the joints and ligaments all strengthen each other. And so Paul even says that I'm feeling what's lacking in Christ's suffering on your behalf. Like here I am embedded my body in the body serving other Christians as a way of the sanctification of the body all because
the fullness of God dwelt bodily in Christ and we are attached to him.
PJ Wehry (48:09.152)
So we talked a little bit and I feel like this is still all part of the Calvin discussion as we move from Aquinas to Calvin to kind of modern-day American Protestant theology.
Matthew LaPine (48:17.39)
Sure. Yeah.
Yeah.
PJ Wehry (48:23.676)
What are some of the applications that you see? What are some of the gaps that you are addressing?
Matthew LaPine (48:31.682)
Yeah, well, I think that, you know, probably the first thing and most important thing for me is just the sort of liturgy of obedience. There's a sort of, Paul says it in Romans 12, is a sort of reasonable service. Like, think that we sort of see, we talk about obedience as if it's the overflow of the heart sometimes, which I grant that it is, but it's also,
It's practice. So a practice is something that I do not just for the sake of doing it but for how it works back on me It's the same thing. It's that it's that the middle voice, right? I I clothe myself so so I That's Paul's language of putting on or putting off, right? So I I think that Paul sees Sees his theology and his ethics as integrally connected
in part of the formative process. And I think we sometimes miss that. We become too cognitive about it. We think that as long as I change my thoughts, then my heart will change and then my actions will change. And I'm just saying full participation in Jesus involves thoughts and fully embodied participation in the life of Jesus within the church. And that involves not just my own individual life, but also the social life as the spirit distributes the gifts.
to the different members for strengthening. Does that make sense? So I just recovering the place of obedience within community is probably the first and most significant one. But I think the one that I've been moving to a lot more recently is also just understanding why people are where they are. as I've, know, when I'm looking at, let's say anxiety,
you know, what I'm afraid of is I'm afraid of a posture which says, now, I wonder if this is sin or if this is like a chemical imbalance. Like that's a sort of guilty until proven innocent approach to mental health, which doesn't reflect the reality of mental health. But if you talk to someone who has generalized anxiety disorder or OCD or something like that, and you hear more about their story, you're going to find that there's a lot more going on with it. And I think that that's...
Matthew LaPine (50:56.182)
you know, churches often sort of valorize people who have a stable upbringing as being the most righteous. there's sort of who we put forward. And in some ways that's true, like emotional stability and self-control and all these things are important fruits of the spirit. But it's also important to understand that the community someone was raised in is an important part of what forms them.
And there's courageous, faith-filled, spirit-filled transformation that happens in people who have been significantly abused. If you look at ACE scores, which is adverse childhood experiences, if you're four or higher on ACE scores, your health outcomes and your mental health outcomes are just devastating. And so I think we just need to do a better job of understanding where people are coming from and why.
PJ Wehry (51:48.713)
Mm-hmm.
Matthew LaPine (51:54.38)
And honestly, that raises the stakes for us in terms of what it looks like to live a community of holiness and righteousness. Like we are cultivating each other in how we treat each other. And it raises the stakes for how we interact with people by giving honor and offering the welcome that Christ gives and how we care and how we listen. And so I just think that part of understanding how people got where they are is also understanding our responsibility.
to cultivate peace in others by how we engage with them. Like I'm much more communitarian in how I look at the church. The church is not just a bunch of people who come together weekly to worship God alongside each other and then go about their business. The church is a social group. And the social group matters because it's the body of Christ. Like we're connected to Him, we're connected with one other. Each of us contributes by the gifts that we give to each other.
And so read 1 Corinthians 12 and ask yourself, is this what my church looks like? Do we give more honor to the weaker members, the less presentable members so that there will not be division, so they don't feel overlooked and left out?
PJ Wehry (53:12.02)
And I know that you said that you think cognitive comes first or governs first, but it also seems like
Matthew LaPine (53:19.438)
in a broad sense over time, thoughts govern, our thoughts and choice govern how we come to be formed. But I'm also adding in this social component. And part of that has to do with human beings sit both in the higher level as we talk to each other and in the experiential register. So if I say, God loves you and then scream at you, you know.
You might know what the words God loves you mean, but you might not experience that. Does that make sense?
PJ Wehry (53:53.705)
Yeah, well, you're not going to understand it the right way. Part of this is, as you've talked about, I think a lot of times it's, well, you need to listen to preaching and you need to speak truth to yourself. You need to go to therapy. But seeing spiritual practices like the Lord's Supper, like gathering, like singing, fasting and giving and all these things.
Matthew LaPine (53:56.814)
Right.
PJ Wehry (54:19.04)
which are bodily more embodied practices would also be what you would from what I understand what you're saying those would be very helpful helpful mental health things yes
Matthew LaPine (54:26.702)
Breaking bread.
These are formative. Yeah, yes. And I think that probably that if I were to put a finger on the biggest single cause of our situation today in terms of mental health, it's that almost all of the depression and anxiety spike that we've seen recently is addiction and isolation. So we are not vitally connected to each other.
PJ Wehry (54:52.446)
Hmm. Right.
Matthew LaPine (55:00.328)
And because of that, or that's a contributing factor to us just digging full scale into addictive behaviors, whether that's just scrolling Facebook or Twitter or whatever it is. But we were not vitally connected in spiritual relationships. I think, mean, Johann Hari wrote a book called Lost Connections, which he gets into all this and I...
I love the first half of the book, second half of the book, you know, whatever. I skipped it. But I skipped most of it. Yeah.
PJ Wehry (55:35.217)
I thank you for saying that no one ever said admits to that right like you're like first half is great second half just skip it It's not worth it. yeah, go ahead
Matthew LaPine (55:42.818)
Yeah, well Mortimer Adler taught me to use books. part of the issue is that he's not reading from a Christian perspective. And so he's nailing the problem. The problem is that we're designed to be in relationship with God, relationship with other people, in relationship with meaningful work within creation. And if I'm not in vital relationships in that way, then I'm going to be suffering. And the link between suffering
PJ Wehry (55:52.094)
Yes.
Matthew LaPine (56:10.602)
and anger or violence or depression or anxiety is huge. We have to learn that our ultimate hope is found in God, but the means of grace are also partly the church that he's given us and the calling that he's given us to love and serve others, that those are healthy things to engage in.
PJ Wehry (56:36.131)
This has been awesome. I really appreciate it. As a final, you know, I to be respectful of your time. As a final question, besides buying and reading your excellent book with a gorgeous cover, this whole series, anyways, I'm always a fan of like cool paintings on the front. What would you recommend to somebody who has listened to us for the last hour to either do or meditate on or over the next week?
Matthew LaPine (56:52.492)
Yeah, yeah, they did a nice job. Yeah.
Matthew LaPine (57:08.322)
Yeah, I mean, I think probably the first thing I would say is, know, those three avenues that I've just talked about, relationship with God, like, for me personally, the last few years have been a pathway of saying, do I find ultimate rest in you? Like, you know, it's been kind of a difficult few years, but
PJ Wehry (57:33.728)
Hmm.
Matthew LaPine (57:38.21)
But like just literally in prayer opening my hands and saying not my will but your will be done and finding my rest in my heavenly father has been really, really vital. So how do you assess yourself? Can you say to live as Christ and to die as gain? Can you say that you've learned the secret of contentment because the one thing that you want is to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of his sufferings like Paul does in Philippians.
How, what are your practices of relating to God? Maybe also secondly then assess like, who are the three people that I have vital and intimate relationship with? Who are the 15 people that I'm in community with and who are, who's the group that I'm a part of that I get a broader sense that I have a shared mission with? So like how spiritually vital are my friendships? And then lastly, what's my understanding of my vocation? I think a lot of.
Sort of run-of-the-mill not like extremely complex mental health issues, but a lot of the run-of-the-mill mental health issues Can be improved slowly over time by assessing where I am on those on those axes how I relate to God in a primary sense how I relate to others and how I relate to meaningful work in creation if you find yourself spending six hours a day on your phone these things are going to be hindered and and so Do do that assessment ask yourself?
Am I walking with God in deep dependence? Am I walking with others in deep interdependence? And I'm building meaningful things in the real world.
PJ Wehry (59:17.254)
Awesome, Dr. Lopine. Absolute joy having you on today. What just like it's such an actionable and practical ending. So I appreciate it. Thank you.
Matthew LaPine (59:27.278)
Yes, thank you so much for having me.