Episode 4: When Theology Meets Marvel

Show Notes

Can we make up our own theology? Who cares about doctrine? How does your universe work? Anita Wing Lee demystifies 'theology' as she uncovers the thousands of different ways to express faith in something bigger than ourselves. 

Features conversations with Dr. Patrick Franklin, Dr. Victor Shepherd and Dr. James Tyler Robertson. 

What is Heavenly Minded Earthly Good?

Anita Wing Lee has spent a decade as content creator -- blogging, filming, snapping, live streaming, editing and publishing her way around the world. Since the age of 21, she's told stories from dozens of countries, confronted inequality and injustice, shared her spiritual journey, and aspired to be a voice for good.

But behind the Instagram and YouTube videos, there was something she never talked about: God had let her down.

A supernatural encounter in 2017 forced her to stop traveling, demolished her fledgling career, and left her with no option but to come back to Toronto where she found herself working at church.

When she enrolled in a Master's of divinity at Tyndale University, she wasn't trying to become holy or a pastor.

It was just unfinished business.

They call it deconstruction. She calls it seeking the truth. This is her story.

Anita Wing Lee 00:02
To be honest, I wasn't even sure what a Master's of divinity was. I had to google it. And Google said it was a professional degree for clergy. But I had zero interest in being a pastor or a minister. In fact, I thought a Masters of divinity sounded pretentious. Like I'm getting a masters of the cosmos or Masters of the Universe. Whenever I told people I was doing a masters and they'd asked me, What are you studying? I stopped saying a Masters of divinity since no one knew what that was. So I started saying, I'm studying theology. But that sounded like another elite word that only Christians used. And I was not one of those people. And I hadn't read a Christian book in years. Now, as a part of this program, I was supposed to read how many books?

Anita Wing Lee 00:56
Tyndale University presents heavenly minded earthly good. Deconstruction is the word commonly used for the process of critically dissecting your Christian beliefs.

Dr. James Tyler Robertson 01:07
For some in the church deconstruction is kind of the new bad word of backsliding or apostasy or heresy.

Anita Wing Lee 01:15
Churches tend to assume that deconstruction is an intellectual issue. But it's intertwined with all these other layers of what makes us human.

Dr. Helen Noh 01:24
What makes up a person is things like their cognitive layers, their emotional layers, their behavioral layers, and their relational layers.

Anita Wing Lee 01:32
And this podcast follows my personal journey through deconstruction. Along the way, we're going to chat with professors, pastors, psychologists, researchers, historians, and artists.

Tara Jean Stevens 01:44
But I was still really struggling with the fact that if I was wrong, I might be going to hell.

Anita Wing Lee 01:53
We'll explore the questions so many of us have about Christianity, the stuff you probably didn't feel comfortable bringing up on Sunday at youth group or small group. I'm your host and guide for this journey, and Anita Wing Lee.

Anita Wing Lee 02:09
The first course for my Master's of divinity program, called Church In The City was held at a retreat center in Niagara Falls. It's a unique incubator style program designed specifically for people who are working, which was the only reason and the only way I would do an M Dev. I didn't have to quit my jobs. I just had classes on Wednesday, and there were six week courses with two weeks off. I also only looked at this program and applied to this one because it was one where I'd be with the same cohort of students for the first three years. I didn't like the idea of bouncing between courses like a typical master's and where your classmates change every week. So this was it.

Anita Wing Lee 02:51
This course in the summer of 2019 was the first time I would meet the nine people who would be my classmates. We spent the next five days together, sharing our stories, heartaches, tragedies and dreams. They were moms, dads, people who worked in churches like me, pastors, people who were just working in other professions and felt led to study. It was a course about spiritual formation, the idea that we are meant to be formed into the image of Christ through our spiritual journeys. And a book that we had to read was called thirsty for God. A few lines of the introduction of this book jumped out at me, and would become a motto and an anthem for me.

Anita Wing Lee 03:35
As the author Bradley Holt wrote, "the underlying message of this book is that there are many authentic ways to be Christian, to practice Christian spirituality. Thus, we have not only many spiritualities in the world, but also many Christian spiritualities. Many views on how to live the Christian life." Wait a second, he just wrote that there are many authentic ways to be Christian, and to practice Christian spirituality. In my head, having grown up in Christian culture, I got the idea that there was just one way to be Christian. But this book outline dozens, if not hundreds, of different ways that people over the centuries have found to express and live out their faith in God. Sometimes these ways were conflicting. People went to live in forests out in nature, others went to serve the poor, some people worshiped with extravagant music and movement and others sat in silence. It was the first time that I realized there are 1000s of different ways of following God. There is no cookie cutter path of being Christian. And this was how I started my degree.

Anita Wing Lee 04:52
I may have grown up in church and learned the songs memorized the Bible verses but now in comparison to what I was learning in seminary, everything in church seemed like kindergarten. I was headed for way into the deep end. One of the first things on my list to figure out was theology. Apparently, I was enrolled in theological studies. So I better figure out what theology is. I asked Dr. Patrick Franklin, the professor of systematic theology, and we heard from an episode one, how he defines theology. And he gave me three different ways of looking at it, beginning with simply thinking about God.

Patrick Franklin 05:37
There's a lot of different ways to about theology. The one of the simplest definitions is Alister McGrath, he says, It's discourse about God. Theos. Logos. So thinking about God, discourse about God. But then I think people think about theology in different ways. One of the common ways to think about it is that it's a body of knowledge. So, like, I read theology, they might be thinking content, it's a body of knowledge that you read. Another way of thinking about it is that it's an academic and ecclesial, or even pastoral discipline. So there you're doing in the context of certain communities, traditions, certain ways of asking questions, whether that's the academic university context, which like certain kinds of questions, or whether it's maybe the pastoral role or church context, in which case, there are other kinds of questions that people might be asking. And so, so then it's a kind of practice within a certain context with certain interlocutors or people you're talking to about theology.

Anita Wing Lee 06:39
In my attempts to make sense of what is theology, I compare it to how I understand other academic disciplines, like psychology or biology. In each field, there are big terms, leading thinkers and theories, and also theories that evolve within the discipline. There's also a difference between reading a popular book with some biology sprinkled into it, compared to an 800 Page biology textbook. It's the difference between getting that veggies are good for you, compared to understanding the intricacy of how our digestive system breaks down chlorophyll in plants. So with theology, there are popular books with some simplified theology sprinkled in there. And then there are 800-page theology textbooks that explain things in so much detail that it makes the most dense sermon seem basic. My theology books were trying to explain how salvation redemption and atonement worked. And sometimes it was going way over my head, okay, more than sometimes.

Anita Wing Lee 07:50
But for me, understanding the distinction between beginner biology and advanced biology gave me some relief, knowing that it's okay, if I don't understand all of the advanced stuff. I'm still learning something. But there's one more big distinction we should make between theology and something like religious studies, faith, faith in God. Theological studies assumes that you actually have faith and a personal belief in God. And here's how this factor plays out, according to Dr. Patrick Franklin.

Patrick Franklin 08:27
a way that I think is really important is that theology is a spiritual discipline or a spiritual practice, because it's about God after all. And so I often think that one of the ways that is important about thinking about theology is to think of it in terms of this spiritual discipline of the mind and of the heart. Because a lot of people really get stuck on theology being about content. And that really matters but it can misconstrue theology, one of the things I like to say to my students is, we have to get away from thinking about theology as simply the memorization and regurgitation of doctrine. And doctrine is really important to theology. It's like the fruit of it. It's like the byproduct of theology. So but doctrine is just that it's the fruit of a process. And so often, a theological question will arise in the church. People start reading, studying, debating, discussing, sometimes even pretty heatedly, and the endpoint of that is some kind of conclusion that the church comes to.

Patrick Franklin 09:29
But if we get into just sort of memorizing and regurgitating doctrine, then it's like we're just downloading the end product without understanding the process. And then we lose the context. And you become somebody who, like in math has memorized a bunch of formulas but doesn't know how to apply them to anything. And so you get stuck, and then theology becomes kind of dead. And it becomes this sort of, you know, thing where we're looking over each other's backs we're we're seeing if i's are dotted T's are crossed, for its own sake, rather than seeing this as a process, actually a spiritual discipline of trying to think God's thoughts after him, trying to do that in the context of community, forming the mind and the heart, by the word in the Spirit.

Anita Wing Lee 10:16
For people who grew up in charge and got used to being told the things that you can or can't do, because they're a sin, Christianity can feel like memorizing a bunch of formulas that don't add up. And so here I was putting a lot of money and time and mental energy to study these formulas. It really didn't help that the first few courses we had to take in our program were Greek courses, we all had to learn how to read in Greek so that we could read the Greek New Testament, that means the Greek alphabet, Greek words and Greek grammar, it all seems so pointless. Sometimes I was annoyed that I was doing this. But all the while there was this sense that a part of me was growing deeper. Dr. Victor Shepard, another professor of theology at Tyndale University explains it this way.

Victor Shepherd 11:14
We have to understand that knowledge of God is rooted in an encounter with God with the living person of God, when wherein we are rendered different people, the engagement with God, the encounter with God is transformative. Now, knowledge of God is precisely my knowledge of God, is precisely the difference in me effected through meeting him. My knowledge of my wife isn't that she's five foot two inches tall and weighs 105 pounds and speaks French fluently. My knowledge of my wife is neither more nor less than the difference she has made to me in my living with her for 52 years.

Anita Wing Lee 12:10
On one hand, I was getting a lot of information about God. At the same time, I was also encountering God, through the church that I worked at, there were all these subtle details in my life that kept working out. And I could see God in it. I got to work in a creative team, which was fun. Prior to this, I was usually a solo creative. As a creative person, I always wanted autonomy in my work life. And though there were days, I still had to come to the office, I had a boss who understood what it meant to be creative, and gave us a lot of freedom. I had a good team, and it was all female. My boss was my age, and we got along.

Anita Wing Lee 12:53
After all those years in business school, where I had developed this fear of working in an office, I was surprised to discover that my soul wasn't getting sucked out of me as I worked in the offices that catch the fire. And so I was meeting God and getting to know God, and all these quiet tiny ways, I could see that God was being good to me. I didn't have an answer for what happened in Montenegro yet, but in my work life, and through school, I felt like God loved me. During this time, I stopped posting on social media, and creating content other than what I had to do for work. But I also kind of wanted to write about what was happening to me. But would it be sacrilegious to put my own theological reflections on the internet? I asked Dr. Patrick Franklin, about this.

Patrick Franklin 13:50
Can everybody do theology, and that's almost equated with, everybody's entitled to their opinion about what God is and what the church should believe, and so forth. And that can very quickly become, well, it can even know what the word degenerate, let's say, right, into just a bunch of opinions. And I do observe this a fair bit, I want to say so that can that can devolve quickly, quickly. And I guess the challenge would be, you know, do you understand the discipline? And do you understand of the the integrity of the discipline and what goes on? And then of course, when you get out into the blogosphere, and then to podcasts, and so forth, theology can quickly devolve into, you know, whatever I happen to think about God, and there's no accountability attached to that there are no sort of hard won disciplines attached to that necessarily, and that can become problematic.

Patrick Franklin 14:47
On the reverse side, like there is a sense in which I do want to encourage the idea that every Christian should be a theologian in the sense that a lot of Christians are afraid of theology. And again, they think it's something like the memorization and regurgitation of doctrine. And then they think they just don't know enough or they don't think it's interesting enough to get involved in doing. And I kind of just want to say, well, actually, you're doing theology all the time, in one sense of the term.

Patrick Franklin 15:17
For example, you know, if if you're asked to read a passage of Scripture, on some occasion, a wedding, a funeral, a gathering, Will, Scripture is not going to tell you which verse, you should go to what's going to be fitting and appropriate, you have to have cultivated a kind of theological sensibility, a kind of way where you can improvise on the spot. That's not just throwing any verse out there. But it's kind of a cultivated sense of what's appropriate, and that it takes kind of theology to do that, or a theological sensibility. And there's all kinds of ways in which we're doing theology. So going back to that very basic definition, theology is discourse about God. Well, if you're thinking about God, or talking about God, the question isn't, are you going to do theology? But are you going to do it? Well? And are you going to do it with appropriate sources? Of course, being appropriately informed, and so forth? And are you doing it with a sense of responsibility? I think so I do think in one sense, we need to encourage everyday believers to be responsible with the minds God has given them. You know, Romans 12:2 Don't be conformed any longer to the patterns of this world be conformed, are transformed by the renewing of your mind. And so I think theology is really this discipline that helps us in that task of renewal of mind. So I want Christians to be theologians. But where does the professional theologian comes in? Well, I guess it's like a lot of other things, right? We encourage people to be active physically, not everybody's a professional athlete or a professional coach. And I think the discipline of theology is a little bit like coaching people to be better theologians in their own lives.

Anita Wing Lee 17:06
So maybe seminary was making me a baby theologian. It was teaching me how to think about God and consider different ways that other people thought about him. But while the content was interesting, it was still a lot of work. Every week, I had to do readings, schoolwork, and attend class, in addition to working full time, I couldn't help but ask myself, am I wasting my time? Does theology make any difference in my life? Does it even matter what I think or believe about God? As I wrestled with this question, I started to compare theology to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. And then I could see that what I believe about God really does matter.

Anita Wing Lee 17:49
So consider this, if you believed that the Marvel Cinematic Universe was real, and somebody told you that you had superpowers, it would make a difference to how you live, you are no mere human. Imagine that we have access to the superpowers, we have access to this ultimate power in the universe that's healing and redeeming all things. And we are invited to participate in altering the state of the world. Because if I believed that the Marvel Cinematic Universe was real, and that I was invited to be a part of it, I would live my life differently, with much less fear, anxiety and uncertainty. I would know who I am. And I would lean into this power that I have. And so was I compare that to Christianity. Some of the stuff in Christianity doesn't sound that weird. Maybe it's not that weird to believe in a hope that's from another solar system, another universe, because if you believe it, it does make a difference to how you live. And so maybe believing in Christianity, isn't that strange? But then which version of Christianity should I believe? Which one is true? What do I do about Christians who believe completely different things? It's almost a different religion. I bought this question to Dr. James Tyler Robertson, a professor of Christian history, and someone who's very familiar with how Christianity spawned all these denominations.

Dr. James Tyler Robertson 19:20
It's easy to dump on denominationalism. But I actually like it. I see it's a strength. So for me, I've always sort of looked at denominational ism in a similar way. As music genres are there too many music genres? For me denominations when they operate in a really truly biblical way is to give all sorts of different spaces for different people to focus on the the the song or the rhythm or an element of the gospel that really resonates with them and the ways that people resonate with songs or genres of music they love there's people who love hip hop and classical, same person who love hip hop and clap icicle and there's other people that love, you know, 1970s, rock and 1990s, grunge and Susa, for crying out loud. All these different things. Do we want to dump on someone for liking a different music style? Well, for me, it's a similar argument for denominations. There are people that love the ritual on the solemnity you're going to find in a Roman Catholic church or a church of England. There's people who love the guitars and the freewheeling nature of a Pentecostal church. There's people who love the focus on on your own involvement in salvation, like in the Baptist churches that baptism is something that you do when you feel like you want to follow God.

Dr. James Tyler Robertson 20:39
There's there's people who associate their worldviews and their cultures and their understandings with a variety of Orthodox churches, all these things are great. And all these things help us find meaning, and take the enormity of God's kingdom and break it down into something that resonates with you. Obviously, the problem is when someone's a fan of 1990s grunge like I am, or 1990s Hip hop like I am, if I violently oppose my parents who love the Beatles, or 1960s Rock, that's a problem, can I not see that my music genre was influenced by their music genre. And just because I don't like their songs, I do like their songs. Just because I don't like that other musical style doesn't mean that my musical style is better and superior, and is the only musical style. There is Jesus to be found in just a multiplicity of places. And so for me, denominationalism reflects when it's when it's handled well and with humility, it reflects the enormity of God's character, God's beauty, God's ability to communicate to his creations. The problem is when the way God has chosen to speak to us, we believe is the only way he should speak to everybody else as well.

Anita Wing Lee 21:52
So one way of thinking about all the diversity in Christianity is like genres and music. Dr. Victor Shepard presents it another way. He says we should identify what's at the core, from what's more optional. What could be at the periphery,

Victor Shepherd 22:10
We have to be able to distinguish between dogma, the building block of the faith once for all delivered to the saints doctrine, what a denomination records as important as a test for fellowship? And in the third place opinion, should we sing three hymns or four on Sunday morning? Should we celebrate the Lord's Supper in wine or grape juice? Why do we do these things? And why? And in other words, your opinion is something that's deemed advisable, but not essential. Now, to be sure, the line between doctrine and opinion is fluid. It's always fluid. And what someone regards his doctrine, someone else will regard his opinion and vice versa. But in deconstructing our faith, as it were, we have to be able to say to ourselves, what is essential if I am going to identify as belonging to Christ people? And what can I view with the matter, manner of detachment? And say, Well, I think the jury's still out on that one for now. And what can I say? It's relatively a matter of indifference. Are we going to sing hymns Sunday morning? Are we going to stand up and sing choruses? Are we going to have an organ or a guitar strumming? This is a matter of opinion, I think that we have to understand what is at the center of the face, and what moves out layer by layer to the periphery. I want to say that we should understand what is essential to the faith. It's the core. It's irreducible, and non negotiable. And after that, we can talk with one with each other about what we can embrace or allow someone else not to embrace without casting any aspersions on that person's faith. This I think is this understanding is essential in the so called deconstructing.

Anita Wing Lee 24:23
So I get what Dr. Victor Shepard means. Let's the backwards thing about all of this, is that when I came back to church and got this job at a church, and enrolled in seminary, I was not even sure what my beliefs about Christianity were. And if I even believed any of the beliefs, the only strand I had, was that I think God is real. I wasn't even sure if I believed what are the central tenants of Christianity. I wasn't sure about Jesus, the Holy Spirit, the Trinity resurrection, baptism, anything I often had This feeling that somebody's going to find me out, realize that Anita is not even a Christian. So she shouldn't be working in the church, she shouldn't be in this program, and they would just kick me out. But as the months went on, that never happened. What actually happened was I realized, I'm living proof. You can be not sure what you believe, and yet, still loved by God. I felt noticed by God. I felt like God was with me. And for me, there was no doubt that God was orchestrating the events in my life. It was all too strange to be true the way things were working out.

Anita Wing Lee 25:45
So if Christianity is about believing things intellectually, then I lose. I don't make the cut. But Christianity must be about more than just beliefs. Because why am I still here? In fact, why did it feel like God had parted the universe, plucked this girl from the hilltops in Eastern Europe, and plopped her inside a world famous church in Toronto, even in seminary, where I felt like an imposter Christian who didn't even align with Christian beliefs, I still felt a bit like I belonged. We were sitting around reading these deep, intellectually stimulating books, and talking about these kinds of nitty gritty issues about church and the Christian life. Questions I'd always wanted to talk about, I felt a bit like a detective or an investigator and seminary, I wanted to know what was true, and what was worth following, which isJust quite different from trying to study God so that you can serve Him and help other people. Most people don't go to seminary to figure out if they agree with Christianity. But for whatever reason, this must just be the way I'm wired. And maybe God knew going to seminary is the only way that Anita is going to get to the bottom of what she's looking for.

Anita Wing Lee 27:08
If I wasn't enrolled in this program, I probably would have dawdled around reading a book about Christianity here or there. But studying Greek, and reading theology texts that are hundreds of years old. Nope. So now I was in a crash course on Christianity and spirituality. Maybe it's not all that bad. Because even during those days, when I was traveling, and considered myself a spiritual seeker, bouncing between different belief systems, I had heard of the idea that all paths are leading up the same mountain, the mountain being the metaphor for the transcendent, the divine God. And so going into the deep end of one particular path, Christianity didn't seem like such a bad idea, at least I was going up the mountain, and you have to pick one route, if you want to go all the way to the summit. If I kept bouncing between different paths, different religions, or spiritualities, I wouldn't be going up the mountain just around, I could see that if I spent the next 10 years bouncing between different spiritual paths. Two years in Hinduism, three years in Buddhism, another couple years in Greek philosophy, I might not be going up the mountain, and I wanted to go up. I wanted to meet God. And apparently, God thought it was a good idea for me to get a master's degree, while I sorted out what I believed, instead of sorting out what I believed, and then going to get a master's degree for it.

Anita Wing Lee 28:44
One way or another, this was going to be my life for a while. Because the church in the city masters of divinity program is four years long. I could feel that I wouldn't be traveling for a while, so why not? I'll stick around and sort out what I believe. question by question, issue by issue, book by book. And even if a part of me still thought that religion was dumb, I understood now that everyone's got a religion, whether it's Jesus, Apple products, getting rich, or the Marvel Cinematic Universe. We all have a story around what we believe life is about whether we know it consciously or not. And what I believed would define how I live, I wanted to know do I have a superpower or not?

Anita Wing Lee 29:39
Okay, rockin and rollin.

Dr. James Tyler Robertson 29:42
Rockin and rollin.

Anita Wing Lee 29:44
Welcome to the unpolished part of the podcast where I sit with the Dr. James Tyler Robertson and we chat for seven minutes recap the episode, digest some of what happened and ask some questions.

Dr. James Tyler Robertson 29:56
All right, excellent. The timer has began seven min. That will be the maximum amount of time. Our wonderful listeners have to endure the unpolished section. I needed. This was a great episode. This might have been my favorite one so far. I'm curious to see where you're gonna go. In this episode, what sort of as you've sort of listened to it now, after having put it altogether, anything that sticks out for you,

Anita Wing Lee 30:20
I think it surprised me, how, how much I've come to understand theology and went from this word that just almost seemed evil. Like if you were a Christian, and you started talking about theology, it seemed really pretentious. And like, Oh, now you're going to wield your stick and beat me with your Bible. But now I think of it like, No, this is this is everything. I when it comes to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, I think of it like the rules of the universe, like what are the rules that you see in your your universe? Do you believe that the sun will rise tomorrow? And these kinds of simple things actually make a huge difference? So now I feel like everyone should spend some time sorting out what their theology is, even if you don't call it your theology.

Dr. James Tyler Robertson 31:02
Yeah, excellent. There's so many things I want to chat with you about what I liked in this episode is the attention to I think the word was used a few times like discipline. And not that I've ended I've said this from the beginning, not that I have an issue with deconstruction, my concern about deconstruction, too, is again, with this sort of North American focus on the individual, is we we believe that we can just sort of do this on our own. And in fact, think of that as an ethical. And I think that's exactly true. We, we have the ability to discern even from our spiritual leaders, what we're like, Hmm, good, bad, does this work? Does this not work. But the danger on the other side, too, is, this is something to do that puts you into a spot that maybe you wouldn't chosen for yourself, like you studying the Greek like you said, I'm reading these books that are a few 100 years old, nope. There's something profound and this this obviously extends way beyond Christianity into life, there is there is something really profound about choosing to submit to a discipline in order to get the tools that will help you grow. So in this episode, I saw your understanding of theology shift from, from science to, for me personally, what I've always thought of more closely as it's more of an art form. And art doesn't mean anything goes. Art has rules, like you said, and good art is just that it's good art. Even if we can't describe why we think it's good art. It moves us positively, negatively, whatever, it it moves us. And that's what I really liked about this episode.

Anita Wing Lee 32:32
I love that you just connected it to art. Because if you have if you guys haven't been able to figure it out yet, I'm not really into science, and super technical stuff I but I understand that there are principles of art, like composition and tone and color. And these things have, you know, Instagram, why does a feed look good, it's because somebody is using these principles of art. And I think when it comes to the whole, the idea of something beings true, and that being like black and white, and that being the only way to define it. Like, for me, it's so much more nuanced than that. Now, it's not just, it's not a bunch of rules that don't add up, it's more like art, you put these art pieces together, and somehow they form something that is so much more beautiful, and has so much more meaning. And it's not just about your head, it just it touches your heart.

Dr. James Tyler Robertson 33:25
So true. I mean, I think when you're right about composition, spacing, et cetera, et cetera, and reason why my Instagram feed looks terrible is one because I'm old. And too because I don't I don't necessarily follow those rules. But at the heart for the artist to create art, the main qualifier of art is courage, bravery, the ability to know the rules, and where to push the rules, where to even break the rules. And maybe that makes us a little bit nervous. But your reference to the allegory of the metaphor of the mountain, of course, conjures up images of like Dante and Paradiso and that sort of stuff. And never forget, in Dante's journey, the mountain and as he's as he walks up from you know, inferno to Purgatorio, to ultimately parody so there's there's parts where Dante falls off the mountain, and lo and behold, floats is this beautiful reminder that everything we're trying to do and when you said this idea of like, Oh, I'm not gonna figure out my stuff and then go to get my masters of divinity or master of divinity. You're right. It's such a it's such a pretentious.

Anita Wing Lee 34:30
Yeah, they might have to work on that.

Dr. James Tyler Robertson 34:32
Yeah, I mean, I do have an MDiv. But this the beauty of this sort of stuff as you're right in the proclamation of some Christianity is that you have this assent to the proper sentences as if when you die, we'll just put it into the most crass terms is when you die, and I believe it was Pete Holmes that said this, God's gonna crack open your head be like, Oh, there's the right sentence. Come on in as if that's the sum total Christianity and I'll be A little bit tongue in cheek, but I'm not far off. Whereas what we're describing in this, what I'm hoping the rest of the season carries is the more artistic journey of like, I don't know where this is coming from. I don't know what this is about. But I believe it's part of the search of truth. And as a historian in this world, I'll shut up after this as a historian why I am a Christian historian, which is also a history of Christian like, I studied Christianity as a social movement. But also I can I can self profess and be a person of faith is when my life has collapsed when it has broken down. When the temple I thought I built with God and named a grace, I, I and no other, burn it to the ground and discovered lo and behold, God is still there. What I've loved about history is that in this place of being on my own, and as any other human being ever been here before, am I the wars to my heretic? I pick up someone like Julian of Norwich, or Hildegard or St. John of the Cross, or, or et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And see all this is part of the great artistic experiment that we've labeled life, not just Christianity, but life. So we are at six minutes and 22 seconds, and there's a little homily there. I apologize for that. What are some of the stuff that we should put to the listeners before we close off?

Anita Wing Lee 36:18
Yeah, I want to leave you guys with a question. You might not think of yourself as a theologian. But as Patrick said, if you just think of it as talk about God, what do you think is your theology I challenge you to write it down? Like think about what do I actually believe about my life death? Who am I? What is the point of my life? Actually looking at these questions will give you clarity, don't wait until you have a quarter life crisis or midlife crisis like, these are the questions that when you can answer now, or spend some time, listen to the rest of the season and find some answers for yourself. It's so rewarding.

Dr. James Tyler Robertson 36:54
I'm going to add to that in the last few seconds of this. As a historian, time is so amazing. I would love it. If you would write down maybe one, maybe two, maybe three, I believe dot, dot, dot, whatever, don't care what it's about, but tie it into your faith, and then visit it, revisit it three months, six months, eight months, put it in place, this is a discipline and go back and be like, do I still believe that? If you scratch it out, change it with something else, add something in. And while some may look at that as like, Oh, you're losing your faith. We're back to the seminary cemetery. thing. I want to challenge you that looking at that and how your I believe statements, very simple statements are changing. That's some of your indications of the journey, what your mountain the shape of your mountain is beginning to take. What do you think?

Anita Wing Lee 37:41
Yeah, that sounds good.

Dr. James Tyler Robertson 37:42
All right. And that's seven minutes. So no matter what you think we're done, bye.

Anita Wing Lee 37:46
See you in the next one.

Anita Wing Lee 37:47
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