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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 (00:02.665)
Hello and welcome to Chasing Leviathan. I'm your host PJ Wehry and I'm here today with Dr. Jens Zimmerman, the J.I. Packer Professor of Theology at Regent College. And we're here to talk about his book, Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Christian Humanism. Dr. Zimmerman, wonderful to have you on today.
Jens Zimmermann (00:19.0)
Great to be here, PJ.
PJ Wehry (00:21.907)
So I did promise a little bit of an explanation. Dr. Zimmerman, a lot of my own work and a lot of people I've had on, I've actually been in the Bildung tradition. And so my background's in philosophical hermeneutics. That's a central part of Goddamer's discussion. Yes. that's one that part of this is born. The entire podcast is born out of this idea of dialogue or really just natural informal conversation.
Jens Zimmermann (00:39.054)
Hooray!
PJ Wehry (00:52.507)
And so this idea of humanism, of course, coming out of a German context, was really interested because they're because of what we see through Eckhart and Luther into idealism. And then to see Bonhoeffer have humanist tendencies, but being unwilling to say that it was really fascinating to me. And I think if we look forward, we need to I mean, we were just talking about this beforehand.
In the face of AI, what makes humans human and what is the value of developing humanness? This is really fascinating to me. So, Dr. Zimmerman, wonderful to have you on today. Let me just start off by asking why this book? Why did you write this book?
Jens Zimmermann (01:36.751)
Yeah, that's a hard question to answer really quickly, but in hindsight, and I didn't know it at the time, but in hindsight, I would say because of my own personal development and engagement of a certain institution I was teaching at, I was confronted with a kind of dualistic attitude toward reality that is typical, I think, of certain evangelical.
theologies, and this was, you know, an institution that kind of embodied that. And so I felt this constant rift between, you know, literature and the arts, and theology and philosophy. And then what really matters, which was usually science and business. And then oddly enough, you know, God and the Bible, which however, that very dualism shoved
onto the subjective side of knowledge, right? Along with, so only science gives you the facts and therefore only business gives you the job and the university education should really be giving you a good job that treats you with, you know, deal with practical things. And here we are in a humanistic liberal arts tradition that was based in a completely different worldview. And so that tension, I try to find means to combat it, right? So I mean,
practically speaking, you're in an English class teaching, this was my first teaching job teaching poetry and literature. So was an English prof for a good 20 years of my career. And you have students that say, I'm here to get a job. Why the hell would I want to study poetry? And it made them memorize a poetry. And, basically her, well, this is for men in tithes. This is for sissies. Like, why would I want to read poetry? Like, how is that?
PJ Wehry (03:25.03)
You
Jens Zimmermann (03:27.15)
Even relevant, this is like for emotional, like there's all these cliches, right? But they were, they came out and they go all the way up into the administration. So I mean, like long story short, I had these two encounters and I said, I'm glad to hear that you said you're trained in phenomenology or continental philosophy and hermeneutics because those, so on the epistemological front, I realized very quickly and I started reading
PJ Wehry (03:34.301)
Yes.
Jens Zimmermann (03:55.534)
Gadamer and Philosophical Hermeneutics, that's where you address that problem. The problem is the foundation, the epistemological foundation that splits knowledge into reason and faith. And Gadamer addresses that with truth and method, with this whole philosophy. It's really a defense of humanism and of humanistic knowing in literature, the arts and so on, as you well know.
So that helped. But I mean, I'm working at a Christian liberal arts college, so I needed some other source. And Bonhoeffer was sexy for them. Everybody reads Bonhoeffer, but they don't read Bonhoeffer the theologian. They read Bonhoeffer the pious devotional writer. And I discovered, wow, this guy is so... The first book I think I hit was the ethics fragments, like his ethics.
PJ Wehry (04:43.987)
Yeah.
Jens Zimmermann (04:52.877)
Most people access Boniface first through papers and letters and I think that's probably very good and I can see why but it's also confusing because you think you get this radical person who wants to ditch Christianity which is not true at all or a certain confessional Christianity and moves to something else which is not true at all. We can talk about that. But so Boniface of the Ethics is this Jesus guy, he affirms the church, affirms the centrality of Christ, has this personal relation with
to Jesus and God, which I think the Evangelicals rightly pick up on, but then that's all there is. he, one of his things that he discovered in, I think when he was writing Ethics, he latched onto this Colossians passage, right? The Christ is the center of all things. And to him that was, if not new, but at the context that he was in, that was the big epiphany that how that mattered and how that
addressed the problem with the Lutheran Church of his time, which was somehow fine with, you know, preaching like a spiritual uplift and having intense services and doing all the churchy thingy and then split themselves from the realities of what was going on in the state. It was going on in civic society with the, you know, the Nazi regime taking over and influencing the decisions with the German Christians.
PJ Wehry (06:08.318)
Hmm.
Jens Zimmermann (06:17.357)
Lutheranism didn't know how to address it. He realized that everything hangs together in Christ. The center of all of reality is here. Our humanism, or what I would call a Christian humanism, our theology needs to reflect that. We can't bifurcate ourselves like that.
Jens Zimmermann (06:43.081)
And there are many other ways we can talk about this. I discovered that this kind of thought really goes back to his earlier works. But I think for himself, he discovered the real crucial importance of that, both theologically and politically at that time. And so he became this kind of... I remember he had this meeting at the Lake of Geneva when he was one of his times when he could leave Nazi Germany. And we can talk about this too, like he had this really interesting role of a kind of undercover agent, if you will.
And he met with these pastors and all he talked about was this idea of this one reality in Christ and how we can't be dualists and how important that is. So anyway, was Gannem and Bonhoeffer with these two sources that helped me address that bifurcation, which I still think it still exists. I think we could talk about this too. I think that the kind of
PJ Wehry (07:23.774)
Mm.
Jens Zimmermann (07:39.327)
split between mind and body or matter and spirit is still driving a lot of the technological vision that informs our society, right? That we can talk about that too. So anthropologically, it also really matters whether you believe in an embodied spirit, like a psychosomatic unit of the human being, which we are our bodies. And in some sense, we are not reducible to our bodies either. That really matters. And it mattered for the whole building tradition that you mentioned.
I don't do this in this book, but I have another book on humanism and religion where I talk about that, the whole history of the Bildungstradition, or tradition and how it comes out of Christian or neoplatonic Christianity from the Church Fathers all the way through the Renaissance. And then the remnant of that is Humboldt and Schleiermacher, the Germans.
But it's still there. So it's basically that our intellect, our minds are to be shaped, formed, builded, right? Because they're supposed to be formed according to a... Like building, as Gartner says, means formation according to a picture. Well, what's the picture? Like what builds, what form are you going to be shaped into in your education, in your building, right? Your formation. And for the early Christians and then all the way to medieval philosophy and Renaissance, it was the image of God.
I mean, that was the picture. then that gets watered down. Yeah, the imago, the build, the picture. And that gets watered down and then it becomes watered down to intellectual freedom, is a good thing. But in the end, it is lost. When you have liberal arts in a secular society built on the completely forgetfulness of
PJ Wehry (09:07.826)
Hmm. Yeah. Literally the image. Yeah.
Jens Zimmermann (09:35.917)
what this image is supposed to be, then everything falls apart. And it's understandable why even any evangelical traditions that still call themselves liberal arts colleges, that's just kind of gone. And so they, you know, they don't know anymore what to form the people into. And so they it's business and jobs on the one hand, and it's kind of spiritual formation, whatever the heck that's supposed to mean on the other. And it usually means exactly what Bonifera was fighting, namely an inner spiritual uplift.
The spirit of the human being is no longer the German Geist, the inspirited body of everything that you need to connect to, but it's just simply your pious relation to God. that's this bifurcation. Anyway, so we kind of come circle. That's a long-winded answer to a very good question.
PJ Wehry (10:23.464)
Yeah.
PJ Wehry (10:28.606)
That's a great answer. A couple things. One is that the first thing I read by Bonhoeffer was The Cost of Discipleship, which is definitely more in the pious writings, but I really enjoyed it. that's the other part. I was like, oh, this is Bonhoeffer and Christian humanism? Anyways, it was very exciting. The other thing, you're talking about the bifurcation between kind of the soft and hard sciences or disciplines, if you will.
When I was going to Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, my prolegomena, they had me... prolegomena? I read things instead of talking about them and it hurts me every time pronunciation. They had me read John Warwick Montgomery's... This is their main text for theological method. Theology is a science, not an art.
and it talked about the objective facts of it. I will say that was not my favorite class. So what it actually did is it actually pushed, you said it's funny that it's considered important, but it gets pushed to soft sciences. In that class for me, and I think this is one of those, there's different ways that it gets split, but it's like, no, this is just as important as business and the natural sciences because it's over here in the objective world. I was like, anyways, it was.
Jens Zimmermann (11:42.401)
Mm-hmm.
PJ Wehry (11:57.351)
It was a wild ride.
Jens Zimmermann (11:57.997)
Yeah, so let me just, that's really interesting. I read that as I think an undergrad or graduate student, John Warren Montgomery, so Luther, you know? And that's the kind of, it's interesting, right? So theology as a science, and that's the kind of rationalism that was still in place. And then you get counter, because like Karl Barth, for instance, talks about this other big German theologian, talks about theology as a science, but.
What does that mean? So he is already on the other side now, right? Where you fight that kind of rationalism and bifurcation. I don't think he was as good as Bonifer, know, Bart scholars out there, forgive me. I just think Bonifer is, starts with the incarnation, has a better starting point. But Bart said some very intelligent things that were later picked up by a Scottish theologian, one of the Torrances, in a great book on incarnation science and something, can't remember the title.
PJ Wehry (12:30.983)
Yes.
Jens Zimmermann (12:56.278)
But so sciencia, science just means knowledge. And objective knowledge means knowledge that's commensurate with the object that we study. So objectivity means I have to have methods that fit the object that I study. whereas Montgomery would still say, let's all be natural scientists. Well, that's not working because that's the wrong method to apply to the object of knowledge, which is either another human being, sociality,
PJ Wehry (13:11.699)
Yes.
Jens Zimmermann (13:25.95)
love, justice or God, you need different methods. Like you can't use the scientific empirical method, right? And it took Christians a while, like theologians a while to figure this out. think around the, people like Torrance wrote this in like in the 80s maybe or later, you know, and it had to do with another person that never shows up in philosophical discussions. I don't know why, which is Michael Polanyi. I don't know if you've heard of him, but
PJ Wehry (13:52.723)
Yes.
Jens Zimmermann (13:53.404)
So you and I, so we can talk about this. mean, and if anybody listens who is in the hermeneutical, like philosophical hermeneutical tradition and phenomenology and content of philosophy, it is an enigma to me, a mystery. I mean, in the detective sense, not in the sacramental Christian sense, it's a mystery to me why Michael Polanyi isn't the first person that people come up with when they talk about...
a critique of science and to show how science is itself an interpretation requires personal investment, emotions, visions, imagination. Because he did all of that in the 40s. I mean, his Gifford lectures of personal knowledge. And he was a big deal. mean, and even Thomas Kuhn in his work on the paradigms of science, which is sort of a groundbreaking work that shows that science
has a lot to do with intuition and you jump from one paradigm to the next. You don't just do this Lego game and all of a sudden, yeah, I guess we need to... Like he's got a couple of footnotes, I think, to Polanyi. But he should start, like this is the guy that's done all of this work. So anyway, it's a fascinating point to me why that never happens.
PJ Wehry (15:07.463)
Yeah.
PJ Wehry (15:13.205)
Are you familiar with Esther Lightcap Meek?
Jens Zimmermann (15:16.536)
No, I have to confess,
PJ Wehry (15:17.758)
So, no. So, she, I think she's Professor Emeritus at Geneva College, but her specialty is Michael Polanyi. And I made the mistake of saying, mentioning a philosophical hermeneutic philosopher. And she was like, I told him about Michael Polanyi and he refused to talk about it.
Jens Zimmermann (15:28.394)
okay, should know this.
PJ Wehry (15:41.03)
And she was very- it's really- there's- this is this interesting gap here apparently and I have run into it a couple times. So, you're not the only one- Anyways.
Jens Zimmermann (15:41.333)
Crazy. Yeah.
Yep. Yep.
But it is striking that he never comes up, right? I I thought intellectuals go, so they do, especially hermeneuts, you work historically, right? Because we're historical beings and truth doesn't fall from the sky, but it gets worked out historically through, you know, and he doesn't show up. It's just crazy. Anyway, yeah. Sorry, this was a sidetrack. Yeah.
PJ Wehry (16:11.548)
Yeah, so that was a good one. It was a good sidetrack. I'm totally fine with that. how does... Hmm, I'm trying to think. I'm trying to think if we should... Yes, I know, definitely Bonhoeffer, but I was wondering if we should talk a little bit about the history of... You mentioned the Neoplatonic from your previous book. If you could give us just a very...
Jens Zimmermann (16:24.373)
Bonne Heufe!
Jens Zimmermann (16:36.085)
Mm-hmm.
PJ Wehry (16:38.502)
This is probably, I probably should just have you back on to talk about this, but the Neo-Platonic to even like the Erasmian humanism and then to see it be turned into the secular humanism that makes Bonhoeffer uncomfortable using the term. Can you talk about the history of that in a way that, put it in a story that people will be able to understand where we're at talking about Bonhoeffer?
Jens Zimmermann (16:56.17)
Right.
Jens Zimmermann (17:08.203)
Yeah, okay. if I don't make sense, I'll just get people to look at that other book, Humanism and Religion, or what I call my evangelical rant version of the same thing, it's Incarnation of Humanism, like I wrote a version of it for the evangelical audience, which is probably more understandable, less academic. But I and I do this kind of in the first chapter of the book, right, how Bonifera is
PJ Wehry (17:12.06)
No pressure.
Jens Zimmermann (17:37.972)
a Christian humanist, which is this neoplatonic tradition. But he doesn't call himself that. And he himself doesn't like the label humanism because he thinks it's basically secular humanism. Although he recognized that he himself is a product of humanistic education, which means that you combine music, arts and literature and mathematics, and it's all part of the well-rounded individual.
And he has had that education and he sees the failure of it in some ways to produce good people, you know, to make ethically relevant people. So the story of that is basically Christianity's adoption of the ancient Greco-Roman ideal of education. And I think that's a fundamental
fundamentally important starting point is the ancient world believed that our human consciousness, our human being participated in a higher cosmological order, cosmic order of being to which we needed to conform. So human flourishing isn't just something we make up according to whatever we want. There is a natural order of things out there, which Plato tried to express with his forms.
you know, that the human mind needs to conform to. That's kind of the truth out there that needs to be conformed to. Most of us sitting in caves, we're just looking at shadow games. But if we just turned around and saw that somebody is trying to manipulate us with falsities, we need to get out of the cave, look at the sun. So there's this reality out there, the light by which we could come to true knowledge of things. And, and
That's a fun and Aristotle has a different version of it, right? A more biologically conceived, a more earthy version of it. But there is the sense that there's an order of things to which the human mind and human action ultimately needs to conform. We don't make up reality. And that's a fundamental watershed between the pre-modern and the modern world. Because I mean, it doesn't take us very long to see where we are right now, where we create reality, or we think we can envision who or what we are and then the rest of.
Jens Zimmermann (19:56.265)
like our bodies or the reality out there just needs to conform to it. And what helps us? Technology. Technology makes it possible that we just shape reality however we want. you start with this, with the sense there's a reality out there and education or paideia as the Greeks call it, is the shaping of mature human beings, you know, from childhood into a state of rational, responsible citizenship.
And this requires a whole bunch of qualifications because yes, it was only for the elite. Yes, slaves didn't do that. Yes, women were excluded. All of that is true. But this was the ideal, which then Christians realized because you can't read the Bible for very long. We refer to Bonhoeffer's statement that Christ is the center of all of reality and so on. Well, the Judeo-Christian tradition had the same idea that we don't make up reality. Reality is God's creation. It's something that we
are born into, that we live into, that we have to conform to. So that matched and they said, well, if the Greco-Romans wanted to, if education for them is formation into a true human being, and if we as Christians, the true human being actually is Jesus Christ, who is God come from heaven incarnate, who shows us what true humanity actually is, then we're going to take that, whatever the Greek
Greco-Roman world saw, they were anticipating this and we're gonna take this and we slap Christ in there and boom, we've got the true human formation, we've got the true education. And so now the kind of Greco-Roman stuff of literature and so on, that still remains important but is on the periphery and central to human formation becomes the humanity of Christ. That is the formation that we've become front into.
loving God, loving neighbor, doing good for your community, unselfing yourself, living for one's neighbor, the good Samaritan stuff, like what should shape a community. So the early Greeks and Romans had versions of that, but certainly the equality of all human beings and the dignity of each human being before God. So forget slavery.
Jens Zimmermann (22:16.422)
eventually women will be equal, like it took them a while to figure this out. you that was that was a novelty. And so that changed the educational paradigm. And you can take that all the way this kind of so that's neoplatonism means they take platonic ideas, they and they transform it through Christianity. So so one of the caveats that I think one needs to put in this wasn't a distortion of some original Judeo-Christian
notion, right? So they don't platonize Christianity, but they Christianize Platonism, which makes, which is a difference. And, but that's the educational ideal, right? That, that, makes its way all the way into the start of the universities which come out of the cathedral schools in medieval Europe. And the cathedral schools were like, you know, think of Oxford and Cambridge, right? What they look like.
Old churches, spires, the cathedral, then you have an eating hall, then you have... It started there. you basically had initially monks and eventually because of the education of clerical functions, people learned how to read and write, they became sort of educated and they were of great use to the growing administrations across Europe. And so out of that eventually the universities were formed.
And then later on, with secularization, it's the Christian ideals that formed this. So let me just give you one concrete example, and just stop me when you want to interject a question. Is one of the persons I deal with is Gamba Tista Vico, who is an Italian Catholic. So it's post-Reformation, so you can say Roman Catholic, university professor, teacher of history, and so on.
And he has inaugural lectures that you can, they call it, think, six inaugural orations that you can find on the internet. so this poor guy had to give addresses to the parents who brought their students on the inaugural day and had to justify to them. here's what, you know, it's like university president today trying to sell them this education. So here's why these students come. And he basically said they're coming
Jens Zimmermann (24:34.324)
to be shaped in the image of God who makes us common brothers and sisters. again, this was the elite, right? So it's all a bit of rhetoric versus the modern kind of democratic equality thing, which took time to work out. So you're here to be shaped in the image of God because what can be better, and I'm paraphrasing, than serving the common good? And your university education in...
you know, learning Greek and Hebrew and having to read philosophical discourses, having to learn something about the law, having to learn some mathematics is all about, I would say with Iris Murdoch, kind of unselfing and finding a way into the greater reality of things. Learning a language is hard, right? Learning Greek vocabulary is hard. And he says that kind of hard work actually shapes your mind, shapes your spirit.
and kind of other orientedness, you learn how to see things differently, the kind of patient research, this all shapes us. And these were kind of the he's got a book called study methods of our time, which is, which I, which I read with students at the university. And he said, Wow, why don't we get this? Like, why don't why do we get this kind of administrative stuff? What universities but why do we read this? This is really good, because it kind of gave them a reason.
PJ Wehry (25:52.414)
Yeah
Jens Zimmermann (25:54.346)
for studying literature, for studying the arts, for learning mathematics, for learning geometry, because it's still hooked into this notion that that's God's reality or, you know, so the neoplatonic adoption of, you know, there is this reality out there and now it's God's reality. so it still held everything together, right? The disciplines, the natural sciences even, which were just developing in a way at the time.
And then that gets watered down again as Szynski-Szekre. Precisely that notion of what Bildung is, what transformation means of the human spirit and what formation means, then disappears and just becomes research into your knowledge. with the Berlin University, it's like the paradigmatic research university founded by Willem van Humboldt and
Schleiermacher, the theologian and the humanist, who both still kind of saw the reason for this, but it morphed then into this secularized research university, which lost both its connection to the church and its connection to this Imago Dei notion of being formed in the image of God and therefore having to know about all of the reality of God which was interconnected, like that dropped out. And then you get the siloing of the disciplines because there's no more common
platform. And so you get a higher specialization fragmentation of the disciplines, nobody knows why. And then we have in modern universities, we have this thing of interdisciplinarity, where we're trying to weave this back together. But people don't really know why. Because the common foundation still hasn't been reestablished. Right. So that's, that's one of the problems universities to this day, they wrestle with. And, and, and I mean, you could add to this, that even at the secular stage of
PJ Wehry (27:38.099)
Mm.
PJ Wehry (27:41.704)
Mm.
Jens Zimmermann (27:53.564)
of Humboldt and Schleiermacher, they were still the humanities as central. And the role of theology was kind of taken over by philosophy as explaining how this all hangs together and metaphysics was still important. But that all gets cut and whittled away and eventually cut as we progress with the scientific worldview that sort of takes over. By the time you get in the 20th century,
with people like analytic philosophers to come out of the Vienna Circle. All that metaphysical stuff is crap. It's just all a fantasy. It's not verifiable. So there's that whole development. But people often don't see that along with that. You actually have reduced everything to the scientific empirical method, which is wholly, as we talked about earlier, inadequate for, I would say, we can differ on this, but say about 80 % of our human experience.
I mean, how much of our human experience on what matters in our politics, in our life together, both with your spouse and your community, with your family and so on, is based on scientific verifiable evidence? You know, beauty, justice, truth-seeking together in critical dialogue are all these things you cannot do with a repeat verifiable method of the natural sciences. And yet, for some time,
in the early 20th century, the humanities try to be scientific in that way, in that wrong, in that way that doesn't work. And then somebody like Gadmer comes along and says, look, this is just totally wrongheaded, here's why. Anyway, that's the...
PJ Wehry (29:27.464)
Mm-hmm.
PJ Wehry (29:36.799)
I mean there's two that yeah, I mean I get excited about this kind of stuff. That's that I love it You could you could have kept talking about 20 minutes. I would have listened with raft attention. So thank you Two things what is that? I mean when you're talking about the Vienna Circle, not only does it not support 80 I mean, I think you're being generous when you say 80 % like if you ask the average person, how does your microwave work? I don't think we're gonna get like
Jens Zimmermann (30:00.339)
Yeah.
PJ Wehry (30:06.362)
Like, we're going to get the scientific reasoning behind that. But it also couldn't, the reason that the Vienna Circle has kind of died out, that whole ideology, is because it couldn't support itself. Right? I mean, that was the argument. Right? Like, it's like the verification principle can't verify itself. And this is like the snake eating its own tail went on for a couple of decades and finally like, we can't solve this. And, but to address the human experience part of it is...
Jens Zimmermann (30:27.634)
Yes.
PJ Wehry (30:35.742)
by the time that you repetitively verified anything, you're already past the need to have it, right? In terms of your individual life. So when you talk about the 80%, it's like, can't run experiments on my wife to know what's gonna work, right? This is the Kierkegaard's problem with Hegel, but like 10 times over. I was just reading...
Jens Zimmermann (30:48.326)
Mm-hmm.
PJ Wehry (31:04.958)
Vygotsky, I don't know if you know that name, but he's a yep And he's he's talking about a colleague who decided and I just can't even imagine doing it My wife would kill me but the he sat there and watched his wife not by got ski But his his colleague watched his wife make dinner for 20 minutes and recorded 480 distinct actions and You're like this is not
Jens Zimmermann (31:07.846)
Yeah, I do. Yeah.
PJ Wehry (31:32.284)
This is not how marriage works, right? Like, you're not like, it's like, honey, I have a spreadsheet of all your behaviors and I'm going to make sure that we're running the household according to scientific principles. I don't know. Maybe someone is doing that somewhere, but I can't imagine that would see widespread adoption.
Jens Zimmermann (31:34.981)
No.
Jens Zimmermann (31:48.585)
No, mean, and that's Gadamer's point, right? I mean, my first comment would be, well, he should maybe make dinner now and then. the other is, Gadamer always says, right, it's an art. so life is an art. And it can't be a science. I mean, but it's been the interesting thing about all this PJ is that it has been so massaged into our heads. And then that one of my favorite
PJ Wehry (31:54.859)
hahahahah
Jens Zimmermann (32:18.484)
writers, I don't know if you know him, it's John McMurray, who's long dead, but he was a Scottish Canadian, I think, philosopher who also gave Gifford lectures on the on the person. And he has a very small, really fantastic little books called interpreting the universe was just lectures to undergraduate students. And very, very understandable, like people want to look that up. I use that in the class I teach on hermeneutics. And whenever we come to that book, they they always say, why didn't you give us that first?
Why did we have to read Gautama first? But he opens this up by saying, have falsely been trained to believe that knowledge is derived from theory. So that, you know, we and we flip this around, like that's not actually how we work because we are immersed in life. We are immersed in a shared life world. We actually know, for instance, he says, we know what water is. Like water is not
you know, a chemical formula. Water is what we make tea with, what we shower in, what we swim in. Like we have a practical understanding and an existential understanding that informs us what water is. And it extends all the way from life giving to baptism, to what we do with it, to cleansing. Like those are fundamental meanings of water. And yet we're being told those are irrelevant. don't know water is only really known when we put it in a scientific formula.
He said that exactly like whatever, inverts, like puts the card before the horse, whatever you want to call it. It flips around what actually is the case and which is a much, much cooler, quicker point than the same point that Heidegger makes over many, many pages and in being in time and hard to understand. But I mean, that's really it. And we still think that, right? We still think we have to wait for the scientific expert to tell us what reality looks like. And we're taught to distrust our own intuitive feelings.
This goes all the way back to Descartes and to Galileo, not least, who basically say, you all the common person sees science really shows us what that is. So it's the, what you think you perceive, well, what's underneath in terms of quantifiability of natural laws and so on. So that's reality. And that's really what real true knowledge is, right? So the peasant and all those other people,
Jens Zimmermann (34:43.944)
They haven't got a clue, like they need science to show you, you know, that just invalidates your intuition about life. But I think they're true. I think that's why largely the peasant knows that what the politician is telling him is just BS, right? Even if they can't articulate it, but they know because detached from how things actually work and so on. Anyway, I think that's an important addition to our conversation.
PJ Wehry (35:10.568)
Yeah.
PJ Wehry (35:14.058)
And I think there's a kind of compounding part to this problem where because we have downplayed the knowledge from what I mean, feelings is probably, you know, these innate abilities, faculties we have, we've because we've downplayed them, we don't train them. And that is a big part is that they have to be trained. And so then they become more fallible. So we have a bunch of people who haven't trained them. And then they're like, see, it doesn't work. And it's like,
Jens Zimmermann (35:15.944)
.
Jens Zimmermann (35:31.804)
Yeah, totally true.
PJ Wehry (35:44.031)
These are things that's what a humanistic liberal arts education is supposed to do is to train these faculties. And I mean, I know I'm not saying anything new, but it's that self, I think as an addition to what you're, the point you're making, that self-compounding problem of that we don't train these at all. And then we're like, people don't know how to have conversations. know, anyways.
Jens Zimmermann (36:06.971)
Yeah, no, no, it's true. And I mean, we could read this back to Bonhoeffer, right? Because I, in the first part of the book, he, he notices that even the humanistic education that ideally does that has kind of atrophied and become rigidly academic and abstracted from life. And so he's wondering at some point, as he travels, right, and makes all the he loved to travel and encounter things and try to figure out, okay,
I don't want to exaggerate, it didn't say it like that, you what is God saying? Well, what am I being taught here about the reality that I inhabit by these different cultures? And how is that commensurate with, you my theological knowledge of what I God is teaching us? So he was very open to that. And he said at one point, I wonder if our humanistic education is just too abstract, even in the German tradition, because, and then he has this remark where he says, you know, Karl Barth, he doesn't
travel a lot maybe that's a problem he doesn't see he isn't impacted by this yeah anyway yeah so yeah just to confirm what you're saying right I mean so that's really important and I think to put Humpty Dumpty back together like you know so we we split the mind from the body I think there are people like Matthew Crawford which is a well-known writer you know the world beyond your head and
PJ Wehry (37:05.596)
Yes, I saw that, yes.
Jens Zimmermann (37:29.543)
I think his shop worker, Soulcraft, is another of his books. He makes this point very strongly that our attention to things needs to be embodied and we need to attend to materiality of things. So you can't fix a motorcycle. Like he says, this philosopher runs a high-end motorcycle. He used to run a high-end motorcycle shop. You can't fix a machine anyway. There's a way in which that thing works and you can't just invent another way. And it's not something arbitrary because the whole thing, as it's designed integrally,
only works on all the parts, each part just the part within the whole. Right. And, and so that's true in some sense, at least of life as well. Not in an organic sense, not in a scientific sense. And but we are training people to detach ourselves from reality. And I mean, what we're doing here, like the virtual world, I mean, I'd much rather sit with you over coffee, right in person and, and be able to sense your body language and so on. I mean, it's
But we do this all the time. Like we're, we're segregating our minds from our bodies all the time. that's not a good thing.
PJ Wehry (38:35.71)
Well, and I think the continued philosophical hermeneutic tradition you see with Charles Taylor and Richard Kearney picks us up with the idea of excarnation, which when you talk about the... It's like, I can't touch you, right? like... But I wanted to ask this and I want to say that I've enjoyed all of this and I do think it'd be useful, one, people should just get your book and read it. So it's okay that we're not covering everything in it. But I...
I think there's this key element here that you've talked about and as kind of an answer to this split is the incarnation. Can you talk a little bit about why the incarnation is so important to Bonhoeffer and how that leads to this Christian humanism that he doesn't label but that is very evident in him?
Jens Zimmermann (39:23.515)
Yeah, and there are two sides to this, and this is what connects Bonhoeffer to the earlier patristic tradition, right? So on the one hand, the platonic reality or God's reality, the reality that the transcendence that we don't create but make up, and that we don't understand because we're finite and ideally this transcendent is an infinite thing, it actually comes down, it actually, you know,
to use psychological language. And this is really important because Plato didn't have that language. And Aristotle was too much of a biologist, I think. So there is a telos that is kind of transcendent in a sense, it works itself out in each thing. And there's an ultimate unmoved mover because he conceived of everything in motion, in terms of motion and coming to rest and so on. But neither Aristotle nor Plato
had the personal element of a God who recognizes you and me as a person. That kind of drops out. It's all more epistemologically cerebral in terms of encountering truth impersonally as a reality. Whereas here, not only does the world of the forms, the transcendent, the truth that we need to conform to,
They not only come down, but they're also personal and they come down. so the theological language, which is easiest for me, the holy other creator, the God whom we don't understand because he's not a supersized PJ or Jens, right? He is the ground of all of what is. He's not another being. He's an entity we don't comprehend. We don't understand.
This is how limited we are. So I hope I can make the arc back. But one of my favorite instances or illustrations is Star Trek. There's the Star Trek, the early Star Trek with James T. Kirk still, where they're on the planet and they, no, it's not with James T. Kirk, it's with that woman as the captain. Anyway, I want to be quick here. So they made this planet and it's a reincarnation of Eden kind of thing, right? And so the kids play, like they beam down and they play.
PJ Wehry (41:41.158)
You
Jens Zimmermann (41:48.163)
and the captain's or the ship doctor's son, Wesley, he falls into this glass flower planter. And that's the death penalty because the of that planet has to create that totally arbitrary thing, which is a weird interpretation of Christianity, but it's the death penalty. And now they have to deal with this. They have to meet this god. And this god just turns out to be a vastly advanced kind of being, technologically vastly advanced.
But so right away you have the exact opposite of what the biblical God is. He's not another vastly advanced superior super being. He's the ground of all being. People need to let that sink in. So now I know I lost my arc. don't know anymore why I wanted to, the incarnation. So these two, this holy.
PJ Wehry (42:38.738)
Well, we're talking about the incarnation as the center of humanism.
Jens Zimmermann (42:46.534)
creator God who's personal comes down into a flesh, into a hum an being, walks the planet, right? So it's not, it's the two realities are concojointed. And this is the whole trajectory of the of the biblical Christian humanistic notion is this unfathomable thought that the creator God who is only other is not the puppeteer as in other religions, right? It's not making creating us as water carriers and then it's
Is PO'd if we actually discover fire and become godlike? No. This god actually wants us to become godlike. He wants to draw creation as much into himself, and himself here is a gender term that doesn't really apply, right? Into whatever this god is, as possible. Because he is so powerful, so big and so loving that he doesn't care about, I can't do that, I get solid. But no, that's the whole movement, right?
the created and the uncreated become conjoined. And so you have now access in some sense to the transcendent reality in a real sense. that's the first. The second aspect is that in this incarnation, then God shows who he really is, namely somebody who is not afraid of joining creation, of coming down into creation in order to draw creation up to himself.
And at the same time, he does it how? He does it through becoming human, like not a donkey, not a rock, not a human being. And so the culmination of the salvation, restoration and glorification of creation is in humanity. So if you want to talk about anthropocentrism, speciesism and all this kind of stuff, yes, the biblical God is wholly anthropocentric.
And in that sense of never losing his transcendence but joining himself. And so the second aspect is that not only does God show who he really is, but he shows us who we really are supposed to be, right? So in the humanity of Jesus, and that was very important for Bonhoeffer, you now have the image of God that was talked about in Genesis fully displayed, explained, and exegeted in this living human being. So what are the...
Jens Zimmermann (45:00.322)
What are the qualities of the image of God? Like what are we to reflect as those who are made in God's image? Well, it is self-negation, like not doormatting, but self-negation while retaining your freedom. Right? It is being there for others. It is establishing a community whose ultimate goal is to love one another because that reflects the love of the Father, the Triune God, which is also something that happens with the Incarnation, right? The Trinity.
this bizarre Christian teaching, you know, that Muslims don't understand and I can't blame them. If there's three in one, right? But you have to do that. Because once Jesus says crazy stuff like I am the father one, you see me, you see the father, you have an eye, thou relationship within the monotheistic construct of one God. And all the rest of the Christian theology is trying to what the heck, like how do we articulate that? Right? And that's why you have these debates of
PJ Wehry (45:35.762)
You
Jens Zimmermann (45:57.306)
Calcedon and Nicaea and like this whole stuff. But anyway, back to your question. So both God shows who he is and we can access the transcendent reality directly. And our humanity is shown for what it is and what we are supposed to, now this is where our whole educational stuff comes in, conform to and be shaped into. And that was Bonhoeffer's, so for Bonhoeffer, it solved the dualism question, right? The two come together and it solved the
What's the Christian life all about questioned? The Christian life is all about living out holistically, no longer dualistically, holistically in this world, refracting or shining outwards and therefore massaging it to society without turning it into God's kingdom, which is a problem. This humanity of God, that's what we're supposed to be shaped into. And for him, the church then, the ecclesia, the called out ones,
PJ Wehry (46:29.598)
Hmm.
Jens Zimmermann (46:54.373)
was precisely the new humanity and embryo as he called it. There was the new humanity of God working itself out because each of these members was now connected to this God. This is your faith, this is the prayer of Jesus in John. I pray for all of these that they may be in me as we are in them, that they may be one as we are one. So this oneness without losing your individuality. In fact, the oneness
in God and the oneness with one another would bring out your individuality as a communal being in a particular way. it's actually Christianity is an interesting beast that way. I think it's the only philosophically working construct that keeps the collective and the individual together, like both the common good, the commonality, the collective and the individual as a person.
without dissolving the tension one way or another, without falling into individualism or collectivism. But anyway, I would say that's the key for the incarnation. You bring together these two realities and you show the humanity of God and our Godward trajectory if Christ-likeness becomes the goal of our human communities. I mean, ideally the churches haven't done a super job.
PJ Wehry (47:54.558)
Hmm.
Jens Zimmermann (48:20.709)
But ideally, when you get churches at their best and building hospitals and doing these kind charitable things, that is refracting that humanity of Christ outward. That's the idea.
PJ Wehry (48:37.726)
To pull out biblical quotations, and I can never remember if it's 1st or 2nd Peter, you have, this is where I think you're referencing like partaking in the divine nature. And then, and then when Paul, 1st Peter 4, when you talk, Paul talks about being in Christ and how that leads to our maturity in Christ. That's the end, the worthiness of our call in Ephesians 4. And, no, go for it.
Jens Zimmermann (48:48.195)
Yes, first speed of four, yeah.
Jens Zimmermann (49:01.305)
Yeah, yeah, and then you have to add, to interrupt, and then you have to add all these passages where we're supposed to be shaped into the icon of God who is Christ, right? In all of Paul's letters, and in the letters to Hebrews. It's that image of God is Christ, and we're supposed to be transformed into that image, yeah.
PJ Wehry (49:15.25)
Yes.
PJ Wehry (49:20.284)
Yes, and this is where literally in Hebrews 12, to even bring it back to Vico, what he's talking about, it's the divine discipline that leads us to maturity. Anyways.
There's so much more I want to ask you, but want to be respectful of your time. No. Good.
Jens Zimmermann (49:38.566)
Okay, let me just, while you're thinking about it, let me just add. So for Bonhoeffer, Christian life, what's happening in the church is Christ formation. That's it, right? So Christ works himself out in each believer, Christ works himself out in the church. And since that has to do with our common humanity, anybody out there who says Jews, know, baptized Jews who are Christian are not Christian because they're Jewish.
Or we should fire all the Jewish pastors because there was this Aryan paragraph in the German history that Hitler issued which meant all civil servants could not be Jewish. And since pastors were civil servants, they had to, and the church was fine with that, they had to eject the Christian pastors of Jewish ancestry. And they said, yeah, that's okay, that's just a civil service law, we'll do that. Boniface, no.
This is not just a bureaucratic matter. You're the axe to the gospel, to the heart of the thing. You can't do that. So that's why this mattered.
PJ Wehry (50:44.572)
Yes. Yeah, I appreciate that. There's a... Because of that, keeping that tension of somehow we're both able to be common and individual at the same time, there's something... I think there's a message of hope there for what feels like a very divided time. So I appreciate that. But I want to be respectful of your time, speaking of time. so what I... One, thank you so much for coming on today.
Jens Zimmermann (50:46.789)
Thank
Jens Zimmermann (51:04.399)
for sure.
PJ Wehry (51:13.01)
The last question I always want to ask is besides buying and reading your excellent book, which I always want to make sure I plug, what would you recommend to someone who has listened to us for the last hour? Someone who's listened to you talk about humanism and this need to grow as people. What is something they can meditate on or do over the next week in response?
Jens Zimmermann (51:39.237)
I'm a university prof, so I usually recommend books. So I would say what you need to think about, and I wish we had more time, maybe we could do this in another segment, I wish we could talk more about the technological challenge to all of this. And the technological challenge which is grounded still in this dualism, which has been overcome academically. People like Gartner have written on it, theologians have written on it, philosophers have written on it.
PJ Wehry (51:43.347)
haha
Jens Zimmermann (52:07.522)
There's this whole development. We mentioned John McMurray. There are others, Melo Ponti, like the embodied way of being and so on. Within cognitive science, there are counter movements I think people need to be aware of. They don't have to buy into one narrative if they want to shore it up in terms of research and scientific evidence. Science itself has counter moves to these things. But there is the contingent, like the one...
piece of science that is dominant right now is not those guys. It's the techies. It's the ones that actually keep perpetuating this dualistic vision that we are basically machines, bio-machines, and that the spirit is either wholly material or it's an epiphenomenon of that. I mean, I'm going all the way here to transhumanists. And I think...
with their qualifications between somebody like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and others. But that's the basic paradigm there, right? So what we've talked about, this dualism is still being pushed, you know, this denaturing of ourselves, uncoupling from a natural, in a metaphysical sense, right? Reality that we need to respect and conform to.
gene editing, like all this stuff, as if there was no boundaries or limits whatsoever. And the question of limits are important. Anyway, I would say people need to think about that. And to and to realize that that still comes from this dualism that we talked about the scientism, they need to figure out if they haven't read something around those around those themes. And, and, and
and realize like that's the crux of the issue, right? mean, whatever you're being sold in terms of software, in terms of AI companions, it goes back to that, right? And to the atrophying of the human spirit and what that is. then there are the larger issues of, you know, so I would recommend of politics around that.
PJ Wehry (54:03.774)
Hmm.
Jens Zimmermann (54:25.1)
and the tension between our individual freedoms and the common good based on these things. So I would recommend for people maybe something like, you know, John McMurray's interpreting the universe if they can find it. I think it's on the Internet Archive, which, know, so I'm speaking here as a user, not as an academic who's supposed to adhere to copyright issues and things like that, right? But I think like the Internet Archive is a kind of a
ambivalent thing there, but it's highly accessible. So John McMurray interpreting the universe and the other book I would highly recommend and it is a Warren listeners. It is a Christian theological thinker, but he was a philosopher, highly influential on the UN declaration of human rights. This is Jacques Maritain or Jacques Maritain, however you want to say that. And it's the person and the common good. It's a very small book.
But it talks about what a person is. It talks about what the common good is and how politics needs to combine the two. And he deals with a, it's very dense. It's very short. It's quite clear, but he deals with these issues. And I think, I mean, they're more modern writers, right? I mean, like we'd mentioned Matthew Crawford, I think it's definitely worth looking at. Is the world beyond our heads gets at that techno, anti-materialist techno thing.
PJ Wehry (55:31.774)
Mm.
Jens Zimmermann (55:54.03)
Yeah, I think you need to think about these things seriously because the politics we're experiencing right now are driven by these issues. And if you don't think about it, you're just a lemming. If you want to be a lemming, that's fine. But it'll come back to you, right? mean, yeah. So I mean, from one humanist to another, I think that's what you've to look at.
PJ Wehry (56:17.106)
Read more! That's a great, yeah, that's a very, I mean, it's a stereotypical humanist answer, but I think it's still a great answer to read more.
Jens Zimmermann (56:25.156)
Or I mean, you can't, right? But this is part of what's happening, right? Our attention is being fragmented, so we don't read. But I mean, you're in that sort of camp, there still are. You can get a lot of stuff through YouTube clips and conversations. You just have to know whom to listen to. Yeah.
PJ Wehry (56:45.992)
Yeah, absolutely. Dr. Zimmerman, it's been an absolute joy having you on. Thank you so much.
Jens Zimmermann (56:51.652)
You're very welcome. Thanks, PJ. It's been an honor. And if you want to do this again sometime, let me know.
PJ Wehry (56:57.874)
I would love that.
Jens Zimmermann (56:59.301)
Okay.