Episode 103: Interview with Dr. Matthew Wilcoxen

We are back with a discussion of Divine Humility with Dr. Matthew Wilcoxen. Dr. Wilcoxen's book Divine Humility was published with Baylor University Press. Dr. Wilcoxen was kind enough to talk with me for an hour about all things humility. He even has some advice for pastors on discussing deep theology with parishioners. Hope you enjoy it!

Timestamps:

8:42- Karl Barth on Humility

14:21- God’s Humility

30:11- Augustine’s View

41:39- Katherine Sonderegger

Episode Transcription

Charles Kim 0:00

Hello and welcome to a history of Christian theology. My name is Chad Kim. With me this week will be Dr. Matthew Wilcoxon. We discussed his recently published book, divine humility, God's morally perfect being with Baylor University Press. As regular listeners will be aware, it has been some time since I've released a podcast at least I think a month or month and a half. And I'm very sorry for this delay, but my family was moving and the semester was ending, and yada, yada, yada. But we will be doing new episodes. I have one planned with Ben, Dr. Ben winter, who wrote on Bonaventure so we should be recording that one soon. I think also be doing a podcast with Hans Bergsma. who's done a lot of work on sacramental theology. And I'm very excited about that one. But we'll see if I think that will be recorded in February. So that will be some time away. But we do have some stuff on tap. And so that's coming down the pipeline. So be be looking out for those. So with Dr. Wilcox, and today, we talked about the his book and we talked about the different conceptions of humility, from Augustine to Carl BART to the more recent Catherine sonderegger. And Dr. Wilcoxon even makes a somewhat controversial claim about some Theology at Princeton. But no, but it was all good fun. But I hope that you'll enjoy this podcast. And Dr. Wilcoxon was was a delight to talk to. And it was her pleasure to get to hear a little bit more about his work and research. So thank you for listening, please rate us and review us on iTunes, and follow us on Twitter and all those other things. We appreciate that. So with no further ado, here's Dr. Wilcoxon. And how did you end up in Australia? I mean, did you was it to go to school there? Did you? And you worked with Ben Myers?

Matthew Wilcoxen 1:54

Is that right? Yeah. So I was in California, where I'm from, and I had done a bachelor's and was finishing up a master's and really had decided I would love to do a PhD. And I was talking to some folks in the UK, that was sort of what I was thinking is that we would try to go to one of the universities over there. And then I, I somehow started having some engagement with Ben Myers online through his blog and, and I think I was writing on a different blog at the time, and we corresponded a little bit and then I asked him in a in an offhand manner, I said, you know, do you do PhD, oversee PhD theses, dissertations? And he said, Oh, yes, I do. Like, let's talk. And so I ended up talking to him. And it was a sort of strange confluence of things. My wife had lived in Australia when she was a girl for a little while and just fell in love with it. And our family had built all these connections there. And so we knew people in Australia and then in talking to Ben, I really liked him. He's this. He's still his young, even now, which he then is young, very gifted, writer, and very approachable, accessible guy. He was really helpful to me and yeah, so those things were kind of coming together a bit there. And then I, through through Ben's advocacy was able to receive a scholarship there with the university. And so it just all came together really well to to go to Australia to go to Sydney rather than, you know, trying to go to the UK.

Charles Kim 3:38

Yeah. So is it like the UK system? Were you there for like three or four years just writing or did you do court like seminar work with him? Or I don't know how they do it?

Matthew Wilcoxen 3:48

Yeah, it's, it's pretty much exactly like the UK system. There are some seminars, you you go to one off kind of seminars that you're, quote, unquote, required to go to, but but principally, it's, it's dissertation writing, so there's no coursework. Formally, there's there's no comps, it's, it's a UK type system. And so I was, you know, supposed to be there for three or maybe four years. But I ended up a couple years in, did a couple of years full time and then took a position at a church. And so I went to part time, and took a few years there to finish my PhD.

Charles Kim 4:38

And did you become so you grew up? Maybe in Calvary Chapel? Did you become an Anglican while you were in the UK? Or was that before? That? Is? Yeah, so in Australia, so I'm sorry, Australia. Yeah,

Matthew Wilcoxen 4:50

I grew up in Calvary Chapel churches. Then I went off to college and bio at Biola and became, you know, sort of In a non nondenominational Baptist kind of evangelical setting, and but then I, I really sort of read my way into thinking, you know, I think I'm Anglican, or would like to be a certain type of Anglican and in evangelical Anglican that, you know, has an emphasis on Scripture and a personal relationship with Christ but also worships liturgically and has Episcopal church structure and has, you know, connection to the history and tradition of the church in a more robust way. And so that, so I kind of went there with my eye on becoming a neat an Anglican Sidney is very famous for being a bastion of evangelical Anglicanism. And so, yeah, so I actually ended up they let me i weaseled my way in and, and got a ministry position as a lay person. So it wasn't ordained. But I but I got to do some ministry with limitations in a church, and that was my way of getting my foot in the door to be an Anglican minister.

Charles Kim 6:18

Well, so Dr. Wilcoxson is the is an Anglican priest at at the associate Rask, Rector of church of the resurrection in Washington, DC. And he did his PhD in Australia under Ben Meier's and the book that came out of that is at least I assume, right, the viability came out of your dissertation.

Matthew Wilcoxen 6:38

Yes, that's right. It's only slightly edited and improved.

Charles Kim 6:45

Very good. Well, I so the reason I wanted Dr. Wilcox, it wasn't just because I wanted to talk about his book. It was that but so like, one of the things that we're doing in the podcast, is I'm trying to expand kind of the conversations that we have. So we spent a lot of time talking about what authors said. And recently, we've been digging a little bit more into sort of the doctrines and we had Matt Emerson on, or well, we've recorded, Matt Emerson talking about the descent to the dead. We've had Philip Kerry, talking a little bit about the meaning of Protestant theology and how salvation works. We're getting a little bit more into the mechanics of the theological position. So I wanted to learn from Dr. Wilcox and a little bit more about what we might call more dogmatic theology or systematic theology, versus what I tend to do, which is more like, we call it historical theology, which is we're not we're neither historians nor theologians. We're just bad at both. Or at least that's what I say. So I wanted to think a little bit more a lot like along with Dr. Wilcox and about how his understanding of humility works, because I also did humility in Augustine, but I did it about how Augustine preached the virtue of humility. But Dr. Wilcox, it was talking about the doctrine of divine humility, which might be a little bit different, or at least have some different applications. So that's kind of where I want this conversation to head is, is just think through exactly how his his work looks a little bit differently, but but sort of jumps off from from Augustine still. So I'll just say broad, I'll just ask broadly, what what drew you to writing about humility? Was it humility that was of interest to you? Or was it something else? And then you ended up in humility?

Matthew Wilcoxen 8:42

Yeah, I have to be really honest. When people asked me this, I had a, an idea that I was working on for my dissertation. And it had nothing to do with humility. It was about time and was going to write about Karl Barth's theology of time. And so I was already sort of in love with Augustine a little bit and ended up doing you know, trying my hand at some writing on what Agustin had to say about time, you know, in very famous passage of, of confessions 11. And, you know, in the midst of that, I just was reading so much Augustine reading so much Bart, and I sort of got sidetracked or distracted by them, both talking about humility in in relation to God, you know, so in Carl Bart very explicitly, saying that God is supremely humble and meaning some really interesting things by that. And then Augustine to saying, you know, using phrases about the humility of God, and yeah, I sort of just got sidetracked in a way in the early stages where You're just exploring all these different ideas and, and thought, you know, I think I'd really like to write about this, I think I could write something that I think I could accomplish a thesis or dissertation that I'm happy with on this topic. And I was feeling that I either wouldn't enjoy it as much or wouldn't be able to accomplish what I really wanted if I stayed on the topic of time. And so I just talked to my supervisor and said, Let's, I think I want to switch to this. And he said, I love it. That's a great idea. And so so that's, that's what really happened. I just got interested in, you know, it struck me as like, made perfect sense, but also a little bit odd to say that God is humble. And, and I was intrigued by that. So it became a bit of a problem to solve like, what, what do you mean by that? And what don't you mean by that Augustine and Bart, and what do we do with that dogmatically?

Charles Kim 10:59

Yeah, well, and I suspect with Agustin it can be pretty hard. There's a French scholar from the middle part of the 20th century, who says we can find Augustine saying all over the place what pride is, but it's a little harder to pin him down exactly what he means when he's talking about the humble God or, you know, Christ being humble and this sort of thing. So sometimes Augustine is a little slippery, and a little harder to pin down. But you have you brought up some really interesting in kind of helpful things when you're talking about Agustin 's interpretation of Exodus three. So we're gonna kind of jump down a little bit in the questions but but so Agustin talks about the Divine Name and how and how that works in, in, in, in Exodus three. So could you tell? Tell us a little bit about how Agustin understands humility, and what place the this passage from Exodus has?

Matthew Wilcoxen 11:58

Yeah, I was just really taken with these two sermons, sermons six and seven on the Exodus three, verses 14 and 15. And he talks you know, there is he's preaching on the divine name. And he picks up on the fact that though, we commonly talk about that as a place where there's one name the Divine Name, Agustin really parses it out into two names that are given there, and the one name is, I Am that I Am the divine name, but the other name is the one that follows right on the heels of that in the in the text, which is, I am the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. And he Agustin calls, one the name of being and the other the name of mercy. And it just seemed like this perfect encapsulation of what you see happening throughout Augustine, in this regard of God in himself, put into this very interesting and fruitful juxtaposition with God and His being. For us. Now, obviously, the in himself and for us are not terms in ways that Agustin himself describes this and I'm importing later, later categories there, but yeah, the way that he he talks about the two realities of of God as He is in himself or the name of being, and yet as, as God has revealed to us, in the name of mercy, that that juxtaposition, I think, is key for what Augustine is doing and how he conceives of humility, that throughout his work, he's constantly playing off the fact that God is, you know, us say, self existent God is, you know, totally sufficient in and of himself. And yet is, is constantly and even, in a sense, eternally acting for us and is God for us. So, yeah, does that answer your question?

Charles Kim 14:21

Yeah, that's, that's great. Well, and that kind of helps us get into this question of exactly what is humility? So oftentimes, I think a lot of your work goes a long way to say, you know, it sort of makes sense to, to talk about Christ. For us as humble. So Christ in the Incarnation, that sort of humility, in the economy of salvation makes sort of makes more sense or is easy to easier to explain using Philippians two, where where he does not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but takes on the form of the servant. And so a lot of people want to talk about the humility of God sort of more in this direction. But your work is trying to drive that definition of humility, and to see that as one of God's perfections. So you know, sort of going back towards this, God in himself. So So why is that a difficult thing to say? Why is it that hard to talk about God as humble in God's self?

Matthew Wilcoxen 15:26

Yeah, and I even in my work, as you know, if you've read you've you've read it, want to be careful about what what we do and don't mean there. But part of the, you know, the issue driving this is, if, what, what Christ does and who Christ is, is ultimately not only reconciling, but also revelatory. Well, then it has to be at some level, revelatory of the being of God. And so we can make some move where we say he's only humble as a human in his human nature. I don't think and I would even say biblically that that Philippians two passage is the description of a single agent, principally, which is the word you know, the, the Son himself, from who condescends and in taking on a nature not that he's humble only in his human nature. And so, you know, you've got that how, if if humility is central to what Christ does as Revealer and reconciler? Well, then how is humility revelatory of God himself? Because it, it seems that it would be on on one way of thinking about it anyways. So that's part of of what's going on there. I think, you know, a lot of the times we we struggle with the idea of applying humility to God because of how we've already learned to use the term humility. And you know, one of the things that's central to the way I think about doing this as well, that there are multiple ways to use a term, and these terms themselves have have a history. Are there other ways of using that term? Or is there another way of defining that term that has pedigree and history behind it and meaning behind it, not just redefining it, willy nilly that maybe encapsulates something closer to what what we could be talking about in in terms of divine humility. And so I look at not only the kind of what I would call, like, a flat definition of humility is just loneliness, but some some strands of thinking about humility, within the Christian tradition, that that I find more generative. And those typically revolve, not around loneliness, per se, but about the use of strength for the sake of others, the use of power in a certain way, that constitutes a type of humility. So that it's possible to be humble. In fact, it's a sort of more pure form of humility is actually exercised by someone, the more powerful they are, not the more lowly they are. And it's then a question of what they do with that power and how they will did. So. I do some of that in the second chapter of the book, definitions of humility, looking at different things throughout the history of Christian tradition, and also philosophy about what what do we mean by this, this concept of humility in the first place? Because if you just assume that humility is self deprecation, or being lonely for lowliness sake, well, God's not humble, if that's what we mean. But But is that the right way to define humility? Is that the best way to define it? And I don't think I don't think it is.

Charles Kim 19:08

Yeah, I think it was that second chapter. I think it's at the end of the second chapter, maybe if I remember correctly, where you you brought up Mr. Darcy, from Pride and Prejudice. And so sort of, he had this sort of magnanimous humility that lifted up the benefits. And so is that an I, I just I wanted to bring that up, because I really appreciated it. And I had no idea that that was coming. Like I was sort of surprised that a kind of more dogmatic systematic text, that Pride and Prejudice made its way and so I really appreciated that way of explaining how you're understanding humility.

Matthew Wilcoxen 19:43

Yeah, it kind of doesn't fit because I don't do very much of that. But it was one of my proudest moments to work in a Jane Austen reference. You know, Alistair McIntyre makes the case that Jane Austen or makes at least the comment that Jane Austen is like our sort of best modern, ethical philosopher. And I think that's right. And I just it stood out to me that, that if we're trying to understand humility in its purest form that that Mr. Darcy himself is, is a sort of template of this in the way that he uses his power and privilege for the sake of others. And so that's exactly right. And what I'm doing in that chapter is trying to bring some clarity to what we do and don't mean by humility, how we're going to use it. And is there a sense in which, in our ordinary language, we already have a working definition of it that can be helpful. And as we then describe God, and that's that was kind of where I closed out that and then so reference to George Herbert's, you know, part of the temple. So yeah, I appreciate

Charles Kim 21:09

it. And I think, you know, one of the things that I'm sort of, you know, I didn't do, I realized, actually, I looked back at some stuff, I'm trying to work on my dissertation a little bit more. And I realized that I, like, you know, when I talked about Augustine, or when I talked about Augustine, and Augustine is reading of Philippians, two, you know, I didn't really make too much reference to the economy of salvation, versus God and himself. And one of the things that you bring up later is the place of metaphysics, and maybe exactly how Bart use them or understood them. But even they are, but even specifically, this concept of classical theism. And, you know, just occurred to me, it struck me that, you know, I didn't, that's not that hasn't been part of my training. So that hasn't really been I mean, it has it points, but like, we were so concerned with, like, making sure we had the right sources and making sure we do the languages and all these other things that we weren't dealing in those sort of more, we might call them dogmatic categories. Not not that was totally unaware of them. But actually, it was one of the things Carol Harrison was on my committee, and she that was one of her big sort of criticisms in the best way possible. Like one of her like ways of trying to help me improve it was to think more theologically to think more dogmatically than I had been, I was just trying to explicate what I saw Agustin doing and putting it in its historical context. And she was trying to draw out of me how that functions theologically. So it's sort of a big broad question. How does that how does that work for you? Like, I mean, do you think of yourselves? I guess your degree is called systematic theology. I wanted to call it dogmatic theology. But what how do you think about the work that you do? And what does it mean to go about your work as a, as a dog petition or as a system petition?

Matthew Wilcoxen 22:58

Well, I think for me, it's it's always starting with questions that address an issue in doctrine that, you know, so it's the end goal for me, even even as I do Scholarship, which, you know, I mean, I've only written one book, and hopefully I'll write another but I think of systematic theologies is, the end goal is to write something that is fresh, a fresh way of saying something to the church, to the world about who God is what the gospel is. And so you kind of start with the end goal in mind of addressing a particular question or particular issue. And then, you know, Augustine becomes, you know, I guess this can, yeah, Augustine becomes a, a sort of helper in that task, and you find out who's going to be the most helpful person to you, of course, in actuality, as you engage with these helpers, they change your mind on things and they might even change your task. But But I go to Augustine as a helper, and then I'm heavily reliant on people like you and Carol Harrison, who's phenomenal to to help me do some of the work that maybe I'm not very strong in, which is really spending that time at the nitty gritty level of the text and in the ancient world. So try to consult actual patristic scholars, you know, who are the best and make sure that the way that I'm engaging with the person with my own interest that the the way that I'm engaging with Augustine is respectable and accurate. So I I think about it that way that, you know, we need to team up. There are a few people who who have put these things all together in themselves. And those are the eminent scholars. And I think Carol Harrison's a good example that her books on Augustine are just phenomenal. And so yeah, that's, that's that kind of answer your question there? I mean, oh, yeah, absolutely. And I think I think so. So I'm using people I'm, which probably drives, if I don't do it, I always have to worry about the people who are like Augustine scholars, or Bart scholars proper, looking over my shoulder and saying that I'm abusing them. And that's a good sort of tension to have to make sure that I'm never doing that, that I'm actually engaged in the scholarship and putting them to dogmatic use in ways that are in keeping with what they're actually saying in the text. So

Charles Kim 25:58

yeah, no, that's very helpful. Like I say, it was it was part of me. I mean, this is just part of like, like I said, I tried to think of the podcast is like, ways that I can continue to learn, like so I can just write, you know, I can have people on, and I learn as much through conversation as I do through reading and writing. So it's helpful to hear other people describe their task, and you know, how they go about their work. And And I'll say, I'll

Matthew Wilcoxen 26:21

say one other thing that I think is right about bringing later categories to Augustine. Again, you have to do so very carefully. And let's say for other Patristics as well, you have to do so carefully, and not anachronistically. And you need to be really clear about what you're doing. But so many of these categories came out of Augustine, as people read him later, you know, like you think of the, the medieval scholastics, you think of Anselm And Aquinas and clearly going way beyond Augustine and bringing other things in, but learning theology from Augustine like that, in really important ways. And so there's a sort of reverse engineering that that you can do here, that I think is a helpful way to, to get into what Augustine is actually saying, again, always been very clear and respectful of, of the text. But yeah, so that's something that I'm really interested in.

Charles Kim 27:27

Yeah, I think that's quite, quite helpful. I'm going to take a quick break from our podcast to tell you a little bit about our sponsor the upper room. There are some daily comforts that just make you grateful and feel more grounded in life patting the dog hitting that snooze button. And of course, that first cup of coffee. These are things that you count on every day to help you get where you want to go. Things like the Upper Room, daily devotional guide, you can count on the upper room for daily inspiration, daily community and daily prayer. It is the only daily devotional magazine written by readers, ordinary people, people who have encountered God and daily situations. The upper room is here for you every day through your email, a custom app or a printed magazine, enjoy a free 30 day trial of our email or app service by visiting upper the upper room.org/welcome that is u p, p e r r O M dot O R G slash w e l c o m e, upper room.org/welcome To get your first 30 days free. It is inter denominational and written by readers. And it has 80 years of history and 5 million readers around the world. So this is a well established organization. So I encourage you to go check them out and get their emails and devotional guides from their website. Let's see. So I had a few other things here. So I guess I've kind of asked a few of them. Yeah, so one of the things that you were talking a little bit about reverse engineering. And one of these phrases that has come up that actually, I mean, probably to my detriment. I never heard when I was in seminary, when I was doing my masters. We didn't talk about divine simplicity. I think I heard some of it. I went to Princeton seminary. So I think I heard some of it around differences over interpretation of BART and some things but I wasn't really too privy to those conversations. So when one one of the things that you're trying to do, as you think about God and God's self versus God, in in the economy, and some of this has to do with these, this idea of divine simplicity and what is it what can one properly say about God? What are God's perfections What are God's attributes? So why, what what exactly is this idea of divine simplicity? Why and why is that a way that, you know, one should consider when thinking about even Augustine. So part of this has to do with whether you know exactly to what extent Augustine had the same ideas in his head?

Matthew Wilcoxen 30:11

Yeah, I think it's really clear that Augustine is deeply committed to divine simplicity. It's clearly not worked out in the Scholastic way that it is in Thomas, for instance, and but what is divine simplicity and demand simplicity? Stated succinctly, in the least objectionable way is that God is wholly who he is, at all times, there's no composition in God, meaning that God doesn't you know, God is wise. Correct. So God is wise. Well, where does he get his wisdom? He doesn't get it from anywhere outside of himself, he is his own wisdom, and he is it entirely and completely. And, and I think that these categories, especially simplicity are, are really just sort of worked out from the Divine Name, Exodus three itself that what does it mean for God to be entirely self defined, he is, he is defined only by himself and not in comparison, or even contrast ultimately, with anything else. And so that's that's kind of I mean, I'm a little bit all over the place here. Simplicity is not as simple as it sounds like but that that's that becomes God's simplicity, his oneness, his unity, his which is very, very related to God's unknowability, ultimately, in the fact that he has to make himself known to us because we live in a world of complexity rather than simplicity. We live in a world where everything is known by, you know, in the space of, of, of time, and spatial concepts and bodily concepts. And God is beyond all of these things. And so what you end up having to say is, is divine simplicity is this negative statement of a sort that serves as a rule over all of the other statements that are, are made, even in Scripture, not a rule that negates them, but a rule that is always qualifying and helping to determine what they mean. So that rather than flattening them out as creaturely concepts, they continually are lifted up and point us to the God who has made himself known and yet remains beyond knowing. And so simplicity is, is this sort of overarching rule, that is really, really important. Without simplicity, you don't get Trinitarian theology classically conceived, you get something like try theism or Modalism, or something like that, but but simplicity is, is very central to the way that Trinitarian doctrine actually gets understood, as it's developed in, in the first centuries of the church.

Charles Kim 33:40

Well, and that kind of relates to one of the sort of struggles for BART, at least as you explain Bart's concept of humility, like you want to see, Christ or Bart wanted to see Christ as in some way subordinate to God, or humble to the Father, with without there being without there being monarchism without there being a hierarchy within the Trinity. And so that's, that's one of these difficulties. These part of this task, as I understand it, for dogma petitions and for system petitions, is to work out exactly how do we understand the things that we are told in Scripture, like so Philippians, two, and about Christ and this other, like you brought up Exodus three from Augustine, but how exactly it is that that in some ways Christ seems to be submitting to God. But but also because of the way that we understand the Trinity that in some ways, there's not multiple wills, there is just one will in the sense of of all the members of the trinity or all the persons in the Trinity having one unified will so that they are ultimately simple. So could you explain a little bit exactly the the difficulty that BART runs into a Um, with respect to this kind of understanding of humility,

Matthew Wilcoxen 35:05

yeah. But Bart's really committed to admirably committed to defining God, as he is eternally by what we see in the economy. And so you know, that whatever you see, playing out, has to be in the life of Christ, and broadly conceived, is itself a reflection of the reality that's eternally true in God Himself. And reflections, probably not even strong enough of a word. It's the manifestation of what's eternally true, it is the life of God in some sense. And so, but one of the problems with that is that, to do that work of taking what you see revealed in the economy, into who God is, and himself there, if you do that in a straightforward manner, without the necessary sort of work of purgation, or purification, that is enabled by reading through the lens of divine simplicity, you end up with some things that are problematic. So Bart, I think, sort of simplistically says, well, here's Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane struggling with a, you know his own will and submitting it to the will of the Father. Therefore, we are seeing that the fact that from all eternity, the son is obedient to the Father, and there are just a number of problems with this that I think a a deeper commitment to a doctrine of divine simplicity, would would help us avoid where you go, Well, it can't quite mean what you're saying, Carl, Bart, because God is there is not multiple wills in the divine being there, multiple persons, but person is a term that's used, because we don't know what else to say. And so you end up having the divine simplicity rule and the way it negates certain ideas that you could get from a more straightforward reading, ended up pushing you actually deeper into the text and deeper into theology to understand what's really going on, for example, in Gethsemane, and you end up thinking, Oh, we have to think about the fact that he has a human will and a divine will. And so in what sense is this actually his human will, that is, is having to be brought into some sort of submission to the Divine Will, which is shared by the Father and the Son, or belongs to both of them entirely, or is both of them entirely, rather than the submission of one Divine Will to the other, which just doesn't make any sense. And so I kind of make the case that there's a sort of fundamental procedural problem that Bard has. And that is the way he he does this mirroring work of looking at the economy and sort of going from there without the necessary purgation into the divine life, himself itself. And so I argue, you know, that's a procedural problem that in the way that Bart's theology works, that that leads him to problems and this being chief among them. So Bart ends up in a weird place where he is either a, you know, he's either a affirming a sort of, you know, he's denying diode elitism, he's saying there's only one will in Christ, which one doesn't want to say if if you care about the later councils or he's saying something weird and implying something like try theism, which of course he's not. And so there's just this strange tension where things aren't really working if you dig into it and and I wanted to find out why that was. Again, I love Carl Bart, he's one of my favorite theologians. And, and the danger with reading board is he just takes over your mind and and you never figure out how to get outside the system. This is I'm gonna say something really controversial, but I'm not in the academic world. officially,

this is like the whole problem with everyone at Princeton right is they're stuck in the BART, Bart loop. And anyways, so we don't have to go into that none of those people listened to it. They're all gonna be mad at me, but

Charles Kim 40:17

Well, I don't know exactly who listens to it. But my guess is that there aren't very many of my friends from Princeton who do. And most of my friends from Princeton don't aren't in academics anyway. So they're, they're doing ministry.

Matthew Wilcoxen 40:33

I gotta put some juicy smack talk in this to kind of help the ratings you know, that's

Charles Kim 40:39

right. I appreciate it. I was gonna say, I mean, as a side sort of a side point. I was ended up with a I ended up in a kind of back and forth with Bruce McCormack on Facebook. And I tried to get him to come on the podcast, but he wouldn't. Who is Bruce? Record? I've never heard of that guy. Bruce McCormack? Oh, I just like to say here.

Matthew Wilcoxen 41:09

I like to have I like to have fun. cited in the thesis.

Charles Kim 41:16

I was like, I'm pretty sure that's in there. Yeah. But anyway, I Well, yeah. It had to do with Hegel. And I said some things that I maybe were overly simplistic, I don't remember. But I was like, Hey, Dr. McCormick, you should just come on the podcast and tell me why I'm wrong. And he didn't, he didn't take me up on it.

Matthew Wilcoxen 41:35

Well, you should keep trying.

Charles Kim 41:39

Okay, well, I was gonna, so let's I was gonna have you complete the loop real quick. So what does Catherine sonderegger? How does she help you and borrow out of this kind of problem with humility? How does she return this? This the the concept of humility to be, as you described at the beginning with the sort of the magnanimous humility? How does she help us and help Bart fix this problem?

Matthew Wilcoxen 42:07

Yeah, I mean, one of the things that I argue which is almost seems too convenient, but is that you know, in Augustine, you've got this sort of tantalizing tension. Pointing to to the fact that humility is the name that I the attribute that names the fact that that that God is entirely sufficient in himself, and yet is disposed to see eternally in mercy in an in an unnecessary but eternally actualized way. And Bart, I think, sort of breaks that and goes too far in the way he does it. And then Zonda rager, she's she's just right. She she sort of retains some of the bar tea and emphasis on the crystal centrism. She's, she's post Bart are, you know, but but also not making the mistakes that BART is doing. And so I find her to be just kind of the person who saves this whole conversation for me, and helps me find a way forward. And she, essentially by thinking of the divine being, in terms not of causation, but instead, using the concept of energy, is able to capture the fact that God is sort of outward movement from himself. And that's a truth about him in himself, and goes from there to really have this sort of emphasized concept of omnipotence, as she called it, which is a lot in keeping with the sort of subtitle of my book, which is morally perfect being like, how do you take these these attributes? Like omnipotence? Well, there's a way of thinking of God being all powerful. For instance, in, in a sense, that's theoretically neutral. Well, he's all powerful, but to what end? And sort of ethically neutral, I suppose you could say and zonder agar says, No, we can't conceive of the divine attributes, in that way that has this kind of potential ethical neutrality as if God can use his power for anything, because God is not only a sort of vague abstract power, but God is a person that is always an already a type of person, a specific moral person and has his power ordained within you know, that's probably not the right word has his power oriented, to flow out in goodness and so She just really has interesting ideas about what it means to, to think about these divine attributes in terms of their moral qualities that are and seeing that those moral components is integral to the attribute itself. And it's just interesting how the only way she's really able to do that is, is by heavily heavy reliance on humility, the concept of humility. And she is able to talk about humility in a way that is not about server civility or submission. Those could be parts of it. But principally, it's about the use of power and God's use of power. And so she just kind of comes in as the savior of the book. It's funny how that happened. I had written everything except figuring out how I was going to going to enter the book. And then I got a hold of her her first volume of her systematics and read it not thinking it was going to be part of my dissertation. And I thought, she's answering all the questions that I've been asking him to wrestle with Augustine and Bart, and I need to write a chapter about her. And even though it seems too convenient that she, she solves all the problems she did. And so that's, that's kind of why the the last chapter is is reliant on Zonda rigor. And by the way, her, her new book is her second volume that systematics is coming out on November 3. So there will be a German, a German American by descent who capitalizes way too many letters, that should be the subject of everyone's attention on November 3, and it's not Donald Trump. It's Catherine zonedirector.

Charles Kim 47:01

Greet. Well, my my last parting kind of question here that, so Alright, we're gonna turn to the practical, I guess you could almost say but so I was just thinking about the fact that I was given the latitude to teach a class at my church, and I called it Africans against the world. How the resolve of the African church I don't know saved Christianity. I can't remember how I subtitled it. But we got to Cyril of Alexandria, we started talking about the Council of Cal Seton. And I said, How am I going to? How am I going to help the class of sort of, you know, average churchgoers, who don't have theology degrees? Are philosophy degrees, how am I going to get them to think through why the solution came of you know, Christ out of two natures are into nature's both of those are translations but be that as it may, Christ into nature's fully God, fully man, what we standard what we say? And so I asked them the question I said, Okay, well, how can let me think about let's think about this, how would you define God? Like, what what would you say? What do we know about God? What can we say about God? And none of the answers I got included anything remotely like divine simplicity. And you know, as an analytic philosophers and undergrad, you know, we thought about the three Oh, God, God is omniscient, omnipresent, omnibenevolent, and omnipotent or whatever, but not specifically, simplicity, or not specifically, you know, some of these other, these other kind of concepts, and then humanity. But you know, we started talking about creativity, and we talked about all these other things, but we didn't, strictly speaking, talk about a soul and a body or, you know, some of the wills or some of the things that become sort of important categories for trying to figure out how Christ as a human was also God. And some of the, you know, the heresies like, well, it was the the mind of God and a human person or something like that. So how, you know, how important is it, let's say, or does that part of your work as a pastor, you think, to help people think through these maybe more arcane, or? I don't know, oh, colts, but in the sense of dark, not using the Latin definition. I don't know the harder to explain parts of sort of metaphysics and philosophy and theology. Is that is that part of a pastor's task? Do we would we be better as a church if we had more robust concepts? And you know, I don't know how do we go about that task?

Matthew Wilcoxen 49:47

Yeah, well, you know, it's it's, I don't know that I figured out always how to do it, but I think I've found plenty of people. aces, whether it be occasionally in a sermon, or in teaching certain courses, you know, or discipling, people who are pretty intellectual, and there are a lot of people that are like that. So there's just all different kinds of, of ways that these kinds of things work themselves out. I also think we really ought to go back to how did the patristic scholars, how did the sorry, the non patristic side of the patristic, the Church Fathers, how did they do this work? Because Augustine, for instance, you know, he's, he doesn't, he saves his most technical stuff for outside of the sermons, right. But then you can clearly see where he does bring in some pretty heavy, heavy theology. You can see how his his, his more precise thinking, is fueling his preaching and his reading of texts. And I think he's just such a model, or you think of some of the greatest theological texts we have, from the early church, were sermons, you know, or end up being sermons or some kinds of discourses given for the church. And so I'm in this journey of just trying to think about how do I meet the pastoral needs of a church? And not everyone's always interested in these questions, there are many other things that that they need and are interested in. But then what do these these issues of, you know, kind of doctrine, theology proper, you know, what, what pastoral function do they have, and they have a worship function, they draw our mind, learning these these things about God is some of these apophatic theological moves to disabuse us of habits of thinking about God and creaturely terms, has this way of lifting our minds from our sort of being overly sure of our concepts of God, hopefully not in a way that's ultimately on unsettling, but that's unsettling enough to throw us back into searching the Scripture and throw us back into a life of prayer and seeking God and encounter with God. And so I think there's a real worship sort of liturgical, and there's like an ASCII says that that can happen in the teaching and learning of theology within the church. That's, that's really important. So that's one way I think of it is, you know, people need to be disabused of ideas of God that are too small to who's the guy who JB Phillips, Your God is too small. You know, I don't think he meant to quite in the way I'm talking but the real spiritual refreshment for us to realize that we've, we're barely scratching the surface of who God is. And we're, we're constantly needing to return to that, that process of seeking Him, which involves the mind, and it involves the body, and it involves prayer. And so I do think that that theology proper when done in the right way, in sermons and in church teaching can keep us in that process, that that spiritual process of interpretation and prayer, and in induct us into that process, as well. So, I do think we need more of it. It's not always easy to figure out how to do it if it doesn't terminate, and lead people by example, into a real spiritual encounter with God or at least seeking that encounter with God. I think it fails if it becomes a sort of dry scholastic exercise. Yeah. To itself, but the dry scholastic sort of element of it and be involved in deeper, more robust spirituality. That's what I think we need. So long winded answer there apologize.

Charles Kim 54:36

No, no, that's great. That's I mean, you know, I, I think I agree with you. And I appreciate Yeah, just hearing some some thoughts on that and hopefully, whoever's listening can will be edified and and encouraged by it as, as I was. So I want to thank Dr. Wilcoxon for coming on. And, you know, this is this was definitely one of those conversations that stretched me quite a bit, as did his book. So I commend it to all of you. It is a it is both, you know, good excuses, as you said earlier, it's a good way to strengthen my my mind, but also my soul as I think through, you know who what kind of God God is for for us. So, so thanks, Dr. Wilcoxson. And it was a pleasure to have you on.

Matthew Wilcoxen 55:30

Hey, thanks so much for having me and I hope to meet you in person sometime and yeah, thank you.

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