Episode 112: Interview with Dr. Dru Johnson
Continuing in our conversations over the overlap between philosophy and theology, we welcome Dr. Dru Johnson to discuss his recent book Biblical Philosophy: A Hebraic Approach to the Old and New Testaments (Cambridge University Press). Dr. Johnson's challenge in the book is to consider the bible as a philosophical text, not just a religious or theological one.
Timestamps:
5:38- Paul’s Warning Against Greek Philosophy
21:30- Defining Biblical Philosophy
38:53- Johnson’s Change of Mind
57:23- Hebraic Thought in the West
Episode Transcription
Charles Kim 0:00
Hello and welcome to history of Christian theology. My name is Chad Kim. With me this week will be Dr. Drew Johnson. Dr. Johnson recently wrote a book called biblical philosophy, a Hebraic approach to the Old and New Testaments. Dr. Johnson is the director of the Center of break thought at King's College in New York City. And this is a kind of magnum opus for his work on looking at the scriptures as a base text for what he calls a philosophy or second order thinking. And he his contention in the book is that Christians and others who read the Old and New Testaments as scripture should value those scriptures as their own, in their own way as a savvy and smart and sophisticated text, and not feel the need to necessarily always draw in other intellectual traditions. It is an intellectual tradition of its own. So it's a thought provoking book a little outside of my sort of typical interviews. But I but I thought, as we're doing all these conversations on philosophy, that his voice would be an interesting one to kind of challenge Christians in a different way. So I hope that you appreciate this conversation. I have a few more coming up with Mike hobbits on TF Torrance and the doctrine Theosis. Jonathan Pennington on philosophy, and the Christian tradition, as well as conversation with Louie Marco. So we got a lot of stuff lined up. Thank you for your patience in the last month, as I was starting school and a new position at St. Louis University, as well as in welcoming my daughter, who's now five months or five weeks old, welcoming her into the world. So it's been a crazy few weeks at the at the Kim household. So thank you so much for listening, please rate us review us on iTunes. And, yeah, drop us a line if you have any questions or concerns, and we appreciate you listening.
All right, well, welcome. Drew Johnson. Dr. Johnson is the Associate Professor of biblical and theological studies at the King's College in New York City. And he is the director of the Center for Hebraic thought, and I take this center to be something that sort of probably come up from all of his research, which is, in some ways, maybe the, I don't know, the flowering of all of your research could be the book that just came out with Cambridge University Press, which we're here to talk about biblical philosophy Hebraic approach to the Old and New Testaments. And so yeah, welcome Dr. Johnson.
Dru Johnson 2:39
Thank you very much, Charles. And yeah, you're exactly right. That's that's the manifesto and it's it's dedicated to my good friend your arm Czone because he basically pushed me into he bullied me into writing that because he's like, quit quit given us the pieces of your system and just give the whole thing so
Charles Kim 2:57
so because you have a precursor book. That's kind of a piss them on a pistol Knology in biblical thinking, and that plays a little role at the end of the book, too. But, okay,
Dru Johnson 3:07
yeah, so yeah, I did a lot on epistemology, which helped me think about as you probably notice methodology, like how do you keep yourself from wrecking wrecking the project methodologically and helped me through you know, a lot of a lot of philosophical discussion is always going to circulate around what's the epistemological model at work within that system? So yeah, it it was not completely it was adjacent to everything I was doing.
Charles Kim 3:31
Very good. Um, all right. So that's, that's the book I yeah, I saw it, I think on your Twitter feed, actually was how I did it. And so Drew also is a interviews people for on script, the podcast on script, right.
Dru Johnson 3:46
So yes, wildly popular on script. Well, actually, I was just in Wisconsin yesterday, filming a Live episode of On script. So that was, it was fun to see actual people who listen to the podcast, like drive from Chicago up to Wisconsin just to, like, see the thing. And I was like, Wow, this feels feels real all the sudden.
Charles Kim 4:07
That's funny. Yeah. One time we did a live I started this podcast like six years ago with two buddies of mine, we taught at a classical school, and about a year into it. And the only reason I think we have followers is because my friend Tom knows everybody in southern Idaho. And oh, yeah. And that was where we were living at the time. Not that populous of a place, but when you know, everybody in the So anyway, we had a bunch of people come to one of our we did a live event thing out there one time, and that was a lot of fun. But
Dru Johnson 4:39
seeing real eyeballs is pretty, pretty freaky. So
Charles Kim 4:43
especially post COVID. Yes, exactly. Um, all right. Well, I have sent drew some questions. They, you know, I always like to say that I hope that my interviews are like sort of an addendum to the book or something. Like I don't want to just straight recapitulate Late, what Drew has argued Dr. Johnson has argued, because I want you to read the book, I want people to engage his scholarly work, there's a lot there more than then can be digested in an hour. But But I always enjoy that I get to read a book and then actually talk with the author. So it's a lot of fun for me. And I've learned a lot from this book, it has made me think about, you know, think about the Bible in different ways, and what exactly it means to do sort of philosophy. And so so I really appreciated it.
Dru Johnson 5:31
Oh, good. Well, that was that was its only goal is just to pry open a little crack in a door for people to think differently. So
Charles Kim 5:38
yeah, well, so my first question, I'm gonna sort of take, start with a passage of scripture that came to mind and I know that it comes up and towards the end of the book, but Paul says in his letter to the Corinthians, in chapter one, Where is the wise person who is the teacher of the law? Where is the philosopher of this age Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world, for sensing the wisdom of God, the world through its wisdom did not know Him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe. And then Jews demand signs, and Greeks look for wisdom. So I know that, you know, I know that you're familiar with this, quote, of course, but how do you how do you think your book engages with Paul's warnings against Greek philosophy, but also kind of moves beyond them?
Dru Johnson 6:29
Yeah. All right. I'm not quite sure they actually are warnings against Greek philosophy. Actually, I think I think it when you follow it, you know, there's like, you can pick a little quote out here, and of course, people have picked this quote. I mean, I've heard people actually say, This is why nobody should study modern philosophy or contemporary philosophy, because Paul says not to write. And I say, Okay, well just keep on reading and see what he does. Right? So he, that's where he starts, you know, eloquent words, empty the power of its cross, you know, he starts out really heavy on soothsaying and wisdom of the world and philosophy. But then notice what he does, and the rest of Corinthians is, he doesn't say, you know, get the thou for to a prayer closet and be spiritual for the rest of your life, right and spiritual, I mean, not in the Greco Roman sense of spirituality, but in, you know, our sense of spirituality. No, he then actually programmatically lays out, and reasons and using story and in their own biography of the church, and what's going on with the church. And he argued with them about the nature of this abstract thing called Unity. What does it mean to be one body, despite the Corinthian diversity, you know, it's, it's famously a port town, it's a debaucherous town, you know, it's fully Greco Roman, but it's has all these eastern elements in there. So what does it mean for these people who have real people and real problems, if you haven't read the letter, like, it's real, real problems that everybody who's pastor today understands. But there's this thing called Unity in the Holy Spirit that he believes is possible. And so he slices at it through a lot of different angles, both in principle, he talks about as this principle of unity, and then what does it look like in concrete situations. And that's just reasoning with people about the nature of a reality outside of any particular instance of it. So I would actually say what he's doing, as he's warning them about particularly deleterious modes of philosophizing. And then trying to give them good models for how to do it, and it's in the model includes living it out in their community, it's not an individual sport, it's not about the tranquility of their souls, although that can be a knock on effect of what he's doing. But, but that that's actually about them as a community becoming wise and discerning about this abstract topic called Unity. Yeah, we could stand to think about today as well.
Charles Kim 8:48
For sure, for sure. Well, and I think part of even how you responded to that maybe was something like, you know, having just read the book, you use some phrases about narrative and reasoning and their own sort of understanding of the church within the broader Hebraic paradigm. You know, some of those things are part of what you try to elucidate in the book is exactly how Paul, so you know, how Paul thinks and reasons, in a way that's more indicative of His Hebraic background than a Greek background. So in some ways, maybe what he's even doing is saying, like, the Greeks don't have the could, I mean, would you say that, you know, maybe Paul's saying the Greeks don't have the total claim to philosophizing.
Dru Johnson 9:35
They don't have the goods as it were. They have some good, right, but they don't have the goods. Yeah, I was actually I did not know it. But I was at a seminary yesterday in Wisconsin, that was actually a very, like, bringing Neo Platonism back to like, let's make playtime or Christianity platonic again, or something like that. And I was sitting there talking about this book and I, you know, the basic data points and Jonathan Pennington, my friend who's a gospel scholar has pointed this out with his book Jesus, the great philosopher and Sermon on the Mountain human flourishing, that, that Jesus, you know, if you just want to talk about Jesus as recorded in the book of Matthew, which is where his sweet spot is, is engaging wholeheartedly in the virtue ethics tradition, which we can talk about later. But he's not engaging to say like, this is good enough, go down this road, he's saying no, there's obviously something here that's true and good and useful. But he then reroutes it into Taurus thinking, right? He says, but here's the here's the how the Torah thinks, and here's how you've misunderstood the Torah. And let me recalculate the Torah for you. So you can see what the Torah was always doing that you missed. He's not giving anything new there. He's only going back to the old. And so, you know, Jonathan says it this way, or he said it to me in conversation. I don't know if he said it in writing, but he's like, the, you know, if Jesus, if you think about what he's doing there, he's saying, the Hebraic tradition, which I would say the Hebraic intellectual tradition is powerful enough, it can go toe to toe with the greatest Roman philosophies of his day. And Jesus thinks that it wins, right? Like the break tradition wins. It's better at the end of the day. I think Paul does the same thing. He puts he puts it in direct conversation, he'll, he'll do a lot of like, okay, I'm, I know, you can't quite understand what I'm saying. So I'll put it in a way that you can hear it. But at the end of the day, what I'm trying to do is move you over to this other intellectual system. And by intellectual I mean, spiritual, embodied, communitarian, etc. I don't mean an individual sitting in their own mind, Cartesian style, wrapping on chunks of wax, trying to think about the nature of knowledge.
Charles Kim 11:42
I think I heard the phrase from James K. Smith, but I'm not sure the brain on the stick, kind of
Dru Johnson 11:47
Yeah, that's Jamie Smith. Yeah, exactly. And even then a brain on a stick. You know, I point out, it's a great analogy to get you thinking about it. But a brain on stick is still an embodied situation. It's an embodied situation in a community already. So like, we just can't get away from it. And the biblical authors are like, why would you want to get away from that? That's the stuff, man philosophically and theologically. That's the sweet spot.
Charles Kim 12:10
Well, yeah, I think I mean, so one of the reasons that I was so intrigued by this book anyway, is I suspect you might have been talking to or at least I know, he's there. Hans Bergsma at Nashville house. And so he's been on the he's been on the podcast. Yeah. And so I find a lot of what Dr. Bergsma is trying to do very appealing. He was a teacher of professor of mine for a year at SLU. He was here for a year. So that's how I got to know him. And yeah, so I mean, he definitely is trying to talk about Christian Platonism. And to what extent we can learn from this sort of Neoplatonic tradition. And so you know, and he's put forward that on the podcast, so those who are listening can go back and see our conversation with them. But that's one reason that I wanted to have you hear was like, you know, there are, that's not the only way. And that's not the only that's not the only part of the Christian tradition, even if it's one that I find particularly persuasive. That's what made your book so interesting to me. I was like, Okay, I need to always be aware that there's more that there's more that I could learn. There are different ways to crack this nut. And so I yeah, I don't know if that I'll be looking forward to your conversation with him. But
Dru Johnson 13:25
I mean, yeah, he and I should should talk at some point. I know, he's had kind of a rivalry with improvin at Regent where he I mean, an intellectual fringe friendly rivalry on these topics. Yeah. And I think at the end of the day, you know, when I read his his book, heavenly participation long time ago, I remember thinking like, Okay, well, he's raised a lot of issues of Platonism. I had never thought about before, which I love that in a book like, Okay, I've never thought about that. I need to take that seriously think that went through. But at the end of the day, what I'm going to suggest is okay, you have this plate Platanus tradition of intellectualism. And you have the tiebreak tradition. There is kind of a choose this day, whom you're going to serve like because you actually cannot enter whole hog into both and obviously all the Patristics knew this right, all the fathers knew this and mothers. And actually, they're making these distinctions in their writing. Even Justin Martyr, who I know often gets accused of being the most Platanus to Platanus. There's, you know, there's been some people writing about him recently. They're like, well, if you look a little bit closer, he seems to be making a lot of similar moves that Paul is moving, where he's like, Yeah, Platonism great. But actually, let me tell you about this other philosophical system. That's pretty, pretty great, too. And again, putting them head to head and seeing which one wins, if you want to speak about and kind of American competitive terms.
Charles Kim 14:52
Yeah, well, I think that's right. Like I mean, a lot of the Athanasius and others. Cyril of Alexandria, they'll talk about they like they actually will chastise the Hellenic approach or the Helene's or you know that they they do want to distinguish themselves to some extent, from what is Greek now, they'll talk about philosophy and true philosophy or jazz and Justin Martyr, the divine philosophy and these sorts of things like so, you know, they're very aware that they're part of a philosophical tradition. And but but they don't think that it's simply an importation of those ideas from the sort of the pagan Greek world like they're, you know, and we may think that they overlook things or that they're still assuming certain things, right. But they, at least, like by their own words, think that they're doing a separation, something a little different,
Dru Johnson 15:46
even as you say that the the example that comes to my mind is, you know, I teach Hebrew Bible in English, every semester to freshmen as a core class. And when we get to Leviticus and sexuality, actually, you just get through Genesis and it's like, you know, so many sexual escapades, you know, most of them are shocked by that point, they had no idea all this stuff is in the Bible. And then you get to Leviticus where you get these prohibitions of sexual relationships. And I, when I first started teaching, I was not hip to the issue, like they have no conceptual world of sexuality that in any way overlaps with the biblical authors, conceptual world of sexuality, right? Yeah. Like there is this completely front loaded with completely different concepts of autonomy, body self, the telos of sexuality. So when you when I say simple things like, well, sexuality and baby making are just completely intertangled in the Bible, like no biblical author would ever separate those two things out as two separate, you know, and you can see a lot of them going like, well, crap, that's I don't think that that's right or true. And so what I have to do in that situation where there's like, the Venn diagram is barely overlap, like there is a thin razor's edge where there's overlapping, I end up saying a lot of things about sexual identity, not because anybody thinks sexual identity is an actual thing. I mean, a lot of queer theologians don't even think that's a thing. But then nobody before 1860 thought sexual identity was a thing. But like, because your view of sexuality is completely ensconced in sexual identity. Let me say this in a way that you can understand. But the goal, again, is to bring you back over and say, so, you know, to peel back layers, so you can eventually hear the biblical conceptuality. Not even so that you have to agree with it, just so you can hear what they're doing. And it's a tedious process. And it's not that you can't do it in one lecture, like you got to keep basting that Turkey, and then eventually, you're only going to get about half of them to actually see what's going on there and care about it. Most of them are just gonna say like, so is it anti homosexual or not? And I'm like, Yeah, well, that's, that's five degrees of the wrong question. Right. So, so I feel like when I read Paul, I completely get it that you can see that similar, frustrated, not in a good frustration, he's rolling ideas over saying, Okay, I know, this is how you hear it in your culture. And I cited even there that, you know, these physiological studies of trying to find the center of Paul's rhetoric, they basically ended up all giving up and saying the center of his rhetoric seems to be entirely audience contingent, whoever he's talking to. He thinks about how they need to hear it. So I became all things to all people. Apparently, he was really serious about that, like that even goes all the way down into his choice of prepositions. So, so yeah, I think the word gets thrown around here is engaging the culture, right. That's the one we throw around in Christian knees. But I think they're doing something way more sophisticated than engaging culture, whatever people think they mean by that today. They're really doing a usurpation job, like, almost like those imposter perfumes in the 80s. You know, you like Giorgio, you'll love, you know, whatever. Right. So let me get you in the same room, conceptually, and then we can start letting these things tear into each other.
Charles Kim 19:04
Yeah, and just as a side note, one of the other sort of nuggets I guess, that I took from this book, biblical philosophy was when you talked about the way the narrative approach to law, and sort of like what's going on in the legal frameworks of Leviticus, and some of that, like stuff that feels very tedious and foreign to us, because we come from like this Anglo legal tradition, statuary tradition. I think you call it a statutory tradition? Yeah. tutori tradition. Yeah. So like, even that was, like, helpful to me as like, Oh, right. I can't just import my concepts into that. And I should know better. I've been have I've had some training in history, but I still had
Dru Johnson 19:43
all doing it. Right. Yeah. Well, even if you have training history, unless you know that the statutory approach the law, statutory approach, meaning there's a law, if you break it, there's a penalty, and that's basically the structure of legal thinking, which is not at all what's going on in Scripture. It's actually not at all what's going on in the ancient world. Even then people go, Well, what about this law? It's like, well, let me let's read five laws next to each other. Now notice what they did with narratives in the law, they make the law into a micro narrative rather than just a merely if then right if this happens in this out a bunch of so they're doing, they're making very sophisticated moves. I mean, a lot of people have known this for literally millennia, right? And there's been people hopping up and down excited. I mean, if you read Calvin's commentaries, you know, he's reading all of this in the Hebrew. And he is just super excited to show you all the stuff that's going on. But it gets lost. And there's, there's obviously very particular reasons even within Liberal Studies, why this has been lost over the last 150 years or so. And always has to do with the Germans, right? We always blame for everything. But yeah, there's a certain schools of approaching even the liberal texts that have, have lost the sophisticated, their sophisticated use of literature, Robert Alter has kind of helped people to pick that back up. And essentially, what I'm doing is kind of a side project to Robert Alter, like, he's saying, Look, in the Hebrew, they're doing all this really sophisticated literary stuff. But when we translate it, we translate it out of all the sophisticated stuff, and we show like this bland, or these very different things. I'm trying to say, yeah, and they're also doing all this sophisticated philosophical stuff. But we often miss it, because we read it devotionally only, or, or we read it with statute, we read these laws as if they're just, you know, harsh and mean and pinup penalizing, etc. So I'm sorry, you didn't ask for any of that. But I just got on a soapbox there.
Charles Kim 21:30
Know that it was it was helpful. Um, all right. Well, so the second question I basically had was, you know, you spend a lot of time and the books called biblical philosophy, which, of course, is, as many will know, you know, a Greek word, philosophy, a love of wisdom. But you spent a lot of book trying to establish what counts as philosophy. And I know that that's you. Like, one of the things that like, following along in your argument is I could sort of, I felt like I could follow you trying to say, Alright, how am I going to make this make sense? And, and so, but, you know, one, one phrase that came came, keeps coming back was second order thinking or thinking about thinking. And so I wanted to say, why did you choose to call this biblical philosophy and not biblical second order thinking, or biblical, even biblical rationality? Or something like what? Why philosophy? Why do you want to hold on to that as what this is about?
Dru Johnson 22:28
Well, I feel like I say this all the time. So I might have even said it earlier. But the first thing to know about publishing books is authors do not get to say what the title of the book is, right? If if if you have a good relationship with a publisher, then they will ask you, Hey, what do you think of the book? This is my first book with Cambridge. And so like, this goes all the way down to the first time I saw the cover of the book was on Amazon. Right? So. So now they did run the title, but asked me and I thought, Okay, that's a little more bold than I would have said, but they wanted it to be a little provocative. So with that title, same type of philosophy. But I would also say, you know, if you think about second order reasoning, one of the reasons I was involved in a work group of ancient Near Eastern scholars, so Egyptologist and assyriology, just Mesopotamian scholars, thinking about second order reasoning in the ancient Near East, and how you discern that through various literary traditions in the ancient Near East. What I found out in that group is that they all see and they have for a long time, is they see the Hebrew Bible as representing an intellectual tradition that's over with the Greeks and the Romans, Romans, like, they see it as clearly this high level, high order intellectual progress, where the Egyptians and the Mesopotamians are kind of stuck in doing, they're doing abstraction, but they're doing it so cryptically and so differently, that it's hard to tell exactly what they're doing. So the other thing is, and you said that you could tell I was struggling to say, how am I going to say this? And that? I'm glad to hear you say that, because that was exactly the problem is what would you do here? Normally, you just say, well, let's get the agreed upon definition of philosophy. And then, and then just show how this either fits it or it doesn't or should create a bigger category or something like that. So I started looking up all the standard places in philosophy to find definitions of philosophy, and started emailing friends who are working philosophers and, and lo and behold, everybody gave me a different answer to the question, what is philosophy? Or what is the nature of the philosophy? And then I got down to kind of like, well, what's the philosophical method? Right? Yeah. And could not even find a center mass to shoot at here. Yeah. And so I said, like, Look, we're not gonna even try this. Who am I trying to find? So I really went to this kind of like philosophical style. There's things like you hand me you know, if I handed you a text, that some point and say like, what do you think this text is? You never read it before in your life. There's going to be certain genetic markers, they're gonna tip you off. This is Hellenistic period. This is Roman. Um, this is Byzantine, you know, there's gonna be in whatever those features are, whether those are things like our ways of talking about topics or ideas that come up again. So if somebody's talking about sin and non beam, I'm like, Okay, so now we're talking about late ancient Christian philosophy, right? Or all the way up to early modern, you can get people talking about sin and non being, I've always had to explain to students when I taught philosophy of religion, like okay, believe it or not, there was a time in the world where people thought of goodness on one end of the continuum and non being on the end of the the other end of the continuum, right? And they're like, What? Right? So there are, there are topics, and there are methods, and there are ways of talking about things and their convictions about what is like so the conviction that goodness and non beating are on a continuum continuum. Those are the genetic markers. And so as I looked across scripture, I just said, Okay, are there are there any stable genetic markers that when you see these things, you can say like, Okay, that seems definitively Hebraic. And so that's where I kind of outline those. And, excuse me, the other thing is like, look, I'm convinced that if you're humans gathered together, you're doing speculation about the nature of the world, like everybody's doing it right. So you just got to figure out what's their way of speaking, speculated about the world. But I made this distinction, which was wholly mine, nobody gave this to me. I'm sure somebody else has made it before. It's kind of uninteresting to me that humans are speculating about things. What when it becomes interesting is when they say, and this is why you should speculate about it in this way, right? The advocacy of speculation. Yeah. And so that's what I defined as moving from kind of scholarly to speculation to a philosophical style was when you advocate a particular way. So we can say, you know, there's been arguments about this, but I think a lot of people would agree that there is a Socratic way to philosophize, there's like a method. There's a platonic method. There's an Aristotelian method. And I just want to say, so that's why it's philosophy. So when you entered the advocacy, that's when I said, Okay, that's more like philosophy, because it means people valued it. They wanted to pass it down generation to generation, you had to opt in in order to learn it this way. And that seems like something worth talking about.
Charles Kim 27:10
Yeah, that's very helpful. And sort of staying on the topic of the book before I get into my Patristics scholar reading stuff. I have no idea what to say. Well, I, you know, you it's like, once you're so ensconced in kind of a world, you know, I don't think I read everything through that world. But I'm trying to stay in your your field for a while. And then I'll be I'll be my, you know, those annoying questions at the conference like, well, how come you didn't think about the one thing that I know about?
Dru Johnson 27:44
How come you didn't write it the way I would have written?
Charles Kim 27:48
Which, which will be my later question. So I will. So you say at 84 Only once we have grasped something central to a break philosophy, can we begin to put his questions and insights into conversation with other philosophies, which is kind of like I say, sort of what I wanted to do, I wanted to say, Okay, if I take your argument, I want to know what I do with all of this stuff that I've studied. But before we get to that, what is what is central to her break philosophy, as you argue in the book, so you just gave one advocacy? Well, that's just general philosophy.
Dru Johnson 28:23
It's a general category and advocacy. Yeah. So you have to ask the question, do we see a style, a method of reasoning about the nature of the world? advocated particularly right, so? Because they are prophetic texts, right. They're purported to be from prophets speaking on behalf of the God of the universe, obviously, advocacy is going to be an easy, that's a low hurdle to pass and say, yeah, they're advocating things. Are they advocating them? consistently? So I split this into modes and convictions like so what's this the stylistic mode by which they they try to get you to speculate about things? And then what did they seem to be necessarily true or good or useful in order to think about it in the right way? So modes would be I came up with two and look, I changed the names on these a half dozen times, ask brands like I different names for all of these than the ones that are in the book. And like there's no family friendly way to get so just bear with these names, right. So I said there, it's pixelated arguments, so you can compare them and I do throughout the book to like a caricature. I think it's just a helpful caricature. It's obviously not gonna be true in all places of Greco Roman philosophical traditions more Greco than Roman actually. But if, if you think of linear deductive arguments as being the the stuff philosophically, the Hebraic philosophy is going to say like actually more like Robert, California off the office. Like, let me tell you a story. Let me tell you another story. Let me tell you a poem that is meant to interpret that story. Let me give you a series of laws that are meant to reason with you about the nature of that thing that I just talked about in that story. Again, Paul, in First Corinthians it says topic after topic After topic, all slicing away that same concept of unity in a diverse setting, and what does unity actually mean? If there's actually tension to diversity or something like that, so that's pixelated and pixelated meaning like no single pixel on my screen right now tells me anything about what's on the screen that's meaningful. It's only when I step back and see how the pixels are coordinated. Or I think I was originally called this point to list something of pointillism. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I got a joke shot. So that's one mode. Another mode is indirectly related is that that those pixels are networked together. And specifically, in the Hebraic tradition, they use literary tactics and techniques to connect ideas, right, so they retell a story. So there's a there's, most people have speculated there's probably some kind of reason why you get a shepherd helping somebody at a well, that story gets repeated over and over again, that you get a young Hebrew thrown into a prison under a king who can interpret dreams. Like there's reasons why those stories get told, those are the like the big glaring, Billboard obvious ones, there are lots more sophisticated ones that if you read it into Hebrew, become obvious, through repetition of words, what they call light word, or chi, ASMs, parallelisms. There's all kinds of literary too, but notably, these are literary techniques. So they're not oral techniques. They're they're specifically verbal written techniques, for making sure like winking and nodding and saying, do you, are you picking up what I'm laying down here? Right? Which means it is a wisdom tradition, it's actually it is, it's, it's actually making you do the work of picking up the breadcrumbs that they're laying down. So it's highly inductive, and disparate. And that so these pixels are networked together. So you can trace networks of justice, like, what is the nature of justice? Well, that's not ever discussed in one place in the Hebrew Bible is discussed in 100. places across store, you know, seeing injustice store unjust stories, unfolding, hearing some legal reasoning on what's just and what's not, never telling you why it's just or not right, just presuming that you're going to be able to put this put this together and, and extend the thinking of justice in the new situations, which you haven't seen before. So that's what we call wisdom, right? Skillful discernment, the ability to see the same abstract principle in a new situation that you haven't seen it before. And this is like, we're, you know, we're academics. So you know how this goes in, like a symposium, when you're trying to figure out whether this person actually knows what they're talking about or not? What or whether they just have a cute little paper they gave. And so you kind of throw them this new situation in there. And even something where they go like we, this is where we scholars have our aha moment, right with people, when they say, Okay, here's why that sounds like it fits with my thesis, but it actually doesn't. And then they give you a very discerning description of why that seems to fit, but it actually doesn't. And that you know, that's Aristotelian genius, differentiate what it is and what it isn't, which, of course, the biblical authors are doing centuries before Aristotle comes up with this.
So that that and then they have these convictions that I labeled mysterious to creationist trans demographic, which I think we'll talk about later. And then ritualist, which is the big one, as well, that these are all important, you know, creationist just means they believe there's a God who created the universe, Abraham, Isaac, Jake, like that history, they're all part of that history. mysteriousness, you know, kind of like, begins Mysterion ism, like, you're just not going to be able to figure out the whole and that's not the project. So it doesn't, it doesn't sweep away. Discovery and speculation, it just says like, there's no naive program, there's no positivist program, we're gonna figure that all that out. And then ritualism, it comes down to that, in order to know what you need to know, like about the nature of this reality that is abstract, you have to embody these these actions in community in order to see what I'm trying to show you. Which means that you will never ever understand the nature of justice unless you embody these particular practices in community in order to discern justice in the world or, or something like that. Or discern unjust use of political power if you want to get into political thought. There's a lot of political philosophy, obviously, in the Bible, both Old and New Testament. I mean, almost everything Jesus says is political philosophy, right of some sort or another. So that between those those modes and those convictions, and now you can hear in the kind of if you take a caricature of Greco Roman traditions of philosophizing. I mean, I'd say actually, you do have ritualism in Greco. I mean, there's peripatetic way, right, you walk along the way the schools, to my shock. I've never really heard anybody talk about this, but that a lot of Greek philosophers, poo pooed people who merely, you know, were Sophists, who just talked and made arguments, they really wanted to see how you live your life, right? Yeah, and that it was consistent. It was still individualistic. It was all aimed at the tranquillity of the soul. But I think that's why Greco Roman thought Besides Christianity entering the Greco Roman world, one of the reasons it's such a great conversation partner for Christianity is because it has so many elements that that he break philosophy is trying to get at it just valorizes and prioritizes. Some of the wrong ones I would say. Which makes it always slightly off kilter from what the he read philosophy is doing even when it's really close.
Charles Kim 35:22
Interesting. Yeah. Well, one thing I just got the pixelated one was one I found really helpful. And I've done a little bit of Jewish biblical interpretation. And, you know, yeah. And I was like, That's exactly right. And but it was, it's funny comparing that with. So when I was growing up, I had a Bible that had topics in the back, and you could look for, you know, if I was struggling with sadness, but what the book would do was list a whole bunch of different passages all across the Bible, because in a sense, I mean, I guess, you know, you might say, you might look at that and say, well look at how influenced we are by sort of more Greco Roman kind of thing. We have a topic, and we want to know, how do I read about that topic? But then when you go to the Bible, you have to say, well, you read the whole thing, you know,
Dru Johnson 36:10
and stand back and look and see and see what comes to focus, right. Yeah,
Charles Kim 36:15
yeah. It's sort of like that table of contents almost embodies both of those things like this is the the trouble that I had, I wanted to find my topic, but I couldn't find it in just one place.
Dru Johnson 36:26
But and think about as a researcher, this happens all the time, right? Is you have this, this intuitive thesis you think might be going on. But as you research it, like the reality of the research, like what you find out, reshapes the question, right? So if you have the same thesis, when you started, and when you finish, then I'm going to say you, you were just you're actually doing propaganda at that point, right? Yeah, it has to be kicked back. I think also, you know, and this is, to your point, the thing that emerges when you see the kind of the philosophical style of the Hebrew Bible that gets worked into the New Testament, is you see their anthropology and their their methodology that kind of emerges. And it really is telling you about what kind of philosophical communities are good. And I mean, good in the kind of the fundamental sense. And what's what's even possible, right? Because I think we would all say there are certain ways of speculating about the nature of reality, that would be wrong. Or maybe we as Christians would even say wicked or evil or bad, right? Or useless, or, you know, things that spin people into interior speculation that actually is ultimately unhelpful for them. Right. So. So yeah, I think I think it you know, the method, the mode, the philosophical style, then actually helps reveal the theological anthropology then, which actually then reinforces what kind of philosophies are good, permissible and actually lead you down the road to better understanding? And, you know, you can think about, like, really obvious examples, you think about medical speculation, you know, medical ideas, what there were people at one point in history that like vivisected, living human beings, just to see how they would react to it, that would just inject them with chemicals, and you know, like the, the unit in Japan that was doing this to POWs or Dr. Mengele, right. These are extreme examples. But those are, you know, in some ways, those are epistemological enterprises. But we, we have to say why those are wrong, because they're, they're inhumane, right. And I think what you get in the Hebraic notion is a humane way. And of course, you know, Socratic and platonic speculation. They believe they are selling a humane way. It's just their theological anthropology, I would say is, is not right. At the end of the day, I just say they didn't get it, right. They were close, but no cigar. And it's a just so good enough story. But it's, I have to say, at the end of the day, I'm just like, that's not quite what the biblical authors, that's not where they want to get you.
Charles Kim 38:53
Well, I'll do my, I'll do my sort of change gears question. And so this is the thing that we've started asking on the podcast. And I, you know, get some interesting responses. And I always say, you can you know, this can be this could be something that happened within the course of your research something frivolous or something more, you know, in your broader life. But what is one thing that you believe to be true that you once thought was false, or vice versa? One thing that you believe is false, but you once thought was true. And in some respects, this goes towards what you've been saying. Like, if you're, if your thesis of your research doesn't change to some degree, well, you're not, you know, that's probably propaganda as you called it, but it may be that you're not actually thinking about reality, like you're not actually encountering, whatever you're studying, you're just trying to push through what you already think to be true. So anyway, as philosophers I did this question with my two buddies in the podcast and it's a philosophers love this kind of question, because it sort of opens up how your reasoning or you know, that kind of thing.
Dru Johnson 39:58
Yeah. Um, so So the thing that I think of is actually my my view of philosophy. So I think, or maybe my focus, maybe not my view, but I think, you know, when I started seminary, and definitely by the time I started studying philosophy, I didn't actually take a philosophy class. And I was like, in my 30s, in a master's program in philosophy, right. And so I was trying to figure out what this is that we were doing. And I was very, like, content and argument focused, you know, I was almost probably not this obnoxious, but close to that kind of, like, you know, the guy that sits down in the middle of a college campus with a poster on his table that says, you know, like, feminism is idiocy changed my mind. Right? You know, let's, let's hear your argument. Right? And I am much more, you know, like, I, let's see how you live now, what community are you in? Are you married? Are you single? What are you doing with your life? How do you spend your time, you know, that to me, so in some ways, I've ended up in the Hellenistic, you know, right, right alongside those Stoics, who really want to see how this works out in your life. Because I think that all of that other stuff is shaping how you think about those arguments. So for instance, and actually, this came, this change in my mind came from researching, I was reading a monograph on the ritual ritual epistemology within scripture. And why scripture is so insistent that you do rituals in order to know something, right. So there's a really unique way to talk about ritual rituals in the ancient world, Greco Roman or otherwise. And, and I used to think of my classroom, the you probably sympathize with this as like, Okay, here's the content we need to get through. And after working through all the ritual epistemology and scripture, I was like, Oh, I'm so that's the wrong focus. I should be thinking, what rituals am I going to ask them to embody throughout the semester that are going to allow them to see what I'm really trying to show them? So I think that's been a major change in my thinking, I have lots of things that I thought were true that I like, like that there is a single right way to interpret Scripture. Like there's just one single interpretation of Scripture. Like I said, now I teach hermeneutics and I now see how foolhardy that is, besides being a Christian who believes that we have four gospels that aren't identical. That all tell the true true story of Jesus. Right. So those kinds of things are I have a baker's dozen of those, but the the kind of how you live your life feature was a big, big eye opener for me. Yeah,
Charles Kim 42:32
I'm rethinking how I teach my language classes. But I heard I heard a linguist of some sort, say that the best language teacher is a planner, not a speaker. And that is you should be planning all the different ways that you're going to help your student encounter the language. And so your primary role isn't a like just trying to fill all of the information into the head of the
Dru Johnson 43:02
student. And you know, this book
Charles Kim 43:06
I teach almost exclusively from it Yes. Okay. Surely he's showing familia Romana and I'm, I do spoken Latin and written Latin like I
Dru Johnson 43:14
Yeah, okay. So you you fully know this. Yeah, I someone just turned me on to this. And I started reading it. I could not believe how brilliant this book is. I was.
Charles Kim 43:24
So well, we could have a whole side conversation about teaching languages. I'm trying to find my Hebrew books. So when I teach Hebrew Have you seen? Have you seen this? So this is new from cook and homestead?
Dru Johnson 43:38
Oh, yeah, I've got several of those on the shelves here.
Charles Kim 43:41
Yeah, so they do something like they're like, you know, they kind of move closer towards?
Dru Johnson 43:47
Yeah, you can't do this in Hebrew, because we don't have all the cognates. And what would you do like AMEN At the very beginning? I love
Charles Kim 43:56
Exactly, exactly right. I have a friend, I have a kind of a friend who's trying to do something similar with Greek. And
Dru Johnson 44:02
oh, great, good. That's a needed resource. But it really is thinking about the embodied perspective of the person that you're teaching. Yeah, so I love a good planner. I love that I'm gonna steal that from you.
Charles Kim 44:13
It's not mine. It's not mine. I'll have to figure I can't remember the guys name that I actually heard it from. But, but yeah, so 100% Agree. I'm actually at the convent in column this week. So I'm in like this thing where every day I gather with other Latinus and we read a text and only speak Latin, play games and Latin sing songs in Latin do other things. So I
Dru Johnson 44:36
wish I had those linguistic skills that's that's where I really lack so good for you.
Charles Kim 44:42
It actually started because I was teaching Latin to classical Christian school, which I think you just were at the ACC Yes.
Dru Johnson 44:50
Yeah. The ACC Yes, that's right. Yeah. I went no contact with classical school. So that was my first contact was one of their conferences and I learned a lot and 124 hours period. Let's just put it that way.
Charles Kim 45:01
Yeah, well, I was teaching at this classical school and all the parents hated Latin. All the students hated Latin and David Goodwin, who's now the president was my headmaster at the time. And very graciously said, I'm gonna give you what kind of money whatever money you need to do this, but we need to do something different in Latin. And there was a woman who was also teaching there. She said, there's this place in Rome, where all they do is speak Latin and Greek. And so I look it up. And I say, all right, David, I want to do this. So he sends me to Rome for the summer. And so I did I only spoke Latin and Greek for the summer. And I was like, Oh,
Dru Johnson 45:44
yeah.
Charles Kim 45:45
And I lived in France for a while and could speak French. But like, I was like, Why did I never think that you could you could teach Latin, like I knew French. The tradition
Dru Johnson 45:54
is so strong. Yeah. When I lived in Jerusalem, actually, when I was writing that book on ritual, we're living in Jerusalem. And I was learning modern Hebrew. And I learned seminary Hebrew, right, which God bless him, it was the best they could do in that short space of time. And, you know, with an empty of, you're distracted by all these other things. So it was as soon as I started reading, and speaking modern, Israeli Hebrew, my Biblical Hebrew just exploded, like all kinds of windows opened in the text for me. So yeah, hi, hi. Advocacy for that style of learning. Yeah. And I'm not a great Hebrew reader, speaker, etc. But you just need a little bit goes a long way.
Charles Kim 46:33
Yeah. Right. Well, we are we're running short on time. So yeah, I've tried to figure out which one of these to go through. But one one question that comes up for me when I'm reading this book. And, you know, Eusebius may overstate his case here, but it's pithy. So I'll use it for so you see these necessery says, What is Plato, but Moses speaking attic Greek? So there's this kind of idea that floats around in the early Christian writings, that something somehow Plato must have learned from Moses? And you know, really, the Jewish thing is much older than the Greek thing. So, you know, how would you respond to, to Eusebius necessery. And this kind of idea. I mean, eventually Augustine proposed it, he's like, Well, really, we know that probably most Plato did not read Moses. They do. They do kind of realize that that's not what happened. But it's kind of in the water. So
Dru Johnson 47:31
yeah, well, there is a just a plug against that view. We're not against that view, but like, at least going in the other direction. So there are some conferences I've noticed that have come up mostly European Ancient Near Eastern scholars, revisiting the Aegean Mediterranean question, like how much intellectual commerce was going on, you know, the question of look of your afford a boat ride from a place, it's really hard to believe that your ideas weren't affecting each other early, early, and often. Yeah, might not have been the case. But there's at least people reexploring that question. Be I love you Sibelius is energy as the kids say, these days, I'm vibing with that, dude, because, because at least he's going in the right direction, right? He's saying there's something good here and what I hear in this great thinking, but we have something but it must have been derivative. If it's good, it's derivative, right? Yeah, it's derivative of the ultimately good intellectual world of the Bible. And so I at least like that move, I I haven't read this part of Eusebius. And I didn't look it up. But I, I would, I would say it was probably, I'm gonna guess with Eusebius, it was probably a little bit of naivete as well, because it really is like, Plato can't actually have the intellectual world of Moses unless he's inhabiting the communitarian philosophy that Moses advocates, right. So any goods he has are limited and overlapping and goods, because he's a human. And maybe, you know, maybe we'll find out one day there was actually more intellectual commerce than we realize in the Mediterranean. But yeah, I like the move. And that's actually if I wish, I wish theologians and quite honestly, biblical scholars would even make that move today and just say, like, oh, the primary intellectual resource that we have as Christians is actually the biblical intellectual world. Everything else is derivative and interesting. But we need to go to the primary first. I'm totally add Fontas on so many things.
Charles Kim 49:30
And add fonts is Yeah, classic slogan for classical schools. Yeah. Yeah. Well, so similarly, and, you know, I realize you may not have read a lot of Syriac authors, but it just it struck me here like so I'm learning Syriac, it's a derivative language from Hebrew. And in our program, Jeff wicks, who's been on the podcast is a famous for pretty well known Syriac scholar, and I'm doing some work on Christian interpretation of the Psalms. So hopefully my book BLSA Vladimir is pressed in the spring. But um, but I'm trying to incorporate the Syriac author some and Sebastian Brock is a famous Syriac scholar who says, he says that he's basically Syriac Christianity is Christianity, and it's submitted form. And again, this kind of a, another kind of pithy phrase. But it encapsulates a little bit of how like, when you read the Syriac authors, they are the Mamre and madrasha. These various forms are songs, their sermons, but they're not writing treatises. They're not writing even dialogues directly, but they're engaging with their community. Like there's all this literature about how Efrem involves himself with his community, how the stuff that he's writing is, you know, caught on Macclesfield, I guess we could say but in front of the church rather than in front of God or something, but it's not just alone in a room reading and and deductive argument. And so that's kind of I think that's kind of what Brock is trying to get at. So I don't know, you may not have a lot of familiarity with Syriac Christianity,
Dru Johnson 51:04
I don't and But interestingly, a several people have mentioned this to me who do know Syriac Christianity, be I work with an organization that works with living Syriac Christian communities in the Middle East right now. See, we have a research fellow that we just brought on this year. He's a retired Marine Corps Special Operations colonel, of 30 years, mine writer. He happens to be fluent in Arabic, Hebrew, and Syriac. And is doing his PhD at American University right now in Syriac, exploring this exact question. So, so yeah, so I don't know anything. But I'm really excited to find out where this line of thinking ends. Because enough people who are in the know have mentioned this to me that there's got to be something to it. Yeah. Okay. Well, yes. That was a good that was good pickup on your part. Although I think Sebastian Brock actually sang for a band in the 80s. Like a glam metal band. Maybe that's Sebastian. Okay, yeah.
Charles Kim 52:03
That's, that's good. You're better out the connections than than I am. Yeah. Well, one thing that just kind of like, to your point about, like trying out some of your ideas, I was curious about the Levites. The Levites Oh, yeah. Special. They seem to have a special form of knowing it's maybe not Democratic or trans demographic, as you call it. Yeah. I do they do they know something about God that the rest of us don't know, because they get this sort of special ritual participation.
Dru Johnson 52:34
I love the little Marxist in you that came out at that point. I can, because I think we all have that like, like, like the good stuff of Marxism, right? There's some power though. There's the ability to manipulate a situation like and I've been a pastor and work in churches. So I'm very sensitive to people who have special rules, who can manipulate power to their advantage. But ya know, I actually work this out in my ritual work. Because this comes up, you know, women don't have the same access to rituals as men do children as adults and et cetera. And I, where I landed when looking at the totality of data across scripture, Old and New Testament, right, so people will point out in the New Testament women never take communion, right? So does that mean women shouldn't take communion? Right? Because it's not advocated taught or described? It's like, no, it's presumed, I think, I would say there's structured differentiated participation. But that is not hierarchy. And I think that's I think that's a problem in our thinking, as we think everything through hierarchy. But so a woman brings sacrifices to the tabernacle on behalf of her family that a man cannot bring. Right and her sacrifices are necessary for that family to be whole, in their relationship to God. A man brings sacrifices that a woman won't necessarily bring children come and witness but they don't necessarily participate. The priest handles the elements over to the altar, but the priests can't handle what the the high priests can handle only the high priests can go anyway. So everybody has a role to play, I would say it's like a science lab, right? Everybody is not all looking down the same microscope. At the same time, everybody plays a role. Everybody plays the role. And when they play diligently, they participate in the community of knowers where they're disparate participation in their disparate perspectives actually enrich what they know. Right? So again, that single right, everybody should have equal access to the same interpretation at all times. It's it's inhumane, honestly, it's like you from nowhere ism. And that's so the biblical authors I don't and I think the the, if you look at the other part of this, too, is priests, judges, kings, anybody in that kind of role that we consider authoritative? It's a crappy role. I mean, like you look at at the end of the day, it's not a fun role. You don't get the goods you don't get land you don't like you don't get an inheritance. Like it really it's a blue collar priest is a blue collar job. I know we think of it as elite but the priest basically handled blood and guts and bread most of the day, so yeah, so I think I'm glad you brought that up, but I still think that actually adds to the transition. demographic evaluation of Scripture. There is no classes it's not elites. So
Charles Kim 55:05
yeah, well, I, I might be more prone to just thinking hierarchically rather than wanting there to be some kind of Marxist thing. It's, I'm aware of those kinds of interpretations, but I was actually more coming at it from wanting to say that actually Hebrews are closer to a sort of, you know, I mean, even pseudo Dionysius has sort of Christian hierarchy, that he talks about working its way up and a kind of beneficial way. So I'm not opposed to certain kind
Dru Johnson 55:35
of No, no, no, no, accusing you of Marxism, but I do, I do think that we need more often re rejigger our language away from hierarchy and towards structure and then discern when it is hierarchy and when it is just a structured differentiated participation in something
Charles Kim 55:54
very, very fair enough. Um, yeah, well, I like I say, I have so many questions, but here, I'll, I'll give you maybe
Dru Johnson 56:02
we talked about the Tom Holland one. Oh, sure.
Charles Kim 56:05
Yeah. Yeah. Very good. I was gonna go to my last one and let you kind of we could use this as the last one too, if you wanted, but okay. So, the other way that I say I wrote to Drew here, Tom Holland. And I find Tom Holland and his work. Interesting for exactly the reason that drew CITES, but you claimed that it
Dru Johnson 56:24
was a great movie.
Charles Kim 56:27
Is that what he? Is that what he says? I don't know.
Dru Johnson 56:31
My children. Oh, no, Tom Holland. He's the actor who plays Spider Man and all the new movies. Oh, okay. So we're just be careful that we're referring to the Oxford historian Tom Hall. Yeah. Yeah, Dominion. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
Charles Kim 56:47
Yeah. I like I like TV shows. It's not that I'm against like media, but I hate sitting through movie so I don't ever watch movies. Wow. Yeah.
Dru Johnson 56:58
That's okay. That's, we'll explore that in a later part.
Charles Kim 57:01
Yeah, I haven't seen a movie and I don't know a decade. I watch sport. My wife makes fun of me. I will watch four hours of baseball. But I can I don't I don't like movies. Hey, look,
Dru Johnson 57:15
we all have our pathologies. It's cool. notion. Okay, so we're talking about Tom home the historian.
Charles Kim 57:23
So he so let's see, he notices that the West is Hebraic rather than well. So your claim is that what he notices that the West is Hebraic rather than Christian? So Holland finds he does his history and says, look at how influenced we are by Christianity. And you say, look at how influenced we are by the Hebraic thought so right.
Dru Johnson 57:43
When he says Christianity, you can just swap out. You could say Hebrew Christianity, Judeo Christianity, but my Jewish friends all say like, you know, you guys like Inigo Montoya, you keep on using that term, Judeo Christian, but all you seem to mean by it is Christian Christian, right? You dropped the Judeo Hebrew Christian out. So yeah, I think. Yeah, and even thinking about, you know, this kind of like, well, the New Testament is in Greek, right? So isn't like Greek somehow, and they're quoting the Septuagint, or kind of free version with the Septuagint sometimes and the the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, I would say, a I love a Tom Holland is like 75 years late to the game on this, this idea, right? So the Ancient Near Eastern scholars from the University of Chicago Oriental Institute, were saying that's back in the 40s. And these are people who know the other side of the literature, the more the Iron Age and Bronze Age literature. But I would say like, if you think about the Gospels alone, right, so to separate everything out, the Gospels aren't recorded in Greek, or I should say that the Gospels aren't in Greek, they were actually spoken amongst the witnesses and shared and reshared. And we I mean, even Mark's gospel, we know from Poppy, so if you take that fragment to be correct, is from listening to the oral presentation of the gospel over and over again, probably sometimes in Greek, sometimes in Aramaic, possibly something, you know, there's like this Philo Hebrew, there's this return to Hebrew, you know, a little bit before the time of Jesus. So maybe even he heard it in Hebrew, right. Matthew's Gospel, there's some indication that there might be very old Hebrew copies as well. Whether those a derivative from Greek or prior to Greek or not, we don't know. But I would say they're actually not Greek. They're recorded later in Greek after they're processed by the community of witnesses and various languages, which means it's an ethno, you know, it's an ethno. polyarchy at the very beginning, right. Lots of languages. Lots of people from lots of places are talking about this. Matthew puts it in his perspective, Mark copies down Peters preaching, which is really you know, if you think about how negative Mark's gospel is towards the disciples, you know, that's either mark really doing a sham job on Peter or, or that's how Peter talked about, like, that's his view. Look at how dumb we were looking how doltish and hardhearted we were right. And then Luke you know, does He's kind of broader goes to the witnesses, right? And in whatever languages, they're communicating those things to him, I'm sure Greek is eventually how it ends up. And he puts together this orderly account. So I do think language is important, but the only as important, you know if I'd say this way, the intellectual world of the Bible, if you follow the storyline of the Bible, it couldn't have happened any just anywhere, right? It really is. This particular people in this particular land, a waterless land that's important feature of it, right? Because they have to rely on God to actually have food. This particular people this particular land, and in this particular language, right, if you ask, on Sinai, what language when God carved with his own finger into the stones, these commandments? Are these words that these 10 things? What language does he write it in? Well, we presume it's Hebrew, and then you ask a question like, Well, is it because God speaks Hebrew? Or because the Hebrew speak Hebrew? Now, the Quran has a very definitive answer to this question. Yeah, you would write it in Arabic, because God speaks or a lot speaks Arabic. But again, here, it's, I would say there, the totality of evidence from the Scripture itself is that it's in Hebrew, because God wants to communicate to these people who speak that language, right. And supposedly, he would write writing paleo Hebrew rather than square Aramaic script, as well, because they wouldn't understand that. So for me, it's important because that gets at the the necessity of the locale and the language, and the people that actually create a particular intellectual tradition, which would say the same thing about the Greeks, like, it's not their location in the language or speaking is not happenstance. Uh, you know, Latin and Greek and Hebrew, you know, all of these languages. You know, Latin is not as versatile of a language at this point, to do a lot of the things that the New Testament is doing storytelling and poetry wise. And Calvin loves to point out every time where the Latin makes not a mistake, but it just is insufficient to say the kinds of things that they that being said in the Hebrew or the Greek there, right? So I think so when I say it's not just Christian, a tea break, I mean, like three layers down, it's the break, even in the New Testament, like it's all the way infected, but because they live in this non non theocracy of Israel. And it was true even in the Old Testament, even when they're at their highest power as a nation, they're constantly interacting, engaging. And I tried to show in the book, how even in Genesis, you're seeing he breakthough, engaging Egyptian thought you're seeing you break that engaging Mesopotamian thought, when they when they're exiled into those places, they are engaging in those forums, but usurping them with what they think is a better form of reasoning. Yeah.
Charles Kim 1:02:47
Well, would you like to take one more you want to go? I was gonna give you the sort of the softball question, what what would it look like if Christians took seriously your charge to return to the heat break philosophy of the Christian scriptures?
Dru Johnson 1:03:00
Well, you've probably heard it, but I think I would just say, the one thing that this is gonna sound so patronizing and demeaning, and I kind of mean it to be like, it's part of my project. My call in life, I think right now is, if we just valued the scriptures as their own sufficient savvy, sophisticated, sorry, in the literary now intellectual world that we're in, I would just say, we don't write and I've spoken to lots of universities, PhD students, you know, and there's this. And it comes back to this like, Okay, this whole topic you just worked out, you realize, the biblical authors have their own abstract view of that topic and how that works out. And sometimes I'm like, what, and you nailed it, like, You're right on top of it. But do you know how you nailed it? Like, do you actually know the necessary connections from their thinking to your thinking? And often you don't I mean, there's a very famous, very popular Christian philosopher who writes stuff that I think is great, and I agree with a lot of it. I don't think he can actually connect it to biblical thinking at all. I've seen him try. And I'm like, It's not that's not exactly what's going on there. Right. I could articulate better than he could, right. And so I think if we want to, if we want to say that our that our thinking is, in some way resonant with God, this is how this is, these are the communities in the way that he has taught us to speculate about the nature of the world. I think it's worth just first truckstop he break thought and then start putting it in conversation, as it's meant to be put in conversation with other philosophies and other ways of thinking about the world. And then see, see what happens, right? And of course, I worked. You know, my work was on epistemology within scripture, and then scientific epistemology and the 20th and 21st century, like most people wouldn't put those things in conversation. But I think once you've sufficiently understand what's going on scripture, there's actually a riveting conversation to be had where scripture will endorse much of scientific epistemology and then sharpen it in some ways.
Charles Kim 1:04:58
Well, my guest today has been Drew Johnson. And as my fit one of my favorite podcasts is econ talk, and he says, thanks for being a part of, of Christian. Well, he says thanks for being a part of the history of EAC. Or he says thanks for being a part of econ talk. And but yeah, thanks for being a part of history Christian theology. I appreciate it.
Dru Johnson 1:05:20
I'm honored that you would like to step out this far out of your lane and that and that you haven't made me feel like an idiot for me stepping this far out of my lane into yours. It's been a it's been an honor. Well, good.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
