Episode 140: Dr. Paul Hinlicky on Sameul Stefan Osusky

Paul Hinlicky comes back on the pod to discuss Between Humanis Philosophy and Apocalyptic Theology: The Twentieth Century Sojourn of Samuel Stefan Osusky (T and T Clark, 2016). This fascinating man confronted some of the great historical disasters of the twentieth century from Communism to Nazism and found that the biblical faith of his childhood was the only thing which could carry him through the dark times.

Timestamps:

2:22- Theology and Political Agitation

15:37- Theology and Anti-Communism

35:08- The Devastation of Faith in the Wake of the Holocaust

Charles Kim 0:00

Hello and welcome to history of Christian theology. My name is Chad Kim. With me this week will be Paul him lucky. Dr. Henley key was gracious enough to come back on the podcast and talk with us a little bit about some of the political developments of the 20th century. And how one theologian, a Slovakian theologian named Samuel Stefan Osusky, how he responded to some of the challenges of Nazism and Communism, and just the difficulties of being in a smaller country during these great wars and battles. And so we find, of course, that through it all, it was a suitcase faith, and especially his reading of the scriptures, including revelation and job, which gave him solace during some of his imprisonment and eventual exile by the communists after the end of World War Two. So, Paul Hindley, He comes to us from the queen of the sciences podcast. And so we're grateful to do another crossover episode with them. And we have a few episodes coming up. We have one coming up with Zack Hicks on Thomas Cranmer. We have one coming up with Grant Kaplan on faith and reason. We've got one coming up with Rubin, Rosario Rodriguez, on sort of understanding theology in the 21st century. So we got a lot of stuff coming up. hope that you enjoy listening to this podcast, please do rate us review us on iTunes, and let others know about the show. We'd love to hear from you. So you can feel free to message us at faith on Facebook. You can also message us at host at a history of Christian theology.com. So thank you for listening. And here's my conversation with Paul hin lucky today I have the privilege of speaking with Dr. Paul hidden licky. And you may recognize his name because we did a episode very recently with Dr. Han licky on the topic of one of his theological works, divine complexity. But today we're going to talk about a book that he wrote between humanist philosophy and apocalyptic theology, the 20th century sojourn of Samuel, Stephen Osofsky, and I'm sure you will help me pronounce that better.

Paul Hinlicky 2:22

But you got it right. Except for Stefan. Sh. Stefan. Samuel. Stefan also ski.

Charles Kim 2:30

Okay, I wondered about the Yeah, the marker above the s, but yeah, very good. Dr. Han licky is the T's professor at Roanoke College in Virginia, and the docent of Protestant theological faculty of Comenius. University in Slovakia, which I say, Well, I kind of know and also, yeah, kind of think you mentioned this, but in the previous conversation, but part of your exposure to OSU ski came from your time working in Slovakia. Is that right?

Paul Hinlicky 3:02

Absolutely. Yeah. I, one of the things, of course, that was fascinating to live there in the 1990s, as the country was emerging from 45 years of Marxism Leninism was to talk about the survivors of this period, what they had experienced. And I quickly realized that in his lifetime, this individual Samuel Stefan Osinski, had lived under imperialism in the Austro Hungarian empire, then in the Czech or Slovak democracy between the world wars, then, during the alliance of independent Slovakia, with Nazi Germany under fascism during World War Two, and then a brief period of renewed democracy after the end of World War Two, until the communist coup in February of 1948. And he spent hid the remaining years of his life under the Marxist Leninist regime. So what a fascinating thing to trace in one biography, this transition through these four major political parks.

Charles Kim 4:13

Yeah, that's right. I guess I hadn't thought it in. Or I could have understood that in a new light. Yeah, I mean, basically every, like major kind of political organization almost. In the 20th century, he experienced all of those Hmm,

Paul Hinlicky 4:29

that's right. Yeah. And he was kind of a nationalist agitator in his youth against the imperialism of the Hungarians. In his that period, he was an opponent of World War One as dancing as close to the edges he could without getting into trouble with the state, but he called into question, the bloodshed of World War One. And then, of course, as well Learn die hope today, his heroic resistance to fascist policies and the deportation of the Slovak Jews to Auschwitz. And then for the very same reasons got into trouble with the Marxist Leninist regime later on.

Charles Kim 5:17

Yeah. Yeah, well, yeah, as you say, just a totally very fascinating life with all these political considerations, but also a great theologian, a leader in the Lutheran Church in Slovakia, a bishop for part of his time. And he wrote several theological works. And I thought maybe I would actually begin with one of my favorite quotes, which comes from one of the last works that he wrote, The gallery of the New Testament figures, but I think it just gives a sense of his comfort in his faith during all of this. So this is on 164 of your book, but he says, often I read the Bible, but probably the Bible was never so close to me as during the 63 days of political imprisonment in isolation in 1944, when dignities and name were taken away, and I became a mere number, when many friends abandoned me the best friend the Bible did not abandon me. She so Converse me with converse with this imprisoned, weak and declining person and so deepened my feeling for people that I forgave them. And she so strengthened my faith that I easily overcome the suffering. Holy, dear Bible, what can you do when people do not read you or consider you, but how powerfully you speak and work when someone opens your old but not antiquated pages, and reads and reads and meditates? Only Why do so many people not take joy in you? So I thought we'd just start with that quote, just so the audience can get a sense of the theology of Ozersky his personal faith and what it meant to him during the struggle. But could you say a little bit more about Osofsky and maybe even this quote,

Paul Hinlicky 7:01

you know, that's a wonderful quote, that you've read it very inspiring in many ways. But it also indicates a kind of a deep tension and also skis intellectual life, because on the one hand, he inherited, I think that quote, talks about learning the Bible earlier on from his mother's knee, right. And this is kind of deeply in the ethos of the Church of the Augsburg confession in Slovakia. This this Bible based piety, the by reading the Bible is practically the sacrament of this church really seriously. It's a Bible based piety. And Bible reading, of course, is a sacramental experience. I'm speaking loosely but I think that's that's really on target. And yet intellectually, as he came of maturity at the end of the beginning of the turn of the 20th century, and was educated in Prague, where there was a rather liberal rationalistic School of biblical criticism. He inherited and imbibed intellectually, the 19th century historical criticism of the Bible. And his whole life is a kind of a tension between this piety that he learned from his mother's knee, that you just expressed in that wonderful quote, and his intellectual discoveries of the Bible was not a perfect and inerrant, dictated word from God. That was preserved from all error, that it required serious study and interpretation, in order to extract its meaning. And so that tension existed in OSU ski his entire life, which is why I sub called the book between humanist philosophy and apocalyptic theology.

Charles Kim 9:05

Yeah, and so that kind of gets us right at the heart of what you're trying to do throughout the narrative, which is essentially follow suit ski as he works his way through his own theology. So you sort of describe this, as you just said, the German rationalism, the kind of more historical critical modes of reading scripture, sometimes called liberal theology, where that was the way so he kind of has this training from his mother's knee, but then he has a different kind of education in the sort of liberal theology, but ultimately, he comes to find some resolution by the end of his life, and maybe even a change towards apocalyptic theology. Is that right, which is what you kind of you see in him towards the end of what I should say, I called it his life, but I think actually, to be fair, it's the end of his writing life which isn't actually the end of his life because he's confined to obscurity for the majority of the remainder of his life. Right?

Paul Hinlicky 10:05

Yeah, that you're right that there is a kind of resolution in the last great book. The Gallery of New Testament figures, which was, by the way, was the type scripts were lost except for one copy that was maintained by the the the typist, the person who took Oh skis dictation from his handwritten manuscript. And he The Type has kept this copy. And only in the late 1990s, revealed its existence and got a grant for the students to key it into a digital program and produce this 1000 page book. Which was his final literary product, which appeared 20 years after his death

Charles Kim 10:55

appeared 20 years after his death but written in the 50s in the mid 50s. Is that right? Yeah, it

Paul Hinlicky 11:01

was typed the typist typed it in the 1950s. Secretly of course, because if the if the ashitaba which is there, the secret police have discovered if they would have gotten in trouble and of course it would have been destroyed.

Charles Kim 11:17

Well, I have well, I guess while we're on that thought so and this goes to sort of the last great resistance and as in part of his life, so in that time, he was resisting the Marxist Leninist, is that right? Resist resisting those who are in power in his area of Slovakia. What is modern day Slovakia I guess? Yeah.

Paul Hinlicky 11:39

Yes, that's right. He was. He was. He was deposed. He was a professor at the theological faculty. He was the first one to be deposed by the Marxist Leninist regime, when they took over the seminary faculty and replaced its teachers with minions of the of the socialist state. And he was sent into internal exile. So he went back to his home village, and he lived there for the next 25 years and quiet in secret, not allowed to preach or republish.

Charles Kim 12:19

And they were threatened by him because of his persistent resistance under various forms of government in the area. But but even most recently, this Marxist Leninist, right, so his, he was unwilling to kind of bend under the pressure of the government. Is that right?

Paul Hinlicky 12:37

Yeah, it's well, let me back up the story a little bit, Chad, by I first discovered, oh, ski one. One of the prison would they were called, at that time, the prison pastors, the pastors of the Lutheran church, who had been imprisoned under socialism, for disloyalty of various stripes. And he told me that Oh, Sue ski had lectured to the assembly of the clergy in 1937. I think it was 37 or 38, an essay called a lecture called the philosophy of fascists, fascism, Hitlerism and Bolshevism. So I looked up this lecture and I read it and I was stunned that in 1937, o su ski was predicting the future, down to the down to the Johnson the totals, it was amazing, amazing to me, that he had such an understanding of the ideological dynamics that were going on that what would happen and he was warning the clergy to be prepared for very difficult days. So that was my first clue to the significance of this, this man, and he then was instrumental in 1942. And publishing a public letter from the Lutheran church, rejecting the deportation of the Jews into Poland, to what they knew would be their death sentences. And that he managed to get that that objection out in public, which of course got him into serious trouble but not yet arrested under the Slovak fascist state, but in 1944, when the Nazi armies came into Slovakia, and took over the country. At that point, he was arrested by the Gestapo and imprisoned and until his health almost broke. And then when the war ended with the Russian army, He's driving out the Nazis. He was rehabilitated and greeted as you know, a heroic figure. And he was a very prominent person, the one person who had predicted what was coming. And objection objected heroically against the Nazi fascist policies. But for the very that very reason, a threat to the Bolsheviks coming to power in 1948, because he had also in that 1937 lecture, warned against the dangers of Marxism. Leninism.

Charles Kim 15:37

Yeah, that's i And again, as I'm hearing as I'm talking with you, you know, I read I read through the book, and admittedly, I you know, I don't know that I dwelled on every single page, but it just strikes me what a as much as I should have, but it strikes me just what a whiplash that must have been, on the one hand, he was released from the fascists connected with Hitler, and the Gestapo. And so you must be thinking, that's it. All right. I've been free. I can go about my business. And then here, you know, not too many years later, just right back into the thick of like, you know, right back into the thick of things like go back underground. I mean, yeah, that must have been such a hard thing. Like, alright, I've done my time. I've gotten out but but no, just gonna go right back into it.

Paul Hinlicky 16:23

No, you can save all the terrible crimes Hitler committed against humanity, is that he gave anti communism a bad name.

Charles Kim 16:33

That's pretty good. Um, well, I guess as we're kind of going, so now we're sort of working back backwards. But I think it's good to foreground, the foreground the importance of this man in the midst of all of these sort of political currents and movements. But as you say, it's interesting to go back even to the First World War, because ASUW ski begins by writing a one of his books where he catalogs all the German theologians who were just rubber stamping, the German military conquests, in the First World War. And so you know, he has these sort of inklings of, of resistance, starting all the way back then, like, you know, we shouldn't necessarily just say, because the state says we need to go to war, the Christians and their churches should bless it. Is that right?

Paul Hinlicky 17:26

Absolutely. Yeah, he, he shares the general. At the time there was a movement called religious socialism, led by Raghav was out of Switzerland. And Ozersky was very sympathetic to religious socialism, which was for him not Marxism, Marxism Leninism because it was explicitly based upon Christian understandings of divine transcendence, and incarnational, humanism and things like that. So he was already also opposed to the idea of empire as a principle, a multi ethnic, political unit, but in fact, always, there was one nation that was more equal than others. For him as a Slovak that was the Hungarians. And he was, therefore part of the movement for Slovak national independence. Politically, that was part of it. And then, of course, what happens in World War One is that the Austro Hungarian empire has a mass conscription, in which all of these minority ethnicities like the Slovaks, among others, are being sent as cannon fodder to the front lines. And in his own congregation, a large a large congregation in western Slovakia. He counted hundreds upon hundreds of war deaths among his own youth from in World War One. So his disillusionment with the trench warfare, and the messy politics of World War One came to expression in that little book on the war. Pointing out pointing out also how the German theologians were singing Hallelujah to the Kaiser. Yeah.

Charles Kim 19:21

Yeah, well, it's, yeah, so many fascinating trends here. But but but all the way back, then he probably doesn't seem to have taken this sort of theological turn that he eventually does. Going back even to the art, you know, at the beginning of that conversation, we talked about the Gallery of New Testament figures, but can you give us a sense of his kind of theological journey? Like what are you know, so we can see all of these religions, all these political movements that he is sort of in the midst of and pushing back against, but he's also He's also studying a bunch of different kinds of theological traditions and movements. So can you get a sense of of how that is his sort of core conviction through all of this is not precisely about finding the right sort of politics, or at least finding the right sort of politics outside of his Christian theological understanding. But actually, those two are kind of working together but but are still also a kind of journey.

Paul Hinlicky 20:24

Yeah, I think you can, you know, in Europe, in general, in Protestant Europe is particularly since the time of the Reformation, the when you don't no longer have a pope, and you no longer have an Episcopal see, and you no longer have a transnational understanding of the of the church, except in an ethereal spiritual sense. What happens almost inevitably is that Christianity becomes enculturated, into the rise of national consciousness. And so Oh, ski was part of that 19 century romanticism, in which language, culture, nationality and religion, kind of form of a seamless, whole. But he always had the liberal theological idea of a transnational spiritual unity, the law of love, which which would supervenes these national religious cultural identities. So that that was a tension in his thought from the very beginning. But as he's evolving into the 1920s, he has his PhD from Charles University in Prague, but he takes it in the fields of philosophy and law, and sociology. And so on the theological faculty, he's a, he's really what we would call today a philosopher of religion, rather than a biblical scholar or a systematic theologian. It's in that capacity that he studies, these evolutions of modern culture and politics, which prepared him so well, then for these later interventions in life. He has a conflict with a fundamentalist pastor named strew Hark, who accuses him publicly of denying the virgin birth of Christ. And this is, as you know, something of a terrible upset for him. What he has is simple questions. The Virgin, the nativity story is found only in Matthew and Luke, the rest of the New Testament knows nothing about it. How significant a doctrine can it be, then? That's an obvious legitimate question. And then the stories in Matthew and Luke are not easily reconcilable. Historically. That's a legitimate question. So his doubts about it were more biblically based. He's not he's not dogmatically denying the virgin birth of Christ, but he is questioning it's biblical. It's biblical basis. And it's, and its way, the way to draw to have and so forth. Well, that controversy blows over. But it's an indication that he's not a simple fundamentalist, or a simple bibble assist. He's asking questions about church teaching in the light of his study of the Bible. I think that's way to put it. But all that becomes passe by the time of the 1930s. When, when the threat of Hitlerism is is, is increasingly intense. And that's Chad, where a big change in his perspective occurs. Because up until now, he was kind of paralyzed between his biblical piety and his liberal theological education, in terms of Scripture studies, but as World War Two takes over, and now you have to recognize Slovakia becomes a satellite state of Nazi Germany. And the Slovak army is sent to the Russian front to fight side by side with the Russians, though they were very ineffective militarily, because they didn't really want to be doing this. But the point is, is that in when he publishes his first book during the war on the on the book of which is first I'm forgetting I haven't slipped my mind here. Which book came first? Yeah, the end of the world 1941. That's the commentary on the book of Revelation. So all All of the sudden here in 1941. He's picking up the book of Revelation to write a commentary on why, in 1941. As he's publishing this book, The swastika flies victorious from the coast of France to the outskirts of Moscow. And is if the dragon and the beast have conquered the world. That's how he's feeling. You know? Yeah, the swastika has replaced the Christian cross, across the face of Europe. And so, what's very powerful about the commentary on the book of Revelation is that he uses his historical critical insight, that this apocalypse is not about the literal end of the world. It is about the it's not about the end of time, but about the time of the end breaking in episodically, into mundane, secular history. And so the book of Revelation becomes usable, usable, to interpret an apocalyptic situation in actual secular history. So as he's suffering under the apparent victory of the swastika, he's reading the book of Revelation to exhort his readers to be faithful and true, even to the point of martyrdom, in resisting the dragon and the beast.

Charles Kim 26:27

Yeah, well, and that sort of makes sense of the you know, so, you call this apocalyptic theology and, you drawing on and here the title you call it, the, the episodically the, the time of the in breaking in episodically, so, so for for that part of the title, so really, it is actually literally reading the Apocalypse of John, that he is understanding how God breaks in in human history. And in that sense, it is it his own reading of revelation and how that is to help us know how to resist these terrible atrocities like the swastika. And it reminds me as well. Well, I just did an interview that hasn't aired yet, with Scot McKnight. He just wrote a book on Revelation. It's something I can't remember the title, but it includes the word dissidents, and I was talking with Scott about it. And I mentioned that I was reading about Sol o su ski. And sorry, Samuel o su ski, and about how Samuel osiecki was reading Revelation. And that that fit nicely with what how McKnight was interpreting revelation.

Paul Hinlicky 27:39

Actually, I'm happy to hear that. Yeah.

Charles Kim 27:42

So yeah, it's pretty, it's pretty intense. So one of the lines that you use as you're kind of thinking through his turn, so you just mentioned sort of the fundamentalist critique of OSU ski. You say that he doesn't want to make a kind of bulk media D mythologize ation, but what you call a de literalization. So I Could you could you kind of explore that a little bit, a little bit for us, like what is what is this move mean for OSU? Ski?

Paul Hinlicky 28:13

Yeah, it's, uh, of course, oh, Cisco. This is my interpretation of what Oh, skis doing. OSU ski himself did not use a term like D mythologizing or D literal lysing. So I'm trying to make sense out of this what OSU ski is actually doing. And I distinguish between the two of this wipe mythos in Greek is simply the word for a story, a narrative. And when you d mythologize, what you're actually doing is gutting the story, destroying the narrative, rather than following the narrative, to understand its point. So I reject the mythologizing as the narrative arising of Scripture, take away the narrative and you take away scripture, even the non narrative sections of Scripture are embedded in narrative. So narrative is a key notion for a genuinely scriptural hermeneutic. So by contrast, de literalization, is the standard recognition. That earthly language, including the language of narrative, cannot refer literally in the sense of a correspondence kind of theory to God. Because God, somehow, as creator transcends the categories of time and space, he's not alien to the categories of time and space, but he transcends them. And so de literalization is simply qualifying a naive reading of narrative in order to make it clear that the point of the narrative is to instruct about deities talk about God And so the classic instance of this in the Lutheran tradition is Luthers interpretation of the ascension of Christ. His opponent was thinking that the body of Jesus had ascended up to a local heaven somewhere. And there it was confined and could not be capable of being present in the Eucharist. And Luther said, this is naive, literalism. ascensions to the right hand of God does not mean that God the Father literally has a right hand. And Christ is seated there on a velvet cushion, with the angels dancing around and something like that know, the right hand of God is a figure of speech for the omnipotent power of the Creator. So the ascension to the right hand of God means that Christ is invested with the omnipotent power of God in His messianic exalted messianic office, where he must reign until he subdues all things under his feet. And so that that's what I mean by do literalization, where we understand the narrative to be referring to and instructing us about the self revelation of God.

Charles Kim 31:14

Yeah, it's interesting, one of the questions that I often asked my guests is, what is one thing that you once thought was true, and now think is false, and one thing was false. And now think is true. And so I often try to get my my guests to sort of open up in their conversation by asking this question. And then it gives you a sense of like, what makes people change their mind and that kind of thing. And it's interesting to think about OSU ski in that way, because his whole story is a kind of a change in his mind towards this apocalyptic situation, this apocalyptic theology from the situation in which he was living in, which kind of opened him up to, and I think it's interesting because you, you know, you could have seen him just straight abandon his faith at this point. Like, look, it's been so disastrous for us as Slovaks, for us as Christians. For us, as Lutherans like it, you know, you could have just said, Enough with this. But in fact, by reading job and by reading Revelation, some of those difficult texts in the our scripture to interpret, he finds a sort of revitalization, a new place for himself within his faith.

Paul Hinlicky 32:28

Yeah, I was talking to Catherine Schiffer Decker, who is a kind of an expert on the book of Job and explaining to her the, the Oh Scuse interpretation of Joe, by the way, that's the book that comes in 1944 45, the mystery of the cross. And it's basically an extended study of the book of Job. And, of course, the questions of theodicy. At this time at the as the end is the end of World War Two is approaching are just enormous. Where is God and all this suffering? In in fact, man my age, Peter Gashi, in Slovakia, who's kind of the Slovak expert on OSU ski, often points out how many people simply lost their Christian faith, in view of the massive brutality and destruction and death of World War Two, we have to remember if something like 50 million people died in World War Two, and that kind of massive murder, and mayhem and destruction would leave anyone saying where is God in this midst, as le vissol famously said, in our shorts, whereas God when you see them hanging from the jibbitz, and so forth, of course, Osofsky would answer God is right there hanging with them on the giblets like Bonhoeffer he would say God is there suffering with us something along those lines, but the mystery of the cross, in his interpretation of the book of Job is a very interesting attempt at a kind of theme what I call a theodicy of faith, not a philosophical or rationalistic theodicy, famously expressed in something like this is the best of all possible worlds. Though, even though I think that's terribly misunderstood by Voltaire is kind of cheap, cheap shot. Criticisms of Leibniz. A theodicy of faith is one in which the promises of God include finally the promises of the victory of righteousness over unrighteousness. So it's kind of an eschatological theodicy, something like that. But also ski does take up this difficult book of the of the of is the book of Job to interpret the sufferings of his times in 1944 or five? Yeah,

Charles Kim 35:08

yeah, it's, it's interesting, you talk about the sort of devastation of faith as well in the aftermath of World War Two. And I know we're gonna get to sort of comparing us or not maybe not comparing but sort of the conversation of OSU ski among the other theologians during World War Two. But when I spent the summer in Berlin, and I remember visiting Pong offers church and or, well, one of the places where he was Did he do his vicarage? Maybe I can't remember. But anyway, but just how empty many of the Yvonne galas care here were even the ones where this guy who Bonhoeffer who I'd looked up to, as kind of a, you know, an exemplar of the faith. But how, you know, for me, it was like going to a place where, oh, you know, commemoration of this great man, but it was empty. And most of the people didn't even you know, there was a side there, but it might as well have been, you know, useless because most of the people walking the streets of Berlin didn't care about Bono for in the same way that I did.

Paul Hinlicky 36:16

Yeah. Yeah, the decline of the churches in Europe is really quite alarming. Though, I have to say, I see lots of signs of vitality in the Slovak Lutheran Church, the generation that I was educating in the 1990s, has now become the leading pastors in the church and I see a lot of vitality there. I don't think in Germany, there was ever a true theological reckoning with what happened under Hitler, until it was too late. Well into the 1960s, when the reckoning had to come as nothing but a I accuse, I accuse, I accuse, and why did the German church fail? After World War Two to reckon with what had happened? Well, partly the Cold War explains that. But I think also other factors which we need and go into here. There was no genuine reckoning with, with the collaboration of the leading church people in the Protestant world with Nazism.

Charles Kim 37:32

Yeah. So that just makes me wonder. So in your time in Slovakia, like did you were you able, are there there theologians who have done this kind of reckoning work? I mean, you know, assist skis manuscript, as you say, came out in the 90s. So there may not have even, I don't know, did people draw on him as a kind of figure in this earlier not knowing about this book, or what has kind of been the reception of of Lutheranism in the light of all, that that's a lochia had gone through?

Paul Hinlicky 38:04

Well, you know, one of the differences in Slovakia was that for the 45 years under Marxism, there was no, there was no limit to the critiques of collaboration with Nazis. I mean, that that's all that they learned. They learned. They learned to curse fascism, and they learned to curse, Nazism. And rightly so to that extent, of course, but that critique had was never able to be turned on the Marxist Leninist regime, the Marxist Leninist regime that sponsored I had a relative and uneducated woman, but a very personable and a Christian, who told me how her class as a school girl, they were bussed over the border to Auschwitz, to visit the death camps. And how they, of course, were taught that the they were liberated by the Red Army and so forth. It was all part of the Marxist regimes propaganda. So, there was always a reckoning with fascism, and with Nazism, there, what has not fully happened yet is a reckoning with the 45 years of Marxism Leninism that that it has only become possible in the last 20 years or so.

Charles Kim 39:21

And just a point of clarification, you often throughout the book use the phrase that phrase like either Bolshevism or then Marxist Leninism it is that so very specific rather than just saying communism bluntly, is that to be sort of more accurate within their context, or is there also a sort of a political or other reason for making that designation?

Paul Hinlicky 39:46

I think so. I think that first of all, Bolshevism is the term that OSU ski uses. Yeah. And Bolshevism is Lenin's strategy during the Russian Revolution. And to centralize authority in the Communist Party, because the working class always goes astray if they're not led by the Communist Party, you know, and that, of course, means the dictatorship of the proletariat means the dictatorship of the Communist Party with Lenin at the head. That's Marxism Leninism. Right? That kind of thing, which is very different from Western humanistic Marxism, for example, in the Frankfurt School or something like that. And I just think, in terms of precision that we have to talk that way.

Charles Kim 40:35

Helpful. Well, I think I did sort of want to what when I when I first saw the title of the book, it reminded me I was able to interview Stanley Howard was who wrote recently wrote a book on Carl Bart, the apocalyptic humanism of Carl Bart. And he says, he talks about the purpose for writing this book, that it's my conviction that theology is a descriptive discipline aimed at helping us discover the power of the narrative that is the gospel for determining the way the world is, as well as how we are to live in it. And then he says, Bard, I hope to show shared my view. And he says, with some irony, I say this, that theological claims work as a form of practical wisdom. And then it with throughout the book, he uses Bart as his example of someone who understood the connection between the truthfulness of Christian speech and politics. And so he thinks that BART is his great example for this. But reading your book, I wondered if Oh, Sue ski in a certain way wasn't even more so an example of the truthfulness of Christian speech in the sense that throughout his life, he was resisting various regimes of, of, you know, of death, I guess. Yeah. And domination and suffered for it not only in the days of captivity under Nazism under the Shako, but then under the Marxist Leninist regime, so I thought I'd let you kind of respond how to you know, do I don't know if you know, how it was his work that well or whatever, but but it just struck me that there was some similarities there.

Paul Hinlicky 42:18

Yeah, I know Stanley Hall Ross's work well, yes. And I admire him as a significant theological thinker. Let me just say quickly, in the 1937 conference of the pastor's OSU ski was not the only speaker, his colleague on the theological faculty and men named Bebel. Avi lectured and made the claim that the most faithful Lutherans are the ones now in the concentration camps 1937. And of course, he's referring to ni molar at that time, Martin new molar. So M double, Avi then basically argued for the truthfulness of Karl Barth's doctrine of the Word of God in that same conference. So remember, OSU ski was not a systematic theologian by profession, and he limited himself to speaking to his field, his discipline of philosophy, political philosophy, but he was certainly aware of what Bart's significance in the opposition to Nazism. And secondly, we have to remember that most people at this time in history did not know the church dogmatics, which were only beginning to be published in the 1930s, in German, in Bart's difficult demanding German, right. And, and what they didn't know was the initial commentary on Romans, which to a person like Oh, Sue ski sounded like it was making Gods so utterly other and transcendent, that he had no relationship to humanity, let alone positive relationship to humanist philosophy. And so that this is a development of the much later a theology of Carl Bart, which also ski then could not have known about and so he was ignorant of, but to the material point that you're making. Yes, for Oh, Sue ski. This last book that he wrote, The Gallery of New Testament figures, is kind of a return to the pre critical tradition of Midrash. In which you take a bare boned, biblical character portrait of a biblical figure. You don't know anything about their psychology, their motivations, their history, other than the bare facts that Peter got up and follow Jesus but then later, Peter denied Jesus in the courtyard. The geezer guides you Peter got out out of the boat and walked on the water, but then he lost his faith and fell. So you get these barebone narratives. And then this traditionally this often, this often caused pre critical commentators to write psychological stories that would make sense of the narrative. You know what was going through Peters head and things like that. And that's the method, the pre critical method that OSU ski is picking up on. By the way, I don't know if Oh, ski knew Martin Luther, his lectures on Genesis, but that's the method Luther uses in his lectures on Genesis, he takes the stories of the patriarchs, and he creates a kind of a novelistic retelling of the story, in which he explores the feelings and the motives going on in these characters. Most famously exam, for example, the story of Abraham, taking Isaac to the Mount of Moriah, what's going through Abraham's head? Why is he doing what he's doing? What about Isaac, what's going on in his head, things like this. So this myth, this kind of midrashic expansion of the barebone narratives, that's what asky is doing in his gallery of New Testament figures. Why? Because it creates a humanistic portrait of what it means to believe in the Christian god.

Charles Kim 46:20

Yeah. Yeah, that's it. Yeah, it's a it's a very fascinating, I remember, you know, getting to that section and just being struck by the, I mean, in a sense, not exactly the novelty, I guess, the novelty in a 21st century sense. Like, I don't see many people doing this kind of thing anymore. But it is a deep engagement in love with the scriptures. To think so hard to kind of, you know, meditation or the of each figure like that is, you know, like I said, it's unlike anything that I'd really seen before, especially going through every, you know, over 1000 pages going through so many of the of the figures.

Paul Hinlicky 46:58

Well, Chad, let's face it, he had a lot of time on his hands, doing an internal exile.

Charles Kim 47:06

Fair enough. Well, so I think kind of, like I said, I just was, it's interesting to think about how asky fits in with these other figures. We've mentioned Bon, Bon Iver. We've mentioned Bart, or, you know, it makes me wonder, are there other people unknown from, from Europe, other pastors who have sort of like such a significant theological and they're just sort of human witness for us that we don't know their stories about like, so you know, so I guess I understand in a sense why people don't know su ski as well, given that his the, the book that you talk about was not published until the 90s. But he was in an exile and sort of was cast away for so many years. But are there other people like that, that we don't know their stories? Or maybe is it just my own lack of education?

Paul Hinlicky 48:06

Well, I, you know, clearly, oh, suschem was not only a cut off from the knowledge of the Western world, all through the Marxist Leninist period, but the obscurity of his language. Slovak is spoken by by five or 6 million people in the world. It's a very minority language. And I was the only person capable, I think of actually making his story known in English, which is one of the mode the motives I had in writing the book. I think that one of the most fruitful areas to explore would be the resistance to Christian resistance in Denmark and in Norway, and in the Netherlands. We know a little bit about resistance in France. You know, but I don't know that there were intellectual figures of the stature of OSU ski in those contexts. I just don't know.

Charles Kim 49:04

Yeah. Yeah. Oh, that Yeah. That's, that's, that's very helpful. Well, I our time is coming to a close, but I just wondered if there, you know, maybe you could mention a little bit like sort of the influence that OSU ski has had on your own faith and theology or anything else that you would want our, my listeners our listeners to know about Ozersky or the Slovak people. Yeah,

Paul Hinlicky 49:37

yeah. I think that the tradition of philosophical humanism is largely being renounced today in our Western culture, by all forms of deconstruction and the Anthropocene is largely regarded as an epoch of human arrogance and self aggrandizement at the expense of the rest of the planet and creatures. I think humanism is in a great deal of trouble. And like Dietrich Bonhoeffer who writes in the ethics, commenting on the fact that in the resistance, suddenly the humanists have discovered their mother and their shelter in the Christian people. And perhaps this is the signal of a reconciliation of the humanism coming out of the Enlightenment and the Renaissance with the Reformation theology that Bonhoeffer represented, and that would be certainly my hope. And that's kind of what I see in the legacy of Samuel Stephano ski, who did not renounce but overcame the limitations of his own training and humanistic philosophy and found a non literal, but serious interpretation of biblical apocalyptic as the, as the as the as the as the basis from which that reconciliation with humanism could occur.

Charles Kim 51:13

Well, Dr. Hinlicky, it has been quite a pleasure to speak with you again. And what a gift that you're able to, you know, bring the knowledge of a su ski to the English speaking world, and I really appreciate your time and the hard work and the writing and researching this book, but also spending an hour with me.

Paul Hinlicky 51:35

Thank you, Chad. It's been a pleasure as usual.

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