Episode 94: Interview with Dr. Jeffrey Wickes

Dr. Wickes is the Associate Professor of Ancient Christianity at Saint Louis University. In this podcast, Dr. Wickes gives some background on Syriac Christianity; explores the import of poetry in this tradition; and even liken Ephrem the Syrian to DC Talk and Reliant K. He also goes into his own journey of how he came to love Ephrem and studying early Christian history.

Timestamps:

6:37- What is Syriac?

21:35- Syriac Poetry

32:08- Wickes’ Relation to Syriac Christianity

52:51- Syriac Exegesis

Episode Transcription

Charles Kim 0:00

Hello, and welcome to a history of Christian theology. My name is Chad Kim. This week, I will be interviewing Dr. Jeffrey wicks. And I will, I will tell you a little bit more about that in a second. If you're the kind of person who fast forwards through these intros, please hang on just one second. Because I wanted to tell you all that we are going to be offering some books on our social media. So on our Facebook page facebook.com/a history of Christian theology, and Twitter at theology, x i A N. So if you would log into those, follow us, and retweet or share the, the notice about what books that we're offering, you can be entered in to win one of those books. So we're going to do one and Samantha Miller's Chris awesomes, devil. And then we're also going to do one and Gavin ortlund, St. Augustine, theology of creation. So if you would please like and retweet and share those, I would really appreciate it, we launched it yesterday, didn't get a whole lot of interest. So if you're hearing this, now's your time to possibly get one of these books, we'll have several of them on both of our sites. So there'll be at least four chances to win each book, depending on whether or not you're on Twitter or Facebook. And we're going to be doing it we'll be rolling those out little by little. And I think it's going to happen more often. So if you stay following us, you'll be you'll be aware of when those come around. So like I said, if you're the kind of person who fast forwards, I hope that you've listened to this. And now I'm going to tell you a little bit about the actual podcast with Jeff and then he'll be on shortly. I thought I would have Jeff come on and talk to us a little bit about Syriac Christianity, something that we haven't covered very much on the podcast thus far. And which Jeff is an expert in so he recently released a book with with the University of California Press called Bible and poetry and Lady antique Mesopotamia, FM's hymns on faith. And this book is largely comes out of his dissertation. And it is also going to serve as a springboard for some of his other work. So he focuses quite a bit on poetry, and this tradition of Christianity and East Asia that springs up kind of in the general area of where Jesus lived. And so it's exciting to have Dr. wicks on the podcast today. So our podcast is going to cover a lot of different things. We begin by explaining just exactly what we mean when we say Syriac Christianity. Then we talk a little bit about why Syriac Christians tend to prefer poetry as their mode of expression as compared to Greeks and Romans. And then about halfway through the podcast, we discuss the beginnings of early Christian rock music, because Jeff makes the comparison between FM the cerium and rock groups like DC talk. And so we talk a little bit about his background and music that he loved as a kid. And and then why that's similar to what FM the cerium was doing in Asia in the fourth century. So I hope you enjoy the podcast. So it's stem are a sort of goes back and forth between a little bit more academic and at times a little bit more fun, where we, you know, talk a little about his his background as a Christian and how he found his way, actually, to the Orthodox Church. So we we've got a lot of different topics here. I also should have probably done this at the beginning. But if you are still listening, please check out our Facebook page or our Twitter, we're going to start doing some giveaways. InterVarsity press has been kind enough to give us several different books. And so we'll be releasing those as sort of giveaways for those who engage with our social media accounts on Twitter and on Facebook. So be looking out for those. One of them is Samantha Miller's book on John Chrysostom, and the devil. The other is Gavin ortlund book on Augustine and creation. And I expect that there'll be more of those to come as we go along and expand our relationship with other publishers. So definitely check us out on there and look out for some giveaways. So without any further ado, here is my conversation with Dr. Jeff wicks. Cool.

So, welcome to history of Christian theology. This week, I have Dr. Jeffrey wicks with me and Dr. wicks, is the Associate Professor of early Christianity and the coordinator for graduate studies at St. Louis University. He was also my professor. And so I got to know Jeff for a few years here in St. Louis, and he is a specialist in Syriac Christianity, especially the poetry of f from the Syrian. So he's written a I guess you've got to translations of his hymns on faith. You have a book on poetry, the Bible and poetry for Bible poetry and Lady antique Mesopotamia. And you have another book coming out on poetry. Is that just in the ancient world More broadly or you know, that's the work that you're, that should be, I guess, that you're in the middle of working on, right?

Jeffrey Wickes 5:08

Yeah, I'm sort of at the beginning of it. So yeah, it's on hygge geographical poetry. So in the Syriac world, authors start writing poems on saints in the fourth century. And then in the fifth and sixth centuries, not surprisingly, as the cult of the saints kind of explodes throughout the Mediterranean, and really takes on it a coherent, recognizable shape. There's also an explosion of poems, specifically liturgical poems and hymns, on sites and that so this book is on Hagee, a grant, Syriac, kinky, a graphical poetry spanning the fourth through sixth centuries. Okay, and I'm just starting it I hope to Yeah, God willing. I wouldn't be done with this in two or three years.

Charles Kim 5:58

Okay. All right. So that's yeah, that's sort of way in the future. Because I was gonna say, I looked up the more recent published book, the Bible and poetry, and that was 2019, I guess, University

Jeffrey Wickes 6:07

of California. Timber. Yeah. Yeah.

Charles Kim 6:11

I actually was reading your section on express this and thinking about incorporating that for my dissertation.

Jeffrey Wickes 6:17

Oh, yeah. Well, actually, I was gonna, we can sort of trade some materials because I actually have to write a essay on Syriac poetry for volume on on homilies late and T commonly so I was gonna, I was gonna send that essay your way once it's done and get your feedback on it.

Charles Kim 6:37

Yeah, that'd be great. Well, let's go. Let's step back for just a second here. So Syriac, is a phrase that may be less familiar to people who are not studying ancient Christianity. So what does that refer to very broadly?

Jeffrey Wickes 6:54

Sure. So Syriac is a dialect of Aramaic. Aramaic is a language family. Like, let's say the Romance languages. And so usually when we say Aramaic, usually, especially when Christians say Aramaic, what they refer to as the language that Jesus spoke, spoke, right, which was, would be more kind of technically called Palestinian Aramaic. Syriac is the dialect of Aramaic that was spoken east of Antioch. Beginning in the second and third centuries C. So it's kind of its headquarters, its capital, so to speak, was a town called ADESA, which is right in the modern day world is right on the border of Turkey and Syria. And it was a literary literary language that grew up in late antique Christianity. It was after Greek and Latin, the most prevalent Christian language. And it produced a huge literary body, which began to decline in number, a number of works written with the rise of Islam, though it's still hold held on as a as a common enough language until the 13th century, when it was really kind of almost totally replaced by Arabic. Okay, with the exception of a few fairly isolated villages, where in fact it is still still spoken today in Turkey, Syria and Iraq. There's a dialect of Syriac is is still spoken to this day.

Charles Kim 8:41

Yeah, so I think when I was doing my class on Syriac Christianity at Princeton seminary, we got to go to a Syriac Orthodox church and I guess they call it the holy core Bono. And they were very proud that they were still sort of celebrating the mass celebrating the the communion, The Last Supper in the language that Jesus spoke. So there are still elements of it in Aramaic, but But it's largely preserved in Syriac churches and Syriac speaking community. So it's also a liturgical language. Is that right? That's where a lot of people are more familiar with it.

Jeffrey Wickes 9:13

That's right. Yeah. So Syriac today for many of the churches from the Middle East would functions similarly to the way Latin functions in the Catholic Church or Greek functions in the Orthodox Church as the primary language of literacy and of course, it will be will be translated in in America, large chunks of the service will be in English or in in Arabic, depending on how depending on when the community has emigrated, but the the kind of most important parts of the services like the the anaphora, the words of institution will still will still be in in Aramaic slash Syriac. Yeah.

Charles Kim 10:01

Interesting. Well, while we're talking about the language specifically, one question that I had, as I was sort of reviewing some of the, the history of the language, both for this podcast and some other things that I was thinking about, I just noticed how laced with poetry and song, most of the sort of Syriac churches and I, when I took, we had a book that I had to buy in seminary, the earliest Christian hymn book, The odes of Solomon, which has a lot in Aramaic, and then Syriac, I guess. So going back to sort of the beginning of this, this form of Christianity that's that's large, largely in Aramaic are largely in Syriac. And this culture just seems to be sort of almost centered around poetry and song. So why is it? Why is it that this form of Christianity is so steeped and so immersed in music and musicality? Maybe in ways that, you know, we don't often think about Latin or Greek in quite the same way, especially when you're doing theology in those languages. It's almost always treatises, commentaries, but very rarely, song and hymnody. So what is it about Syriac that makes it either so apt to be written in poetry or the culture that supports it? Any thoughts on that?

Jeffrey Wickes 11:20

Yeah, it's a really good question. It's a really difficult question to answer. So before I hazard a question of why I want to just kind of emphasize your point of how prevalent it is. And yeah, you mentioned the odds of Solomon. So the odds of Solomon are one of our earliest extant long worst works in Syriac, they actually may have been written in Greek. Okay, it's one of these things where they exist early concurrently in both Greek and Syriac. I think current scholarly consensus is that they were probably written in Greek and then immediately translated into Syriac. But point being they, they survive in their longest form in Syriac. And they are poetry. Another early Syriac work, which is called the acts of Thomas not to be confused with the Gospel of Thomas has large chunks that are that are him, Nick. But the the staff that I think kind of, sort of seals it for people is, or at least people that study early Christianity, if you can kind of form in your mind the way say Latin and Greek builds a theological culture in the fourth and fifth centuries, and who the who the major authors are like Augustine, in Latin, Gregory now Xeons, in in Greek, John Crysis stone, so on and so forth. In Syriac, you can think of there being really kind of four, maybe five major single authored corpora, between the fourth and sixth centuries. So these would be earliest, by a guy named F, from who you mentioned the beginning, that's who I've kind of cut my teeth on. And then a guy named Nora Sai, who dies right at the beginning of the sixth century. And then two authors, Jacob and philoxenia of those four authors. Three of them wrote predominantly poetry. So just comparing it to kind of Greek and Latin. The kind of the church fathers in Syriac, wrote most of what they wrote in poetic form. So it does raise this question of why was that? And I have to say that I just don't right now have for that it's one of the things I think about a lot, I could kind of hazard some half baked answers, but I don't have a great answer. And part of the reason that it's hard to answer is because for as much as Syriac writes poetry as much as Syriac authors produce, poetic forms, right, their theology and poetic forms, they don't theorize about Oka poetry. So there's nothing like Aristotle's Poetics in the Syriac world, like Augustine ins on Christian doctrine in the de Doctrina in Syriac. So it's, it's kind of it in fact, part of what I was trying to do in my book, and part of what I'm trying to do in the book I'm writing that writing now is how can we get answers to these these questions

about why poetry through through the works themselves, so instead of doing an explicit theoretical work, which would be looking at someone writes a book about poetry, a kind of scholarly book and explains to you why poetry gets written, since we don't have any works like that? Can we take the poems themselves and use those as evidence for? Why did it seem to be the case that poetry was the genre most favored when it came to doing theology. And I mean, part of it might be institutional, like, it might be just the kinds of institutions out of which, out of which the literature developed, like there does not seem to have been the same kind of school culture, or rhetorical culture, the kind of the institutions of literary training that existed in Greek and Latin cultures, it seems that schools to the extent that they existed, were more connected to the church and the worshiping community. So in that sense, you can think of poetry as kind of like a homiletic genre, like to develop more immediately, in connection with catechism than it did in, in Greek and Latin. Not to say that, that it didn't but you know, even like Augustine, who, as you know, thinks of himself as a catechist, as much as anything else. He has a certain literary training, which shapes Yeah, he, he writes. So it's just not clear that the institutions that offer that literary training existed in Syriac, but that still doesn't explain why poetry and not for example, hot not homilies, right. And that's, it's a, it's an interesting question, which I hope one day to have a better answer for, but right now, I don't, you know, because they didn't, they didn't seem that interested in, in giving us wine and kind of having the critical distance to sort of say, like, Oh, we're doing theology differently. Sorry, I'm kind of droning on here. But I will say one, one last thing that I think is important on this question of why, and, you know, I'm sure you've heard this phrase, which is, was set by Evagrius that the theologian is one who prays and one who

Charles Kim 17:12

prays I love that. I love that quote, yeah,

Jeffrey Wickes 17:14

right, right. And kind of a similar, similar idea, as the quote by prosper of Aquitaine Lexa Romandie, Lex crit. Dindi. Right? sense that. Whereas we think of often we think of theology as something you do in a secularized classroom. As you well know, this is not the the East Eastern Christianity has no particular purchase on this. In the early Christian world, theology is much more about something. It's not about kind of mastering a body of facts, but it's very much connected to one's life and specifically one's life of life of prayer. I do think that that sits at the heart of the way Syriac Christians think about theology. So the fact that they would utter their theology in a genre that is not above all, seeking clarity, organization and definitions, not to say that they don't, at times prioritize those things. But that's not the be all and end all the the goal of theology is both to echo one's own communion with God and in a sense to sway others to, to engage in that same kind of relationship that from that, presumably, it makes sense that, that you would write something like poetry as opposed to, you know, not to set up a straw man here, but I'll go ahead and do it. Not something like the Summa of Thomas Aquinas, where the goal of that I'm totally speaking in ignorance here, but I'm just going to proceed. The role of that is to establish a system of theology in a clear as way as as possible. Right. Yeah. Any question you have? I'm going to give you a fairly clear, fairly, fairly thorough answer. That's not what really Syriac theology is doing. I probably just butchered Thomas, but

Charles Kim 19:22

no, I mean, well, I'm not that well versed in Thomistic theology, although I think he didn't quite finish. And at one point, he wanted to just destroy it. And so I think, yes, I think there is a little bit in there might have been some ambivalence in the totality of his life. And, you know, maybe what it was all for, but be that as it may. I wanted to trace a couple lines of thought that you brought up there that were just sort of interesting to me. Well, one would just be Carol Harrison, who was on my dissertation committee, wrote a book on Agustin and music And part of what she deals with in that book is sort is Agustin is the ambivalence towards music on the one hand, he loves it, Ambrose kind of brings music into his worship in Milan. And this floor is Augustine, you know, he's, he's so moved by it. But in the I wonder if in sort of the way that Augustine was taught, he was almost taught to fear the emotions of music, and so like music could generate in him some anxiety, because he couldn't control it in the way that he could control his mind. And I wonder if there's a similar sort of, you know, I know the Eastern tradition, a little less. But but you know, Nazianzen writes poetry. But, but even that, I guess, is like sort of secondary to some of his orations and his other treatises. But there does seem to be, and I was, I was thinking of Athanasius of Alexandria, in his letter to Marcel Linus, and also has some ambivalence about the music, like, be careful, we have a rational explanation for this. And is, Is there less emphasis on that rationality? And that might lead us into some of the poetry itself? But yeah, I don't know that that could be almost like a foil, like you have people in the in the sort of more Western. And, you know, and west and east, meaning Greek, but Latin Greek traditions, you have more of a self conscious reflection on the method and the style, where they're worried about it is they're just not that worried. And again, I guess it's hard to answer, because you'd be talking from silence. But I would just offer that up for a response. But

Jeffrey Wickes 21:35

right, no, it's actually, yeah. So let me stretch back to what I said at the very beginning, when I said there are no, there are no theoretical treatises on poetry or music. And you know, you're right to kind of bring in music because, of course, in the ancient world, in the late ancient world, poetry is poetry and song, the boundaries between the two are, are porous. Right. Right. Poetry is, is musical and most music has words, not exclusively, but most does. So yeah, I said at the beginning, that there are no theoretical treatises on poetry or music in Syria. And that's true, but there are, there are, there are narrative sources that we can think of as kind of offering a theoretical reflection on poetry. And what I would say those do is they actually do register that same poetry or music, they register that same ambivalence that Augustine, which I'm almost certain he's getting from Plato, or at least from a platonic tradition, that that Augustine, Augustine registers, but they seem much more willing, for that, and for the danger of music to work both ways. So what I mean by that is, I'm thinking for example of the Syriac life of FM, which is actually written until over 100 years after he dies. And in that, you know, in in FM's actual authentic poetry, he almost never speaks biographically. So he never tells us, where he came from much less, why he, how he came to write poetry, why he came to write poetry. But he does hint that there was a pretty significant poet before him is pretty significant Syriac quote before him, which is a guy named Bart Dyson, who you may I'm pretty sure we read him when we did the early Christianity seminars. So he was a third century Syriac philosopher theologian, who, you know, as a lot of as a lot of early Christian theologians, not a lot, but it's not uncommon that an early, early Christian theologian will think of themselves as Orthodox in their own day. And then as they kind of get rescued, they're sort of found to be heretical, much to their own surprise after after they're dead. But by Dyson was one of these. And he was really kind of obsessed with the problem of evil. The problem of evil the problem of fate, why, why some people were born sickly, and some people are born healthy, how a good God could create a world where there seemed to be such randomness, these ideas were really, he kind of fixated on them. And he developed this this really thorough notion of astrology where he kind of had this idea like there's God. But there's also a level on which the stars have a lot of control over things like why one of us why one of us is born to a poor family and one of us is born to a rich family. So as you can imagine, this did not age well.

So F from F from bar Dyson was kind of even though he had been dead for While by the time Efrem was working Efrem was obsessed with kind of like putting the final nail in his coffin. But he he alludes to BART Dyson having actually written 150 songs, 150 hymns, which he says he did, in imitation of David, and of course fmcc, the sign of hubris that he was basically trying to usurp the Psalter. And he says in there, that the reason Bart Dyson did it or maybe not even the reason it's kind of ambiguous if he's depicting it causally. But the effect of bar dice and writing the songs was that people heard the sweet melodies, and they kind of ingested the heretical teaching through the sweet melodies. That's all FM says he doesn't connect his whole own emnity to this, this project. But in the Syriac life of FM, which gets written later, they actually Naira type Naira ties in narrative out of the scene where FM has been, you know, living a long life as a monk, he's been primarily writing commentaries on scripture, like good monastic writing, and then at the end of his life, he wanders into the city because as a monk, he's living outside the city alone. He wanders into the city, and he hears the songs. And they are the songs of Mr. Dyson, right. And they have these really catchy melodies. And everybody is singing them not knowing what they're singing, but there's they're singing as this so I tell that these woefully heretical ideas. So what FM does according to this life, is he simply takes Bart Eisen song, this is like the origins of Christian rock, he takes by dice thongs, and puts orthodox words to them, but blatantly, he does it to the same end as Bart Isom. So the idea is, music will get you to subscribe to things that you have not thought out rationally. It can be and quite simply, it can be used for good or ill. So in that sense, the Syriac tradition does not problematize the fact like whereas Augustine is sort of like the fact that certain genres get you to care about things that you have not thought through rationally. The fact that that bothers Augustine, the Syriac tradition just sort of says, oh, that's fine, let's just use it to a good end, you know, make sense. So there is Yeah, totally the same ambiguity, but there's a real willingness to, to use it, and just sort of say, like, let's just, let's use it to good. And you also, I mean, kind of connected to this, whereas a lot of the early Christian traditions have a certain ambivalence about using non scriptural hymnody in liturgical worship. So you may know, they're, they're fourth century canons, fifth century canons, against the writing of one's own liturgical hymnody. Eventually, the, the tradition sort of says, like, Oh, it's fine, and people start writing all their own hymns. But there's, in a sense, especially among like Egyptian monks, that all of liturgical worship should be scripturally based. That kind of anxiety never really has much purchase in the Syriac tradition, tradition, from the beginning seems to be very comfortable with writing its own, its own liturgical hymnody, not to display scripture, but standing alongside scripture.

Charles Kim 28:43

Right? Well, I'm gonna use your line about the beginnings of Christian rock music that's gonna be Hamas on this podcast today. So in this podcast, I talked with Jeff wicks about the touristic professor on the origins of Christian rock music. Have you ever listened to Reliant K or DC talk? Were you ever into Christian rock music?

Jeffrey Wickes 29:05

So I tried. You really hear that story? There's a pretty lengthy history of you, sir. Yeah, so in seventh grade. I don't know I want to ask you when you were born, this may have been after your time or before your time, I mean, but when I was in seventh grade, there was a the band The Red Hot Chili Peppers had the album blood sugar, sex Magik and I had a copy of the CD and I like kind of listened to it and my mom one day as mother's to wandered in and like got out the little jacket which I think about this a lot as a parent now like we don't have any way to scrutinize the lyrics of our kids music. You know, the Lyric is just like a really filthy album and she was so appalled that she she forbade me from listening to any quote secular music, and took me down Come to the Bible bookstore and told me to pick out any CD I wanted. She would like pay for it, but I just wasn't allowed to listen to Christian music to secular music. So I did like I got into some of the more edgier stuff. So I thought DC talk was kind of lame reliant case. My time I honestly, I've heard the name, but I don't know anything about them. But I did once go to a DC talk concert. And, and it was pretty good. It was pretty good. But But yeah, I don't know if you know, like to send mail records, which, yeah, so they came around came along around 9394. And we're sort of putting out edgier, edgier music. And but with that would be sold in the Bible bookstore. So I was a big fan of that for a little while. But then my mom kind of stopped paying attention. And

Charles Kim 30:50

I went back to my old Red Hot Chili Peppers.

Jeffrey Wickes 30:52

I went back to my old sending ways.

Charles Kim 30:55

That reminds me of the time, I bought a lattice more set album that had a swear word in it when I was in middle school or something. And I had been at the mall or I don't remember. And I actually turned it into my dad, I didn't realize that there was like a radio edit. And there was a CD version and then had like more swearing and the CD version. I actually brought it to my dad and said I'm really sorry. I should have

Unknown Speaker 31:23

told you.

Charles Kim 31:24

I think I was like 1112 I

Jeffrey Wickes 31:27

don't remember Wow, he were good. Good.

Charles Kim 31:33

Yeah, I mean, you know, well, like I say we try to make this podcast like have some academic elements have some broader appeal here, but I could go all day on on Christian music. So

Jeffrey Wickes 31:45

though, the history of what's that we can do another another interview on the history of Christian music.

Charles Kim 31:52

So somehow, Jeff wicks goes from tooth and nail records and DC talk to studying ancient Syriac Christianity

Jeffrey Wickes 32:01

once saw DC talk, right? I don't want the implication on record that I was a big DC talk fan.

Charles Kim 32:08

I Oh, sorry, my bad, my bad. But anyway, somehow you having enough familiarity with that? Like having heard them, but how is it that someone goes from like, you know, this kind of like, you know, from the very American pop culture to studying Syriac Christianity, and I, you're not actually a member of the Syriac Orthodox churches, I understand like, so you're not like, that's not like your family history or anything, right?

Jeffrey Wickes 32:32

No. So I am I am Greek Orthodox, but I grew up Southern Baptists. So yeah. Welcome to the club. Away from from Chirac. No, so yeah, just a little I mean, it's, it's kind of related to my own, I guess you would call it spiritual journey. But yeah, so I grew up, I grew up Southern Baptists. And for a variety of reasons. I became pretty disillusioned with the faith as I knew it. Through through high school, but especially in my senior year of high school, I went to a public high school, but they had a course my last semester, my senior year, called Bible as literature. And the course, which was awesome. I mean, in many ways, when I think about like my own life and the Academy, like I point to that course. But in many ways, the strategy of that course Mrs. Hickson was the teacher was to find all the passages in the Bible that she knew we had never paid close attention to, and force us to really contemplate how difficult they were like, you know, the classic one being Genesis 22, Abraham sacrifice of Isaac just kind of really get us to sit with, you know, just the basic question like is this the guide that you understand yourself to believe in and she really she herself was actually a Christian. She was not trying to destroy anyone's faith, but really wanted us to wrestle with some of these difficult questions. And the effect it had on me was to just become really, really sort of confused, not confused about my faith, but to, to kind of stirred up a lot of questions about my faith, that that the, the world in which the Christian world in which I had grown up for whatever reason, just what, I didn't feel like it could answer, you know, and certainly, certainly, like my dad, at that point, started putting CS Lewis in front of me and that was that was, you know, really, really important actually not like you know, most people think of like Mere Christianity or Screwtape Letters, those were are not the books that really, I think of as having made a difference in my faith, it was more like actually surprised by joy, where he, he recounts his own his own conversion. As I recall, I haven't read this since the sort of in 1997. As I recall, it was not kind of he, he figured out the faith in this this way that satisfied him intellectually, and he could answer every question he had. But it was more of just sort of like, he, in an almost like, effective way, just admitted that he had to submit to, to God, to to believe, to faith. And that was actually really helpful to me, because it sort of, I never wanted to leave my faith, I never felt any draw to like atheism. I actually, and I would say this to this day that I always felt that my faith had had given me much more than it had taken from me, you know, I grew up in a very conservative home, but it was also a very loving home and a very conservative Christian community, but also one that was very loving in its way very open, you know, in a sense, like that on a person to person level, I felt like people were treated really well with real loving kindness. And so I never, I never had any interest in in leaving my faith. But the whole experience there, my senior year of high school, kind of having all these questions, reading enough, CS Lewis, to convince myself that I didn't have to abandon my faith, but not like a real commitment to continuing to sort of figure out my faith, I kind of left high school in that place, and then went into college. And then in college, I just kind of, I didn't abandon my faith, but I abandoned any kind of practice. Like, I just I think, as a lot of college kids do, I just kind of went stopped going to church. And, and, and I, over the next actually, four years, because I took two years off of college, I went two years, and I took two years off, and I went back over those next four years, two years of college, and then two years out of college.

I, you know, like, I just didn't, I didn't think a lot about my faith, but for, for a number of reasons. I kind of reached a point, four years in where, where I just kind of needed to figure things out. And, and going back to church was one of the first obvious things were that, you know, it occurred to me to do to kind of, quote, get my life together, you know. And so, I knew that I knew that for me, like the Southern Baptist church that I come from, as much as I loved, it was just, it just didn't feel like an option anymore. I felt like I needed something. I mean, I'll say now, I don't know that I would have said it, at that time, a little more intellectual, kind of not strictly Evangelical, but like, Okay, now that you've been saved, how do you how do you think through your faith and that sort of thing. So I kind of, you know, I kind of bopped around to some, some churches. And quite frankly, I just had this feeling that if I went to a big church, where I didn't really know anyone, I just had the sense that I knew I wouldn't stay, like I knew I would not keep going, I would just go back to, to not going to church. And it was really important to me, that I actually make going to church, a regular part of my life. And I had a couple of friends that had become Orthodox, become Orthodox, and I, I didn't know a lot about it, but I was, I was curious about it, you know, it was, they would say were interesting. And so I started going with them to just this very small, Orthodox Church, and I just fell in love with it. You know, I loved the priests, he was just super. He himself had done an M div at Duke. So he's like, kind of nerdy about theology. Pretty charismatic, but and all the people were really nice and really welcoming. And I just love I loved the service, you know, I loved I love the aesthetic experience of the church. I mean, the, the the fact that, you know, going in, I grew up, you know, pretty interested in the arts, both my parents are actually musicians. So walking into a church base, where it was like, oh, like, things like art matter. They're not secondary. You know, they're, they're actually like a key part of the way we experience God. And we're not going to we're not going to kind of shun now we're going to actually build it in to the fabric of the way we do worship. So, you know, and then, you know, like, I think I think there's a way that I can think about some aspects of my love for the the worship in a superficial way. And I think there was certainly a superficial element to it. But you know, I loved the incense, like, I loved the vestments, I just, I thought it was super cool. You know, like, this was just like, so different. And, you know, just to be totally honest, there was a part of it, there was like, it was just different from what I had grown up with. And I, I liked that, you know, I liked kind of, I could be a Christian, but I wasn't that type of Christian, which I'm not in any way endorsing. But in my 2122 year old brain, that was certainly part of it. And yeah, so I started going to this church, and then that kind of, that kind of

initiated my, my study of, of theology, it was specifically wanting to be wanting to know more about the history and the theology of, of this of this church, that was not what I had grown up with. And so I went to a state school, I went to the University of Tennessee Chattanooga. So I switched, they, of course, didn't have theology. And I switched my major to religious studies. There was a the religious studies department had one historian, and he did medieval, but he agreed, you know, kind of helped me negotiate early church and, and then, at a certain point, I was I was talking to someone about, like, as I kind of started to think, like, maybe I want to do more studies beyond undergraduate, I was talking to someone about, like, what I would need to do to study early Christianity, and you have so much experience with language that you probably can't relate to this. But I think for a lot of us that come into the study of early Christianity late, there's always that daunting conversation where you realize you've got to learn at least four languages, you know, right, right, do this, you know, Greek, Latin, French, and German. And then this guy is talking to told me like, if you really want to do Eastern Christianity and do it, right, you don't only need to learn Greek, Latin, French, and German. But you also need to learn Syriac. And I was like, What in the world is Syriac. And so I, I think I just went to Amazon, and like, looked up introduction to Syriac. And there was this grammar, by this guy, wheelers axe, and I actually have my tattered copy right here by me. And I ordered it. And I was just so kind of gung ho at that time in my life, that as a senior in college, I just, well, let me say that when I when I got the book, in the back was a crystal mithya a reader, you know, and I, I went and looked, and if you've ever seen Syriac, it's a beautiful script. I should say that to your listeners, like go Google, which is of Syriac, just a beautiful script. And looking through those texts. And knowing like, there's a way I could learn to make sense of these dots and squiggles and they would be semantically meaningful to me in the way that reading an English book is semantically meaningful to me. And that was just so cool. And interesting to me, I dove in and I actually do the grammar on my own. And out of straight out of undergraduate, I went to an orthodox seminary for two years. And there was nobody there that did Syriac. So I would actually just for 15 minutes a day, just study a little bit on my own. And, and then from there, I went to the University of Notre Dame where I could finally actually work with someone who knew Who knew Syriac. And yeah, the rest is history.

Charles Kim 43:51

Right? Yeah, I mean, 15 minutes a day, I have. One of the things that I get when I teach languages is a link to a site for people who want to do Latin. And he talks about Latin and 10 minutes a day. And there's sort of a

Jeffrey Wickes 44:05

What's that? I said, you can do a lot if you're consistent with it.

Charles Kim 44:09

Well, in a sense, you can do more than if you spend two hours and beat your head against the wall. But if you spend, you know, over the course of a week, 10 minutes a day, you could probably, you know, progress quicker than if you try to do too much at once.

Jeffrey Wickes 44:22

Yeah, certainly if you do kind of like eight hours a day for a month, and then don't look at it for a year, which is what humans often do.

Charles Kim 44:29

Right? Right. Yeah, no, that's the other thing I was thinking about when you described going to the Orthodox Church. I have been teaching Latin at a Catholic seminary, and I've never heard this, but one of the older sort of priests in formation, he said that a lot of the evangelical churches basically set up their worship to look like the stage of a Johnny Carson Show.

Jeffrey Wickes 44:55

I had never heard that. Johnny Carson

Charles Kim 45:01

So he use Johnny Carson. I was like, you know, Jimmy Fallon or something. But it seemed like I was like, I'd never thought about that. But yeah, you put the band on one side, and you got your talking head on the other. And, you know, I mean, there's really like, it's kind of embarrassing, but that seems to be like, you know, but part of the point that he was making that I've sort of thought about was where it seems like a lot of evangelical worship is intended to mimic the culture directly, so that people feel comfortable, but like when you go into an Orthodox Church, or even an Anglican Church, if you are used to going to church, like the building that I grew up in, that was built in the 70s, and had burgundy and, you know, really, like, kind of, I don't know, cheesy

Jeffrey Wickes 45:50

match to the burgundy carpet and the white wall.

Charles Kim 45:56

But you go into an orthodox church and you know, you're trained to you feel like you're in a different world, you feel like you're coming into something that is meant to be different. It sort of reminds me of going to a well, so again, I'll make another nerdy reference. I love Tolkien, as do most like evangelicals who

Jeffrey Wickes 46:16

never read anything but the Hobbit, but in the movies.

Charles Kim 46:21

I hate the movies. But that's a separate story. But anyway, they go to Rivendale fellowship. And what one of the things that they love about their time, the hobbits as they're on their journey, one of the things that they love about their time and Rivendale is they're safe for a little while. And they know they have to go back out into the world, they know that they have a job to do they know that they have a journey to go on. But at Rivendale they can be at peace, because it's not the same. Right? Yeah. And, and there's sort of a sense to me when I go into like a more traditional, like, historic of some of the historic churches that maintain this, this sort of same idea that it's like you're coming in here in a world set apart.

Jeffrey Wickes 47:04

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's really well put. Yeah, I mean, I also just, I liked the, you know, growing up Southern Baptist as I so I should say, when I talk about Southern Baptist theology, I haven't been an active part of Southern Baptist church since 1996 1997. So this could be totally out of sync with where doesn't Baptist Church is now but at the time, I mean, it was all about evangelism of a very specific kind, getting people to give their life to the Lord, you know, with the, the basic pitch thrown through Romans. And I took for really, and, you know, I mean, even the way it's structured, you can see the way it kind of came of age in like, salesman, culture of America, you know, they're making the pitch, you know, and I think just walking into an Orthodox Church, where no, it didn't feel like anybody was trying to sell me anything, you know, and there was even like, a sense of like, like, when I'm like, sign me up, I want to be Orthodox, the priests was sort of, like, hold on, hold on, like. And like, that was really reassuring, you know, like, we're not like, you know, you weren't even here, like, like, we've been here for, you know, 1500 years, we'll be here for certainly long enough for you to kind of think through this and decide if it if it makes sense. And I think there's some practical wisdom to that just because, you know, having been orthodox now for almost 20 years, like a lot of people do come and go, you know, a lot of people come in, it is so are kind of so immediately smitten with it. And then, you know, pretty soon you realize, like, its problems are not the same problems of the place you came from. But it's got problems. It has got problems and in some ways, you're you're trading one set of problems, simply a different set of problems, you know. And so some people once they hit that reality, they're kind of like, what am I doing here? You know, but But anyway, yeah, I totally, I think I think that's exactly right. That it is this sense of a appreciate that it's not trying to be like the world. It's kind of stubborn in its willingness to be irrelevant, so to speak, right, so to speak. I don't actually think it's irrelevant, but not playing the game of of relevancy night. Yeah, I really appreciate that. And I will, I will say, you know, to this day, I still, you know, I still am just immensely grateful for that, and it kind of keeps me sane, and it does feel like life is, life is so blisteringly fast in the way it changes, to have that weekly connection with something that sometimes frustratingly, sometimes It was not simply doesn't it doesn't change, you know, whether you think that's a good thing or a bad thing. It is a thing that it's the right worship is the same every week and it it does become this metaphor for. For Okay, there, there are things that transcend the utter on, you know ceaseless change of the world in which I spend most of my life, like where it day to day everything seems to be different. Like there's something other than that.

Charles Kim 50:33

No. Yeah. Well, I mean, one thing that I would, you know, the other way that I look at some of these things, and I, I actually am still a regular attender of a Southern Baptist Church, actually. But you know,

Jeffrey Wickes 50:47

some time What's that? I'll come visit your church.

Charles Kim 50:51

Well, yeah, I appreciate it. Yeah, I mean, you know, maybe maybe we can work that out. I only pointed that out to say, but like, one of the things that I I sort of struggle with when I work with the worship planning team, and one of the things that like, you know, when I tried to incorporate historic elements of the faith, you know, that one of the push backs they sometimes get is, well, people won't feel comfortable with it. And one of the things that I try to explain is, like, in a sense, they won't feel comfortable with it. But when you have a low barrier to entry, it's really easy to leave as well. And so what I mean is, like, you know, if they, if it's really easy to slip in, it's so easy to slip back out. But if it's something that requires more of you like, Okay, I have to learn, I have to be committed, I have to, you know, really think about is this actually what I want? Well, then you're going to, you know, build a member for life, not just for the weekend. And I know there can be you know, there can be different perspectives on that. But that's one of the things that I tried to explain about, like the importance of, you know, in a sense, even a watt can feel like a stubbornly and in some ways, difficult thing to enter into. That is part of its beauty, because it will hold you there. If you can learn to appreciate it.

Jeffrey Wickes 52:02

Yeah, I think that's absolutely right.

Charles Kim 52:05

And I could also just say, as a shout out to like there are there are Baptists who are thinking about this, not not necessarily just myself, but like the Center for Baptists renewal. There's some people that are trying to sort of tie in Baptists to the historic, you know, great tradition, but But yeah, it'd

Jeffrey Wickes 52:23

be bad. Apparently, you can even be Baptists and drink beer now, which is, you know, that's all I need.

Charles Kim 52:31

That's right. Well, yeah. Yeah, my Yeah. Well, I yeah, that it actually not in every part.

Jeffrey Wickes 52:42

So that was, you know, that was the joke when I was growing up. How do you know a, a Catholic in the south, they'll say hi to you in the liquor store.

Charles Kim 52:51

That's right. Well, I don't want to take up too much of your time. I had some other questions. I was trying to see if I could pull them up some other questions about F from and Okay, so one thing, this is going to like, Alright, I'm gonna like, we're gonna shift gears real fast. You have a minute before you go. Yeah, please. So in some sense, like, so Antioch is Syria. Antioch is the sort of like far eastern border will not the far eastern border, but one of the eastern most parts of where Christianity spreads. And it's associated with a kind of, quote, unquote, literal exegesis, which, you know, in some ways, like so when I read like that, when I read Theodore mops, who estia deed or Tarsus, when I read some of their biblical exegesis, there's nothing about it, that's particularly literary, poetic. And, you know, they're trying to get at the historical situation. Now, I think I don't like the terms, you know, Antioch and Alexandria. I studied a little bit with Peter Martin, so I know that those

Jeffrey Wickes 53:58

problems, yeah, but like,

Charles Kim 54:00

so how does that How did it go ahead?

Jeffrey Wickes 54:04

I said, yeah, the labels are problematic, but anyone would admit there are different ways of reading the Bible in there. Yeah, these labels are trying to get at something, we need better labels, but they're, they're getting it something real.

Charles Kim 54:18

Right. Well, and how does like how does someone like Efrem fit into that? How did the Syriac, like offer hot or Efrem? Or, you know, some of these other guys? How do they fit in with some of that Antioch, Alexandria? I mean, but they're just poetic that in some ways, it doesn't even seem like they're in the same concept conversation. Not that they're not Christian, but they they just approach scripture in such a different way. Could you I don't know, some thoughts on how do they fit in some of these dichotomies? Yeah, or you? No, not really, obviously. But

Jeffrey Wickes 54:50

yeah, yeah. I mean, there was a there was a move as like in general. I don't know if this is getting too far afield for your listeners. I apologize if it is, but In general, as you know, in the 40s 50s and 60s, there was a move in European theology to kind of reclaim patristic exegesis, both just to kind of write the narrative of it, but also to see if it can provide resources for what felt like kind of some dead ends of historical critical reception of the Bible. And, you know, so this is when de lubok Dannielle, who are writing their kind of magisterial histories of early Christian medieval exegesis. And in kind of, in response to those studies, there was a there was a period where people, people scholars asked this question of Efrain, particularly, how does he fit with the kind of Alexandria Antioch paradigm and in this paradigm, Alexandria is kind of allegorical exegesis. Antioch is literal exegesis. And, you know, the the general conclusion was like, he just doesn't really fit in the paradigm very well. With perhaps one exception, which is, so he he, you know, according to his hagiography, whether it's true or not, he wrote commentaries on every book of the Bible, I think it's probably true. But of all those, we only have three that are extant commentary on Genesis, a commentary on Exodus and a commentary on what's called the DHEA testosterone, which is what it's the basically in the second third centuries in Syria, they did not use and continuing the fourth century, they did not use the four gospels that that we use today and that were used at the time in Greek and Latin, but they used a single combined gospel, which was called the DNS room, you know, according to the four versions, and this was when FM lived the so to speak canonical gospel of the Syriac church, we know that because he wrote a commentary on it. So those are the only biblical commentaries he has. But in his commentaries on Genesis and Exodus, he actually looks like someone like Theodore Matsu. SGM, very literal. When he reads Genesis, there are places where you would just assume he's going to kind of go wild with finding Christological types. And he doesn't. His commentary on Genesis is basically just a rien narration, an explanatory narration of the Genesis text. But in his poetry in his hymnody, that is not the way he reads the Bible at all. He doesn't he also that doesn't read it like somebody like like Origen, he has similar concepts to origin, like he will talk about the literal sense of Scripture and the spiritual sense of Scripture, he has an idea of kind of two levels of Scripture. He doesn't talk about that frequently. He I think he makes one allusion to it. And he has this general sense that what Scripture represents is not any kind of literal depiction of the the life of God, but a compassionate. I use this word which has a very different resonance in contemporary English, but you'll know what I mean, a compassionate condescension, on its part that God has kind of recognize, God recognizes that recognizes that if he presented himself to us as He is, we would sort of like have no way to understand it. So he presents himself essentially, metaphorically, so that we can understand it, or kind of didn't like it, you can think of it as like a parable, like the parables Jesus tells. It's like a story, so that we can get some grasp of what the truth of God is. And that's kind of how he thinks of the Bible. Is it as it is, on some level, a parable for the life of God? Now, in a contemporary context, that's immediately going to raise questions of like, Oh, are you saying that? You know, the Israelites didn't really cross the Red Sea? Or like, what does that do with history? And we can kind of think about that, but that's not really FM's concern. FM's not engaged in 20th century debates over whether the Bible was historical or not historical. The point for him is that the Bible represents

a kind of parabolic representation of the life of God, how that kind of manifests itself, literarily is it means you can you can play with the Bible, you can kind of connect things that we would never we've been kind of contemporary common sense Americans would never connect like you can, if you're reflecting on In Jesus baptism in the Jordan, you can do a complete search of the entire Bible. And remember that FM's doing this search in his mind because he probably has huge chunks of it memorized for every reference to water, and use those to innocence, unpack the meaning of Jesus baptism in the Jordan. So there's a real kind of, there's not a kind of sense of chronological development of Scripture, there's a sense that everything gets temporarily collapsed around whatever he is, whatever it is that he's talking about, he's talking about the crucifixion, he's going to do a complete search for every allusion to wood throughout the Bible can use that as a way to unpack the meaning of the crucifixion. So in that sense, it's it's not it's not literal. It's not literal. But it is very connected to the words of the text, right? Is very immersed in the details of the text. But the whole text is kind of the whole Bible is sort of sort of fair game. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know if that kind of gets it. You're looking for.

Charles Kim 1:01:17

Yeah, that was that's really helpful. I mean, you know, it's funny to like, and this is why I understand the frustration with those terms, literal and allegorical, because, you know, you can read origin doing the exact same thing. And for whatever reason, the one that's coming to me is kind of binding to go down, right? And

Jeffrey Wickes 1:01:35

the same idea. Yep.

Charles Kim 1:01:37

Yeah. So it's just like, anytime he basically has the Bible memorized, and he can go through and say, Okay, going down, going down, going down. And, you know, it's just, it's pretty incredible. So, but he's supposed to be what the one that's allegorical, but if there's someone who knows the letter of the text better, which, you know, literal letter, and you know, if there's someone who knows that letter better, I would be surprised, right?

Jeffrey Wickes 1:02:01

That's right. Yeah. Yeah, it you may think that the way origin are Efrem, you may think the way they're reading scripture is totally crazy. But you can't say they're not serious about the Bible. You can't they just sort of put all of us to shame with their their knowledge of the Bible.

Charles Kim 1:02:21

Yeah, well, and one of the things I mean, to go back to some of the like, you know, to tie in just my own sort of personal reflections on even our conversation today, but like, when I thought about the frustrations I had growing up in Southern Baptist evangelical context was, it felt like the Bible, like I knew that there was interpretation going on. But the Southern Baptist didn't like to talk about what that looked like, and what those principles were. And I did this program when I was in seminary, where I went with some Jewish rabbinical students to the Holy Land, and we would talk about how they understood Genesis or how they understood, you know, elements of the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, and, and they would, they knew their Talmud, they knew their scaffolding, they knew the interpretive tradition. And I was like, I know we have one of these in Christianity. I just don't know it very well.

Jeffrey Wickes 1:03:13

So yeah.

Charles Kim 1:03:15

Yeah. And so you know, so like, one of the reasons that I love, you know, that I wanted to come to SLU and keep doing this kind of stuff was like, Okay, we need to, like rebuild and be self conscious about what our edifices are for interpretation. And because I know they're there, you know, and, you know, I have I mean, I guess I could say, I have some of my questions about patriarchy on and on the first principles from origin, I, maybe I don't agree 100% with how he lays down his interpretation, but he knew that he was doing an interpretation. And then there's a consistency to it.

Jeffrey Wickes 1:03:48

Yeah. Even that process of recognizing, if you read a patristic exegesis, and you sort of say, like, I don't buy this, even that process of having to explain why forces you to articulate what you do by what it is that matters to you about exegesis, rather than just well, he's not saying what the Bible says, and I am, you know, it forces you to be articulate and conscious of what what you're doing when you read the Bible, right? Because you're not just simply unpacking it the only way it the only way it can be unpacked. Right, right? Yeah, you're making you're making choices, you're kind of pushing things to the side, you're emphasizing certain things, de emphasizing certain things, even if it's, you know, you're reading the New Testament through the lens of Romans, whatever it may be, you know, you're reading the Old Testament, through the lens of the New Testament, whatever it may be, you're making, making choices and yeah, we could all stand to be clear and humble about those choices. We're making them

Charles Kim 1:05:00

Thank you for listening to a history of Christian theology. As I said at the end of my extremely long intro, please do engage with us on Twitter and Facebook. You'll see some giveaways for some books from InterVarsity press from some authors that we'll be interviewing here in the coming weeks. So be looking out for those. Thanks for listening, and we'll talk to you in a couple of weeks.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai