Beeson podcast, Episode 432
Dr. Timothy Larsen
February 19, 2019

Announcer:          Welcome to the Beeson Podcast coming to you from Beeson Divinity School on the campus of Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. Now your host, Timothy George.

Timothy George:     Welcome to today's Beeson Podcast. Today I have the privilege of having a conversation with a friend of mine, Dr. Timothy Larsen. Dr. Larsen is a professor at Wheaton College. He holds the Carolyn and Fred McManus professorship in Christian thought at Wheaton. His intellectual interests are varied and wide. If he has a special area where he's really dug deeply, it may be the 19th century, but he can talk about any number of disciplines and from anthropology to literature to spirituality to hymnology. And so, we only have 30 minutes, but it's a joy to welcome Dr. Timothy Larsen to the Beeson Podcast. Thank you so much for this conversation.

Timothy Larsen:     I am honored to be here. It's wonderful to be with you, Timothy.

Timothy George:     Now let me begin by recalling the first time I ever heard about you, before I ever met you. I was in England and our mutual friend, Dr. David Bebbington, told me about you. He described you then as a young, brilliant historian. Well, you're still brilliant and you're pretty young still too. But he also said, and he is a serious Pentecostal Christian. And you have openly identified that way. So I wonder if you would say a little bit about yourself, your background, how you came to faith in Christ and what it has meant to you to be a Pentecostal.

Timothy Larsen:     Sure. With pleasure. My father in a very Evangelical way had a dramatic adult conversion experience when his life was just shipwrecked in lots of ways. And he came from a Norwegian Lutheran background and was led into a Pentecostal church where he met my mom. She's from Church of God, Cleveland, Tennessee, Alabama, Appalachian. By the power of the Holy Spirit my maternal grandmother picked up rattlesnakes without harm. She was a formidable woman, led people to Christ while in a trance holding a snake, it's one of the family stories that I have an oral history of that I put on tape recording before she died. So when I was 13 years old, I found my way to a charismatic church. And that's really where I began to appropriate my faith in a deeper way. I believed and I still believe that to be a part of what God is doing in the church is the most important thing you can do and send center your life around. And so that world of a charismatic church life and spirituality formed me deeply as an adolescent and sent me on my trajectory for all of life. I'm in a charismatic church now, which has a little bit of an association with the Assemblies of God, although you would need a court order to find that out, I think.

Timothy George:     So Pentecostalism is such a world explosive movement, isn't it?

Timothy Larsen:     Yes.

Timothy George:     As we all know from reading a sociology's of religion, most of the Christians in the world are touched in a powerful way by the Pentecostal movement. What do you make of that?

Timothy Larsen:     I think that, to put it negatively, to put it the other way around, the basic mistake that so many Christians made for 100 years, 150 years, 200 years, was to try to make Christianity explicable by making it less and less supernatural and more and more common sense. And either we have a message of a radical supernatural transformation of lives or it's not worth doing. People will fade away when you tell them it's all just common sense. Eventually they think, well, I can do common sense on my own. Why should I get up and get dressed on Sunday morning and you have you come and tell me it's all common sense.

Timothy Larsen:     So we need a message that says you can't fix the problems in your life, but there is a powerful, omnipotent being who created the world, who has become in Jesus Christ the Savior of the world. And he is more than sufficient. He can do exceedingly abundantly more than you can ask or imagine. And that message is the ringing note of the Pentecostal movement. And I think it's the ringing note of authentic Christianity and Pentecostalism has just taken certain distinctives in certain directions.

Timothy George:     I don't think you've ever been to Beeson Divinity School, but at Beeson we have a dome in our chapel and 16 figures from the Christian tradition. Our students call them the Sweet 16 from Athanasius and Perpetua in the early church, right through Toyohiko Kagawa in Japan in the 20th century. One of those is the leader of the Azusa Street Revival. Do you know that story?

Timothy Larsen:     Yeah, so William Seymour, I'm assuming.

Timothy George:     William Seymour, he's there with that famous line that in the blood of Jesus, [crosstalk 00:05:19].

Timothy Larsen:     Absolutely.

Timothy George:     So we feel that part of the Pentecostal tradition every time we look at Seymour and of course have entertained so many students from that tradition and they're just wonderful, godly people. I've sometimes asked if I'm a Pentecostal and I have to confess that I don't think I am. I mean the obvious signs that Pentecostals talk about, I cannot bear personal witness to them in a He did it kind of way, but I think that's probably just because I'm not as close to the Lord as the Pentecostals I know who do. So to find you now at Wheaton College, one of the leading scholars on the campus, one of the leading scholars in our country today openly declaring your Pentecostal faith is just a blessing to me.

Timothy Larsen:     I love the image of the Sweet 16 because we don't have to choose between these, these are all our brothers and sisters in Christ. They all have a charism that we can partake of. And so it's not Pentecostal and therefore not or against Anglican or against Baptist or against Presbyterian or against Methodist. There is something in all of the great spiritual leaders, in all the great Christian traditions that every Christian is better of if they can partake of that.

Timothy George:     Yes, that's the heart of our school. I think you've expressed it well. Well, let's go on and talk about some of your recent writings, which don't focus on Pentecostalism necessarily, but you might think about a connection between them. But let's begin with George MacDonald. George MacDonald was an amazing litterateur in Great Britain. Had great influence on numbers of people that would be well known to every one of our listeners, including folks like CS Lewis and Tolkien. And talk about George MacDonald. Who was he and why were you drawn to his story?

Timothy Larsen:     George MacDonald I think is most famous for being a pioneer of two new forms of literature. The first one is children's literature. He is in the generation where authors really got serious about writing for children. One of his good friends was Lewis Carroll. George MacDonald's own children actually read Alice in Wonderland in draft and approved him going on to kind of get published. There was the vetting committee and MacDonald had 11 children. His wife, with undiminished ardor said that that was the wrong side of a dozen. So she would have liked to have had 13 children, at least. And they read it. That's the other genre was a fantasy literature. Not really pioneers fantasy literature, two important books, Phantastes and Lilith. And it was a hard new genre for people because people were used to allegory and they kept on writing to him and saying, well what does this mean and what does that mean?

Timothy Larsen:     And he was like, it doesn't get decoded that way. I wanted to bring you into an alternative world. And that's partly why people like Tolkien and Lewis so revered MacDonald because then they created alternative worlds of their own. And MacDonald had taught them how to do that to create another world that has its own integrity, its own logic, its own mystery. But MacDonald was a deeply godly Christian man. He actually went to seminary and was ordained as a congregational minister. He decided that pastoring wasn't what his life's calling was, but it was writing. But he continued to be faithful by being a guest preacher. And by writing what he called his unspoken sermons, where he would publish sermons that he had thought out as kind of theological essays and he wrote multiple, just kind of Christian teaching books, such as the Miracles of our Lord.

Timothy George:     He's often thought of as a person who may be offers a counter voice to a figure like Knox Vaber who talks about the disenchantment that we all live with. The disenchantment thesis has become a part of our vocabulary. MacDonald seems to be standing over against that, at least about what he did. Was that conscious on his part?

Timothy Larsen:     Absolutely. He was defiant in the face of a kind of crass materialism. That was one way of thinking about what it meant to be modern. That all that there is is the physical. He has a line in one of his children's books about somebody who was becoming rather stupid and eventually would only believe in his own dinner, you know, if it wasn't that something very kind of physical and material and biological, it didn't exist. And so part of what he was doing by writing fairy tales and all of these mythical and magical creatures was saying there's another realm besides the realm that you are leaving in, in this material, quotidian sort of way. And that he wanted to then lead people on to confidence in the realm of the spirit.

Timothy George:     Yeah. And at the same time he was very controversial in some ways, often accused of universalism for example. Is that true?

Timothy Larsen:     It certainly is true. He's accused of it, and I think it's not, it's not wrong to say that he might have hoped towards universalism, but his was a very gritty kind of view. He believed that even if somebody was in Hell, God would not let them keep their sin. That the fire is the fire of a holy God. Our God is a consuming fire and he is still determined to have you purified and purged. Even if you've opted for hell, you are not going to be allowed to keep your sin. You were going to encounter a holy God. So, MacDonald's, you can see his, view as hopeful in a certain sense, but it's not sentimental.

Timothy George:     If you were to encourage someone to read MacDonald for the first time, where would they start?

Timothy Larsen:     I think, you know, people often find their way in a, with the fairy tales, the Light Princess, the Princess and the Goblin. Those are fun and accessible on multiple levels for people. Phantastes and Lilith are deeply strange books and so you have to kind of have a taste for the strange and again, these people that wrote to him, you have to content yourself with not always knowing what it means and some kind of didactic way. Those are the probably where I would start.

Timothy George:     And talk about incarnation, which seems to be a big motif or MacDonald, really for all these figures we've talked about Lewis, too, Tolkien. And incarnation is so central to the Christian understanding of who God is and what he's about in the world. Can MacDonald help us here in a world that is coming from a, usually a very low christology?

Timothy Larsen:     Yes, yes. In MacDonald there's a move towards any emphasis on the dock the incarnation and the second half of the 20th century. And MacDonald participate strongly in that. To have God break into the world as a human being. That's the tone for understanding our entire lives and condition. And so it's about giving meaning to the human experience, to being human, to be the world. All of that is dignified because the Son of God took on flesh and lived human life. And so it's about, again, it's another way of pushing back at materialism. You're not just somebody who has evolved and at chance halfbreed and kind of soup of physicality. And that's all the meaning there is to it. you are a human being and God himself has become a human being and it's dignified the human condition. There's a connection that's kind of fun. Which is that the Victorians really elevate the Feast of our Lord's Nativity Christmas. And there's a connection there.

Timothy Larsen:     They see that the doctrine of the incarnation is so important and I think there's a way in which then therefore Christmas becomes so important and we've never gone back from the Victorian Christmas. From their time onward. Christmas has been such a large festival in all of culture and the Western world. And in some ways I think there's a connection that the discovery of the importance of the doctrine of incarnation helped to accelerate the celebration of the feast that marks that.

Timothy George:     That's great. MacDonald was on one side of the disenchantment thesis, trying to re-enchant the world through these fabulous stories that he told, alternative worlds he offered us. You've also written about doubt a lot. The crisis of doubt. We associate that with the 19th century, the Victorian crisis of faith, Matthew Arnold. Why is doubt such an important theme for us to think about today? Now I'm going to ask you about your book where you deal with these various figures who fall into doubt and actually leave or deconvert from the faith and are drawn back.

Timothy Larsen:     Yeah. So doubt, I think, deeply misunderstood by so many people. Doubt always presumes a context of faith. To doubt something is to at least speak into a context in which is believed. So doubt is not the same thing as just unbelief. So, you know, we're here together in Denver today and you don't say, "I doubt that Denver's in California." You say Denver's not in California. So it's just a matter of not being true of unbelief, of being wrong, but to doubt something is to speak to faith. And so people latch onto doubt as if it means unbelief, when it actually means that faith is alive and being engaged and MacDonald grasped that. That there's an emotional engagement with doubt that can be a road to a mature, deeper faith.

Timothy George:     I talk about your book on doubt that came out a few years ago, I think it's called Crises of Doubt: Honest Faith in the 19th Century. And the particular figures you deal with there.

Timothy Larsen:     Yeah. So I was doing something very different for my PhD. I was working on Christians and politics and I would read about these figures. He would come into that story who became the leading figures in organized atheism and secularism and the 19th century, they were the main paid lecturers. They were off to the editors of the most important publications. They were literally, you know, named as the most significant leaders in the atheist movement or the secularist movement. And then sometimes you would just literally in a footnote, you would get late in life they came back to faith. And I would feel like that's interesting. Why are you not interested in that? The authors were kind of dismissive and apologetic. It was sometimes it would even be said, you know, in their kind of, you know, senile old age they came back to faith or something like that as if ... Pay no attention over here. Don't look that way. That doesn't matter.

Timothy Larsen:     And I thought, well this is interesting. And then I kept collecting them and it turned out that a significant percentage of the official named leaders of Organized Free Thought and secularism and atheism came back to faith. And nobody had told that story because they were so, they so assumed that the story had to be people losing their faith. That it becomes a self fulfilling thing. That all you want to do is tell those stories. And the other stories are by definition anomaly, but statistically that's not true. A lot more atheists leaders came to faith than Christian ministers lost their faith. Statistically the percentage is much, much higher. And that was the story I wanted to tell.

Timothy George:     One of the things that happened in the 19th century, maybe not related to doubt and faith so much, but it was a revival of faith in the form of the Oxford Movement, particularly in the Church of England. We think of figures like Pusey and of course Cardinal Newman who was Anglican, became Catholic and had a tremendous influence on that whole Oxford Movement. Now both at Wheaton where you teach and Beeson where I work, there seems to me to be a resurgence of interest in the things the Oxford Movement was concerned about. Maybe not strictly by the rubrics of the 19th century tractarians, but we have students who hunger for liturgy, the church year, vestments in worship, reading the church, following the church calendar. Do you see this sort of thing, which I find an encouragement by and large within evangelicalism today and maybe a little bit of the re-enchantment that will be going on. Is that related somehow to the Oxford Movement in the 19th century?

Timothy Larsen:     It is for sure. And I love talking about the 19th century. So prompt me again on that, but let me start with where you started, which is more contemporary phenomenon. And it's actually, I put it another way. The strings of evangelicalism also are our pressure points sometimes. And I see a couple of ways in which that happens that then leads on to this kind of desire for a liturgical faith. One of those is that evangelicalism often makes the quintessential Christian story and a dramatic adult conversion narrative. And sometimes when children are raised in the faith, they find it harder to appropriate their faith when the template is an experience that doesn't really fit their experience, that they've never, you know, gone off and become, you know, like the prodigal son, you know, and had this turning around and that kind of way.

Timothy Larsen:     And I think often a turn towards liturgical forms of Christianity speaks to a kind of continuity precept upon precept, line upon line, growing in faith that makes more sense to their own experiences growing up in a Christian home. And the other thing is evangelicalism is very good at taking the timeless Gospel and expressing it in contemporary cultural forms that people can relate to, but that can be overdone and it can become scary for people or it can have its own reaction against it. Particularly I think there's sometimes a way in which a lot of, even Sunday morning church life is kind of aimed at the 13 and 14 year olds. You know, we're going to make sure that this feels really culturally exciting to you. We're going to have the minister do a wrap and we're gonna, you know, and, and then when those people become 20 year olds, it's not aimed at them anymore and they know it. It's aimed at people younger than them.

Timothy Larsen:     And it feels a little frightening maybe that, that that church is so malleable to the fickle fashions of 14 year olds. And then the liturgy feels like here's something that has its own integrity, its own rhythm. It's not about you and your cultural moment. It's about you joining in something that flows on over the centuries. And that can be very attractive when you're kind of disenchanted with this, over commitment to being relevant and in the cultural moment.

Timothy George:     I don't really know how to ask this question, but we started talking about Pentecostalism. Now we're talking about the Oxford Movement and then liturgical renewal you all that's going on within evangelicalism. You might think of this as polar opposites, but is a way in which these two connect?

Timothy Larsen:     Yes, I believe deeply. For one, they both have a strong conviction that the physical can be a vehicle for the supernatural and the spiritual. So Pentecostals believe that something as simple as laying on of hands can be a dramatic way in which the Holy Spirit imports something that's powerful and supernatural. And so the sacramentalism of the Oxford Movement makes perfect sense, that this might be water. Well, water is just water, hands or just hands. Bread, wine, oil. These simple, ordinary things can be physical means in which dramatic spiritual realities are imparted. And yeah, I think there's a way in which they come together with that understanding.

Timothy Larsen:     It's not an accident that the Catholic church and Anglo Catholics were more open to contemporary miracles then were a lot of other traditions. That they were willing to tell us. I read for example, I know we're jumping around, but let's do it. You know, Catherine of Sienna and I think what a Pentecostal. Yeah. She prophesies, she talks about the blood of Christ a lot. She's a woman in ministry. All these things are part of my tradition. And I, you know, I look at her and said, yeah, I know exactly where you're coming from. Your spirituality makes complete sense to me. And so yeah, there are ways in which traditions have, surprising to some people, a overlaps and points of affinity.

Timothy George:     We're almost out of time, but I must ask you about the conference we both participated in at Wheaton last year called Balm in Gilead had a theological dialogue with Marilyn Robinson. Now, Marilyn Robinson was neither a Pentecostal, isn't either a Pentecostal nor an Anglican, as far as I know. She grew up in Presbyterian tradition and has become a Congregationalist. You were the person who kind of brought this conference together, you gave the first paper on Marilyn Robinson and it was a brilliant paper. I wonder if in just a few minutes you could recap what you were trying to say to us on that occasion and then why is Marilyn Robinson an important conversation partner?

Timothy Larsen:     Certainly, I know you did a great paper at that conference as well, which will also be part of the book that we hope will come out next year. So it's like we do, we just were talking about with the Oxford Movement and Pentecostalism, what I tried to do in my paper was show there's a lot more in common between Marilyn Robinson's United Church of Christ tradition and her main line context at Wheaton College and it's explicitly evangelical context. And I showed that in a few ways. One way was going back to the common roots and revivalist evangelical abolitionism, deeply radical movement committed often to women's rights. Wheaton College was founded as one of the first colleges in the country to admit women also graduated the first African American in Illinois. So you have this social justice, you have a commitment to learning and book knowledge and Liberal Arts, and you have a commitment of revival.

Timothy Larsen:     And you have a commitment to the Gospel in an evangelical form. And the affinities were so strong that Marilyn Robinson's home church today in Iowa City was actually had its inaugural sermon preached by Jonathan Blanchard who founded Wheaton College. So they're there together in the same movement in that founding generation, which is there as the backstory in the Gilead novels or with a John Ames's, his grandfather, who's this fiery abolitionist, much like Jonathan Blanchard. And then I tried to pull it up into John Ames, his own present in the 1950s and I looked at the Christian century and Christianity today to show that there is this group of Orthodox, heart warmed Christians in both mainline and other Protestant dominations who were actually very similar in lots of ways. And I showed that John Ames has a lot more in common with the Wheaton College and Christianity today and Billy Graham and that world of the 1950s than some of the readers of the novels would imagine or assume.

Timothy George:     My guest today on the Beeson Podcast is Dr. Timothy Larsen. He has the Carolyn and Fred McManus, professor of Christian thought at Wheaton College, a wonderful scholar, a true believer. Thank you so much for this conversation, Tim.

Timothy Larsen:     Thank you.

Announcer:          You've been listening to the Beeson Podcast with host Timothy George. You can subscribe to the Beeson Podcast at our website, beesondivinity.com. Beeson Divinity School is an interdenominational, evangelical divinity school training men and women in the service of Jesus Christ. We pray that this podcast will aid and encourage your word, and we hope you will listen to each upcoming edition of the Beeson Podcast.