Beeson podcast, Episode 475 Dr. Gerald McDermott Dec. 17, 2019 Announcer: Welcome to the Beeson podcast coming to you from Beeson Divinity School on the campus of Samford University. Now, your hosts, Doug Sweeney and Kristen Padilla. Doug Sweeney: Welcome to the Beeson podcast. I'm Doug Sweeney here with my cohost Kristin Padilla. Excited about today's conversation with one of our colleagues, Dr. Gerald McDermott. This episode is airing the week before Christmas when we remember and celebrate God's most gracious act of love toward us in sending his son into the world to assume our humanity so that he might reconcile us to himself. We pray that you are finding time to prepare your hearts for Christmas and that you're finding rest and peace in him. Kristen, would you please introduce today's guest? Kristen Padilla: Yes, a warm welcome to all of you on this cold December day. Today in our studio is our own Dr. Gerald McDermott, Anglican chair of divinity and director of the Institute of Anglican Studies at Beeson. Dr. McDermott has been a guest on the podcast several times in the past five years since coming on faculty. As director of the Institute of Anglican Studies, he has grown the reach of the institute through annual conferences, publishing conference books, networking with Anglicans all over the world, bringing them to our school, hosting a podcast and so much more. Jerry is probably one of the hardest working colleagues here at Beeson and he has been a friend to so many of us, including myself, and we are glad to have you on today's show to talk about one of your newest books, Everyday Glory. So welcome, Jerry. Dr. McDermott: Well, thank you, Kristen and Doug. You're both very kind and I appreciate being on the podcast. Kristen Padilla: For some who are regular listeners, they may know you from those past episodes, but for those who are new to this show, who is Gerald McDermott? Dr. McDermott: Well, I'm the husband of Jean. I'm the father of three grown sons, grandfather of 10 grandchildren. I am the Anglican chair of divinity here at Beeson, which I have greatly enjoyed. I like to write books about Jonathan Edwards, and this is one. I like to write books about theology of world religions and Israel and a few other subjects. So I think that's enough for now. Doug Sweeney: Jerry, we've got you on today to talk about one of your newest books, came out just this past year, Everyday Glory: The Revelation of God in All of Reality. I have read it and I love it, but I'm not sure many of the people in our audience have yet read it. Would you just introduce it to them? What is this book about and why do you think it's important? Dr. McDermott: Yeah, I tell people, this is really a book about Jonathan Edwards' typological view of reality. He famously said, "All the world is full of types." Now, what's a type? A type is a God-placed symbol in scripture or outside of scripture, out in the world, pointing to his Trinitarian self. And Edwards was convinced, as I just said, that all the world is full of types, and so this is about God's other book of revelation. Theologians in previous generations used to talk about God's two books, the book of scripture and the book of creation. And we Protestants have not been very good on the book of creation, at least the last century or so. And so Edwards kept a notebook all throughout his career from his teenage days until his premature death at the very, very young age of 54 filled with notes about types that he saw primarily out there in nature pointing to the Trinitarian God. And so my book is an attempt to sort of flesh out how Edwards would have elaborated on these types, which he did plan to do if he were living in the 21st century. Kristen Padilla: Jerry, you begin your book with a chapter on recovering a lost vision of God's glory in creation, and you talk about how the glory of the Lord is right before our eyes, but we often miss it. What is the reason or reasons for this and how do you propose we see what is right before our eyes? Dr. McDermott: Well, I think we often miss it, number one because of unbelief. We're like the father in the gospels who said, "Lord, I believe but heal my unbelief," and we all have a mixture of belief and unbelief. There's so much more of God that we could see if God would take the relative blinders off our eyes. I think also, as I mentioned before, we Protestants, well, Catholics too, have been very influenced by Karl Barth. Now, Karl Barth, probably the most influential theologian of the 20th century, did help particularly intellectual Christians work their way through the enlightenment because the enlightenment did a lot of damage to Christian theology and the christian church, and Barth really did some good things helping Christians think their way through past the enlightenment, through the enlightenment. But Barth also rejected all natural revelation, which was a rejection of the great tradition. The great tradition in and Christian theology, Catholic and Protestant, all the way up until the mid 20th century, firmly believed that God revealed himself through nature. Barth said no. Dr. McDermott: Now, Barth was in the context of rejecting Nazi-ism and fighting boldly against Nazi-ism and we can admire him for that and we understand the context, but at the same time, he threw the baby out with the bathwater. So he rejected all natural theology, which also was ... There was a great tradition of Protestant natural theology up until the mid 20th century. So it's partly because of Barth that many of us on the Protestant side of things have lost sight of this. And so how do we get it back? Well, I think we have to take more seriously what scripture says, and which I think Barth misinterpreted. So for instance, Psalm 19, "The heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament proclaims his handiwork," and Romans 1, "God's invisible attributes are known and seen through the things that he has made." And Paul's research specifically referring there to what we would call nature, creation. Doug Sweeney: Jerry, glory is one of those bible words that lots of us use, but probably some of us would have a hard time defining. So when you use glory and talk about everyday glory and then try to get us to think better about the beauty of the Lord as we experience it in the world, what do you mean by that? How should we understand words like glory and beauty theologically? Dr. McDermott: You know as one of the world's leading authorities on Jonathan Edwards, that for Edwards, glory in the bible is the radiance, the brightness, the shining of light so bright and no man can see and remain alive. And yet God does diffuse his glory. He blunts it, as it were. He deflects part of it so that we can still get glimpses of his glory without dying and without being blinded. And he also shares his glory with much of the creation and puts his glory in much of the creation. Now, for Edwards, there's a relationship between God's glory and God's beauty. And sometimes he uses the two words, I think, synonymously. Dr. McDermott: Now, beauty for Edwards was ... Well, the sum and substance and the model for all beauty are the inter-Trinitarian relations, so the perfect infinite love that is shared among the three persons of the Trinity, the self-giving love of each of the three to the other two. Edwards says this is true beauty, this inter-Trinitarian love. This is the glory of God. This is the shining, the brilliant radiance that no man can see and live, but that God also filled his son with and continues to fill his son with. And all the beauty we see in creation is simply a reflection, a refraction of that divine brilliance. Dr. McDermott: And he wonderfully says a few times in his Corpus that created things like trees and stars and planets reflect that beauty that comes from the self-giving nature of the Trinity. Each person of the Trinity perfectly obeys the goal and vision as it were, of the father and of the Holy Trinity. So too, the stars and the planets perfectly obey what we call the laws of nature, which means they're God's laws, perfectly obey God's laws. The birds, gravity or water, obeying gravity is a type to us of perfect obedience to God in his laws. All of nature, the animals and the stars and the streams, they all say yes to God. We love you. We obey you perfectly. And now God calls on us intelligent creatures to match that obedience, which is ultimate beauty. Kristen Padilla: Going back to the answer that you gave to my question, you mentioned natural theology, and perhaps you can define that term a bit more for those listening who may not know what you mean by that, and then how that works out both perhaps in apologetics on the one hand or for believers on the other who are looking at nature through the eyes of faith, if you could tease that out a bit. Dr. McDermott: Yeah. Well, first of all, let me go back to Barth and his rejection of natural theology. He was looking at the natural theology of the deists who assumed that nature could lead you to God and you don't need the revelation that comes from scripture. And of course that was debased in Nazi theology, which was a kind of natural theology, of blood and soil as the Nazis explicitly taught, and this was a theology because the Nazis taught a deity. Of course it was a false deity. Dr. McDermott: But historically, the great tradition has always had a natural theology that is God teaching us through nature, but always subordinated to God's revelation in scripture. So scripture has always been seen by the great tradition as the proper prism through which or by which we interpret nature, and if we use scripture as our teacher, we can see things in nature that are glorious and will lead us to the glory of God. Doug Sweeney: Dr. McDermott, I'm just looking at the table of contents of your book here, and we don't have time to talk about every chapter in the book. There are 11 chapters, but you're asking your audience, your readers to recognize, appreciate, and even do some reflecting of and reflecting on God's glory in many different aspects of our everyday life. Chapter one, you're sort of setting out this lost vision of Jonathan Edwards' typological view of the world which you share. You talk about the bible and its types and anti-types in chapter two, and then you work us through the book of nature in many different ways. Chapter three is on God's glory as seen in nature. Chapter four, God's glory is seen in science. Chapter five, law, chapter six, history, chapter seven, animals, chapter eight, sex, chapter nine, sports, chapter 10, world religions and then a concluding chapter. Doug Sweeney: That's such an array of contexts in which people are able to see the glory of God. Can we just take a couple of these chapters and get you talking about them for us? I'm thinking about chapters three and four and seven. Nature, science and animals. My own son is becoming a natural scientist and is also a Christian believer and is thinking a lot these days about what we can know about God from his work in biology and Marine biology, how we see the glory of God in the sea creatures. What do you want us to think about when it comes to science and animals? Are we really supposed to be able to learn things about God by studying science, studying animals, and in what ways do we see God's beauty and God's glory reflected in the world of science and even the world of animals? Dr. McDermott: You mentioned three chapters, Doug, and I'll go through those three chapters. So first of all, the chapter on nature. Jonathan Edwards said, "Look at Jesus and look at Paul. They were constantly pointing to nature and what nature tells us about God." Jesus in John 12 says, "Unless a grain of wheat falls and dies, it remains alone, but if it dies, it bears much fruit." Paul in first Corinthians 15 gets exasperated when he gets these questions about the resurrection of the body and he says, "You fool." I mean, he actually says that. "You fool. Don't you realize that what you sow does not come to life unless it dies? Of course we're going to have a different body in the resurrection." So both Jesus and Paul are pointing to nature saying, "Look at what nature teaches us about God and God's waves." Jesus again. I mean, think of Sermon on the Mount. He says, in trying to teach how God provides for us, he says, "Look at the lilies of the field and how God provides for them. Learn from nature." Dr. McDermott: Then the chapter on science, I'll just give you one example. Physicists the last 50 years have talked about the fine tuning of the laws of nature and the constants in physics, the constants, C-O-N-S-T-A-N-T-S, for our listeners, that had to be so precise at the creation of the world in order for human life to make possible human life. So for example, carbon resonance. Residence means the level of energy in the carbon molecule, which is necessary for any life. It's the heart of all biological life, carbon. And what these physicists have found is if that resonance, that level of energy was a fraction of 1% higher, the creative world would not have been able to sustain life. If it had been a fraction of 1% lower, this world would not have been able to sustain life. So you get an agnostic physicist like the British Sir Fred Hoyle, very famous, who reviewed all this evidence of fine tuning of the elements of the universe that went into the creation and he says, "It looks like a put up job." Dr. McDermott: Now, the third chapter you mentioned is animals. And I tell the story in there about Luther, Martin Luther, and probably everyone in our listening audience knows Martin Luther. He had a puppy. He loved this puppy. And in his table talk, he taught his students who wrote the notes of his conversations, told about this one time when Luther held a piece of meat out for his little puppy. And he said, "Look at his mouth, how he keeps it open and look at his eyes. He will not take his eyes off that meat and put it on anything no matter what else is going on in the room." He says, "Oh, I wish I could pray like my puppy so that I had no other thought, no other wish, no other hope except God." So we should pray like our dogs. What we can learn from animals. Kristen Padilla: Let's go to one more chapter. In chapter 10, you discuss world religions as being similar and yet so different. And you've also contributed recently a chapter to another book, a Four Views book by Zondervan called Do Christians, Muslims and Jews Worship the Same God. So feel free to bring in your chapter to that book as well to help us think through the following. What do the major world religions have in common and what makes them different? And then how is God at work in planting these types that you talk about or seeds about himself in these other world religions? Dr. McDermott: Well, you asked two very big questions there, Kristen, it would take about three hours to answer them sufficiently, or actually about three years and four courses. But first of all, what do the world religions have in common? They all reject what's rightly been called scientism, not science, but the philosophy of some devotees of science that science can not only answer our questions about the what of the world, but also the why. And most thinking people realize that is foolish. And all the world religions agree that that's foolish and they all agree there's something more than atoms and molecules that explain the atoms and molecules and sustain the atoms of molecules that science deals with. Dr. McDermott: Also, all the world religions, as CS Lewis famously showed in his magnificent book many years ago, The Abolition of Man at the back, a little section called the Tao, now in the modern translation, the Dao, that all the world religions reject what we would call moral relativism, that they all accept basically the principles of the 10 commandments. All the world religions too. They agree on the horizontal and even some of the vertical but not whether or not ... Now here we get into how they're different. Dr. McDermott: The world religions don't agree on whether or not there is even a God. There are major world religions like Teravata Buddhism and philosophical Taoism and philosophical Hinduism that you see in [inaudible] that are atheistic, that don't believe in a personal God. Probably a lot of our listeners don't realize that the Buddha himself was for all practical purposes an atheist. He always held it as a question that cannot be answered whether or not there is a personal God. So the world religions is different on the most basic thing. Is there a God? They also differ on even those who say there is a personal God on what that person will God is like and how we reach that God. So there are major differences there. Dr. McDermott: Well, let's take the religion that is most at the forefront, the non-Christian religion that is most of the forefront of the world's attention, and that is Islam. Allah, the God of Islam, who I argue in this book, Do Christians, Muslims and Jews Worship the Same God, I argue is not the same as the father of Jesus Christ, and Allah, the Quran, not the word Allah because Arab Christians use the word Allah for the father of Jesus Christ when they speak Arabic, because that is the Arabic word for God. But the Allah of the Quran is not the same as the father of Jesus Christ. The Allah of mainstream Islam is not the father of Jesus Christ. Dr. McDermott: So for Muslims, Allah is holy. And there we agree. The Hebrew, kadosh, which we translate holy means separate and apart. It's totally apart from anything in the creation. We Christians agree. But the Muslim Allah is also so distant, so transcendent, that there's no relationship whatsoever between him and us. So for example, the word father is never used for Allah in the Quran, never. And mainstream Muslim theologians reject the term father for Allah because it suggests too much that is human and Allah is utterly transcendent, utterly removed from anything human. Dr. McDermott: But here's a type. The fact that God is holy and God has given us morality. I mean, you can find in the Quran really all the 10 commandments, not with that term, but the same concepts, the same commandments. So there are some types, and it's interesting. There's a revival going on all over the world now in Islam of Muslims who are looking for something more than Allah because they realize, millions of them, that this religion in which they've been raised might not have what they want and what they need and what they sense. We have radical Islam to thank for that. That's one good thing about radical Islam. It's shown many of the evils in even some of the traditional concepts of God. Dr. McDermott: So many people are following the path that Lamin Sanneh took. Now, Lamin Sanneh just recently died. He was a wonderful, wonderful historian and theologian from The Gambia in West Africa. He grew up the son of a Muslim shake, and it was from the Quran that he was led to Jesus because Jesus is the most developed character in the Quran. And Jonathan Edwards would say, "That's an example of God putting types within the religion of Islam." And he came to love this Jesus in the Quran. And so he knew that Christians believed in Jesus and Christian had different ideas about Jesus. Dr. McDermott: So he asked a Catholic priest in The Gambia if he would tell him more about Jesus. The Catholic priest said no, because of the agreement the Catholic church has with the government not to make disciples or else they'll be kicked out. So then he went to an Anglican priest and the Anglican priest led him to a Christian view of Jesus and accepted him into the church. And then he went to London, he got one or two PhDs in England and became one of the great founders of this giant new discipline in the history of Christianity called World Christianity. And he also became probably the foremost authority on the history of Islam in Africa through primarily the Sufis, who were the great evangelists of Islam to Africa. So Jonathan Edwards would say Lamin Sanneh is a perfect example of how God plants his type, his types of himself, even within world religions that radically disagree with the faith of Christians. But God uses those types to lead people within those religions to himself. Doug Sweeney: This is such a wonderful book, Dr. McDermott, and I hope all our listeners will read it. It is so very edifying. And your mention of Jonathan Edwards again here in the latter part of the interview raises a concluding question for me. You and I have spent much of our lives studying this genius pastor and theologian. We found him to be a very captivating, inspiring, helpful theological thinker. But I'm sure there are lots of people listening to us now who've never read Jonathan Edwards at all and are wondering what the big deal is. Can we get you in conclusion, just to kind of stand back from the details of the chapters of the book and reflect a little bit on the person who inspired the writing of this book more than any other theologian in the history of Christianity has inspired the writing of this book, how has he helped you look at God's relationship to the world differently? And how has Jonathan Edwards and maybe his view of beauty in particular shaped your own spiritual life? Dr. McDermott: Well, Doug, you know that Edwards is the paramount theologian of beauty. No one else in the history of Christian thought has made beauty so central to his vision of God as Jonathan Edwards. Now, Augustan is arrival and so is Balthazar, the Swiss Catholic theologian of the 20th century, but even they did not make beauty so central to their vision of God as Jonathan Edwards. And I think at the end of the day, this is what has drawn me to Edwards so much is his beautiful vision of God, which means his vision of God and beauty. Dr. McDermott: I did an article for Kristen a few years ago when I first came to Beeson that Kristen commissioned and I talked in there about how for Edwards, we are not driven by duty but we're drawn by beauty in our pursuit of God. God does not compel. God lures by his alluring beauty. And I think that's the thing that has transformed my own walk with the Lord. And I remember back when I first got a little tiny glimpse of this, 35, maybe more years ago, and I remember how it changed my view of God and I've never been the same since. Doug Sweeney: Well, thanks be to this beautiful, glorious God. You have been listening to Dr. Gerald McDermott, the Anglican chair of divinity and director of the Institute of Anglican Studies here at Beeson Divinity School. He is a wonderful friend of mine, a great friend of our divinity school. He's written a beautiful book Everyday Glory: The Revelation of God in All of Reality. It's the kind of book any person can read. It's not written just for academic specialists, and Kristen and I are here to commend it highly to all of you. Thanks very much for tuning in. Goodbye for now. Kristen Padilla: You've been listening to the Beeson Podcast. Our theme music is written and performed by Advent Birmingham of the Cathedral Church of the Advent in Birmingham, Alabama. Our engineer is Rob Willis. Our announcer is Mike Pasquerilla. Our cohosts are Doug Sweeney and myself, Kristen Padilla. Please subscribe to the Beeson podcast at beesondivinity.com/podcast or on iTunes.