https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=eXlVUZeZKVo
So hello everybody, I would like to introduce you to Alistair Roberts. Alistair, some of you might have seen him. He did a review of my brother Matthew’s book and I’ve been kind of, he’s been kind of floating around the same circles as I, you know, because he talks about symbolism. He has a blog and a podcast called Alistair’s Adversaria. He works for the Theopolis Institute in a relationship with James V. Jordan and Peter Leithart. And these are all, I would say, a group of Protestant thinkers that are trying to think symbolically. And so there’s some interesting things happening in those circles. I was right away when I started doing public speaking, someone kind of plugged me into James V. Jordan’s book Through New Eyes, which I, which I read a large part of. And I, and I thought it was very interesting because it really did kind of coincide with some of the ideas that I had, that Matthew had, and that we were discovering also in the Church Fathers. And so I’m really looking forward to talk to him about his own symbolic discovery, symbolic view, and also the resemblances and differences between the way that, that I approach things and also the way that Orthodox approach things. This is Jonathan Peugeot. Welcome to the symbolic world. So Alastair, maybe you can give a little introduction to yourself, kind of how you came into this world of symbolism and this way of interpreting the Bible. And then we’ll go from there. Well, I was raised in the Republic of Ireland. My father is a pastor and he had a tremendous library, huge library, over 10,000 books at one point. And I was raised in the Republic of Ireland. I always was interested in theology but I started out on the direction of maths and philosophy at university and then found myself reading theology on the way to University on the Bus. And it just caught my attention. It was something that I was passionate about. And at the time, I was really having a bit of a spiritual awakening. And so at that time I got into theology and it, about a year or two after that, into theology and about a year or two after that I started looking through my dad’s shelves, came across a book called Through New Eyes which you’ve already mentioned by James B Jordan, picked it up and leafed through it for a while and just thought this is weird and put it back and then a while later I picked it up again and read it and my whole way of reading the Bible changed. I think the main thing that excited me about the book is its use of symbolism, its use of typology and these other figural ways of approaching the text to show that the biblical narrative really contains a lot of theological import and content and I’ve not really found my way out of that rabbit hole yet. I’ve been looking into understanding the theology of biblical narrative in a lot more detail, reading through Old Testament texts, getting into the Gospels and what I’ve been trying to do is communicate this in a way that is accessible to people and in a way that gets people excited about this too. So my PhD was on the relationship with between baptism and the Red Sea crossing, between liturgy and typology and since then I’ve written a book on echoes of Exodus, exploring the theme of Exodus as it plays out throughout the Bible. I particularly focused upon narrative structures and patterns so it’s related to symbolism but maybe more a matter of typology. Yeah well I think to me the crux of symbolism in Scripture at least the way that I approach it and my brother a little bit less because he tends to he wanted especially in his first book to stay in the Old Testament and really use the Old Testament and show its coherence and its structure whereas myself I tend to always use Christ as the let’s say the fulcrum and always in trying to show how everything kind of points towards him and so he’s he’s my guide through the Old Testament and it doesn’t mean that there isn’t a variety of symbolism and a variety of elements pointing to different things but I always kind of use Christ as my let’s say guide as I’m reading the Old Testament. One of the things that I find interesting is that I think we have seen we have seen in let’s say the 19th century and the early 20th century we have seen Protestants discover patterns narrative patterns in Scripture but for some reason this was used almost in a subversive manner you know in the very very liberal Protestant world and this idea of demythologizing the text where they would see the patterns and then they would use the patterns to say see how this is you know like we need to get rid of this like we because actually because it has a pattern you know it’s pointing away from the historical thing where it’s pointing away from from the you know from what actually happened that type of thinking whereas what I’m excited to see in your in your work and what James B. Jordan is doing is no it’s rather it’s diving into the patterns in order to see how precious and beautiful and powerful it is you know and and how it is helping us understand the New Testament as well. I think one of the influences that has been very significant in the development of typology is a renewed attention to the literary character of the biblical narratives that these aren’t just blow-by-blow accounts of just events there’s a presentation of the events in a very structured and careful way to help you recognize symmetries connections themes that connect things together and the way that these things resonate with past events and that sort of influence has come from a number of different sources whether the work of people like Richard Hayes or his work on echoes of scripture in the in the letters of Paul and echoes of scripture in the Gospels more recently or people like Robert Alter the art of biblical literature and other Jewish sources where there has been this attentiveness to the biblical text and the way that stories are told and I think one of the ways in which this has really hit the ground has been in contexts where people have been trying to develop an understanding of the authority of biblical narrative and realizing that the way that we read biblical narrative is very thin that there’s just not much to it and so people trying to get into the depth of biblical narrative say why has God given us this in the first place and then when you start to notice the patterns you begin to realize well maybe there’s a reason for these patterns and those patterns are the breadcrumbs that lead you to greater theological insights I believe and so following those literary patterns through to a deeper theological reading of the text recognizing the unity of the text and as you point out that ultimately all of this leads to Christ it’s in that sense a figural reading becomes a transfigural reading and I’ve likened it to walking a path where at many points you can only see a few steps ahead or you might be walking through woods and you can’t see long into the distance but occasionally through the leaf cover you can spy this distant mountain and that great peak is the point that you’re working towards but much of the time you can’t see it you walk through rocky terrain following the path and then finally you ascend this great mountain and then from the vantage point at the top everything unfolds as a unified itinerary and from that perspective I think our understanding of Christ as that which is the vantage point from which the whole text opens up I think that has been a very important I suppose it’s the destination of a true literary reading of the text yeah so the literary reading helps us to follow the path itself not just to jump straight to the mountaintop and miss the significance of the path right exactly but actually to hold those things together so what I’ve seen in your work and in Jordan’s work you know and even in letharge work is I really see some insights is some some powerful insights sometimes some things that I hadn’t thought about some parallels that I haven’t even seen or that it seems like no one has seen before that are that are being brought about and shown in these different lines and threads and and so I’ve gathered some insight from even your work or James Jordan’s work one of the questions I have though is you know you can do it from a literary standpoint where you see the the Bible and you look at how all these literary patterns work their way and kind of lead up towards Christ as the culmination of the of the story you could say one of the contentions that I’ve had and that my brother material has also had is that this pattern that you see that leads to Christ is not only a literary pattern that leads to Christ but it also ultimately the pattern by which we actually encounter reality that it is it is showing us the manner in which reality unfolds its reality itself unfolds and so the the by the glasses that you get from training in Scripture are actually the best glasses to have to look at the world around you and to notice the patterns that are appearing in the world and so I don’t know if that’s something that that you or some of your group have also talked about or worked on I’d very much agree with that that the patterns that we’re reading are not mere literary patterns they are literary patterns but when we see that sort of analogy between different levels of reality the ways in which characters are likened to each other or we see themes and motifs playing out again and something about reality itself and I think the key aspect of reality that we’re being exposed to is the work of the Holy Spirit the Holy Spirit is that which unifies the medium of time and the Holy Spirit bears things along through time and connects things together in a unified work and so for instance if we’re reading the creation account of Genesis 1 it’s told in a poetic form but the poetry is fitting to the reality because the world is poetic the world has these symbolic and typological structures as part of it and so poetry helps us to see the ways that different parts of reality resonate with each other how they’re not detached and just objects within space and time but there is this unity of the dance of reality that God has established and the Holy Spirit’s orchestration of reality the orchestration of time so time is not just one thing after another but is a unified movement and there is a musical character to it I’ve often returned to that metaphor of music to understand the way time when we think about the exploration of time music is perhaps the richest and and the strongest purchase that we can have upon time conceptually music is something that can connect different times together in very powerful and immediate ways so it’s not just clock time the succession of instance that can divide two events but rather two events can be brought together in a very powerful way through musical connections and there are ways in which times can be charged by music even silences are not absent of places of absence and none presence they can be places of the deepest and most pregnant presence when there is reality surrounding them and framing them and in the same way and think in Scripture we’re seeing out these patterns playing out through time in a musical way that ultimately lead to this great crescendo and then that works out in the aftermath in the life of the church one of the things that it has opened up for me as well is that discovering that and understanding the let’s say understanding how the patterns lay themselves out how narrative patterns lay themselves out and then also how they culminate in Christ what had it it’s a one of the things that is freed from is that using my anchor like keeping hold on my anchor which is Christ I feel like I’m less threatened by other stories as well you know because one of the one of the attacks that have launched on Christians you know for 200 300 years has been how similar the story of Christ is to you know picking out stories from other mythologies and showing how this aspect of Christ story resembles this one and this you know and and so to me that has acts now it’s it’s like yeah bring it on you know this is great I don’t have a problem with any of this I actually think that it is wonderful the thing they don’t realize is how actually Christ unites all these stories together and one of the reasons why you can see aspects of of Christ in different gods and different different mythological structure is that actually they’re all jammed into this one mass this one story and this one character that that is you know a king and and and an outcast and you know and he’s an agriculturalist but he’s also a shepherd and he’s he has all these he’s pulled all these these strings of reality it’s kind of brought them into one character and that idea of Christ as as Lewis talked about it as true myth I think that’s part of Christ redemption that he can take up all the stories and bring them to their full and complete resolution in himself and if we just had Christ as one particular type of story that didn’t really have the ability to comprehend the full variety and variegation of human story I think he wouldn’t be the true archetype that he is I think Christ as the word is the one who can take up all the words and take them into himself one of the questions that I had is is how do you your group how do you and your group how do you relate to the Church Fathers because I one of the things that I’ve been trying to do is to try to open up for people once again the typology which you find in you know I have my main characters which I’m always pushing the same the same the same writers and Ephraim saying I st. Gregory of Nyssa and St. Maximus but there’s also you know the early mystic agis of the church there are different early mystic agis that do that that I could also point you so how how has your exploration been affected or not by by those types of readings I think the Church Fathers are incredibly important in what they emphasize is the vantage point from which the church reads the scriptures so they stress as I think Reverend Charles put it the dominical warrant to read the Old Testament in the light of Christ so Christ has called us to see him in all the scriptures and the Church Fathers recognizing and taking that authority have gone throughout the Old Testament and seen Christ within its stories I think the Protestant concern has generally been the concern that you can make the text into whatever you want that arguing for the Church Fathers I don’t think that’s what they’re doing it’s not just taking an allegorical approach as such to the text it’s taking the biblical warrant given by Christ to the text and seeing him where he has told us that he has to be seen the problem however is how can you be sure that you’re seeing Christ in the text itself and not just projecting projecting Christ into the text and so the Reformation was very much a return to the literary the literal or literary sense of the text actually getting into the order of the word the grammatical sense the historical sense and then trying to work from that ideally to something beyond that the figural the allegorical sense and then to the other senses that medieval and patristic writers have highlighted I think the danger is that for many people after the Reformation the whole quest became stymied in the literal sense they never actually went beyond that and one of the things that we’re trying to do I think within the circles I’m operating in is to recover something of the Christological and allegorical and typological reading that the Church Fathers exemplify within the framework of a disciplined grammatical historical approach to the text so we’re reading the text itself in a literary way paying attention to the phrases that are used the details that are put in the literary structures and then from that seeing that that elicits the sort of reading that the Fathers were pointing us to now I think the Fathers were often a lot more sophisticated than we give them credit and they recognize the way that the literal sense naturally produces that sort of typological or allegorical reading and the allegorical reading was not just projected onto the text. So for instance in my work on the Red Sea Crossing and Christian baptism I was constantly thinking about some of the ways the early Church Fathers were using Old Testament texts to illumine the practice of baptism and they were recognizing what the Apostles themselves recognized that there is an analogy between the Red Sea Crossing and Christian baptism and they were exploring that in all sorts of ways often with a more retrospective force than the prospective force that Paul uses for instance in 1 Corinthians 10. So Paul very much focuses upon the baptism of the Red Sea Crossing as that which leads into the wilderness experience whereas for the Church Fathers the tendency tended to be to look back to the deliverance from Egypt and that’s what the Red Sea Crossing marks. The Pharaoh of Satan has been drowned within the deep and the demons and the sins that are pursuing us and all of this is enacted within liturgy helps us not just to see this story as something that is over against us as this just a narrative on a page but as something that we’re called to inhabit as the people of God and called to enter in particularly through the practice of baptism and the supper and that way of reading the text which is connected to the practice of liturgy and the Church’s life I think is something that we’re trying to recover but within the context of the discipline of grammatical historical exegesis. I think it’s interesting I mean I think that there’s definitely some fruit there in what you’re saying and in a certain manner that’s what I’m doing and in the sense that I’m explaining symbolism and but I think that the fact that we’re explaining symbolism is a actually a sign of a disease you know it’s actually a it’s a sign that we have to administer a cure when I read let’s say the San Gregor of Nica’s life of Moses what I see is that he’s he’s actually participating in the story and so he’s doing it in a poetic manner and so he is not he’s not just going into the text and then finding the structures he is himself creating poetic structures narrative poetic structures that he is so he’s going back in the Old Testament connecting it with Christ doing it in a poetic manner which is participating in the meaning making and in the let’s say the the celebration of that pattern you know and so I found that in San Gregor of Nica sometimes there are such subtle things that he says that you don’t that you have to approach San Gregor of Nica’s text with the same attention that you would have to approach reading Exodus itself because he will say he will string a sentence together where he will talk about the Egyptians and the foreign and the foreskin and baptism and he is key and and the bitterness of the waters and he’ll string all of that together in one one phrase where he has created a sentence that is not only pointing back to the Old Testament point to the New Testament but creating the music itself not just analyzing the music and I think that that is you know sometimes I I realize that what I’m doing in a way is very much less than what the fathers were doing because I am explaining it rather than I’m trying and in my icon carving and in my art I try then to have participate in the music as much as I can but there is a way in which we have to me that it’s important that we do so that that is also I guess what kind of brings me to the question of liturgical life and liturgical practice and how that fits together and so I don’t know what what your tradition is exactly but I’d like to hear a little bit about how you feel that this new discovery is informing the liturgical life of your of your tradition I think that’s a really important question because as you point out there is an immediacy to the text and its patterns that you see within the Church Fathers that as I’ve noted earlier that all of this is explored within the context of the liturgy and the sacraments so you explore the connections between the Red Sea Crossing and Christian baptism in the context of the performance of Christian baptism not in an abstract theological discourse now that doesn’t mean there’s no place for the abstract theological discourse but it’s a very second-order discourse it’s there to support the primary practice and I think part of this is the problem of our concept of what the scriptures are we I often give the illustration of what is a Shakespearean play and to many people if you asked what is a Shakespearean play they would point to a book off the on the shelf that they would read in a high school English class and say that’s Hamlet that’s a Shakespearean play but a better answer would be to take someone into a theatre and point at what’s taking place on the stage and say that’s a Shakespearean play now behind that play is a script that people have carefully studied they’ve memorized they’ve taken that word into themselves and they’ve also reflected upon the meaning of the text how to express this in the most faithful way to Shakespeare’s original intent and to express it in a way that brings that to life through performance and I think that’s very much like the church’s experience we’re often in the danger I think this is particularly an issue for Protestants who are people who have been defined by spending time with the Bible as a book and with the rise of the Bible as a physical book that is privately owned printed bound and between two covers etc. it’s words on a page but yet to actually engage with the text the true home of the text is the liturgy and that before the books were bound in single cover in a single pandect we don’t have many pandects from the early centuries it’s only fairly late on that we have that and chapters and verses are fairly late editions all of these things are later things that arose around the text to very much conform the text to the eye rather than the ear and the public performance and hearing and so the context for reading the Psalms is singing in a company of people the context for hearing the story is hearing and performing within the context of the liturgy and the sacraments and so we recount the story of the Exodus within context of things like the celebration of the Eucharist and that is the true home for the text and so part of what we need to do I think as a necessary complement to a more symbolic and typological reading of the text is to recover its true liturgical home that the true binding of the text is the church, church’s life. Now one of the important things that the Protestant tradition has tried to emphasize is the place of the scripture as a corrective voice over against the church so if the church is like the people performing a Shakespearean play the text always retains that character of a script something written that can stand over against it and challenge it but without that engagement with a script that’s detached from us ever usurping the primary form of engagement which is that the inhabitation of the text within us the word is supposed to come become flesh it become flesh in Jesus Christ and within his people we’re supposed to be the epistles of Christ as Paul talks about in 2nd Corinthians chapter 3 and 4 so within the liturgy and the sacraments that’s where the text takes flesh in us our bodies are conscripted by the word and we play out these patterns in a way that shows very clearly that we belong to the text and the text has assumed our world that it’s well the world that surrounds us is retold refigured reconfigured in the light of the coordinates of the text right now within the Protestant tradition this is a struggle because on the one hand you have a more high liturgical context and things like the Anglican Catholics on the other hand you have the Bible centered evangelicals and low church groups and actually finding a way to marry a very deep concern with the authority of Scripture and the centrality of Scripture with a more liturgical sensibility and recognition of the importance of the life of the church and its practices and symbols as the true home of the text marrying those two things is difficult so the Protestant tradition has both of those things but they tend to be alienated from each other so within much of the work that I’m doing and things like the Theopolis Institute are doing we’re trying to bring those two things together to get people excited about liturgy again to recognize that liturgy is not just window dressing but it is integral to scriptural practice if we’re going to be faithful to Scripture this requires liturgy it requires an inhabitation of the text and we don’t think about the text carefully enough in its distinctive character I mean you don’t read a recipe book just next to your bedside table you perform it now the Bible is so much more than that the Bible is I mean the Bible itself is not necessarily the best word to use the scriptures are a word that we’re supposed to be performing a word that we’re supposed to be recounting and memorializing these great events of God recognizing that we are part of the story too. Right so I guess that this then leads to the big question I guess the big question is that the question of sacramentality itself and and the the reality of the sacraments one of the things that we saw happen in the modern age you know not in all Protestant traditions in the same at the same level but let’s say as a general pattern has been the because of because of a loss of the symbolic worldview where there’s an integration of image and this and this understanding of patterning and how we participate in the patterns as being in the image of God there has been a desire to make first the sacraments only allegorical or only symbolic in a very negative sense where there’s the idea that there’s a base reality which is objective and and let’s say how can I say this like there’s there’s like a base historical or part thing reality which is which is solid and then there’s a kind of pointing to to some other thing and and it’s and it’s disconnected whereas the symbolic worldview tends to want to connect things and you know participative patterns and so how has this let’s say affected your vision or the people that you’re around how has it affected your vision of the sacrament and of sacramentality I think one of the more distinctive Protestant emphases is upon or you have a variety of different Protestant approaches some would be very strong on real presence for instance within the Eucharist if you talk to many Anglo-Catholics high church or high church Anglicans if you talk to Lutherans and if you talk to traditional reformed Christians you’ll often find this emphasis upon the real presence but alongside that in the more widespread popular movements there tends to be a denial of real presence it’s more more memorialist or merely symbolic understanding now when we talk about merely symbolic the problem there is the merely reality itself is structured by symbols so it’s not as if there’s any symbol that’s merely symbol symbol is some I mean and symbol is something that is at the very core of reality symbol is that which represents the fibers of reality by which things are connected so I don’t think that it is wrong to think about the sacraments in terms of symbolism I just think the mere symbolism is a problem right now Protestants I think have emphasized more the temporal and personal dimensions of the sacraments those have tended to be where their emphasis emphases lie particularly within the more evangelical tradition so within the evangelical tradition it’s focused upon not so much the host as the host that Christ is the one who stands in our midst as we’re celebrating and we as we remember him he is the one who invites us to his table etc he’s present with us now I think that’s a in many contexts it ends up a very thin understanding of what is taking place what typology I think it’s its best is trying to recover is a sense of time itself as a realm of participation and so time itself is that which by the Holy Spirit times that are far distance from each other are held together by the music of his work and so we truly participate in the work of Christ much as you might drop stone into a pond and find the ripples moving towards the shore so each week we’re caught upon those ripples and drawn further towards the shore and feeling the force of that original event but it’s a temporal movement that is emphasized and the personal action of Christ so it’s not so much an emphasis upon spatial and visual and substantial categories as an emphasis almost upon the insubstantiality of reality we are people who are caught upon the waves of time by the spirit and it’s that temporal participation that comes to the fore now I think at its best that can provide quite a thick account but we need to think a lot more about what is it that gives time its reality how can we have a thicker account of time itself and often that has been lacking within Protestant thought where often you’ll spatialize time think about two times opposed to each other new covenant old covenant and law gospel associations with that or the age to come and the present age whatever it is but there’s less of a sense of the lively tensions and connections and interplays between times and there I think the work of the Holy Spirit really needs to come into the foreground again I think that’s one of the things that for instance Calvin was trying to do with his doctrine of the Holy Spirit being far more central to his understanding of the Eucharist but it’s not really been engaged with as much as it should have been and I would like to recover typology as that which explains time itself as a realm of participation that we are caught in the slipstream of the Son of God and we are being drawn into his image as all of Old Testament history was drawn into his slipstream and now we’re being drawn into the age to come as he has gone before us he has split open the abyss of death so that we might walk through on dry ground well then I guess since we are we you kind of brought us on the subject I guess then the the question then comes to the question of body and you know the the the question of space you know and of architecture and of art and everything because that is also one of the things that has been tossed aside not completely but let’s say has been very much marginalized in in the Protestant tradition and so because you see you know one of the things that I saw in in in James B. Jordan’s book and in other of these types of writings is a re-understanding of space in terms of the temple in terms of the tabernacle and kind of re-understanding of how this is a cosmic image it’s not just it’s not just an arbitrary setup you know there is actually is a a structure a cosmic structure in the temple and in the tabernacle and so and that is something that at least the traditional church has transformed and transmuted into what is now the structure of the church the tripart structure of the church which I always tell people is not actually looking towards the Old Testament as people think it’s actually looking towards revelation it’s a there there is no altar in the Holy of Holies in in the Old Testament the altar on which the lamb appears that all are bowing towards is in revelation there’s a there’s a flip which happened which it’s not really a flip it’s more of bringing it all together bringing the whole world into the Holy of Holies is something that happens in in the traditional Christian liturgy so that the altar in the in the Holy of Holies in the church is is the altar but is also the Ark of the Covenant at the same time it’s both at the same time it’s also the table around which we sit to eat it’s also you know it’s it’s it’s all of these things kind of jammed into just like Christ kind of brings everything into himself we we reproduce that in our worship and so has there been a let’s say a rediscovery at least maybe I understand that maybe images is maybe pushing far pushing hard on the Protestant side but you know in terms of just re-understanding the spatial structure of the church has there been some work done in that that respect let’s say I don’t think there’s been enough done but I think you’re right that it is very important that throughout the scripture there is an emphasis upon architectural structures we have the description of the creation of the world is such a structure we have the description of the Garden of Eden that’s another such structure the Tabernacle the temple and a number of other such things all represent architectural structures we even see these things in and prophecies such as Ezekiel and Ezekiel will give the dimensions of this eschatological temple and tell the people that they should see it and mourn their sins because they should see something symbolically within that architectural structure that testifies to their status and how they stand relative to it we see the same thing I think also in revelation along with liturgical structures that are going on in heaven and then we’re told in Hebrews that there is this heavenly Tabernacle or temple that corresponds with the earthly one that is a model of that so we have heavenly models being impressed upon earthly realities with the intent that that earthly model was spread out and affect the whole world now I think within the design of churches historically there has been a deep appreciation of the significance of physical structure so for instance the ways that on many different levels they are formed to coordinate space so you see for instance the church as a landmark with the steeple that’s supposed to stand or or the dome something that’s supposed to stand to be seen from all around to coordinate places it’s a sanctuary there’s a sort of concentric circle ordering of the place in much the same way as you’d see within the Tabernacle and there’s also the way that the church can be a site of pilgrimage in many contexts it serves as a node of destination for an itinerary and then each and then it can be a central seat for a diocese and the cathedral seat and in all of these ways it’s a negotiation and a coordination of space so if you see a great cathedral within a city often the whole city has developed around that place the cathedral or the minster church they were often the first settlements that established the whole sense of spatiality within regions so you’d have the sites of pilgrimage and then the roots of pilgrimage associated with that you’d have the landmarks you’d have putting down roots as well with all the the graves and it’s a sign that we belong in this place and the life in this place is ordered by this symbol that draws our attention up but also recognizes how deep the roots go down and in all of these ways I think the protestant tradition has experienced the thinning out of its understanding of space part of this is simply because of the way in which it’s been negotiating new realities and that’s something that’s in common with other churches that have experienced technological and social changes where we’re building societies around the car instead of around people who are living their lives on foot and horseback and that changes the way things are ordered the idea of the frontier within the US it required for actually working in a very mobile society the sort of system that maybe the Methodist represented with a mobile circuit where people are moving around rather than the settled Paris system that you have that developed over time within Europe and these ways I think we’re facing new challenges but it’s been harder to develop a sense of spatiality within the context within which we’ve been working especially when we become a church that has often reacted too much against fetishization of images and structures and moved against that to a purging of the realm of the physical of images of structures and these sorts of things we see within the Old Testament that there was that danger to fetishize the structure of the temple that the temple itself could become idolatrous we see that in Jeremiah and Ezekiel but then we also see the danger of even licit images like the bronze serpent in first kings 14 it becomes a sort of idolatrous symbol now the Protestant reaction has often been a sort of iconoclastic one and certainly within the more evangelical or puritan traditions and often there’s been a failure to recover a sense of a healthy relationship with spatiality with physicality with the visible realm and also with our bodies and that’s one of the things that I think we need to get back to understanding for instance that God claims our bodies and baptism and I often try and tell people look at your body think about your body and your body is we often think about people as minds that are detached from their bodies but our bodies are the site in which we feel guilt and shame it’s where we feel mortality most keenly it’s where we feel exposure to other people all these sorts of things and so if we think about our bodies in that way it should be all the more surprising that God has declared our bodies to be marked out for resurrection that he has conscripted our limbs and our organs as the ministers of Christ declaring not just us as persons but our very hands and our legs and our mouths as belonging to him for his service and then finally that we have it’s our bodies that are the temple of the Holy Spirit not just the not just the soul but the body itself has been claimed and so I think Protestants have reacted against genuine problems but there is a need to recover some of the good things that may have been thrown out along the way well one of the things that I that I’m that I saw like when I look at the modern story let’s say modern history and how modernism developed and how from the Reformation we kind of move forward it seems like to me that the symbolic question is the biggest one in the sense that the difficulty in understanding symbolism or the difficulty in understanding how symbolism lays itself out and how we participate in it has led people to see patterns as almost bad in themselves that there’s that the very fact that there’s a pattern is it’s almost like it’s it’s verge-a-gone idolatry you know it’s it’s coming close to idolatry just because there’s a pattern and so that has been true of that it seems to me that that’s why there’s a desire to destroy hierarchy or that it’s an implicit desire to kind of annul hierarchy and and I think it depends like you said it just it also depends because product productantism is so wide like it’s so vague there’s so much of it but it seems like there’s that there’s a little bit of that where you and some of the let’s say some of the patterns that remain and some of the hierarchies that remain they become like unconscious they people don’t realize that they’re there and you see that of course you see that much less in let’s say something like an Anglican church like a high Anglican church I’ll definitely speak more from my background which was a kind of you know conservative Baptist background where you know you could feel like even the fact that there was a stage that everybody looked at that there was a point was was almost like a source of guilt for the for the the church it was and they didn’t want to cross like nothing to kind of to pull attention to itself you know because everything had to kind of be flat there’s also like a weird idea that somehow democracy is is a Christian idea in itself like that somehow democracy not just in terms of politics but democracy in terms of just a way of being where everything has a voice like an equal voice and that is really destructive to a symbolic worldview because there is a natural like a natural hierarchy of things which lay themselves out in when you understand patterns you can just the and and if and if we’re called to participate in the fullness of Christ it doesn’t mean that it all gets annulled right it means that we’re brought into it you know but the hierarchy doesn’t disappear we’re actually Christ actually calls us to participate and ultimately even to to to join him you know as high as possible in that in that that ontological hierarchy so maybe this this will bring me to we’ve been going for a while so i’m gonna ask you the hardest question this is that this is gonna be the hardest question for you just want to warn you so that i guess the hardest the hardest question now comes to to people like to to to people let’s say and i mean i’m just going to come to mary it’s going to come to the question of mary and understanding because one of the things that traditional Christians see as they see the pattern is that they see that let’s say as the all the images point to Christ but then in pointing to Christ there’s also an underlying thing right it’s like it’s like everything points to the glory of God which is on the the mercy seat in the in the temple right but there’s also the mercy seat and so the mercy seat is the is the possibility in which this this this happens the throne the the the mercy seat the you know you have all these these images and so it to me it’s because i had to go through i had to make this work i had to do this work myself i grew up Protestant so i had to do the work of understanding okay so then what then what now and it’s the conclusion the traditional Christians came to is that that’s the mother of God that’s that’s mary she is all the places of of uh theophany in the old testament you know are all culminate in her as an image of course not not just her as a just an individual her as the the the mother her as the the the the the the the theotheotokos the one who who who brings forth from below you know up into the world and then ultimately as an image of the church and us together in communion being that new body of christ so i don’t know if if there is because i know that’s at most maybe the touchiest subject but but has there been some work to at least kind of think about it and to to be able to perceive that that this is part of the pattern or is that not at all i think i’ll let you i’ll let you yeah hopefully you won’t sink your ship there it’s it’s an important question and i think all of the things that you were saying there are in part getting back to fundamental questions about how we relate the universal and the particular and i think the modern problem is that we have a universal that raises all particularity and so the hierarchy problem looms very large because the universal would erase all hierarchy flatten out all the reality whereas the biblical universal is one that integrates and um traverses all particulars so we see that i think in christ that he’s not just erasing the differences between men and women jews and gentiles etc but rather integrating all as one it’s the unity that he formed through traversing all of those things yeah now when we’re talking about symbolism i think we’re talking about something different we’re talking about something similar that symbolism is something that integrates many different realities in a unified one and recognizes how different things that might seem to be just diverse or and meaningless because they’re just scattered particulars are actually held into some unified whole now when we’re thinking about mary the question is how does the character of mary relate to all these other aspects of scripture now i think often for protestants the tendency has been to minimize the connections to say that mary is not connected with all these things in the old testament and the new well if you’re reading the story carefully it seems clear to me that she’s connected with characters like miriam miriam’s present at the birth and deliverance of moses and then she’s present at the later deliverance of the whole people as they’re drawn out of the waters as moses was mary is present at the birth she’s also present at the death of christ and both of those events kind of sum up christ’s significance much as moses’s rescue and his birth and then the rescue from the red sea sum up his significance and she’s also someone who is sums up israel in certain respect she stands for israel as the one that has been waiting for and then also welcomes and and opens to christ that christ is and finds a home in her his first home there’s a pentacostal theme there as well that the holy spirit overshadows mary much as the spirit will overshadow the church on the day of pentacast and mary is like hannah she’s the one who sings the magnificat that calls back to the song of hannah she’s the one who’s blessed among women like jail was in the song of deborah and in all these different ways she brings together the stories and the events of the old testament and they’re mobilized within her story and i think what we’re seeing there is not and this is where i differ with catholics and to a lesser extent with orthodox i’ve enjoyed some adison hodges heart book on the woman the hour of the garden i found very helpful on some of these themes recognizing the way that as we go through the gospel of john and she’s constantly just she’s not spoken of by name she’s always the mother of jesus and she’s playing deeply symbolic roles um within that this but it’s recognizing that she is not the one upon all the sim upon whom all the symbolism um collapses and it all points to her rather she stands as the head of a larger reality the reality of the church the reality of israel and it’s the jerusalem above that is the mother of us all in galatians chapter and so we have other persons in scripture that can stand for large realities whether that’s moses or whether it’s abraham and sarah sarah stands for the entire people of god as the great matriarch of israel and you have rachel standing for great companies of people in um jeremiah 31 and also in matthew 2 and i think mary fits into that same sort of mold she’s someone who is uh one of the foreground um particular symbols in which the reality of the lot or the larger reality of the spirit’s work through the church is condensed so it’s where we really see it’s as it were the where the iceberg of that greater reality can be seen above the surface in her story and so she’s very important as an individual person and then also as a symbol but i don’t want to collapse the reality of the symbol which stands for much more it stands for the whole company of the people of god as the church the jerusalem above it stands for all the women of scripture it stands for a much greater reality of the believer as well as the one who welcomes christ into themselves in all these ways she’s archetypal in some sense but i don’t want to um deny the symbolism but nor do i want to collapse the symbolism right well it’s interesting because it’s it’s the way that i think that that at least the orthodox we see it it’s it’s not so much a collapsing as a it’s it’s a it’s an incarnational process i’m not saying she’s the incarnation of course not but what i what i mean is that in the church we have an incarnational reality and so the the it’s like we always talk about how you know in the old testament we have these these prototypes and then we have the anti-types that come in the reality of christ and so it is not just that let’s say even not her i not even just her even saint peter and saint paul and the apostles and and some of the saints it’s not just that they that they point to that they that they’re that they’re stand-ins for a symbol but that it’s a participative reality and that they’re actually engaging manifesting uh gathering together a reality in uh in a way and in the the in the context of the mother of god that gathering you know when she talks about how she gathered all things in her heart all these things in her heart that to me is the image of the incarnation itself that is she she has gathered the logos in her womb and then the the ultimate manifestation has appeared and so it is it’s an it’s like an incarnational process and i guess that that will end up being the biggest difference it’s a between us in the sense that that also leads to our own participative relationship with each other in the orthodox church which is why we we also celebrate saints that’s why we also engage with each other in prayer and in and in mutual veneration you know we we you know we venerate each other the priests the the the people we kiss the holy kiss in our tradition is seen as a form of veneration like you would kiss the gospel that’s one thing theopolis has been trying to bring back the practice of a holy kiss okay that we think it is important to recognize the image of god in each other and i think one of the i would like to see protestants make a lot more of a move to recognizing the importance of mary and the i mean when we think i mentioned earlier the body as the temple of the holy spirit and christ becomes flesh he he um tabernacles among us and we have lots of arc symbolism i think within the gospel of luke and in that sense i think mary is very much functioning like in image of the temple she is in that sense the first temple um that we have in the new testament the new temple and with christ dwelling in her midst with the overshadowing spirit and there i think i would want to use the language of participation but when we’re thinking about the old testament and the new testament realities i wouldn’t think so much in terms of um type reality or yeah um type anti-type i think throughout the old testament and into the new we have larger realities that are being expressed in many different iterations of different degrees of participation and in mary i think we have a particularly condensed expression of that but there’s the reality that she expresses is far larger and it’s one that um i think stands for the great reality of the church and we all participate in that and to an extent um she is archetypal of every believer who has bears christ within their bodies yeah yeah all right alice there so i i really appreciate your time and i will ask everybody to to go check out your blog i’ll put all the links in the description of your blog your podcast and also the institute that you’re involved in and i’m hoping you know i’m hoping that this will be a space for discussion and and kind of discovering um because i i think that the kind of systematic approach that you’re taking and that james b jordan is thinking i think it it actually it actually is wielding good fruit you know some of the you know some of the this rigorous approach whereas if you read the church fathers there’s a more of an intuitive it’s like a more intuitive approach where he this rigorous approach is actually wielding some very interesting results and so i will definitely be be paying attention to what your what you’re doing and continue to and hopefully we can have another discussion at some point i very much enjoy that thank you for having me on oh it’s my pleasure if you enjoy the symbolic world content there’s a lot of things you can do to help us out if you’re not subscribed please do uh go ahead and share this to all your friends if you can get involved in the discussion we have a facebook group in which people can talk about these subjects i will put all those links in the description and also if you can please support us financially by going to my website www.thesymbolicworld.com slash support and i also have a patreon and a subscribe star so thanks again and i will see you soon