BibleProject - The Emergence of Sin with Dr. Matt Croasmun

Episode Date: May 16, 2019

In this show, Tim and Jon sit down with Dr. Matthew Croasmun. Dr. Croasmun is Associate Research Scholar and Director of the Life Worth Living Program at the Yale Center for Faith & Culture as well as Lecturer of Divinity and Humanities at Yale University. He completed his Ph.D. in Religious Studies (New Testament) at Yale in 2014 and was a recipient of the 2015 Manfred Lautenschläger Award for Theological Promise for his dissertation, "The Body of Sin: An Emergent Account of Sin as a Cosmic Power in Romans 5-8." He discusses his new book, The Emergence of Sin. It was a resource that Tim drew on heavily as he wrote and prepared for The Bible Project’s Spiritual Beings video series. Part 1 of the episode (0-53:15) is the interview with Dr. Croasmun. Dr. Croasmun discusses some of the highlights of scientific research, theology, and philosophy, pointing out how they overlap. Dr. Croasmun also discusses dualism and reductionism. Tim and Dr. Croasmun briefly touch on the nature of reality. Then they dive into a discussion on the nature of sin. What is the exact nature of sin or of evil? Dr. Croasmun uses a few examples from nature, including the example of a bee and beehive. He posits the idea of sin or evil as a “super organism.” That is to say, not only do humans “sin” individually, but we are members of larger sin structures and systems. These are systems that create death and pain in the world. Dr. Croasmun shares Romans 6:6 (New American Standard Bible): “knowing this, that our old self was crucified with Him, in order that our body of sin might be done away with, so that we would no longer be slaves to sin.” Dr. Croasmun asks what Paul means by this phrase, “the body of sin.” Or does Paul have multiple meanings in mind? Tim notes that C.S. Lewis and other writers have spoken of sin as a “parasite on the good,” meaning that sin does not exist on its own but always exists as a distortion of the good. Instead of people having total autonomy over their lives, Dr. Croasmun notes, they are always in service to something. We are either in service to systems of sin or to systems under Christ. The systems of sin would be examples of rampant, violent nationalism, racism, or discrimination against vulnerable people, animals, and nature. Dr. Croasmun shares that it’s important to think of sin on three levels: an individual level, a large, super-organism and corporate level, and on a cosmic, supernatural level. All three ways will help a person to more fully understand these issues. In part 2 (53:15-end), Tim and Jon recap their conversation with Dr. Croasmun. Tim says that all theologians are in a constant state of forming and reforming their ideas. He adds that sometimes, in our quest to simplify things, we actually do reality a disservice. Reality is complex, and so are the ideas surrounding God, man, nature, good, and evil. Thank you to all our supporters! Show Resources: Dr. Croasmun’s book: The Emergence of Sin Show Music: “Excellent Instrumental” by Propaganda “Defender Instrumental” by Tents Show produced by: Dan Gummel

Hey, this is Cooper at Bible Project. I produce the podcast in Classroom. We've been exploring a theme called the City, and it's a pretty big theme. So we decided to do two separate Q and R episodes about it. We're currently taking questions for the second Q and R and we'd love to hear from you. Just record your question by July 21st

and send it to us at infoatbiboproject.com. Let us know your name and where you're from, try to keep your question to about 20 seconds and please transcribe your question when you email it in, try to keep your question to about 20 seconds, and please transcribe your question when you email it. That's a huge help to our team. We're excited to hear from you. Here's the episode.

Hey, this is John and Tim at the Bowel Project. This podcast is generally a, just a long discussion between you and I about biblical theology preparing for videos that we're making. And so just you and I, bantering. Yeah, that's right. And discussing theology, I, bantering. Yep, yeah, that's right. And we'll banter it by discussing theology on your student. And one day you came to me and said, you know what would be really cool, as I'm reading all this books preparing for these talks, it'd be so rad to be able to interview some of

these scholars and just pick their brains some more. So we're starting to line those up. Yeah, every bioproject video begins with a huge stack of books. Yeah, for me, and some of them are just like, whoa. Yeah, every time we think of a new video we want to make, I'm like, sweet, I got like four books I want to read. Yeah, so. Yeah, so as we were prepping for quite a while

for the Spiritual Being series, but one of the books I came across was by a scholar at Yale, named Matthew Crosman. He's a research scholar at Yale Divinity School, and then also found out he's planted a church and is a pastor at a local church there, and it's really sharp guy. And he wrote this fascinating book called The Emergence of Sin, Sin as the Cosmic Tyrant tyrant, calls letter to the Romans. And it was stimulating in a million ways. One is, half of it is about science,

one of these science, and the thing called emergence theory. And if you know us, we kind of, yeah, everyone's well geek out about physics and cosmology, and as much as we can. That's right. We just jump right in. It's an idea that's fascinating for a long time and it's just basically what you described to Tim was what does it mean for something to exist to be real and to have its own volition

and power. And us as a human like we exist but we're just a bunch of cells, which are a bunch of atoms. And so, at what point does something become something? And philosophers and physicists are all thinking about this and realizing there's something real that happens when a collection of parts becomes a whole. And that thing becomes greater than the collection. That's within the sum of his parts. Yeah, so he was already interested in that, but then he also noticed that in Paul's letter to the Romans, Paul will use the word sin to refer to stupid things people do, but then he'll also use the word sin to describe what

sounds like a person, that it enslaves people, it rules them, it captures and deceives them. Sin has a body in Paul's thought. He has this phrase, the body of sin, talking about what sounds like a person. So these two ideas combined his mind, and he wrote this fascinating book that just opened my imagination to some new ways of thinking about the powers of evil and sin in Paul's thought and in a World view shaped by the Bible. So Matthew

Crosmond said yes to talking to us and so we got to Have a long conversation with him. Yeah. Thanks for joining us. Let's talk with Matt. Yep Yeah, thanks for joining us. Let's talk with Matt. Yep. Matt, thank you for talking with us today and taking the time. Ah, so glad to be here. So we are talking with you, one, because I was doing a series of projects for the BioProject in Paul's Letters. And your book, I think I read a review of it on Scott McKnight's blog, Jesus Creed, and it was glowing and so positive,

and it addressed issues that I was have been interested in for a long time. So I picked it up and mined blown in the helpful way, and my imagination was expanded. So first of all, thank you. Thank you for the time you invested in that book. I'm sure it required many lonely nights. Yeah, I know that's this is the work of the Bible scholar, right? You like do all this

work and you thought is like someday like as many as like a half a dozen people might read what you. Yeah. Before we dive into talking about the ideas in the book, tell us a little bit about how you ended up in Yale, where you came from, and how you got interested in biblical studies. Oh yeah, so I was a music major in college and I was at Yale's in undergrad. I've been out here for a good long time now. But we had a language requirement, as I'm sure many colleges do,

and I didn't want to take a living language because that intimidated me. So I thought, I'll take a dead language. That'll be fun. And just because I don't know, I just didn't want to have to go listen to tapes or record my voice or whatever. So, and it was tapes back then,

this is before digital. But all to say, I thought like, oh yeah, I'll do the death language. And somewhere back in my mind, I remembered that some part of the Bible was written in Greek. I probably couldn't even told you like which parts. But I thought, okay, well,

between Latin and Greek, I'll do Greek. And honestly, that was sort of like how it all started. And then I was terrible at Greek, actually. But by the time I chugged through what I needed to, I felt like while I might as well read the Bible, if that was somewhere in the back of my mind, part of my goal and took a couple of classes and undergrad, my first of which was with Harry Atridge

on the epistle to the Hebrews. Oh my cow. Which I didn't know that he literally wrote the book, like the commentary on Hebrews. And it was just like this spiritually nourishing, intellectually challenging, just an incredibly rich experience. And basically, that was it. I was hooked. Yeah. So this is all this is all Harry's fault. And I remind him of that from time to time. But yeah, it's been, it's been a lot of fun. Wow. It was your family environment growing up,

a religious environment that kind of fostered positive connections to the Bible at all? Yeah, sure. So I grew up in an evangelical covenant church on the North Shore of Chicago. And it was a good church that instilled a sort of love of scripture, if also some sort of biblicist leaning, sort of, you know, some ideas about what the Bible was.

You know, I mean, I remember like sort of getting to college with this belief that the Bible was this sort of magic book where if anyone read it with a fair, with an open mind, they would come to the rational conclusion that Jesus Christ had died on the cross to save them from their sins. And I would invite my secular friends to like read the Bible and they seemed pretty fair-minded and they didn't come to that conclusion. And I remember feeling a bit betrayed. I don't know if anyone ever told me that, you know, no one, I think I would probably said it exactly that way, but somewhere I had this belief about the Bible. So definitely getting into biblical studies and I think just growing up

required sort of reconfiguring a good deal of those sort of, it's not really the Bible, it's like beliefs about the Bible that were sort of hanging on to it and sort of figuring out how to set some of those aside that needed to be set aside while still finding Scripture to be a place that God inhabited and a place where I still might be able to meet with God and bring my questions and try to puzzle out the deeper questions of life in that space. Hmm, yeah, thank you for sharing. So, talk to us about your hooked on biblical studies.

Are the questions, so your book, the emergence of sin, this was a book version of your dissertation, is that, that's right? Yeah. This was a book version of your dissertation, is it? That's right. Yeah. So, were the questions that you were pursuing in the book, were those kind of forming early, maybe before you really knew it, the accolmination, or did it come kind of later to you? Yeah, I think this project really may owe its origins as much to a set of Ted Talks as to anything that was at first in

the Bible. I remember seeing a Ted Talk on sort of synchronicity and how complex systems just tend to sort of sync up and there was this image that actually did make it into the book of the the London Millennial Bridge, or Millennium Bridge, the day that it was open and the way that the sort of the crowd just walking across the bridge and the bridge's physical structure and the movement of these people

sort of became this sort of feedback loop where the, I don't know, just sort of randomly the bridge started, the, you know, just sort of randomly the bridge started, the more people were walking to the left then to the right and the bridge starts to sway just a little bit and the more that the bridge starts to sway, the more people have to walk in step with the movement of the bridge.

And then the thing just keeps feeding back on itself and eventually you see this bridge swinging violently back and forth. And people having a hard time standing up. And anyway, there was that idea. I forget. There were several other sort of TED talks. And this idea, I didn't know what emergence was, but I kept thinking I sort of had a list

of TED talks when I thought the same idea just keeps coming up over and over and over again. And then what happened was I was reading Jerome Murphy O'Connor and his theological anthropology, his Pauline theological anthropology called Becoming Human Together, I think. And he described sin this way. And I think I described this in the book as sort of like, he was like mattingly tantalizingly close. I thought to the case, and he describes this,

this system, there is no dictator who can be blamed for this. He says it's a little bit like, when these racist, these patriarchal, these, we can get into some of what these concrete systems might look like, but are all these unjust systems that sort that catch us up, make us start to walk in step, as it were.

And he used language that sounds exactly like the Millennium Bridge. He said, it's like a crowd getting swept up in a panic. And I thought, this is it. Then he goes on and says, it is easy to see how this sense of being swayed by a force beyond human control could be transmuted in the mind of simple people into a belief in a supernatural evil power. And I just thought, all of a sudden we have to call people simple-minded for, where is that coming from? The moment I saw that, I thought,

you mean simple people, simple minded people like Paul? And then the, as the final piece was to think, I think Jerome Murphy O'Connor's argument here is that we shouldn't confuse a complex system with a human person. But then the more I started to look into biological anthropology, the more I started to think, well, what else is a human person

on the modern scientific account other than a complex person, or a complex system, rather? Yeah, that's right. And so anyway, that's, I think, sort of where all this started coming together. Yeah, for me. So would you say that's kind of the core set of questions

and interests that really drove you? Because it really drove you into two a multi-disciplinary project of both scientific Philosophy of science emergence and then Pauline theology. Yeah, I think I think that's right I mean I my father's a Caltech trained chemist one of my uncles is a was a until he retired an analysis scientist sort of my uncles was until he retired, a NASA scientist, sort of scientific worldview was as fundamental for me as in certain ways is anything I learned in church.

And so... You're saying it felt natural to you to explore completely. Absolutely, to read these two things together. Like the world that Paul's describing has to be my world. So these sorts of different modes of explanation need to somehow be able to line up.

And I think also the other thing that drove me in this direction was just thinking experientially, I feel like in my own life, I know what it is to be caught up in patterns of thought in modes of relating to people in ways of exploiting and using power that seem bigger than me. And I don't exactly want to say it's not that it's not my fault because I participate in those very systems. But at any explanation of our moral lives that doesn't take into account those sorts of systems just seems incomplete to me.

Mm-hmm. Good. So let's, let's tack it onto something real specific in Paul's letters as we, as we go broader. So you, in one of the opening chapters, you address what has been presented as a puzzle to modern interpreters of Paul that he'll use the verb to sin, or the noun sin, describing stupid things that people do. Terrible things people do. We've all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. But then Paul will also use the noun sin, especially in Romans,

as you'll use the noun as an active agent of verbs, sin in slaves, it rules, it deceives, it takes captive. And this has been a puzzle in modern interpretation of Paul. So people explain it in different ways, and it ties into what you're talking about, is this a mythological entity, is this invisible spiritual being with wings flapping around somewhere. Oh, with a pitchfork.

With a beshore, yeah. So yeah, talk to us about how people in the modern era have understood that and how that fits into your project. Yeah, so there's basically three different approaches, I think, that we can see one, the first would be sort of Boltman's approach, great sort of modernist, biblical critic, and the great demithologizer, and his basic take was Paul may describe sin as a cosmic tyrant as some sort of supernatural agent,

but any of us he thinks who live in a world with modern technology can no longer entertain these sorts of fantasies. We need to find some other way of reading Paul's text to make it meaningful for us. Namely, we need to make it about our existential struggles to be moral, to be authentic, to be chewed ourselves and sort of noble and just. And the second response, the second sort of approach to that actually comes from one of his doctoral students, Ernst Kaiseman, who very much in reaction to this insists, no. One of the first to give us a sort of thoroughly apocalyptic Paul, where this sort of vibrant spiritual world isn't an incidental feature of Paul's thought that we can just scrape away to make it more amenable to our purposes, but Kaseyman says,

no, no, no, that's actually the sort of fundamental issue for Paul. What it is to be human is to be someone set under lordship, either of sin and evil or of grace and of God and of love. And I mean, this is the sort of Bob Dylan, or of grace and of God and of love. I mean, this is the sort of Bob Dylan. Maybe the devil, it may be the Lord, but you're gonna have to serve somebody.

Kaisman, to this day, has followers, Beverly Giventa, J. Lewis Martin, folks like this, whose work I find really compelling in many ways. The third approach comes from the sort of the liberationist camp, largely in Latin America. And these folks suggest that whatever you might say about sin as sort of individual existential failures or as sort of a matter of cosmic tyranny, maybe the most salient way that we see sin in the modern world is actually as embedded in social institutions. And so here, there's some Marxist intuitions working, so it's going to be the capitalist

system, it's going to be unjust governments, it's going to be corporations that operate certain ways, racist structures, sexist structures. And their thought is that these sorts of structures aren't just full of sinful people. The sin that we see operating there isn't just an aggregate, just an adding up of the sins of the individuals that are involved. There's actually a remainder left over that you can't really assign other than to the structure and the in the institutions themselves and so Oscar Romero and and others really like lean into that interpretation and it struck me I guess at first glance the sort of why do we have to choose? Yes, each of those seems to capture something really important actually about what Paul's trying to say is there's some way of holding them all together and really for me, emergence theory then becomes a way of potentially validating each of these insights and giving a framework for interrelating them.

And for you, it all came together in the Millennium Bridge. Seriously. Yeah, and maybe this would be a good moment to then try to really explain what emergence theory is. Yeah. I mean, you give the example of the bridge, but even there maybe really be explicit. What is the emergent phenomena happening in the Millennium Bridge? And is there any other examples you like to go to? Yeah, so with emergence, we want to talk about two dynamics.

One would be a sort of supervenience relationship where, so basically, when you think about emergence, you're thinking about, first of all, you're thinking about the world as being stratified into various sorts of layers of complexity. And so in the physical sciences, we can think about that as the smallest, the micro, the most basic,

fundamental levels, what particle physics, various sorts of physics describe. Then we would move up into the chemical, and the thought being, a bunch of atoms doing their things, or a bunch of subatomic particles doing their things, becomes, at some point, chemistry, a bunch of chemicals doing their thing eventually becomes biology. A certain sort of set of biological things, doing their things becomes psychology, a bunch of individual psychology is doing their things, become sociology or become social entities and you can keep on going. And actually, there are multiple different ways of, multiple different philosophies of science all agree on this basic feature of the world.

And basically the big question of philosophy of science or one of the big questions is, how do you relate these layers? And this sort of classic reductionist view would say, well, all that's real is what's really happening at the smallest most fundamental level. So, you know, we can start all the way up in the social. What's happening in a social system?

Well, there's nothing real in a social system. That's just a convenient metaphor to use for talking about a bunch of individual psychologies. But when we think about individual psychologies, there's nothing real going on there either. What's really happening is a bunch of neurons firing inside a bunch of people's brains. What would be a good example of a social emergent phenomena?

Like racism? Yeah, like racism, right? So a sort of reductionist view would say, there's no real thing called race, or maybe there's not even a real thing called racism. That's just a convenient way for talking about, for example, in some studies we have, a sort of amygdala excitation,

you know, a sort of amygdala excitation, a sort of the fight or flight response part of the brain sort of lighting up in certain social situations when you see an unfamiliar face to trigger this response. And they say, oh, you can just see it's, this is actually just brain function. And the brain function is just chemistry, and the chemistry is just physics. And the only thing that's real are these, are these very, very lowest levels. Emergence suggests instead that these higher levels

actually are irreducible to explaining the world as it actually is, that these aren't just convenient ways of talking about large sets of smaller entities, but that chemicals are real, and biological animals are real and appropriate to talk about as units, and not just as shorthand for talking about piles of particles. But it is true still to say, an emergentist would only make sure it is,

they'd say it's important to still say that a chemical is composed of atoms and subatomic particles that do obey the laws of physics, and it is appropriate to say that, for example, racism is going to have sort of neurobiological substructure. It shouldn't be surprising that you can see in an FMRI machine, you can almost see racism happen as it were. That's a simplification, right? But the world is sort of stitched together this way. So those relationships, the sort of dependency of higher level, higher order social entities

say on psychology or psychology's dependent on biologies, those relationships are called relationships of supervenience. But then what's interesting then is then you have this other half, which is this downward causation piece, where it's not just that my psychology emerges from my biology, but then on the emergence of this account, my psychology actually sort of constrains my biology in ways that change sort of howins biology in ways that change sort of how my biology works, which I take it as exactly what you can see

in that FMI machine, where the social institution of American racism is actually changing the brain chemistry of American patients. I mean, you tap into the mind, body, relation, and debate, but even though it's actually kind of difficult to describe, it's somehow it because we all know basically what conscious mind is. I was gonna say this is getting really dense and I can hear people through their headphones starting to kind of check out.

But the mind thing, that brings it, it's really practical. That's right. That as an organism, we are complex, I don't know how you describe it, but we're a bunch of complex biological systems. Yeah. Yeah. But we think of ourselves as kind of one thing. Yeah. But in reality, we're like a super organism. Yeah. And we wouldn't reduce ourselves to just, well, I'm just bacteria and cells and different things. I think of myself as a whole. Although some people do, like you said, Matt, a reductionist approach. And you come across this

in the modern west, is people who disbelieve in even the reality of their own consciousness. Yeah. In theory, they wouldn't in their real life experience, but in theory they would say, well, my consciousness is just a byproduct. A happy byproduct of my biology. There was a this American life episode not too long ago that ran exactly down this road and basically suggested, I think perhaps a little bit, I mean, I love this American life, but I think it was a little bit intellectually irresponsible actually, the extent to which

they just said, look, this is just basic scientific fact that you are sort of an illusion and all that's real is your brain is producing this illusion of you which you're pretty attached to but otherwise like really isn't a thing. That is out there. That's a problematic sort of way of thinking about it. The other problematic view which is maybe more prevalent in religious circles is the dualistic approach which is to say prevalent in religious circles, is the dualistic approach, which is to say, sure, my brain exists. And if I thought I was, in some sense,

just my a bunch of complex biological systems, oh shoot, maybe I'd fall into the reductionist world and start to think I'm just a fiction of my own fictional imagination. But the dualist would then say, no, no, no, I know what I am. I am a soul. And as I heard one dualist suggest as a slogan, the brain he suggested is just an electrified piece of meat your soul uses to think with. Like a strong sort of dualistic view would say,

you know, there's this whole other thing called soul that is sort of incomprehensible or undescribable on scientific terms that sort of can save you from reductionism, but I think leaves you in a place where, yeah, it's just odd that there would be this really huge part of our world that's that totally defies sort of any sort of scientific explanation or even description or, yeah. That's helpful. So here's, I would like to hear back from you if I understand what you're getting at. But one thing that came to me, I was reading your book, is this is, a lot of this is debating about what,

at what level does something become what we would call quote real. Yeah. So if I have this, my electrified piece of meat, I don't know what that is. In my brain. But it is generating this thing that I experience as my mind and consciousness and emotions. It's fully dependent in this moment on that electrified piece of meat, the piece of

meat constitutes and makes up what I experience as my negrotusness. But at the same time, it's not reducible to anyone little cells of the piece of electrified meat in my brain. And time, it's not reducible to any one little cells of the piece of electrified me in my brain. And so it's a different category of real. That's the phrase I kept coming back to in my mind as I was reading through the book is, emergent theory is a way of saying higher level entities are real, but they're real in a way that's emergent, or they're in a different category of real

than the level that they emerge from. That was a way that my electrified piece of meat was making sense of what you're saying. I think that's quite right. And I suppose then the only thing I would want to add to that is to say that everything you care about is only real in that sense. Yes, yes. So I forget who made this list, everything you care about is only real in that sense.

Yes, yes. So I forget who made this list, but somebody has some list of haircuts and dollars and humans and nations and whatever. All of these things, I guess, are only real in the sense that they emerge from complex social structures that give them meaning and then from the physical things below that. So it strikes me as a bizarre move to try to say that's anything less than, I don't know what's more real than that. You start to realize everything you care about is only that real. That's right.

It's also striking me that as you try to be reductionistic and you get smaller and smaller and smaller, it becomes less understandable and almost less real to me. Like once you get into the quantum realm, all of a sudden we're like, I don't know, what is that? Yes. What actually would count as most real then? It starts to like just sort of slip through your fingers and some of the philosophers of chemistry that actually read on this said, strict reductionism sort of depends on a sort of fantasy version of physics, right,

in which maybe at base level we've got tiny little balls of stuff, but quantum mechanics severely complicates that view. Yeah. Okay, so that's supervenience that real entities exist, that aren't reducible to the parts that they're made up of at a lower level. For example, you. For example, you. For example, the economy. Yeah, that's right. Or, for example, sin.

Yeah. But then in the other part of that, you said, is downward causation. My mind, which is constituted by my electrified piece of meat, but not reducible to it, my mind can actually influence the shape of the piece of meat and of my whole body by what I eat and what I think about and my mental habits that actually shape the physical structure of my brain. So these higher-level entities exercise deep influence on every level that's below them too. That's a key part of what you're saying.

Right, and that's part of, I think, part of the defense of even wanting to call them real. If they didn't have any sort of causal powers, it would be sort of like, well, okay, I guess if you want to call that real, that's fine. But it must be able to do something. And certainly that's the big question when it comes to persons, is we think that people, persons are things that are able to do something in the world. And if I'm able to do something, then my mind that emerges from that electrified

piece of meat can then electrify that piece of meat in various sorts of ways, right? And that, and you have to be very, it does get complicated in trying to figure out exactly how that works, but in broad strokes, that's right. It's this feedback loop where this thing that emerges from this complex system can then constrain and act back on those basic complex structures from which it emerged.

So all the way back when Rudolph Boltman says, when he reads Paul talking about sin as a tyrant that enslave and rules and does things to you, he thinks simple minded people might think of sin that way, but we know it's about my own personal crisis of moral decision making. We could reduce it down to just the individual moral level. Correct. Correct. So what you would want to respond to say, well, what if what it requires for something to be a real person is, we're talking about a different level. Paul has a different level of person

or entity in mind when he imagines sin in slaving or deceiving a person or a whole group of people. So it's about what level of something being a person, a will and volition, what level are we gonna attach sin to? You had so many great chapters in this book, but you focus on the concept of a super organism, something that's real, that you could call a single organism or person, but that it's made up of, I love the beehive example, but you can use whatever example you want. But a super organism, talk to me about that.

Yeah, so I think you're right. I think thinking about social insects is exactly the right way to think about this when it comes to a B-hive. It's not an easy question to answer, which is the organism, the hive or the individual B? A B can't reproduce. Most individual B's can't reproduce. Only the hive really can reproduce. The individual Bs aren't genetically distinct. They're all genetic copies of the queen.

So, you know, antimologist E.O. Wilson suggests that it's better to think about individual bees the way you'd think about individual cells in your body. You have a bunch of different cells, but they all contain the same DNA and they all sort of express help you, be you, and do what you do. And he's, which really starts to sound like, man, maybe the hive, maybe the hive is the organism. And each bee is sort of like a cell. And the ways that they differentiate

from one another are sort of the ways that like a skin cell is different from a blood cell, not the way that like one human being is different from another. But the whole point here is that, well, it's sort of an open question, and neither answer seems obviously wrong, but certainly the larger option seems totally plausible. Maybe the super organism is the right level to be like the individual. That's the real thing. Which I think opens us up for thinking about larger social bodies that we might be a part of, which ends up getting us I think actually pretty close to some of the language that Paul uses.

Our concept of what is a person or an organism is really depends on your vantage point within the hierarchy of complexities. If you were a cell living in a human body and had your own consciousness, you wouldn't really be thinking about the collection of cells having consciousness. You do your thing. If you're just a bee, going from flower to flower, you imagine the bee having its own consciousness, whatever that is. But yeah. That was helpful. It's helpful as an analogy. Actually, I found myself after reading the book, going throughout my days, I would have this meta reflection. I would be like, I want to cup a coffee right now. I'd be walking by a coffee shop. And then I just began to think about coffee's a big deal in Portland, huge part of the food economy. And then I started thinking about why do I desire certain kinds of coffee? Like that's not innate to me. I hated my first cup of coffee, whatever I said, I don't know when I was 12 or 13.

So actually this desire for certain kinds of coffee is a fabricated one from my environment and my lived experience. And then there's certain kinds of advertising and certain kinds of aesthetic of certain shops that's designed by an aesthetic of port. These are systems. And so then I would just like be having cup of coffee and be like I'm just a bee right now doing what I program to do. like I'm just a bee right now, doing what I program to do. But yet, I am a responsible moral agent, and those aren't opposites to each other. It's just a wider framework.

It's just very helpful for me. Yeah, so I think the corrects of this then is how does this relate to Paul's, how he talks about sin, and it's influenced on us. Maybe speak to that a little bit, Matt. Yeah, so I think one of the pivotal texts for me is Roman 6.6, which talks about the body of sin,

which I had never reflected on too much until I had sort of done some of this thinking about the science, and I started to think, well, why don't Earth is body of sin? And thought, well, what on earth is body of sin? And thought, well, I mean, one like obvious answer would be it's analogous to the body of Christ. Why doesn't anybody read it like that? Turns out Andres Nigrin did back in the day,

but very few people read it that way, but I start to think, well, if sin is a person, then might sin not have a body. And if sin had a body, what sort of body would it be? Well, it might really be something analogous in certain ways to the body of Christ. That is that we might sort of make up collectively the body of sin.

And as our desires are being fundamentally shaped, or we might say from a moral point of view, misshapen by certain sorts of social perversions. I mean, Augustine thinks that what you love is actually what you desire. This is actually central to your moral formation. So once we see a sort of market economy, the onslaught of advertising starting to fundamentally

shape the way what it is that we desire. We can start to see, oh, here it is. I'm starting to become a sort of part of some larger entity, which I take it Paul is describing as the body of sin. And so Paul has some, his mind has been shaped in such a way that he can envision as a personal entity a corporate human super organism and call it sin and talk about it as an agent. You were the first person who drawn my attention to Nigerin's work about the body of sin as like this anti-Christ. It was like an anti-body of Christ. And we, you know, maybe it means grappling a new,

with the imagery of body of Christ, which is on the surface more familiar to many readers of Paul's letters, because he uses it all over the place. But we wouldn't say, well, therefore Christ, the new human isn't real, because he is constituted by his body. No one takes that away from Paul's phrase,

the body of Christ. Maybe some people do. Maybe some people do, I don't know. But I'm just trying to play out the analogy. The body of sin, the body of Christ. It begs a question, of course, then, who, who or what is that, quote, person? Who's the head of the body of sin?

That's the equivalent to the head of the body of Christ. In Paul's thought, and what should that be in our thought, too? Do you have any thoughts about that? Yeah, so I think it's important that we say that there are analogies straw, but there are also important disanalogies. There are ways that these two bodies are very different from one another. For example, I don't think that strictly within Christian theology, we would think of Christ as constituted by his body,

by the body of Christ that is. It's not like no church, and then there's no Christ anymore. But we might think about the body of sin that way. And so trying to keep this not from string too far into the theological nerddom route, but there are... Well, I'll try this out. So there are certain ways of thinking about the doctrine of God. You can talk about God having two different natures, consequent and antecedent. What those mean are, the antecedent nature of God is God's

sort of prior existence, prior existence as sort of the ground of all being. But then God also has this consequent sort of existence in along these lines of theological reflection, which is God in relation to God's creation as it unfolds. And I think we would say if that's true about God and therefore true about Christ, we would then say that sin would be like Christ in that it has this consequent nature, it's part of the unfolding of creation, but it would not share in God's antecedent nature this sort of prior existence. That is, sin's just a creature like us,

and I take it no sinners, then there is no sin, at least on this reading, but no church, there still is Christ. How is that related to C.S. Lewis, you know, had this metaphor that appeared in a couple of his writings about evil as a parasite on the good, namely that it doesn't actually have its own existence, its existence depends on something prior to it, namely the God's Good World. And so in that sense, it actually isn't really a thing. It's a thing that exists only as a distortion of the ultimately real things.

Is that related to what you're talking about? I think it is. And here I'll admit that there is a bit of attention in my own thought on this matter. I think sometimes I'm inclined to think, nah, sins just as real as any other creature. What Lewis is pointing at and what Carl Bart also would be sort of in line with this thinking, is that sin may be less real even than a creature.

I'll leave that as an open question, but at any rate what it isn't is it's not as real as God. What it certainly isn't is we don't have a dualistic world here where there's the angel on one shoulder and there's the devil on the other or there's, you know, God, the power of good and sin or the devil as the power of evil and they're sort of, they're equals, equal and opposite forces. There is a priority to the good. I think that's a helpful corrective for us, because if we're, it depends on what sorts of lines

we're trying to draw. If we're drawing a line between natural on the one hand and supernatural on the other, then we'd be inclined to put ourselves on the natural side and maybe sin any sort of cosmic power, demons, et cetera, and God and angels on the supernatural side. But Paul didn't know anything about a supernatural or supernatural division. That was invented during the Enlightenment.

If instead we're drawing a Paul-line distinction between created things on the one hand and the creator on the other. Then I think we're working with categories that are more familiar to Paul. And in that case, Sin definitely goes on our side of the line, maybe even a little further away from the real, maybe than we are, if Bart or Lewis is right. But I think that really helps keep our minds straight about what sort of thing we're talking about even when we try to take Paul's mythological language seriously. Yeah, and that's since the body of Christ, metaphor, is Christ, is on the God creator side of that equation in Paul's thought, and therefore prior to any body through which he manifests himself in the world.

That's the mismatch part of the analogy where the body of sin is a distortion of what ought to be the body of the creator, namely his people. But what seems really important to me about suggesting that we're already a part of a body of sin is that I think otherwise, when we think about the body of Christ, our modern individualism makes us imagine that, well, before we join the body of Christ, we're sort of free agents. And the weird thing that the body of Christ is is that now we start to participate in this weird sort of communal life that's sort of foreign to who we naturally are as free agents. This is where K-Zaman is right. Paul's imagination is, now you're always already part of a sort of social existence. You're always being constrained by some sort of moral community, some social community. What changes when you join the body of Christ

is you're transferred from one social body to another rather than going from being a free agent into this new social arrangement. Yeah, that's good. Back to my coffee analogy then, I am enslaved to the body of coffee In that way I am. I help me understand that one Well, it's just that I didn't naturally I was inculturated and socialized

Into my need. There's this super organism. What we would call like no Well, I guess there's a yeah, I'm picking maybe more li neutral one. Okay. It may be, you know, the coffee industrial complex may not be quite complex enough to qualify as an integrated super organism, but it may be, you know, on its way there. Yeah, it's on its way. So when did sin emerge to become its own thing? When we get to Genesis chapter 3, we encounter a creature that seems to have existed, which already is part of this whole body of sin and death. Oh, that's a terrible question. By which I mean that's a great question. That's the

sort of question you hope no one asks. I think this would require, now the Paul's language, Paul deals with this in Romans 5. Paul's thought is that when sin enters in and then exercises dominion, I'm inclined to think of that as sin entering in through Adam and Eve's transgressions and then exercising dominion thereafter. I recognize that that changes the logic of the narrative of which sort of comes first, but for my money at least, I'm already thinking about the sort of garden of Eden narrative in more sort of poetic sort of terms. So I'm willing to make my peace with that,

but I certainly recognize that I think Genesis 3 has a slightly different, has a different sort of angelology or demonology, sort of different understanding of the origin of evil. But man, that serpent is hard to pin down. That serpent is not named as Satan, it's not named as sin, It's not named as sin. It's not right.

So it is a slippery thing regardless, but your point is well taken. I think it does require some sort of rejigging of how this works. Well, and you probably appreciate that coming from an evangelical background that the, yeah, the paradigm is we were created into this system that already was in place with good and evil. And then we got to choose between the two. And it sounds like you're wrestling through maybe a more different nuance of it, which is that us wrestling through it

and making these poor decisions and creating that culture, then sin emerges out of. That's helpful. Let's think about it this way. Adam's decision is different than mine. Adam chooses disobedience, but Adam doesn't choose disobedience within a social structure that sort of helps him do so.

Oh, sure, there was no culture in that. There was no culture in that. Or there was no culture in that. Yeah. And so I think that would be the sort of distinction I'm trying to make, is that sin in Paul's sort of vivid sense of this sort of tyrant, Adam's not under sin's dominion as he chooses to sin.

You and I and every other human we've ever interacted with has been under the dominion of sin as we choose sin. Yeah. But is there a place for you then for some other type of power as Paul would call the powers and authorities? That's right. Yeah, I did want to ask you if you would say there's an analogy between Paul's concept of the super organism sin and His language about the principalities powers and authorities because there's actually a related puzzle there Paul's language about the powers. You can use the same vocabulary to talk about the Roman governor, to talk about the high priestly system

that killed Jesus, and to talk about what we would call spiritual powers, but it's the same vocabulary, which seems just like the sin vocabulary can refer to something we would call human to something we would call cosmic. I'm curious if you've given thought to that or how you would tell us. Yeah, well I suggest in the book that we can understand the ancient goddess Roma

as one of these sort of emergent entities who I would take to be, I mean this is the goddess who herself sort of embodies the Roman Empire. In some ways that Paul may have in mind as he's thinking about Rome as a sort of single entity. I was trying to be circumspect in the book as a scholar is supposed to be and be careful about you know not getting too wide-ranging but here among friends. Yeah, I will happily say yeah I'm quite inclined to try to think about certainly some amount of what Paul's doing there with this language along exactly these lines.

I think my exploration of the cult of the goddess Roma, and even some of the ways that ancient Roman philosophers are talking about the Roman Empire, or certainly the Roman army, as an extension of the body of the emperor, And the emperor is the sort of animating spirit of the body, which is the empire. In that sense, I think I suggest at one point that Nero, that some of these more sort of eagle-moniacal emperors may in a certain sense be a sort of incarnation, as it were, of this goddess Roma. I think it makes a lot of sense. As you said before, Paul has ancient reasons,

and ancient resources for thinking about social bodies this way. These stoic philosophers who are thinking about the Roman Empire and exactly these terms are chief among them. And so yeah, in as much as it's the same intellectual resources for Paul, the same basic ideas in his context that help him, I think, think about sin and think about powers and authorities

this way. Why not exploit the same opportunity for us in thinking on emergent terms in both contexts as well? It's really helped me actually feel like Paul is actually a little more sane as he looks out at the world than perhaps Rudolph Boltman was. In the sense of being able to actually account for the whole of my human experience, which is a social collective experience as much as it is my own individual experience of life and my moral decisions. I mean, who doesn't have moral conflict over what their governing structures are doing in the world? Yeah.

And it's hard to pin them to one person. It's a whole system. And I don't know, maybe a reductionist or somebody like Rudolph Boltman could talk about those structures, but they didn't read Paul in those terms. And so that's really helpful. Yeah. Thank you so much. This has been very fun to talk with you. If you were to, you know, you're in a local church or you're invited, you know, to like a campus group, Christian campus group, and you're trying to share what you think matters about these ideas, you know, in an evening talk to some college students or to a

local church. How would you... what are some ways that you would encourage just a local community of Jesus followers to take these ideas seriously? I think for me what's most important is to help people see themselves as fundamentally socially constrained. See, I think the mythology that we're that we're brought into is a myth of individuality, a myth of individualism. And those are the things I think that need to be demythologized. And so I had want to help people see rightly

the ways that we are not our own masters. We are constrained by our social institutions, by the communities we choose to invest in, by the patterns of thought we choose to fall into, or rather don't all that intentionally choose. And so therefore, think really seriously about our participation in certain sorts of systems and to take seriously our culpability when we participate in racist, sexist, classist systems of various sorts. But then the other thing that I wanna say,

and of course, you pose this as a hypothetical, I'm a vineyard pastor. This is my world. The other thing that's really important to me is to say to people, look all three of these ways of thinking about sin are important and valuable because they point to different parts of the Christian life.

It's important to think about sin at the individual level, my own sort of, my individual misdeeds, the ways that I harm other people in the world, and to think about sort of personal discipleship, and sometimes therapy, right? It's a really important part of that, like working on my psychology. That's actually really important

and part of my discipleship. But it's also important to recognize the sort of large social structures and to strive for justice, you know, in response to the sort of malformations of social structures. And that's also an important part of discipleship and an important part of participating

in the coming of God's kingdom. But it's also important at the same time, I think, to and appropriate to, I'm an vineyard church, we're good charismatics. I mean, you got to like recognize some spirits and pray for deliverance and cast out demons and, you know, take seriously the sort of the spiritual dimension of what's going on. But I would just hope to be inviting people, whether it's through, you know, whatever sort of reflection they're engaged in, to be looking for ways to hold their whole world together

so that they can live forward in all three of those sorts of modes. Yeah, thank you. Thanks. Yeah, that's, yeah, a really helpful response. Matt, this has been a great privilege. It's really fun to talk with you. And thank you again for the many years

and sleepless nights of writing that book. It wasn't just stimulating for me. It was immensely helpful. Oh man, Tim was talking about it constantly while he was reading it. Just blowing his mind one hour after the next. Yeah. So thank you for the effort you put into that. I trust that it will do what God For the effort you put into that, I trust that it will do what God was calling it to do through you as you wrote that. Well, thank you for the time and attention you gave to it. It's honestly, it's always a serious honor when someone takes the time to really invest themselves in a set of ideas.

And yeah, this has been a really fun conversation. So thanks. Yeah, likewise, Matt. Thanks again for taking the time. Yeah, likewise Matt. Thanks again for taking the time. Yeah, be well That was really a great. I'm slightly concerned that it was too intellectual. Oh, interesting. I kind of, I mean, it took every amount of focus. Yeah.

It was my electrified meat. Well, especially, yeah, the conversation about emergence theory is theoretical. Yeah. Yeah. But I think the brain analogies helpful, we use the word brain to talk about a physical thing, my skull. But we use the word mind to talk about the thing that emerges from it. And the mind, I wouldn't experience my mind without my brain, but my mind also can form thoughts and ideas that exert influence on my brain and body. So there's the philosophical part of that. That's kind of complex.

Then there's another part of it, which is our, I guess maybe the fear of, are we dismissing some sort of real other type of power by just calling it emergence? And what I'm reflecting on is, by using this language and talking this way, it feels at first like maybe we're taking the devil or Satan less seriously. But in a way, this actually starts to make powers

of evil and sin way more serious. And more real. And more real. And more real. I think so. I think that's why I found it helpful was first, it puts back on the table, what is the definition of a real person? Mm-hmm.

And maybe I'm just taking an assumed definition of a personal being and saying, therefore, a spiritual being must like sin, or the power, the principalities and powers and false thought, why am I taking it for granted that I know what kind of being that that is? Maybe it's a being that exists in a way that's a very different kind of personal being that I am.

And yeah, Matt's work shows there's actually lots of different ways to talk about a personal being being real, but that isn't a person like I am. That's helpful to me. And to your point, I think it actually makes these personal realities more of a present and visible force in my day-to-day life than whatever. I just think of silly medieval concepts of like reptilian creatures swapping about that are invisible.

But the comfort in that is there's this meta story that helped me understand. And I feel like you guys are trying to take that away from me a little bit. Yeah, I know that. I lumped you into his thesis project. But like, yeah. Yeah, I hear that. I lumped you into his thesis project, but like, yeah. Yeah, like, hmm. Yeah, and even, notice when we,

does the devil exist? Yeah, when we asked him about that, and I think he's working out his own way of talking about that, I think I still am too. But for me, what's helpful is that he's forcing me to think about it in ways that I haven't before.

And then I go back to text in Paul or Genesis and I realize, oh, yeah, that quite doesn't say what I assume that said. And whatever way the Satan, the devil, exists, what we're not saying is that he doesn't exist. What we're saying is that there is a power, there is a creature, there is an entity, there's something. But what it is, how it came to be, these are all things that are way beyond our ability

to fully comprehend. Or that I shouldn't think that the simplest explanation to me is therefore the right one. Reality is extremely complex. And the biblical literature that talks about these things is actually fairly nuanced and complex. We've talked about this. The spiritual powers of evil, like the snake, for example, in Genesis 3, the power and agency of that being becomes real

in and through a human decision. The power of that being is fully connected to humans who are under its influence and acting upon it. And then right after page 3, it's the human actions that become the foreground of the story. I think that's saying something. Well, couldn't you say in the same way, humans on a collective level who are making poor decisions are like, you know, swaying the millennium bridge in a way that it becomes its own power, that then becomes its own super organism. In that same way, couldn't the divine council

rebelling, create the same sort of phenomena, which then does pre-exist humanity in some way. Oh, I understand. Because the divine council is tied very much up with this vision, and it's right there in Genesis 1, right on through the end, that the heavenly realm is a mirror of the earthly world. I know I want to create this kind of, he's the word ontology, ontology, just of that it was first it existed, it was and then we come onto the scene later. But you, that's right. Well in Genesis 1 the heavenly realm and the earthly realm are both created. Yeah.

Neither one of them is prior. They were brought into existence in the same narrative and their mirrors of each other. And so that therefore, a human rebellion is corresponding to a heavenly rebellion. The heavenly realities are usually in the background, but then occasionally they peak out. The book of Daniel that we've been exploring is a great example where he sees empires boring and then he has a vision and he sees Gabriel of the heavenly host saying, yeah, man, three weeks I was fighting with the Prince of Persia up here. So the biblical authors assume a heavenly, earthly, mirrored reality when it comes to evil. And there you go. And Matt's work has given me

some very helpful categories to critique my previously held assumptions about how I read and even think about any of this in the Bible. So I don't think he thinks he's offering his last word, but he definitely is pushing us to think and imagine wider, which is very helpful for me. Very, very cool. What a cool guy. That was a great conversation. I enjoyed doing that.

If you're following along with this podcast maybe for the first time, this is the Bible project where a non-profits, primarily an animation studio, I suppose, but we exist to show the Bible as a unified story that leads to Jesus and we have animations, explainer videos, we've got this podcast, study notes, and it's all free, and you can find out on our websites bioproject.com, and it's made possible

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