The Eric Metaxas Show - Paul C.H. Lim

Episode Date: April 6, 2020

Award-winning historian Paul C.H. Lim kicks off Holy Week with an examination of what he calls "the crisis of the Trinity" down through the ages.

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I tell all my relatives to take it. relief factor.com. Hey folks, right before we were quarantined, we recorded this program with Dr. Paul C.H. Lim about the history of Christianity. Stay tuned. Welcome to the Eric Muttaxie show.

It's the show that answers the question. Is it possible to make a vowel sound out of a potato? Can the word potato be a verb? What about an actual potato? Can that be a verb? What about the word verb? Can it be a potato?

Mama, I'm scared myself. And now your host, Eric Mottetau. I don't know what just happened, but I don't really like it. Folks, it's the Eric McAxas show. This is the show about everything. Lucky for us, because we like to talk about a lot of different things. Today we're going to be talking about a host of things, but that host of things about which we will be talking will be focused in the person of my guest, Paul Lim.

His last name is L-I-M-L-I-M-L-B, and his initials are. are C.H. Paul C.H. Lim, Lim, who's the author of many books, the one I'm holding in my hand here, published by Oxford University Press, is Mystery Unveiled the Crisis of the Trinity in Early Modern England. Paul Lim, welcome to the program. Thank you very much. The reason you're here, not so much to talk about the crisis of the Trinity in early modern England, not that I'm not interested in that, but I was going to say that your story of your conversion to the Christian

faith came to my attention some months ago. And when I found out that you were an undergraduate at Yale when you came to faith, I said, wow, I got to look into this because when I was at Yale, basically I lost my faith. And I am just fascinated with how secular the Ivy League has become and how so many people are losing their faith in colleges and universities. And so when I hear the story of somebody coming to faith at a place like Yale, I said, That's interesting. So I looked into you. Turns out you're legit, and we decided to get you on the program. So welcome to the program. My audience by now wants me to shut up so you could talk. And I think that let's start at the beginning, or actually let's start in Medias Race.

When were you at Yale and what happened very briefly? And then we'll go backwards and tell the whole story. Sure. I'm a class of 90 from Yale. I was in Trumbull College. and I became a Christian between my first and second semester junior year. Didn't happen on campus. It actually happened at a retreat center in Pocono Mountains in Pennsylvania. My sister had gotten engaged to a seminary student, and he was going to be one of the speakers at a retreat that was going to be held in the Poconos. There was a group of Korean American seminary students

who were leading different youth groups and college groups, and my mom encouraged me to go, and I did not want to go. I thought I had better things to do than. go and hang out with a group of Christians. So it was completely unintended, and I did go, and to make a very long story short, I went up as a scoffer of Christianity. I came back down from the mountain as a Christian, but very confused. Trying to figure out what happened.

Yeah, I was going to say, this is, I mean, it's funny, because the idea that you went on a retreat, on a Christian retreat, but you were a scoffer of Christianity or at Christianity, So this was, I guess, cultural pressure, family pressure. Your sister married somebody who's in seminary. He's giving a retreat. We just want you to go for, you know, because he's going to be in our family soon. Right.

So I think, you know, there are different ways and different modalities of people engaging with any kind of religion. For me, religion was part of my life, but only a very kind of small part of it. When we immigrated to America to Cherry Hill, New Jersey when I was 15, we started going going to church a bit more regularly. And I started going to do churches more regularly, but it didn't really mean much to it. It was kind of a cultural thing? It was a cultural thing. And what about for your family? Was it cultural for them or was it, did they take it more seriously? No, I think my mother and father were more serious, but they went through ups and downs in terms of their, you know, religious commitments and so on. But for me, I think, yeah, I mean, being in

a youth group where I felt more alienated from the group than being a part of it. Because you're from Korea. Yeah, and it was actually a Korean church. Oh, well then you didn't feel alienated. No, it wasn't alienation because of, but, you know, be it as in May, I felt that this wasn't really part of my identity. So when my parents drove me from Wilmington, Delaware, to New Haven, Connecticut, I basically said to myself, now I'm going to be a free person. I'm going to walk away from Christianity as far as I can. And so embrace the college life to, to the tilt, and had a great time. And it was actually at that retreat that I didn't want to go that I ended up going that really kind of profoundly shook my foundation of what is my life about is basically I think I was operating out of a model of conquest, getting things. That's normal.

That is quite normal. It's especially normal for people who come from certain backgrounds like as Greek. There's certain cultures where it's kind of like study hard so you can succeed. And nobody tells you exactly why. But you kind of get on this thing and going to a place like Yale and all this stuff, you kind of think, okay, I'm here to succeed. Right. And you know, you don't know why, but you're doing it. Exactly.

And you're at a place like Yale, which is a very prestigious place. And for the most part, I was kind of confused. I was like, I'm glad to be here and these professors are fantastic. My friends were great. And you're studying these things and enjoying your college life. but I don't think I really could have written my life story more strangely because after I became a Christian, I had a lot of questions about this Christian faith. And so there was a professor who, there are a couple of professors who offered these classes that really kind of got my interest further,

interested further in the study of religion or theology. At Yale. At Yale. Yes, there was a class. Now, before you get into the classes, it's a similar subject. because just because somebody is in seminary or just because somebody is teaching a class on religion or something doesn't mean that they are a person of faith. In other words, when you go to a place like Yale, you know, they have all kinds of, how do I put it, you know, chapel services on campus. There are many churches in New York and around the country that are mainstream Protestant churches.

And in most of them, I would argue, you don't find people who are born again or evangelical. They're just kind of, you know, going. And if you really probe about what they believe, they may not really believe anything. They may believe, you know, the editorial page of the New York Times. That's their cultural loadstone. And so when you say, first of all, before we get to the classes, you say you went to this, your sister married somebody who's in seminary. Right.

Was he a profound Christian and was your sister a profound Christian? And had they had your sister come to her faith before meeting this guy? How did this come about? Yeah, so she was actually had, she was at that point engaged to this guy and married him and still married to him. And for my sister, she was at the University of Chicago and was very heavily involved with the Korean Christian Fellowship. And so she had become some kind of a Christian. Right, right. And she had become very serious about that.

And when did that happen for her at in college also? I think much more intensified while in college. So I think there is a very interesting myth about elite universities and people. basically going there to lose their faith. Those things do happen. However, the flip side of the story, which was actually written up in New York Times a few years back, but how in certain elite universities,

the ivies and the Dukes and Chicago's and Stanford's, and Vandible as well, and there are these students who would come and then they find their enclave of kind of like-minded, like culture of friends, and they also get, you know,

introduced to more orthodox faith. Now, I think you're right that, it may not be through classes, although at the same time, there are professors who are profound versions. I mean, that's, this is why I interrupted because I said, we want to be clear. Like you, okay, so you're at Yale. Yep. And you say, oh, okay, I've, let's say, given my life to Christ.

Now I want to, I want to dig in a little bit intellectually. And you take some classes. And all I was saying was that, you know, there are many classes you can take in the world of religion or even at the Yale Divinity School where you're going to get the far this thing from traditional historical, theological, theologically orthodox trinitarian Christianity, you know. So you, when you took these classes, what did you get? Right.

So I would say that, I mean, interesting enough, our alma mater Yale, that Yale Divinity School is probably one of the few major university-based divinity schools where you can get a kind of orthodox theological education if you do it right. So what are we looking for in these classes? Right. And I'm teaching in religious studies and divinity school and history departments. Now you are.

Now I do. And so I usually tell my students, my classes are neither faith busters nor faith builders. I'm a historian of Christianity. That means I'm going to tell you the whole thing, right? So good and the bad and the ugly. And it's for you to kind of figure out at the end of the day how you'll put it together. Forgive me. We're going to go through a break.

Well, this is not a bad place to stop. Folks, I'm talking to Paul Lim. It's L.I.M. We'll be right back. Hey there folks, it's the Eric from Texas show. I'm talking to Paul Lim, it's L-I-M, who is a professor at Vanderbilt in religious studies. And Divinity School. And the Divinity School.

And we're talking, well, we're talking about a lot of things, but we're talking about your story of coming to faith at Yale and then deciding to take courses. And now these are the kinds of courses you're teaching. So it's fascinating to me. Yeah. So what's interesting is that when you came to faith, how? how instinctively you said, I want to take these classes. And now, of course, all these years later, you're teaching these classes. Like you sort of have an innate sense of thinking in this way.

I mean, you're an academic. You flourished as an academic. But it's so fascinating to me that at that point in your career, you work an economics major. And suddenly you decide, I want to pursue this other thing, which intrigues me. Right. So I think what has happened to me is to go further back than my days in New Haven. I was nine years old when my father became the sort of the collateral damage to the military dictator's been South Korea. Now, most Americans don't know this history.

Right. So the late president, Park Jong-hee, was instrumental in bringing the Korean economy to jumpstart it and to get it going. But at the same time, human rights and so on was not. And this is in the 70s. In the 70s. So I was born in 67, so it must be mid to late 70s. One day I come back from school and my mom says, Dad's not going to be home for a while.

And then next thing, I know that a while lasted about a couple of years. And I think he was in and out of prison. And so at age 9, there was a major rupture in my life, and that is incarceration. Now why was your father? Because I'm not really familiar in the history of South Korea. Yeah. So I'm not even really sure.

I think, you know, I don't want to be speaking out of turn, but I do think that if you are not a sympathizer to the government, if you are not supporting it financially, because he was an entrepreneur, he ran a company, and so he was not a political animal in any shape or form. And then next thing I know, I didn't see my father. So our coming to America when I was 15 had a lot to do with the fact that our life in South Korea was basically really, really untenable.

People don't think of South Korea. at least I should speak for myself, as a place of that kind of political repression. I mean, it's surprising to think that if somebody is not, you know, saying Heil Hitler loudly enough in effect, you're saying, oh, I just want to run my business and suddenly you become a political prisoner. That's, I was not aware that that was happening in South Korea as recently as the 70s. Right. I mean, I do think that when people think about their careers, they tend to think of North Korea as a very repressive regime, and rightly so. But I think the history of democracy in South Korea has been a.

very tortuous path. I mean, right now, it's a, you know, they have had a female president already and who's not behind bars. Who is the daughter of that military dictator? She's behind bars. Yes, I think so. The female president, the former female president was behind bars. Yeah. But anyway, I think the whole issue was, you know, I think the whole question of theoddacy, why do bad things happen to good people, was the sort of inchoate question that I had within my own heart, right? I didn't know the word diodicy. neither in Korean, certainly not in English. But coming to America, so that incarceration kind of experience

of my father really left an indelible mark in my soul. And then coming to America at age 15, now you're in a new culture, new country, not speaking the language, not knowing what's cool and what's not, I felt very much alienated. So that immigration, while overall and on the whole it was a good experience, but while I was in high school, they were really hard. So that at age nine is incarceration, at age 15 is immigration, at age 21 is sort of an invitation to something bigger than myself, right? And that's your conversion?

That's my conversion, right? And then what happened was, I guess I didn't realize until apt to the fact. Like, okay, I've had these questions about it. So in fact, I'm teaching a class in prison right now, and I do that every other year. And the class that I teach is similar to the class that was very instrumental in my Christian growth when I was at Yale. It's a class that I call God and human suffering in Christian traditions. And so why, again, the sort of bad things happening to good people and how do we make sense of it? We read things like Dostoevsky's, you know, Brothers Karamata of the Grand Inquisitor chapter, very similar types of reading.

So this class that I took as an undergraduate at Yale then really kind of blew my socks off. It was called Divine Sovereignty and Human Self-Assertion. And one of the books that I read in the class was, and that became the basis of my senior essay member senior. essay? I didn't have to write a senior essay. And I don't know why. I was an English major. And for some reason, we didn't have to write a senior essay. And I thank the Lord, I didn't. So the book that I used heavily was Kirkcogor's Fear and Trembling, which is a story of Abraham being asked to sacrifice his one and only beloved son, Isaac. And so the question of that divine, if God exists and if God is sovereign, what about human freedom and how do we exist in this continuum?

That is, so a number of questions that I had after my conversion, I still have them in somewhat, you know, similar format, but having questions do not become faith busters. I always tell students, it is faith seeking greater understanding and greater clarity. And so in some ways, the questions that I had immediately after conversion are the reasons why I am what I am today. And I realize even living with undergrads for about seven years, because, you know, Vannibal adopted a residential college system like our, alma mater. And what they ended up doing was I was one of the inaugural faculty heads. And I realized that many of the first year students have similar questions. And knowing that I was a Divinity School professor, it was easier for them to just have breakfast with me or coffee and tea with me and freely talk about their questions about their upbringing and what that means now. And I took

that to be a real great ministry of presence, not ministry of proclamation. Yeah. but yeah well that's so wonderful to think that you uh that you've made yourself available that way gives me hope for for higher education in places like uh like vanderbilt um now when you were taking these classes at yale um you did you begin to uh have some fellowship with other christians at college did that you did okay and what was that like so i think you know more than anything else, it was creating sort of a safe space for me to be who I am as a newly kind of a born again Christian, right? And someone who began to take these things seriously, that meant that I wasn't going to take other stuff that was very kind of at the focal point

of my social life as seriously, right? So, and so I think that local church involvement was really helpful for me to make sense of, because I think, you know, these classes that I was taking were helpful, but then it raised equally as many questions as it provided answers. And I came to realize that maybe I shouldn't be looking for faith confirmation in these classes necessarily. But the local church was extremely helpful. And what kind of a church? It was a Korean Presbyterian church. In New Haven.

And Whaley Avenue. Amazing. Dixwell Avenue or Whalee Avenue? One of them. Yeah, one of them. Hey, I've never gotten that straightened out. I have no idea. And I don't care.

It's so confusing. But that is very interesting to me. So that you have this faith conversion and you were, I mean, I think sometimes, You know, it depends on what circles you're in. You're in the economics world or whatever. I was more in the humanities and I was somehow hanging around with people for whom this would have been confusing and troubling. You could feel that they were, you know, politically and culturally secular left. I mean, that was the world in which they lived very politically correct.

So that was the milieu in which I existed at Yale. And I always say if you're in the sciences or something else, usually it's not as culturally oppressive. in that sense, that you have more freedom or whatever. But everybody's story is different. You found your way. I did find my way. And I think it was, so sometimes I do wonder, had I had some kind of faculty mentors who was speaking to my current situation, then current situation, would I become a professor

myself? I don't know. Because in some ways, precisely because I did not have a faculty member or two or three who took some personal interest in me, I felt like that would be a very important part of my own professional journey, to be the kind of person. person that would provide some kind of, and raise equally similar questions, but at least listen to their stories and struggles. It's interesting.

On this program recently, we had somebody named Margarita Mooney, and she's at Princeton. Okay. She was doing a similar thing that she does a lot of this mentoring of undergrads, and I thought it's such a, it's an amazing thing to think about, because I didn't have anything like that at the time, but to think that there would be people who are coming from a Christian viewpoint in places. like Yale or Vanderbilt or whatever who can kind of come alongside you and help you

reason through these things if you're ready for it. I don't know if I would have been ready for it. I mean, it's just basically saying you're not an utter noter if you believe in, right? I mean, because I think there are some places where, whether in the university or outside of it, if you say that I believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, they'll probably just get out of here, right? So I do think that they're faculty members

throughout, you know, throughout the country. I had a privilege of studying with a very serious Christian during my graduate studies at Cambridge, who is a scholar named Eamond Duffy, who is probably one of the best known Reformation historians and is a deeply devout Catholic, good friends with a couple of the last popes and so on. But he really said to me, you know what, it is very important for you to be a robust Christian who loves engaging with big ideas and on afraid of engaging at secular universities. We need more of you, Paul Lim, I have to tell you. It's just wonderful to think that you'd be willing to do that

and that you feel comfort in being able to do that. Because, listen, if this stuff is true that we believe, we really should be engaging because it's going to lead in the right direction. We're going to another break, folks. I'll be right back with Paul Lim. It's L-I-M. And this is the Airquit Taxes Show. Hey, there, folks.

I'm talking to Paul Lim, or as he's known professionally, Dr. Paul C.H. Lim, he's the author of a number of scholarly works, but he came to my attention through YouTube video. Professor Lim, it's kind of funny we were talking about this. You were at a conference in Ottawa, Canada, and you were asked to kind of give a personal testimony. Now, you're an academic, and you live in an academic world, and so people don't throw around their faith stories too lightly in that universe, especially at universities like Vanderbilt or Yale. So what was it that persuaded you to kind of go public in this way on a video that's on YouTube? And are you comfortable with that?

How does that work? Because it's a tough world, academic world today. Right. I think as an academic, the adage is true that you are tenured and promoted and celebrated for your scholarship that touches just a few people who are super subspecialists in your field. And so the scope of your scholarship is not necessarily. meant to be broad and wide. You've got to go deep and narrow. And that was how I was trained as a graduate

student in England. And that's how I took on my scholarly kind of identity. And also that's how I do still believe is an important part of my scholarly identity is not sort of scholarly populism. Although I do think there's a room for

it now, but I think you almost have to earn your kind of bona fides by doing something very narrowly defined and getting the kudos from your guild saying that's a good, you know, a good scholar. Yeah. So, but I think at this conference in Ottawa, they did ask me to give my personal testimony. And I do remember being somewhat hesitant.

Not because there are some kind of negative repercussions, but I didn't know how the two worlds kind of met, right? So, but then after some thought, I said, okay. And they said, you know, it shouldn't take you too much time to prepare for it. And so on. So I went in and gave that. testimony, but just a couple of weeks prior to that, I gave a lecture, an endowed lecture at Harvard University in their divinity school, and that to me as a scholar was sort of a high point of my career. But as Providence would have it, as fate would have it, what happened was that this

video that I did, which I did not think very much about, and in fact didn't prepare that much for, apparently when, you know, to get Garner a lot of attention. So about eight months after the recording or that event, I started getting emails from people saying that I watched a YouTube video. And I said, what YouTube video are you talking about? Then they said, well, this one, and I clicked on it, and there it was. I actually sort of forgot about it. Because as, you know, as you and I both do, like speaking here and there, and you kind of move on from one event to the next. So, and then next thing I knew was basically it started to, I got over almost a thousand emails about that.

A thousand emails. Yes, unsolicited emails. Let me just tell you, that's a lot of emails to get from a video. Well, over about two years. That's still a lot of emails. Yes. So, and then it reached over a million view mark, and I think it's around 1.5 million. Now, I've, listen, I've got a lot of YouTube videos out there.

Nothing has ever come to like the million mark. That's a staggering, staggering figure. What do you suppose can account for that? I mean, that's an amazing thing. Is it the idea of a Yale professor, or I'm sorry, is the idea that a professor in the academic world in Vanderbilt would be, you know, an evangelical Christian or whatever we want to call it? Is that the news? What is the headline that would make this go genuinely viral? I did ask a friend who used to work in the IT world as to how do you account for this?

And he gave, I think, what is probably the best answer. He said two things. One is called Google Algorithm. The other is a Holy Spirit. And he goes, neither this nor that, but both end. And that really helped me to understand. So if I believe in the operation of God and also in the technologies that human beings have invented and further developed. But I still don't understand.

I mean, Google algorithm is like words that mean nothing. Like, oh, yes, there is a, you know, a digital explanation. The question is, what is that explanation? You know, just by calling it a Google algorithm, the point is that there must be something about your story that, you know, triggered this attention. So, yes, I think one of the things that I found really perplexing and poignant was that a number of emails talked about the fact that in the early part of that testimony,

I talked about, I mentioned the fact that when I was in high school, I felt like a loser. Right? I felt like a loser, especially going to church. I felt even more alienated from that. And so many people have emailed me and said, you know, your youth group experience is my youth group experience. So I do think that sometimes the reason why people walk away from the Christian faith is not necessarily because of some, you know, atheist scoffers of the organized religion,

but is being hurt within the body of Christ, being hurt within the church. And for me, I think that's, it was one of the throwaway lines from me. You know, when I was in youth group in New Jersey, I felt like I didn't really belong there and how that became. Now, again, that doesn't account for the whole thing. And again, I do think that, well, mystery, right? Mystery of life. How do we account for everything in the world?

And I just have come to accept the fact that it happened. And I am a sort of unintended beneficiary of that. I mean, including appearance in the show. And I just decided to embrace it. Like, hey, you know, and I don't hide it. But it's kind of, you know, I don't want to be excessively narcissistic. We all have our very strong narcissistic bends within us just to be human, I suppose, in some ways. But I don't promote it necessarily like, hey, you've got to watch my video.

But people do still reach out to me, and it has opened up a lot of very interesting doors in terms of speaking opportunities. And so I just said, okay, I'm not going to hide it under a bushel, but nor am I going to just promote it. Yeah. But yeah, that's how. I still don't know why. It's funny. It's just funny. It is what it is.

I love it. Okay. We're talking, folks. We're talking to Paul C.H. Lim, the author of many books. And he's my guest today. Stick around. Hey there, folks. It's here.

Kmetax's show. I'm talking to Paul C.H. Lim, who is a professor at Vanderbilt University, associate professor in history of Christianity and many other fields, many other departments. You do a lot of teaching. all over the map, I guess, although what is your, what is your principal focus as an academic? So my principal focus has been early modern Christianity since the Reformation era. So what years? So basically 1530s to about 1700. Okay. Particularly in England. So Henry VIII kind of starting

the Church of England and the ramifications of the political and religious settlement. And particularly with regard to the Puritans and the Anglican debates about the identity of the church, but my last book was on the debates about the Trinity and how it is interesting, but since the Reformation, beginning of the Reformation Luther, as you wrote about a couple of years ago, how the Protestant Reformation could be looked upon as the sort of unleashing of the individual liberty of conscience, but then how the idea of God as existing in the three persons but one God became a cause for serious reinterrogation and reinvestigation of could that be true? So Protestant's emphasis on Solas Scriptura did it lead to the birth of anti-Trinitarian ideas?

Now, I guess the reason why I've been interested in things like this is how do we reconcile faith and reason? just because I cannot explain it, is it untrue? Just because I don't see it, is that just non-existent? These are some kind of fundamental questions that we have raised in regard to religion and faith. And that's partly why I wrote that book, because I realized that after the Reformation in mid-16 through late 17th century, England, there were a lot of questions about the Trinity, a lot of increasing numbers. Let me just ask for it. Sure, of course.

Is this because, when you say Soliscriptoria, is the idea behind what you're saying that because the scripture itself does not explicitly refer to the Trinity, did people then begin to question the idea of the Trinity? That's one clear line of reasoning for some anti-Tunitarians. Because the language, the word Trinity does not appear. Jesus never explicitly claimed himself to be God, so they averred. But the sort of pro-Tunitarians, or Trinitarians, simply put, They were saying, no, if you actually read the scripture rightly, then you would actually arrive at this sort of a deity of Jesus as a legitimate conclusion, warranted conclusion.

And so it became a debate about the three teas, right, tradition of the church, because Protestant said tradition isn't true, transubstantiation, the idea that Jesus's body and blood, you know, the wine and bread become transubstantiated, and the Trinity. So I follow that particular debate with, I suppose, you know, after 496 pages, I became much more aware of the specifics of the debate. I don't know if I became, I would say that I'm a Chinatarian and it is faith-seeking understanding. I became more confident historically aware of the debates at a stake. So currently I'm writing a book about the divinity of Jesus and how that became an important part of the Enlightenment debates about anthropology and Christology. That's a pretty big one for the Enlightenment. Yeah.

My goodness. Yeah, yeah. Because, yeah, I mean, I think that it is fascinating, really, that once you open the door, I think I say in my Luther book that when Luther opened the door to a second church, what he really did is open the door to thousands of new churches. In other words, opening this door, you can't contain, you can't, you can't, you can't, you You can't stop things from going through the door once you've opened the door. And that's what the Reformation did.

And the downside of that, I would argue, of course, the downside of any freedom is people choosing wrong things. They have the freedom to choose. But now the freedom of choose by definition gives them the freedom to choose wrong things. And it opens the door to every kind of heresy and whether it's, you know, unitarianism or anything along those lines. So it is fascinating as an academic as you are to explore what actually happened. That is exactly what you've done. Yes, I have. And continuing on in that sort of query into the 18th century is what I'm doing right now with my current book.

Right. Well, I guess it's fascinating to me because we think about this has been the debate for the last 500 years. I mean, once Luther opened these doors, suddenly everybody's trying to figure out what happened. And you get all of these kinds of, you know, I would describe it as a water. down social gospel Christianity that says, listen, there's a lot here we like. We don't need to believe Jesus is God or divine, but we like the teachings or we like certain aspects of it. And you do get a lot of that in mainline Protestant Christianity, I mean, especially, you know, at the latter part of the 19th century and onward. Right. And obviously, you're looking at the roots. You're

looking at the stem cells in a way of how we all got to that place. What are the first arguments against the divinity of Jesus. It seems to me that anybody making that argument would have to be a really devoted enlightenment rationalist because it's a very brave thing, brave argument to make, not today, but in those days. Sure. I do you think that there are questions about, so scriptural interpretation, the $2 will be hermeneutics, and how you interpret scripture and if it is no longer tied to or anchored by the teaching magistrarium of the church, then if individual believers could come up.

with interpretation that they really believe is warranted by the spirit within me, then as you said, and as you argue in your Luther book, that it opens this kind of barrage of possible interpretations. As Erasmus famously said, when you leave this one pope, you're not just, you know, not having any pope, you're actually opening the door for 1,000 different posts. You know what, I don't remember that. I came up with my thousand church thing, but it's the same concept. Same kind of concept, right? So, I mean, how do we then kind of regulate that?

or is it desirable to regulate that? And I think that's a contemporary, I mean, to not to go back talking about your books only, but you're Wilberford. I mean, Wilberforce and his Claffam's kind of circle, or the types of Orthodox believers within the Church of England, who also believe that this political activism and social justice pursued are really a derived secondary products of your commitment to Orthodox faith. Right.

Perhaps it is that divorce between the two that has, have given rise to liberal Protestantism and conservative Protestantism that I think many evangelical Christians are today and progressive Christians as well are finding this just doesn't really do it. I have said precisely the same thing many times. We'll come back. We can continue this conversation with Paul Lim. Don't go away. Hey there, folks. I'm talking to Paul C.H. Lim, the author of Mystery Unveiled, the Crisis of the Trinity in early modern England. And Paul, we were just talking about, You mentioned the story of William Wilberforce about whom I've written, of course, and I came to precisely the conclusion that you just mentioned that once you make the case that the faith, the Christian faith, leads to these kinds of actions, it doesn't become, it's not merely theological, but it becomes part of the culture. And you start saying to be a Christian doesn't just mean believing these things.

It means acting on this, abolishing slavery, caring about the poor, caring about children, caring about women, caring about everything. And what can happen, and which did happen, of course, is you get a split, which never existed beforehand. Right. And the split is that some people say, okay, I'm going to do that good stuff. Right. And they do the good stuff, and they lose the connection to the theology behind it, or they lose the connection to any kind of evangelistic zeal. Yeah. And they become purveyors of the social gospel.

and then you had in the 1920s in this country the reaction of the fundamentalists against that. Sure. And so you get this bizarre split in the church where people are stressing these fundamentals of the faith on the one hand in evangelism. And then you get these other people that say, forget about all that. Let's just do the good stuff. Right. Let's just care for the poor. Right.

And it's bizarre. I mean, it seems inevitable you can't control history. But that does seem to be a part of more recent story. I think so. Although, I mean, so to your point about how recent is there split, I was, I'm teaching a class this semester on evangelicalism and Pentecostalism in the shape of global Christianity at Vanderbilt. And it's a fantastic class because of the students that are in it and the books were reading. And what has been really fascinating to me was that in one of the books, the author makes this very strong argument that is the millenarian splits, post-millennialism as opposed to pre-millennial. meaning that the thousand reign of Christ, so many had believed that life conditions are getting

better and better, and the church has a role to play in it. Now, hang on, just because I always feel like I have to, because you're an academic, I feel like I want to translate, or make sure I'm tracking, right? Yes. Is that the idea, would NT Wright say that that's, in other words, I get the idea that some people say, you know, the kingdom of God begins now and that we are to live it out and that this world will become more and more like as we pray, thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. And so it can lead to a utopianist strain. It could. Yeah, it could.

And it could lead to this idea that we don't need God. Thank you very much. We can do it ourselves. But the post-millanialism is actually a belief that although there needs to be that decisive intervention God at the end, but the human condition through the partnering of the church and Christians with God, God's spirit, the human condition is going to get better and then the advent of second coming of Christ. So I think that's the end of Christ fit in. Right. Where does the reign of the interchrist?

No, I mean, so it's the whole millennial kind of maze has been truly a confusing one. Oh, my goodness. Many in the church. But the premillennialism basically said, pardon my French here, but like the world is, you know, going to hell in a. handbasket. So the best thing we could do is forget about the world, but to save souls, right? So then the body and the creation and the cosmos and the ecology and all that was secondary, if not tertiary, and of no consequence. Therefore, all we need to do is have these

evangelistic rallies, make sure that you sign on and become a Christian. And forget about this world because it's all going to burn. I want to end on a positive note. I failed. You know what? We're going to have to keep you into the next hour so we can continue. This is a wonderful conversation. Paul C.H. Lim, thanks for being with us and don't go away. Folks, we're going to continue this conversation if you can stick around for hour two. Based on the book by Colin Smith, Heaven, How I Got Here, is the story of the thief on the cross. This is it. This is the day I die. Told in his own words, the thief looks back from heaven on the day that changed his eternity. Jesus, I said, remember me when you come into your kingdom.

So don't miss Heaven how I got here. Listen to Heaven, how I got here, a special Good Friday edition of the Eric Metaxus show right here this Friday on the Eric Metaxus show.