Theology in the Raw - S2 Ep1110: The Role of Our Bodies in Worship: Dr. W. David O. Taylor

Episode Date: September 11, 2023

Dr. W. David O. Taylor joined the Fuller faculty in 2014. Prior to his appointment at Fuller, Dr. Taylor served as a pastor for ten years in Austin, Texas. Born and raised in Guatemala City, he has lectured widely on the arts in both academic and popular settings, from Thailand to South Africa. Taylor is the author of many books in the field of theology, culture, and the arts; his most recent book is A Body of Praise: Understanding the Role of Our Physical Bodies in Worship (Baker Academic, 2023), which forms the foundation for our conversation, after we discuss the short time he spent with Bono.

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Theology in Raw. My guest today is the one and only Dr. David Taylor, who is Associate Professor of Theology and Culture at Fuller Seminary, has a doctorate from Duke Divinity School, is the author of several books, including his most recent book, A Body of Praise, Understanding the Role of Our Physical Bodies in Worship. I so enjoyed this conversation. We kind of go all over the map from a theology of the arts to horror films to the roles of our bodies in worship, different liturgical and worship styles and so on and so forth. So, yeah, this was a super fascinating conversation.

Really enjoyed getting to know David for the first time. So please welcome to the show the one and only David Taylor. David, thanks for joining us at The Aldrin Rob. Thanks for having me. Great to be here. I first, I mean, when you reached out a few months ago and sent me your book, which we'll get to, I was like, that name sounds familiar. And I looked you up and I'm like, oh, wait, you're the guy who did that short film with bono and eugene peterson i am that guy what i mean i can we start there i just think you're talking about that like

how did you arrange people don't know i'm talking about you do the short like 20 minute film where again people don't know eugene Eugene Peterson has had a major impact on, on Bono and his faith. And, and so there's this film of them kind of getting together, hanging out at Eugene's house in Montana and, and talking through kind of the Psalms in particular, and just kind of kind of almost a theology in the arts a little bit, which we're going to get into. Yeah. How did that come about? Like that's crazy. I mean, it is a long story.

So unfortunately, I can't give all the details. But in the fall of 2014, there's no other way to say this, except that I actually had a dream in which Bono and Eugene were talking to each other. And I woke up and at breakfast, I told my wife, wouldn't it be so cool that I actually have in real life? She's like, sure. Yeah, it would be cool.

I was like, but no, seriously, what if it could happen? And so the long and short of it is I got ahold of Eugene, asked him and he said he was open to something like that. And then I knew Charlie Peacock. He's a musician, producer, lives in Nashville. He wrote that song, I Want to Be in the Light. Oh, yeah, yeah. Early 90s. It was a big song. He produced some of Amy Grant's stuff.

And he had hosted Bono's home in the early 2000s when Bono was doing all that kind of Africa debt relief stuff. And so Bono is just, I mean, he is, he's an activist. He's a statesman. And so he was meeting with all kinds of populations that he thought could make a difference. So he met with a bunch of musicians in Nashville, Christian musicians, and Charlie Peacock hosted them. And so I happened to be at a retreat with Charlie and Eugene Peterson actually happened to be at that retreat. And so I approached Charlie and said, what are the chances that Bono would say yes? And he's like 5%, 2%, 1%. He's like, actually 50% that he might say yes.

So long and short, I crafted a letter and then it kind of got passed down through various emissaries. And then it went silent for a long time. And I thought, you know, that's it. And then it went silent for a long time. And I thought, you know, that's it. You know, I tried, um, and, uh, it's not going to happen. And then, uh, in January, 2015, I was teaching class and, and during a break, I opened up my email and I had an email from somebody in Ireland saying Bono's interested. And, um,

and so then it was incredibly difficult to find a time to meet because you two was rehearsing for their songs of innocence tour that was just about to launch and it's like one afternoon two hour slot on april 19th he could do it and so uh we planned for him to fly his his jet to a small town in montana where eugene and Jan Peterson lived. And his condition was that he would get to spend one hour with Eugene and Jan by himself and then one hour on camera. And it wasn't until a year later that I actually found out from Bono himself why he wanted that hour with Eugene. And he and, uh, he shared with me that he had sort of been carrying these, uh, the, these heavy weights of unconfessed things in his life.

And he wanted to unburden himself with, with Eugene and Jan. And I thought that was really beautiful. So, yeah. So we, uh, spent an hour on camera talking about the Psalms and then, um, and then he flew back to Vancouver where they're rehearsing. And then on Tuesday morning, when I landed back in Houston with my wife where we were living at the time, I opened up my email and I had an email from, from Paul David Houston himself, which is his birth name. And he was expressing appreciation for the invitation, but also regret that he had not come fully prepared.

And he asked if he could make it up to me somehow. I was like, yes, I don't know how, but sure. Yes, let's figure out a way you can make it up to me. And so then, you know, through all of the intermediaries that are a part of his world, we arranged to meet him on his tour through new york city uh that summer and we would record an extra session on the psalms with him and then that extra material got folded in uh to the final short film so it was amazing yeah it's pretty awesome what was it like interacting i'm sorry it's not i'll try not to fanboy too much but what was it like interacting with uh was he i always picture people like that kind of more introverted reserved just kind of

yeah he he i mean he's got a big personality but he has this i think amazing ability to modulate to whomever he's with um i found him to be a little bit shy. Yeah. Very, very kind, very generous. When he came into the Peterson home, obviously he'd introduced himself or greeted Eugene and Jan. And then he greeted me, greeted my wife. And there were five film crew. And he went around introducing himself to each person.

And I noticed on the, when he was leaving that he said bye to the petersons to me to fade around my wife and then he said goodbye to each of the film crew by name like he remembered names um he'd come with a gift for the petersons he's a gift giver and so just um very kind unassuming in a way um very i don't know how else to say this, but very present, very real. He was not trying to pretend to be something that he was not. And then, you know, recently after reading his memoir, you know, some of the pennies dropped in terms of my experience and how it sort of mapped out into his whole life. And he's been married to his high school sweetheart for 40 years.

And like, there's something like there's an integrity, you know, to his life, to his work that kind of plays out. And there's just, there's no faking it. Like either he really is himself. He is at home in his own skin or he's not. And like his ability to be at home with us, a bunch of nobodies. I don't know. It was just very impressive.

Did you already know Eugene before that? Like, was it? I don't know. It was just very impressive. Did you already know Eugene before that? Like, was it? I did. Yeah. So I went to seminary in Vancouver, a place called Regent College. And he was teaching there at the time. And so I had him in class. Yeah. Okay. Okay. I was at some anniversary. It's kind of like invite only, maybe like a hundred people through, was it NavPress? Are they the producers of the message? You were there?

Yeah, were you there? I was there. Oh, no way. The big castle out in Colorado? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, the whatever that's called, that castle-like place. Yeah.

And, oh gosh, what's his name? He had produced a film that NAV Press had, I guess, underwritten. Okay. And that's where they were. Yeah, I sat at a dinner between Sally Lloyd-Jones, Jesus Storybook Bible, and Voskamp. It was very bizarre, but pretty fun too. It's funny because I didn't know hardly anybody. I mean, that was a while ago

and I didn't... Yeah, looking back there's probably a lot of names that I now recognize that I didn't even know. I was there for the Free Castle and Free Food and Chance to See Eugene. I remember the funniest line ever was them asking Jan, what's it like being

married to Eugeneugene and she said well the boy doesn't talk too much and he jumps in and says i'm too busy listening it's like oh my word all right so you've done it you've done a ton of work on um the relationship well yeah i don't know how to word it. Theology of the arts, really. You've written several books. You teach courses on it. How did you, well, first of all, can you maybe, let's just go one-on-one for somebody that might hear that phrase, a theology of the arts, and not be able to quite understand what that even means. So let's start there. What is a theology of the arts? And then how did you get into this specific discipline? Yeah, I think there are maybe two ways of looking at theology and the arts, maybe two

sides of the same coin. Some folks in the field, in the academic world, are interested in theological reflections on art, on works of art, on the process of art making, history of art. And then others are actually interested on how works of art can become sources or sites for theological reflection. And someone like Jeremy Begbie, who teaches at Duke Divinity School, you know, he's been writing on this for quite some time, and his area of expertise is music. And so showing how music can become a kind of a grammar uh for discovering how we can think about who god is and so you know one of the more common or popular illustrations

that he uses is you know the the three chord note and how you know three notes together make a chord and all three subsist in the same sonic space in a non-competitive way and uh offering that as a metaphor for how the trinity how the father son spirit can occupy as it were the same divine space in a non-competitive uh you know fashion so music can do things that maybe written language or philosophical, discursive, analytical language perhaps struggles to do. And that is we can, through music, as it were, see by hearing how it is that three things,

three distinct things, particular things, can be also one thing together. So that would be sort of the explanation of theology and the arts. Some people are interested in kind of like, you know, biblical reflections or Christological reflections on art making. How do we think about, you know, music and film and dance and drama and poetry? And others are interested in like how works of art can become sites for theological reflection. How the Psalms, for example, as poetic texts, are doing theology, not illustrating theology.

So, for example, the language of the Lord is my shepherd is a metaphor. And so some in the theology and the arts conversation would want to make the case that it's not that that jesus who calls himself a shepherd is incapable of finding a better more precise way of saying that he cares for his sheep it's that the metaphor is actually polyvalent it's doing a whole bunch of things in this one space of a metaphor and it's through some of that complex of meaning that you discover what it means for Jesus to be a shepherd. And so by extension, all the arts are kind of operating in this kind of metaphorically dense, rich way, helping us understand things about the world or God or ourselves in unique ways. So that would be, I guess, a kind of explanation of what the theology and the arts

conversation is. Okay. That's super helpful. I thought, so I, years ago, I taught briefly at Nottingham University and they had a whole, like a theology, somebody was teaching, I forget who it was, a theology of film course. If I remember who it was, you might recognize, I know it's kind of a small field of people in this um and i remember being fascinated for the first time kind of thinking we had a lot of conversations and thinking through how how even films can be part of again i'm going to use probably inaccurate language almost like general revelation that you know almost and not even sometimes intentionally but just you know you have filmmakers who are created in god's image who have, you know, I forget who said it, the spark of the divine in them.

And there's just this attraction to the divine narrative and it might be skewed and off kilter or whatever, but there is this kind of natural draw to themes of redemption and how that comes out in films and so on. I found that fascinating that, cause usually, you know, growing up in, I guess most kind of Christian circles, you know, your, your theology of film is, you know, does it have too much swearing and nudity and, you know, drug scenes or witchcraft or something, you know, that's our theology of film. It's like, it was just so flat. Like, I don't know, like even, even, um, to my mind and I don't know like even even um to my mind and i don't know you can i would love your thoughts on this i mean you know to me a film that doesn't contain sin is almost being dishonest now and i don't know how where the line is there to me it's like is the film making sin attractive even that it's like well well, sin is attractive. Is that even dishonest?

But is it pulling my heart toward sin or toward God? I don't know. How do you navigate? I get this question a lot recently. Should we watch Oppenheimer? It's got sex scenes in it. And I just don't know how to answer. I don't know how to answer these questions.

Have you thought through? I didn't bring on to talk about theology of film. You ahead than i am in this even if this isn't your main okay well let me avoid oppenheimer i haven't seen it but i'm aware of of you know some of those scenes i'm aware that christians have written about it recently i think these things are far more complex and interesting than sometimes Christians often allow. And I think some Christian communities want a very, very simple, you know, put in a coin into the machine and then the answer pops out and then they can walk away. I think they demand a little bit more reflection, careful reflection and conversation. When I was a pastor after seminary, I was a pastor for about 10 years. And part of my

responsibilities was the care of a community of artists. And it was wonderful. Some of our artists were filmmakers and some of those filmmakers were interested in the genre of horror and they wanted to know my thoughts on it. And then I told them, I'm not sure I had, you know, any developed thoughts, but you know, if they gave me a chance, you know, I could come back. So I did a little bit of research and then I hosted a conversation at our church on the genre of horror and offered a little bit of a history of, of the horror genre, you know, going beyond, you know, the history of film into the 19th century, you know, Gothic era literature,

and even back further into the medieval age and its idea of carnival and even back into the Greco-Roman mythological stories of all these creatures that are, you know, half breeds and dark, dark and the fears of the unknown and the future. And it was a fascinating discussion. And I tried to help them understand what the genre was doing. Like if there's a logic to horror, like what is it trying to do in the world? And why is it that human beings have drawn been drawn towards this genre? What are they trying to make sense of? And so i gave some examples from

the history of film and i made some connection to scripture and to you know the four beasts you know the book of revelation which is rather horrific right uh or even connections to represent visual representations of jesus on the cross which might be regarded as grotesque and a lot of horror kind of ventures into that and uh we had a marvelous discussion at the end of which most of the people in the rooms um said you know thank you this was very illuminating and and and and inspiring in some ways but i'm still not going to watch horror films i was like that's fine that's totally you know great like that's like a wonderful outcome that you have understanding you have some insight into why it is that humans find the horror genre to be this unique vehicle to make sense of evil and i think the best horror movies are naming evil as evil sin as sin and the

warping distorting effects of evil and sin as truly comprehensively, systematically disastrous, right? And I think this is where maybe some Christians have failed to take the truth of sin and the truth of evil seriously enough, and so have maybe whitewashed or, you know, you know, photoshopped sin in a way that I think scripture does not do that. You know, it brings, it reckons with sort of the nightmarish nature of evil and sin. And so I think, you know, with great care and thoughtfulness, and as your conscience allows in certain circumstances, we can venture into these spaces, let's say movies as such, horror movies in particular, and ask ourselves, what is true? What is honest?

What is good? bring us not just face to face with a horrific, terrible nature of evil and sin in our world, but also the possibility of hope, the possibility of grace, the possibility of a hint that all will be well at some point. And I think the best, say, horror movies do this really well. So, I mean, I know I'm focusing on horror movies. We could talk about any genre of art for that matter, but maybe that would be like a little answer. No, I've had people that are kind of in the kind of theology of film space that say horror movies typically are the most theologically thoughtful and powerful.

And like, these are kind of the apex of the kind of film and theology genre. There's a guy who I knew from, I mean, from a distance, but he taught at a very conservative Christian college. You would recognize the name. And I remember he taught a class on theology and film, and I think he made them all watch Poltergeist or something. I don't know if they're...

But I remember him saying like that movie actually is like the... He just went off on how incredible that movie was just from a meaning perspective and and i never thought about it i just thought horror like same thing you come at it with a flat understanding i'm like well it's just you know it's witchcraft all this evil stuff and it's just trying to scare you and you know but i'm like there's yeah there's so much more to it and i yeah i've recently been getting into some i typically never really like the genre but because people keep telling me how thoughtful and so i've been watching more and my kids are freaking out because i'm not the i don't get the least bit

scared and like what's wrong with you like i watched the conjuring the other night in a hotel room by myself with the lights out and i didn't even i don't know um but yeah even that movie that's like wow that that when you open up your mind and start asking deeper questions it's like there's yeah there's more going on here than just let's see how we can scare our audience you know um anyway that's not what yeah i think at some level what's fascinating about the 20th century horror genre i guess and film has become the predominant medium by which most people experience it is how it consistently interrogates the presumptions of our modern era about what is real uh you know yeah naturalism materialism scientism you know sort of these ideas that

what can be measured and placed into a laboratory and scientifically verified. That is only the reliable and the real. And horror genre is just pressing into like the metaphysical straining point of that presumption and saying, maybe there's something more to what it means to be human. Maybe there's something beyond the cosmos. to what it means to be human. Maybe there's something beyond the cosmos. I just think that's just such a theologically rich space for Christians to, you know,

participate in. And again, to each, maybe their own conscience. And it's such a contextual thing, but I guess that's why I'm in this field, theology and the arts. That's good.

I always thought that stranger things is one of the best representations of how thin the actual, if you just take the Bible seriously, how thin the line is between the so-called spiritual realm and the so-called material realm. How they are just blurred together in a way that's hard to even, like you can't even describe. Like when I, it was the first time I'm like, I read the Bible, I do read it differently now. Or I feel like we actually actually there is an upside down like we like this could i could not i mean right i mean i i can't think of a better way to portray that that line is so blurry you know um do you do you agree with that or is that i again, do you feel like they missed it on some level too? vigorously Christians to consider the possibility that they are more naturalists, oddly or weirdly, they're more materialist than they would be willing to concede. That is that so many Christians perhaps have bought into the assumption of the Western world that what I can empirically and rationally verify, that's what's real. And all this other stuff, you know, the so-called supernaturalist or miraculous or the demonic is just, you know, sort of the excesses of unsan unsanctified immature imagination now obviously on the other side

you do have sectors of the church the global church that maybe go to the extreme and everything is it's an over-realized you know supernaturalism uh everything has like a supernaturalist and so you're you're playing the uh the dan brown game of you know the codes you're playing the Dan Brown game of, you know, the codes. You're finding the codes for everything. And you have a healthy appreciation for, you know, what the medieval church called the second book of God, you know, which is creation. And we can study it and we can discover things about it. So it's somewhere in the middle is Stranger Things. That's good. So it's somewhere in the middle is stranger things. So yeah, your most recent book, body of praise, a body of praise,

understanding the role of our physical bodies in worship. When I first saw the title, I was like, all right, here's some Pentecostal guy that's going to be telling me to, I need to be running around in some frenzy with a flag during worship services or something, you know, like nothing wrong with that. Okay. not but i'm just like i don't know like it's not my it's not my tradition i mean just i'm you know i've come a long way folks i came from you know anti-charismaticism to now believing in the gifts and now you know i'm okay now with you know raising my hands kind of you know but no, this book is richly theological.

I was so blown away. Not that guy. Once I saw, you know, oh, this guy's an academic. He's going to bring a lot more maybe theological depth to this topic. theological anthropology is just, you know, is the foundation to the whole book and just opening up these categories of how multifaceted the body is, even as you start discussing, like, what is the body? And everybody's like, well, it's just the body. It's like, well, you have, you know, the biological body, the cultural body, the social body,

and all these various kind of aspects of the body. And I thought that was really helpful. You begin by talking about the pandemic and how, you know, for depending on where you live, you know, for several months, maybe even more than a year. I live in Idaho. So the pandemic lasted about three weeks. But for a period of time, we were participating in corporate worship through a screen and i you you kind of really come right out of the gate and unpack how antithetical not

necessary for i mean what else are you going to do okay i mean but just how antithetical that is to the theology of corporate worship and i know everybody's gonna say yeah it's better to be in person well it's like it's not just there's something intrinsically massively missing um when we're not embodied together can you open that up for us expand on that like like how why it's so necessary to be gathering in person and how that was just a, yeah, I'll leave it at that. There's so many different avenues we can go there. Yeah. I mean, obviously we've had several years now for scientists and psychologists and sociologists, historians for that matter, to make sense.

And I imagine, you know, we will continue to make sense because the effects will have sort of waves. You know, for those of us, for all of us, you know, who experience this firsthand, you know, there's the initial shock of it all, right? The worry of it all, the anxiety, the anxiety that then sort of metastasize into this you know cancerous stress and uh and then of course depending on where you are on planet earth you sheltered in place uh perhaps in your home exclusively and maybe you were single maybe you were you know empty nesters maybe you had seven kids and you all those experiences were unique. Your personality probably came into play, access to technology, the kind of church that you participated in,

and what technological instruments they had at their disposal early on. What I found fascinating, as I read about that period in retrospect is some scientists came up with the language of this idea of touch deficiency syndrome and related it to, you know, all those studies that were done about babies, you know, in orphanages that never received any kind of meaningful positive touch in those early formative stages and how that uh translated into this um you know chemical neurological physical psychosomatic sense of being ill at ease in the world unsafe in the world fundamentally disoriented i think that is what many of us experienced. We experienced depression because being cut off from creation, being cut off from community, being cut off from embodied exchanges with others slowly but surely was innervating. It was devializing. slowly but surely, you know, was innervating. It was devializing. And so, you know, some on one side may say, well, maybe you weren't strong enough. And I'm like, well, maybe your theology is not good enough. And I mean, obviously, I'm arguing against that sort of like, if you were tough enough, you could have endured in a black box you know to pry all sensory you know connection to the world around you and i guess i would simply say human

beings are made from the earth we are quite literally earthlings we are made of biological material we subsist in and through the rhythms of creation. And by that fact alone, we need to have a firsthand, you know, tactile experience of the earth and the rhythms of the earth. And so the sheltering in place was itself, you know, devitalizing to the extent that we could not maybe go outside, maybe into our front yards, backyards, but even then certain cities were like, don't do that. And again, maybe certain cities, certain populations live in apartment complexes. They could not go into a front yard because they didn't have a front yard, right? Beyond that, I would say theologically, God has made human beings to be not in voluntary

relationship with one another. Human beings are not in contractual relations with one another. Human beings are not in contractual relations with one another, which is to say like, well, I will find benefit from you when I feel like it. And when I don't feel like it, you know, I would be an autonomous individual, you know, in contrast maybe to that kind of philosophical way of perceiving the world God has made us fundamentally, as you all know, in contrast, maybe to that kind of philosophical way of perceiving the world, God has made us fundamentally, as you well know, and everybody else on your podcast, you know, has probably said repeatedly over the past number of episodes, human beings are made

from the earth and they're made from one another. So we have come out from one another and we are mutually constituting, mutually animating. We rely upon one another's very physical existence in order to flourish. And so when we gather communally in an embodied space, we are experiencing the kind of corporeal and corporate worship, corporate life that God has designed for us fundamentally. So when we sing, for example, and I write about this in the chapter on sciences, scientists talk about how when human beings sing in a common space, their neurons begin to wire together, like they call it, effect. And that experience of corporate corporeal embodied singing

is tapping into these hormonal places in our brains and bodies that fund a sense of kinship fund a sense of being felt by one another and again i think that's why you know concerts like taylor swift are so like people are craving that kind of experience because it is actually ontologically what helps them to feel that they belong somewhere, that they are someone belonging to a bigger something. And for us as Christians, we are belonging to this many-membered body of Jesus. It's how God has designed us. So we were not meant to exist in isolation. how God has designed us. So we were not meant to exist in isolation. That being said, obviously, the pandemic increased our attentiveness, perhaps, our sense of sympathetic community with

the shut-ins, the chronically sick, the elderly, those that are disabled in any capacity, those who are persecuted in parts of the world. And that's a beautiful kinship, you know, that I think the pandemic perhaps offered us as a gift. But the TLS of it all, the end of it all, is this common embodied life together. This episode is sponsored by Athletic Greens, now called AG1. I've been taking AG1 for over a year now, and I can truly, truly feel the difference. now called AG1. I've been taking AG1 for over a year now and I can truly, truly feel the difference. So over the years, I've tried many different kinds of nutrition supplements and I found AG1 to be the best. It's packed with 75 high quality vitamins,

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I should send an email. But for now, I pay the exact same price you do for AG1 because I care about my health. And for the kind of work that I do, I need to be at the top of my game. So if you want to take ownership of your health, try AG1 and get a free one-year supply of vitamin D and five free AG1 travel packs with your first purchase. Just go to drinkag1.com forward slash T-I-T-R. That's drinkag1.com forward slash T-I-T-R. Check it out. slash T-I-T-R. Check it out. I love how you cite several kind of scientific studies on the need for human interaction. There was one, I'm not sure, I don't know if you mentioned or not, are you familiar with the Rosetto effect? Rosetto, Pennsylvania? It's this, you can Google it,

it's easy to find. It's this small town of Italian immigrants that have been there for several generations. They're not only living very, very long, but they're incredibly healthy. I think almost everybody just dies of old age in their hundreds or something. They eat a ton of sausage. They drink a lot of wine. Several of them smoke. They don't really exercise. Many of them are kind of overweight, obese. And there's zero heart disease or minimal cancer, all these things. And they went and studied. And like, what is the secret sauce here?

They looked at elevation. They looked at climate. They looked at all these things. And none of it made sense. There were all these things and none of it made sense. The only thing that they can find that attributed to this is they, it just showed the, the biological effects of living in tight knit community. And I was like, gosh, there's so much ecclesiology, you know,

I'm like, Oh man, I, cause I, you know, I thought like even during the pandemic and again, there's so many factors here. And,

and my hat goes off to pastors just scrambling around trying to shepherd the people that all with all they know how to do so there's no but like would it be sufficient if say for whatever reason i mean three years ago was a pandemic but for whatever reason if like online attendance doubled um while in-person attendance went down. Like say the church of a thousand people that were meeting together, say for whatever reason, all of a sudden you have like 5,000 people gathering for the online services and say there's only 500 now gathering in person,

but 5,000 are there every single Sunday watching their giving their tithing. They're genuinely in their living rooms, worshiping God, they're learning from sermons and they're putting it into practice. I think by most standards, we would say, well, that's kind of a win. It'd be better if we were together, but that's a win. Would that be a win? Like what would be, what would be insufficient with that kind of quote unquote success? I mean, other than just simply be bad, be better to be together. Like what's theologically missing here? What would be insufficient with that kind of quote unquote success?

I mean, other than just simply it'd be better to be together. Like what's theologically missing here? Yeah. Constitutionally, I'm allergic to overgeneralizations or simplifications, right? We would want to concede the possibility that many goods would result. In fact, I got taken to task on Twitter a couple of days ago by folks who are immunocompromised in a very severe way. Okay. Sure. And they wanted me to be even more careful in how I talked about in-person gathering. Fair enough. That is something pastorally that I wish to be sensitive and sympathetic to. At the same time, I guess I

would say that there's something fundamental about bodies occupying the same space that invites a way to be together that cannot be replicated online. And maybe the analogy here is the difference between playing basketball on EA Sports video game, a bunch of buddies across the city, versus playing basketball with those same buddies on the court. You're together. And so it's not a matter of one is together, one is not together, but you're together in categorically different ways. And there's something that you will get to know about each other on the court, bodies bumping up against bodies, bodies in three dimensional spaces, bodies sweating, there's an odor, there's a way in which all non-verbals are communicating

at lightning speed that is enabling you to get a feel for each other, a feel for the game, that you cannot acquire that same quote-unquote feel online playing with a console, you know, in front of a screen. So I would say like just on scientific terms, it's qualitatively, you know, in front of a screen. So I would say, like, just on scientific terms, it's qualitatively, you know, different. On theological terms, I think one of the things that we might draw attention to is the way in which bodies gather together in person invites a kind of vulnerability that cannot be replicated online. When I bring my body to a physical space, I am choosing to not hide in a way that I could perhaps hide more easily on

screen by literally hiding my video camera. Now I can still hide by being present, right? I can hide in my body. And I think that's one of the destructive effects of sin is that it causes us to want to hide from others, to dissimulate, to be something that we're not. But if I choose actively to be vulnerable, and perhaps I've experienced a tragedy of some sort, a death in the family, or my marriage is breaking down, and I choose to weep at a moment in the service, maybe during the singing, maybe during the Lord's Supper, maybe during the sermon. That's another level of vulnerability that invites the possibility of the grace of God being shared by one another. So let me give you an example. A number of months ago in our church, we're an Anglican church, but, you know, there's good,

solid preaching, expository preaching. We have a little bit of a charismatic kind of bent and we're pretty liturgical. So, you know, it's kind of a nice little combination of different liturgical cultures. I'm on the prayer team, which means every so often during the Lord's Supper, you know, people can come back and receive prayer from us. Well, one Sunday, somebody in our congregation came up and asked for prayer of us. This is somebody that I had been for quite some time irritated at. And if I'm honest, I was mad at them. I was angry for a failure that I had, you know, of relationship that I had experienced with them. This person was not fully aware that I was bitter towards them, that I would have preferred to stay on the other side physically

of the room, not just emotionally and mentally and otherwise. But I want to be as far away as possible. This person came up, asked for prayer. And obviously, my job is to pray. My job is not to say, well, not you today. Well, the way that we normally pray is we ask if we can anoint them with oil. We ask if we can lay a hand on their shoulders. And the person said, yes. The moment I laid my hand on their shoulders and the person said yes the moment i laid my hand on their shoulder was the moment that i felt like the holy spirit had and i'm not sure how to say this but miraculously through the physical act of touch um disrupted sort of this visceral anger inside of me and opened up the possibility of care for them. Slowly but surely, I think something was softened in me that then opened me up to a different

quality of relationship with this person. That kind of vulnerability is difficult, if not impossible, to replicate online because of that physical proximity and the physical touch that are involved that involve vulnerability on their part of asking for prayer for something that was very kind of honest and vulnerability on my part to be willing to say, I have to trust that Jesus is bigger than us in this moment. And so I just, I think those are like, maybe like a little microcosm of the microcosm that is involved when people gather together and willingly open themselves up in vulnerable ways. I just want to state, I guess, name the elephant in the room that you and I are talking through

a screen. In fact, my whole podcast is disembodied. I've had a few guests and I would love to have everybody to fly out and hang out. So it's not because I prefer this. So yeah, I guess to take that for example, there are certain things we do in this day and age that are embodied together. Is that okay? Is a podcast okay? While acknowledging that this can't be, and i would say this over and over listening to a podcast or this podcast cannot be here the totality of your kind of like you know um christian engagement or whatever it plays a an inadequate insufficient role that might

contribute to your whatever your your your journey of faith or whatever, but can't be the totality of that? Is there something more than that? Is there something maybe intrinsically wrong with these kind of spaces? Yeah, I don't think I would say there's something fundamentally or theologically wrong with this, in as much as God has made a world in which we have the capacity to communicate with each other across distances. You go back far enough in history and you'll have letter writing. And so Paul writes a letter to a community in another city, and that letter is a form of grace, a tangible grace that a community receives. And then that letter then embeds itself within their life. It reconstitutes and gives them a new imagination, a new vision of what it means to be the body of Christ in Rome or Corinth or Ephesus.

But it is also true to say that Paul consistently says, I so yearn to be with you face to face. They're not in competitive relationship or antithetical relationship, but the deepest yearning of his heart, as it were, is to be with them face to face. And I think that, again, is like the consistent trajectory or, you know, the arc of Holy Scripture is, as Catholics would call it, the beatific vision, you know, to encounter our Lord face to face, to be embraced fully by the Lord Jesus, right? But that doesn't mean that we're going to stay in the beatific vision in perpetuity. We behold our maker, and in the new creation, then we are redeployed to do who knows what, right? So I think there are, you know, that maybe is just an example in an ancient, you know, the early church era, but I write books, you write books. Those are tangible products or as, you know, Kindles are electronic products that get disseminated around the earth. And we're so

grateful that others experience it. But I think every one of us has been wired to share, you know, a space with one another because there's there's certain irreducible goods of being in a common physical space that's good so i don't need to cancel the show that's good i mean your analogy with paul is because i mean even like first century letter writing like the letter was kind of a a representation of the author in his or her absence, you know, and even the letter carrier would often not just read the letter, but perform the letter. And they would very much do go out of their way to try to like represent intonation, cadence, emphasis, and, and hand gestures to, to, to represent the author as best they could in their absence. But like you said, there's,

there was this longing, like, since I cannot be there for whatever reason, this is kind of the best, but inadequate. Like it's incomplete, but it's some kind of semblance of what I longed to happen, which I could say that with the podcast. Obviously, I would, again, much rather be talking in person with the microphone on. And people listening, I'm sure, would be like, this is good.

Hopefully, they'd say that. Some people say it's crap. The ones like to show this is good. But gosh, I would much rather. Which is one reason why we started doing conferences, the Theology of the Rock Conference, to give people an opportunity to have an embodied experience. So going back to your book, I'm curious. I've not read the whole thing yet. Are there certain forms of gathering, liturgies, worship styles, or whatever that you find

resonate more with your kind of theological anthropology? For instance, you can go all the way like high church where there's incense there's memorization there's participation there's stand up kneel down um versus maybe a very low church but say high energy you know more of a charismatic kind of setting is one better than the well i'm pretty sure you're gonna say one's not better than the other but i mean or i don't're going to say one's not better than the other. Or I don't know. Let me throw it out there.

Maybe I don't know what you're going to say. Is one capturing the human experience better than another kind of service is? It does. I think the case that I tried to make in the book is that it's a both-and. And so I try to show the distinctive benefit of what i call prescriptive uses of the body or what i call the discipline of the body and then the distinctive benefits of spontaneous uses of the body or what i call the freedom of the body i show the you know trajectory of both all throughout old testament all throughout the psalms all throughout the new testament the gospels the epistles the book of revelation all throughout Old Testament, all throughout the Psalms, all throughout the New Testament, the Gospels, the Epistles, the Book of Revelation,

all throughout church history, that each of them works dynamically together to form our whole humanity. And I try to help readers understand that this is actually quite intuitive and empirically verifiable. When I go to a sporting event, let's say in the States, a basketball game, a baseball game, invariably there'll be a national anthem. And what do we do when the national anthem, you know, begins? We all stand, sometimes we put our hand over our heart, and we sing with respect. And that's a way for our bodies to do something, regardless of personality, regardless of our temperament, regardless of feelings that we feel befits the object of attention. In this case, the flag or the anthem, you know, in the country. But at some point in the game, you know, our team does something remarkable. Maybe it's a last

minute sort of, you know, victory. And then our bodies naturally, like in a way that completely makes sense, stand up and roar and clap and cheer. I guess what I'm trying to say is those kinds of postures, gestures, movements of the body also have a place in corporate worship that our God is fully worthy of attention, respect, honor, dignity, majesty, all that wonderful book of Revelation language that has very little to do with my personality type or whether I feel like in the moment. And on the other hand, we see all manner of spontaneous response of the body in Jesus' ministry. And these are overflows of affection for God. They are unselfprotective, unselfconscious expressions of affection

for Jesus. And I think both of those have a place. So I've been to Hillsong worship services. I've been to Catholic and Greek Orthodox and Anglican worship services. I've been to Catholic and Greek Orthodox and Anglican Catholic worship services. I'm grateful for both. I guess of a mind that both practices or both styles or modes have a distinctive role in forming us and training and discipling us. So does it come down to, you mentioned like personality types? How like for like how do we understand why some people would be just super attracted to like an orthodox liturgical contemplative lower for lack of better terms low energy there's still body movement maybe similar up down raise your hand reciting versus somebody who would resonate with like a more hill song like

high high energy. Cause I'm, I, okay. Let me just be totally honest with you. I, I've gone through very seasons in life where I would resonate with one more than the other right now, probably more for a while.

Now I'm in a very low church environment, even though I personally would resonate much more with a more high church liturgical. I feel like for whatever reason, I could connect with resonate much more with a more high church liturgical. I feel like for whatever reason, I could connect with God much more on a liturgical, but being in a low church environment, I often feel guilty. I do. No, I feel like it might even be a Christian because I'm looking around and I don't know, but there's times when I don't. There's times there's certain kind of low church, high energy environments that it just comes

upon me. I'm not forcing it. I'm just not going to do anything that I feel like do it. Well, I don't know how to say that. Sometimes the high energy just stresses me out. It just makes... I don't know. It's very cynical and I don't want to do that. So what's wrong with me?

I should call your wife and get an answer on that one. What is wrong with you? There's nothing wrong with you. I mean, obviously, all of us find ourselves in different seasons of life where we might have very specific, particular God-blessed needs for different kinds of things. I was raised in the Bible church world. I grew up in Guatemala, which is a predominantly Roman Catholic world. So not only were we low church, we were like low

church and anti-Catholic, like actively, like whatever the Catholics did, we didn't do. And then when I was in college, I began feeling a hunger for something more expressive and spontaneous. So I started visiting a Catholic church. I mean, not a Catholic, a charismatic church. By the end of college, I was at University of Texas. I started feeling a hunger for something more deeply rhythm. So I started visiting an Episcopal church, like on Advent and Lent. And I found that it resonated, like it fed me in a very very deep way i became anglican when i was in seminary but i did internships at a non-denom charismatic church and ended up being a pastor there and i was very deeply grateful i mean i was there during the 90s when you know the vineyard you know toronto vineyard barking dogs and roaring lion stuff, you know, what's going on.

So it was very expressive, but you know, at the end of my time as a pastor, I realized I had this insatiable hunger for something perhaps historically rooted and liturgically rhythmed and so on and so forth. And so, you know, I, my wife and I became Anglican full-time. I became an Anglican priest. I'm deeply grateful for it, but I still, maybe the gift of those who are in these kinds of traditions is that you have the church calendar that allows you really to go through all of those different contours of the faith, sort of the exuberant, joyful, open, expressive, but then also the quiet,

the contemplative, the gentle. And I think that maybe is a gift that the whole body of Christ could take advantage of, you know, Pentecostals, Charismatics, non-denoms, they could take advantage of the church calendar if they wish. And then my Anglo-Catholic friends who do believe that everything has been prescribed and was prescribed, you know, 1500 years ago, and there's no point in trying to reinvent anything. I would want to invite them into the possibility that a spontaneous gesture with your body is actually, it befits. I mean, even as we see David, King David in 2 Samuel, be a part of this long ritual procession of the ark, and then as he enters Jerusalem, there's this spontaneous outburst, physical, you know, kinetic dancing, which is, it was ridiculous.

It was ridiculous in the time. And I think that kind of dancing can still be felt to be ridiculous, but I think there's something beautiful about the unselfprotective, unselfconscious that just the fully yielding ourselves to God and to trust that the Holy Spirit is alive and at large in this moment, not just in the designing of the liturgy, which perhaps the fourth century got right as some, you know. And I argue against that in the book. I have a chapter on history. I argue against sort of these false appeals to history. It's like, well, that's when it was the real, you know, worship and we should, you know, map it onto that. So. Is it a danger when, and I guess this is true of every single church I think I've ever been in, like there, there is a particular style of, of worship and then not

just worship as in the singing portion, but this would be the gathering um i i my one i guess my i never thought about like this but like could that monolithic style of individual churches war against diversity like you go to a highly charismatic church and it's it's going to be off-putting for people that don't resonate with that brand of whatever. And vice versa. Somebody deeply liturgical, somebody who is longing for whatever. The way God has wired them, it's good for them to be in a charismatic environment. And they're just not going to be.

And so that liturgical body lacks that kind of person and vice versa. Is that a problem? I don't know how to get, I can't imagine a church like one Sunday, you know, it's charismatic style. Next Sunday, they're swinging incense or something. I wouldn't mind that. I personally, I don't know.

A little more interesting, but. I mean, you know, it does get us into a little bit of a a naughty territory and i mean k o t t y yeah yeah um although it could be bad behaved their their access everybody has a you know a corner on the market of of you know egregious behavior uh all of us all liturgical traditions you know suffer the effects of sin um on the one hand, I would like to concede in principle that the many-membered Holy Spirit, varied nature of Christ's body allows for different personality types to play themselves out in like a family or a tribe, you know. And that one family of the body of Christ is going to be more quiet and contemplative, and one family or tribe of the body of Christ will be more

expressive and loud. I would like in principle to concede that, but the biblical text keeps arguing against me. And to the extent that the Psalms, as the worship book of Israel, and as the worship book of, you know, the church, at least for the majority of church history, that Christians have believed that it was a defining grammar for how we worship and pray, that, along with what I see in the Gospels, the Epistles, the Book of Revelation, That, along with what I see in the Gospels, the Epistles, the Book of Revelation, seems to invite both disciplined uses of our bodies. That is, we raise hands as a sign of honor, but we also raise hands because our Lord Jesus is worthy of that kind of expression of affection. And, you know, the Lord invites us to silence, that all the earth, let all the inhabitants of the earth keep silence. And that same Lord invites us to join the sonorous, exuberant, expressive praise of all creation.

And our bodies are designed to want and need. And so I guess I would hope that maybe it's a rhythm over time. It's not a variety show on every Sunday morning, but over time, there is a place for that. And I do think, you know, like Jewish communities, maybe Jewish Orthodox communities have retained some of that manifold rhythm, you know, the different festivals in the Jewish calendar. Some of them are very expressive, lots of dancing, and some of them are very quiet, very serious, very what we might call reverential. But in the book, I write about how when Christianity was legalized in the fourth century, the Church of Rome slowly but surely came to define sort of a liturgical practice for the rest of, let's just call it Europe, Europe at the time.

And many of those in leadership in the Church of Rome came from upper classes, aristocratic classes, where how you moved your body was a very slow, solemn, so-called dignified. And that was then mapped on to like true faithful reverential worship that ended up being very damaging for the catholics in africa oh yeah they were wanting to say i don't know our cultural our people come most fully alive and expressive you know kinetic worship and so you know it's not until the 1960s and, you know, the big Vatican II gathering where some major changes were, you know, were put into effect to give liberty to the Catholic Church in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. And I think that still plays itself out in some Western, you know, North American context. So you raise another interesting question.

Does a monolithic form of worship, could it war against multi-ethnicity? We, we've got, we go to church. It's a conservative church here in Boise, low church, conservative. But several of our, several of our friends that also go there are from, from Rwanda and the Congo. Um, and yeah, just literally two days ago, my friend from Rwanda, he was like, gosh, when you're singing, like, how come you guys aren't dancing? I just want to dance, but no one's doing that.

So I feel weird. Nah, it's just, it's hard for me to not dance. Like I don't, and I was like, yeah, I would rather be in a church. No, like, but even that, like it brings in this kind of like as different cultures and ethnicity slash cultures have different societal expectations or whatever you want to call it, or just norms of human behavior. Like that's a beautiful thing. And I just wonder if such a strongly monolithic kind of church service wars against that. Um, there,

there was a, a famous black preacher from the seventies. Um, he, he can't save miraculously out of gangs. And anyway, he, he gave a sermon on kind of the multi,

this is back in the seventies before people are talking about kind of multi-ethnic churches. And he was like, you know, when y'all, and it was a lot, it was all white audience. And he was talking about kind of things that prevent kind of multi-ethnic churches and he was like you know when y'all and it was a lot it was all white audience and he was talking about kind of things that prevent kind of multi-ethnicity and he was

like yeah when y'all sing you know amazing grace and he kind of imitated white people singing amazing grace and he's like when we sing amazing grace we sing it like and he just starts going full gospel and everybody's laughing but also like ah like the the manner in which we go about kind of even singing certain songs kind of reinforces this kind of mono-ethnic kind of culture i don't know and i don't want it can be overwhelmed so many things we do it's like well it prevents this and does that and all these blind spots i don't i don't know you can get almost incapacitated by but have you thought about that angle, though? Yeah. So in a previous book that I wrote called Glimpses of the New Creation,

I explore how different media of art, poetry, narrative, music, visual architectural arts, and so on and so forth, form us uniquely. They do something uniquely in our bodies and through our bodies when we gather together as Christ's body. But at the end of that book, I wrestle with a question of what it means for us to recognize that each of us as individuals, each of us as a family, each of us as a community, each of us as a culture likely have a mother tongue. as a culture likely have a mother tongue and our mother tongue is like a, a shorthand for a way in which I, and the way that God has wired me or my community or my people,

like just, we've been wired somehow some way to a combination of nature and nurture to love God and know God in this unique, distinctive particular way. And so I write a chapter in which I try to make a case, a theological case, that God wants to both preserve and grace the particularity of my personality. God delights to work in and through it. God is not erasing my personality. He's not erasing the personality of my community of my people group as it were

but at the same time that we would remain porous um and rather than calcified or ossified that are i am porous to the rest of the members of christ's body we as a community remain porous so what might mean for us over time to be cross pollinating? Okay. So that, um, let's say, let's just say the black church is able to sing indistinctively black church ways,

um, which are kinetically expressive in one form or another. There's a lot of talking back that happens in, in the ways that like Mennonites, maybe you might worship differently mindful that there are different kinds of Mennonites. But what would it mean for different members of Christ's body to remain porous or semi-porous to other members of Christ's body across the global church so that we're over time constantly being enriched? So there's no erasure of my personality, but my personality gets richer and richer and truer. And there's some things that are fundamentally true about all bodies before God.

Okay. And that's, I think, the case that I'm trying to make. There are some basic fundamental theological grammars of the body that should be true for all. Like all bodies understand what gravity is. true for all like all bodies understand what gravity is and that's why musically uh sounds are low and heavy cause bodies and emotions and brains to go low and heavy and music and notes and sounds and compositions of sounds that are high tend to like lift us up cause us to feel expansive or airy or oh yeah and i mean scientists have written about this for years so there's a reason why music that goes up causes us to feel up and it shows up in our in our vocabulary i feel up today why do you

feel up why do you feel down well because gravity pulls down and you know there are things that pull us up and so our vocabulary um sort of re sort of you know iterates or expresses what we experience of the world fundamentally. And I think the Psalms should function as a kind of default for training us in faithful worship. And it does include things that perhaps my charismatic friends would stand to learn from, my Anglican friends could stand to learn from. And I think at the end of the day, you know, where I land in the book is hopefully all what we do with our body is forming Christ-likeness in us, which is to say the fruit of the Spirit, which is to say at the end of the day, humility before our Maker, humility before one another, and wonder,

a sense that we're caught up in something bigger than ourselves it's the movement of of of planets as c.s lewis talks about it's a movement of angels you know who are coursing around the lamb it's the movement of saints throughout the centuries who have inclined themselves and so if our our whatever we do with our bodies is not turning us into more Jesus-like humans, it is definitely failing, whatever it is that we do. Well, that's a good place to wrap things up. I never held up the body, your book here for our viewers. This is a body of praise, understanding the role of our body.

Let me get the title right here because I can't see it anymore. Understanding the role of our physical bodies in worship by David Taylor. David, thanks so much for coming on Theology in a Row. I have so many other questions, but we'll have to continue this at another time. But a little quick shout out to Fuller Seminary. They're not paying me to do this, but if you want to learn more, you can go and take courses under David Taylor and many, many other well-known faculty. I took a German course at Fuller Pasadena years, years ago. Yeah. It was a summer German course that prepared me for my PhD. And I remember being so jealous of how awesome your guys is. You're at the, you're at the Pasadena campus, right? I'm not actually, I know we have a campus in Houston and I was there for five years,

but then four years ago I moved to Austin because, okay, so this is the, I don't know if it's an irony or just it's life. In moving to Austin, I became even more disembodied as a professor, but I moved to Austin because every member of my family was experiencing physical ailments. Oh, gosh. Physically proximate to them. physical ailments and physically proximate to them. So it's an odd sort of thing, uh, in that my professional life, I am mainly through a screen, but I'm here because I needed to be physically close to the family. Oh, gosh. Oh, sorry to hear that. Oh, okay. So you're in Austin for,

for Fuller. Okay. Well, either way, Fuller is, you guys have many different opportunities for, uh, so check out Full check out Fuller Seminary and thanks David for being on the show. Really appreciate the conversation. Yes, sir. This show is part of the Converge Podcast Network.