Thinning American Frontier Religion and the Future of Orthodoxy in America

With Nathan Jacobs

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Dr. Nathan Jacobs

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Nathan Jacobs: Thinning American Frontier Religion and the Future of Orthodoxy in America

[Paul Vander Klay] (0:02 - 0:27)

Hey, this is Paul. And most of you know this guy, Nathan Jacobs. And he was my buddy at ARC last time and not going this time.

Sorry. I'm gonna miss you, man. I'm gonna miss you.

We had a good time together. And so if you do have some frequent flyer miles and you want to fly to Ireland, love to see you over in Galway with my event with Paul Kingsnorth and Martin Shaw. That'd be great.

That'd be great.

[Nathan Jacobs] (0:29 - 0:50)

But- I would love to. I would love to, Paul. I mean, hanging out with you was like the best part of that visit.

I mean, to be honest with ARC. But yeah, I don't have the frequent flyer miles to just like send myself over to London at a whim and get away from you. If anybody wants to donate them to me, you know, I'd consider it, but you know.

[Paul Vander Klay] (0:51 - 2:06)

Careful what you ask for. Oh, yeah. Someone might do it.

So we were just talking and we weren't quite sure what to talk about. So I'm gonna throw, I'm gonna throw, I'm gonna throw the word at Nathan and I want to hear him wrestle around with it. Okay.

So it was about a week and a half ago, I was, you know, ruminating on everything and ruminating on the, and Nathan just said, you know, Nathan and I sort of live in, they're sort of parallel, but they're sort of overlapping worlds. And I was thinking about the end of evangelicalism, which I think we are seeing, but these things are massive. I mean, they don't just disappear.

They just sort of, and they also morph. And so I was thinking about the strangeness of, that my life has taken place. I remember when I first found Jonathan Pajot and it's like, what happens to a, and I can talk about this with Nathan because Nathan got his PhD at my alma mater.

So he knows my world.

[Nathan Jacobs] (2:06 - 2:07)

Yeah.

[Paul Vander Klay] (2:07 - 9:50)

And he also knows orthodoxy and all the worlds he's participated in. And so I was, it just came to mind. It was meta.

So evangelical today is really neo-evangelical and Molly Worthen wrote a great book, Apostles of Reason, working on that. This is all before she became a Christian. And so neo-evangelicalism is this movement that happens in the 20th century with Billy Graham, Carl Henry, Fuller Seminary, Christianity Today, Carol Stream, Illinois, that whole world.

And it's post-fundamentalism in that after the second world war, the fundamentalists began to realize that not only were they sidelined by the mainline, but the mainline itself was crumbling. And so in a sense, they saw the opportunity to become the next mainline. And they sort of reached for that in the 80s with the Moral Majority, Jerry Falwell, Liberty University, all of this stuff.

But they never, and so peak evangelicalism was probably George W. Bush, who then sort of cratered himself with the neocons and the Iraq war and all that stuff. And same-sex marriage sort of forked evangelicalism because you, and the, so you had the seeker movement that was very evangelical, sort of peak evangelical.

But then you had the emergent movement where you have an interesting similarity between let's say Rob Bell, Nadia Bolts Weber, and Mark Driscoll. And so the emergent movement just sort of shatters this stuff. And what we've been seeing, which has really started back with the Roman Catholics, and I'd say someone like Robert Barron is metagelical in that evangelicals were Protestants.

And it was a way for them to sort of transcend the confessional, the perpetual confessional bickering that the fundamentalists were sort of wed to. Evangelicals didn't necessarily give up completely their confessional distinctives within Protestantism, but they sort of put them on the back burner in order to participate in an economic and cultural marketplace for the sense of a broadly Christian mission in the United States, and to a degree in the rest of the Western world, and in the world in which we had influence. And what I've been seeing with Peugeot, with the rise of orthodoxy in the West, with the kinds of conversations that I regularly have now with people in orthodoxy like yourself, I mean, it's super interesting that I'm going to be at a Dominican, see, I don't know all the Catholic words, a Dominican monastery in Ireland with Dominican, I think they're friars, not monks.

I'm trying to get that together. And Paul Kingsnorth, UK convert to orthodoxy, Martin Shaw, now orthodox, and me, a Christian Reformed minister, and we're going to sit down and talk about Christ and culture. And to me, we are in a different space, and it has elements that were similar to evangelicalism, but it's certainly beyond Protestant now.

It does have the elements of both a cultural and commercial marketplace. I think what Jonathan Peugeot is doing with his fairy tales is very much this way. He's got, I mean, some of his illustrators are Reformed, some of them are orthodox.

We've got this new wave and interest in orthodoxy, and so then when I look at, say, what Jordan Peterson is doing with his gospel seminar, he's got Robert Barron there, he's got Jonathan Peugeot there, he's got a couple of Cambridge theologians who are probably ostensibly Anglican of one stripe or another. He's got Dennis Prager there, so you've got movement conservatism there from a Jewish perspective. They're on Daily Wire, which is sort of movement conservatism, but Daily Wire has Clavin, who converted to Anglicanism, and he's got Knowles, who's Roman Catholic.

So there's something happening now where the different traditions have created, similar to evangelicalism, created a cultural marketplace, a marketplace of ideas, and an economic consumer marketplace in which to operate, and I think this is, in fact, so if Ben-Hur and the robe, these elements of Hollywood were sort of part of, Protestant Catholic Jew of the post-World War II era, and evangelicalism created the Jesus movie, which when I was a foreign missionary, missionaries were still huffing around backwoods areas with a generator and a movie projector and a sheet, and showing this to isolated communities and having people come forward to Christ and starting a little church that would be who knows what, and then now sort of the chosen, you can just sort of see the development of that, and so you've got a Roman Catholic playing Jesus in the chosen, and whereas I've talked about the chosen a little bit on my channel, you've got people who are sort of new in orthodoxy now, and are really excited about their embrace of orthodoxy, you've got trad cats who are watching this, you've got evangelicals who are watching this, and I think we are in a metagelical moment, I don't know all where it's going, but you said, well, you just did a thing on the Mary thing on Netflix on your channel. And so I actually see you very deeply as metagelical in that you have your PhD from a bunch of reformed theologians, you break their heart by going to orthodoxy, but their heart isn't really broken too badly, not in the same way that when Peter Kreeft left Calvin College and went to Rome, that was a different thing when Kreeft did it than now when you did it.

So what do you think about this?

[Nathan Jacobs] (9:51 - 9:57)

Wow, that's a whole big can of worms you just opened up, Paul. But I think it's a worthy one.

[Paul Vander Klay] (9:58 - 10:02)

So let me just- I'm not sold on the word, but I needed a word to put it out there.

[Nathan Jacobs] (10:03 - 10:05)

Okay, so this is your invention right here.

[Paul Vander Klay] (10:05 - 10:15)

Yeah, metagelical. Well, I've been shopping it on my channel and been taking shots and some people are running with it, but- Okay, okay.

[Nathan Jacobs] (10:16 - 30:52)

Well, let me talk a little bit about my experience of the evangelical world and sort of evolutionary pattern I saw, because I came into that world as an outsider, right? You know, I was- My mother was Missouri-scented Lutheran, which I don't think I realized at the time how traditional that was. You know, I mean, it wasn't just theologically conservative, but I was raised, you know, we had to memorize Luther's small catechism and we were being taught like Nicene and Chalcedonian formulations regarding Trinity and Christology.

And we had to memorize certain, you know, we had to memorize these creeds and all this sort of stuff, right? You know, very, you know, and it's a liturgical tradition, the one that I went to. I think most people today, if they had stepped into that, would have been like, oh, it's a Catholic church, right?

Which would have been, of course, mortifying to them, you know, how- That's right. You can't come up with a greater slur than that for a traditional Lutheran. But nonetheless, like, I don't think I realized that that was not conventional Protestant, American Protestant evangelicalism.

And in some ways, I think that really is, when I look back on history, I find that much more European. And I'll tell you why I think that. I took, when I was doing my PhD at Calvin, I took a class that was actually on American theology, right, early American theology.

And it was the sort of thing that, of all the classes I took, I was the least interested in this, because I'm- Because he's a prodigal? I'm gonna blank out his name. Is it, it'll come to me, it'll come to me.

But I'm- Keep going. Yeah, I'm blanking on the name. But I remember I was, it was the class I was least interested in taking because I'm an ancient medieval guy, primarily with then, you know, how modernity is impacted by ancient and medieval.

I mean, that's a lot of what I did with Immanuel Kant. It's what my upcoming Leibniz book is about, all that sort of stuff. So I was always interested in 16th, 17th century Protestant Catholic scholasticism.

But it was, I was interested in it as an outgrowth of something else I was more interested in, which was ancient and medieval philosophy. And so going into American theology, I was less interested because I'm like, now we're distancing ourselves even further from all of the things that I'm most curious about. And so, hold on, I'm getting a pop-up.

So forgive me, you might want to cut this out. I'm gonna. Okay.

So, and one of the things that became apparent to me, I spent a lot of time, I don't know how many people are familiar with the work of John Nevin, but I became very familiar with the work of John Nevin during that class because he was particularly interesting. He was the one person that was the most interesting to me in early American theology. So the Mercersburg School of Theology, that's basically, you know, Schaaf, as in like Schaaf, not Shaft, like Schaft, like, but Schaaf as in like the NPNF series, if you look at that, edited by Schaaf.

Well, Schaaf and Nevin were basically the Mercersburg School of Theology. And they were intriguing to me because they were some of the few people who are actually looking at patristic material. And Nevin was particularly interesting to me because he was looking at early Eastern patristic material.

So I went and I dug up all of it. Most folks, if they've read Nevin, they've read like his book, The Anxious Bench, which is about like Calvin's view of the Eucharist, or they've read Antichrist, which incidentally is a scandalous book in early America because he's suggesting that the spirit of Antichrist is the spirit of sect and schism, which he's then saying is the spirit of Protestantism. So that didn't go over so well, but like, those are the things he's, if people have heard of him or read him, that's what they've heard and read.

But I went and dug up all of his articles from the Mercersburg Review, which was the journal that they had where he published way, way, way, way more. And I realized, oh, he's been reading the Eastern Church Fathers. Like most of this is about deification.

It's about the Cappadocians, about Athanasius. And so I resonated with him. And I also found him fascinating because he had clearly read all these sort of German idealists, and he was engaging in modern philosophy using Eastern patristic stuff.

Now, anybody who's looked at my academic stuff would recognize, oh, no wonder you're intrigued by Nevin because you do the same thing, Jacobs, right? Like you engage in modern philosophy and then sort of the trajectory of modern philosophy, but you engage it from this very classic ancient perspective where you're bringing old things into dialogue with it. And that's what Nevin was doing.

Now, the thing that was fascinating and very telling to me was how Nevin was received in early America. And this told me a lot about early American Protestantism. How he was received was that most people didn't recognize the theology he was talking about.

So Eastern Orthodox thinking, right, or Eastern patristic thinking, let's not even say Eastern Orthodox, just Eastern patristic thinking was so alien to the mind of early America. Most of them said he must be a Hegelian. Like they just didn't have any, he's just a German idealist pantheist something.

I don't know what he's talking about. And in fact, a guy that you would know, Charles Hodge, if you look at what he has to say in his systematic theology about Nevin, he says exactly that, right? He's just regurgitating, you know, Hegel's pantheism, et cetera.

And what's also interesting is Nevin wrote a letter to Hodge. I dug it up, I found it. He wrote a letter to Hodge saying, okay, enough is enough.

Like I sat here and I let you say all the stuff you wanted to say, but then in your systematic theology, you quoted me and you quoted me out of context. You quoted what I was saying, where I was describing Hegel and you presented that as my view and you edited out the part where I refer to this as Hegel's monstrous pantheism. Wow.

And guess what? Next edition, Hodge left it in. So it was like wildly dishonest, wildly dishonest scholarship.

But what was most fascinating to me is like, when I went into, I was obviously a student, as you know, of Richard Muller, who is one of the foremost authorities in the world in 16th, 17th century reform scholasticism. And so I knew 16th, 17th century reform scholasticism very, very well when I was looking at this and looking at American Protestantism in contrast, it seemed so shallow. You know, all the sort of scholastic nuance had fallen out of the sort of theology I was seeing there.

Nobody was going into like technical distinctions about like types of necessity and contingency and free will and all this sort of stuff, which is what the scholastics are obsessed with. So all of that talk of causality and freedom and necessity and modalities and all, it just disappears. And the conversation becomes much, much more superficial, sort of this systematic theology that tries to avoid metaphysics in some ways.

And I could feel that sort of thinness, the anemic nature of the contrast there. And then what was also telling to me was that when that world encounters somebody who's actually digging back into patristic sources like Nevin, the worldview that's being presented to them is so alien. They have no category for thinking of it.

They don't even recognize it as Christian. And the result is to say, you must be just some weird German idealist because they don't know what to do with it. And so that was really telling to me.

And that contextualized a lot of what I then started to see in experience. So as I said, going back to my own journey, I was exposed to Missouri Senate, sort of Lutheran Christianity. That's what my mom held to.

And so I didn't realize when I say that's very European, what I mean is it feels much closer to the sort of 16th and 17th century Protestantism that actually did have some sort of rootedness in history and tradition and metaphysics and things like that, even though we didn't talk about metaphysics in that world. I mean, we did to an extent when you're doing Chalcedonian and Nicene stuff, but it felt much more grounded in that world. And then the first time I stepped foot on like an evangelical campus or in an evangelical church or something like that, I started to encounter that world.

I was like, wow, this is a world of a different, this is a totally different type of Protestantism. And only later did I come to realize this type of Protestantism is an outgrowth of that type of contrast that I saw when I was going through American documents, that there was this abandonment of scholasticism, this abandonment of history for this sort of biblicism that was at best sort of a systematic theology about doctrinal points or how you read certain Bible points. And we try to ignore the philosophy of it.

And that's why it feels so thin in comparison. Now, I think what I also noticed in there is that the contrast that you talked about about the shift from like, well, we were fundamentalists, but let's make a move toward the mainstream because we see an opportunity here. And the opportunity was exactly what you said.

Like a lot of the mainline churches, even though they might've had a rootedness in something that was older and more historical had started to go more and more liberal to the point that it was like, it didn't even seem to have anything to do with the history of it anymore. It was now this new social cultural movement thing. And so the evangelicals see an opportunity there.

And what I had noticed just because of the areas I was interested in, right, was that a lot of these evangelicals, the ways in which they tried to step into that in the academy, put aside the politics, but you're right that they did step into that area there. Obviously people like Dr. Dobson and whatever was a big part of that moral majority in trying to move into that space politically and culturally. But there was also on the academic side, what was fascinating is to see that for a long time, at least again, my impression as an outsider stepping into this, that fundamentalism was sort of known for, we stick our fingers in our ears and we don't engage in scholars.

So scholars are gonna come along and they're gonna tell us things about the dating of the Bible that we disagree with, or they're gonna tell us things about miracles that we disagree with, and they're all atheists and they're all corrupt and they're all agents of the devil. And so let's just stick our fingers in our ears and ignore them and read your Bible. And this is what it says.

And the ways in which the evangelicals started to try to move into that space academically seem to be that we're going to engage the academy. We're gonna try to come out of our bunker and really sort of like try to engage them. And we're gonna make the case in the mainstream of the academy, in the halls of the academy, we're gonna make the arguments and defend our position.

Now, I think while I'm all for that, like I'm all for engaging the academy, there was also something that was kind of weird strategically that opened up there. And I can't help but wonder if this was the seeds of something that became, bore some of the fruit that we're now seeing leading to the demise of evangelicalism, which was rather than arguing against the fundamental assumptions of the academy, the best way to engage the academy was to grant their premises. So let's grant everything that you say about like, so I used to joke when I would have students come to me and they'd be fascinated with ancient philosophy or medieval philosophy and patristics.

And so they're now sort of having this mind opening experience about how they look at theology. Let's say, Dr. Jacobs, what do you think about biblical studies? And because they're taking like a New Testament class and I'd be like, oh, you mean that discipline where you read the Bible like you're an atheist?

And the reason is exactly that. When you look at the way biblical studies functions, it embraces a functional atheism. And it's more than just a functional atheism.

It's not like it's saying, well, we're agnostic about whether there's God, we're agnostic about whether this could be inspired. It's actually like actively atheistic in the sense of, we favor a certain type of narrative about the history of humanity and about the history of religion. And it's highly cynical.

Like we presume religion is a political utility. And so therefore the most subversive and dishonest motives are the most likely motives of authors, right? We presume that humanity, it's always got this, out of German idealism actually, it's always got this bias for the present where obviously smarter than those dumb backwater Hicks who used to think this and this, like nobody could possibly believe that.

And so whichever interpretation makes them sound the dumbest, like that's preferable. Like they can't be too sophisticated because we know they're not sophisticated, right? They're not like us.

They're not Germans, right? You know, that's like, and so there's a lot of these sort of biases in biblical studies and that are not just functional atheism where we're gonna try to put on the shelf the question of God. It's actively atheistic where you're being highly negative.

And so in this way, what you would start to see though is you'd see evangelicals who behind closed doors between you and me, of course, I believe in God. Of course, I believe it's inspired. Of course, of course, of course.

But now when I engage the atheists, I'm gonna play on their terms. So I'm gonna see if I can grant all of their cynical premises and yet somehow make the case that Paul is still the author of this or somehow make the case that Paul really did believe that Jesus was divine or whatever it is, right? And that seemed to be the game that the evangelicals played in order to try to win back intellectual integrity.

And then obviously there was also this massive philosophy of religion movement, most of which started out of Calvin College. That's actually the reason I was drawn to Calvin in the first place was all of these folks that I knew were sort of revitalizing Christian philosophy of religion. And they were doing it in very interesting ways, right?

And so people like Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff and others who I'd eventually get to meet and know, a lot of those folks just, they started at Calvin and then like Craved as well, like you mentioned, that they eventually went elsewhere, Yale, Notre Dame, whatever. But like it all seemed to be bubbling out of those waters there. And so I'd seen this sort of interesting thing where it was like the evangelicals were so hungry to gain not just cultural ground, but also academic ground that they ended up saying, well, let's play on the atheist terms and let's go ahead and make the arguments from the atheist terms and let's see if we can still sort of gain background for our positions without having to invoke God or confessions or anything like that.

So there was a lot of that happening. And some of that was very even intentional in the sense that I didn't go to Biola. I was up for a job at Biola at one point, but a couple of times, but I didn't go to Biola, but I know somebody who went there during the sort of like heyday of the Moreland and William Lane Craig stuff.

And my understanding at least, this is hearsay, but my understanding is that they were very intentional in their thriving philosophy of religion program there, that they wanted to train up people, get them for their PhDs into top tier parts of the academy in order to ultimately plant them in top tier schools to try to turn the tide culturally because now you've got a devout Christian who really believes these things, but is in the Department of Philosophy at Yale or something like that. That was part of their agenda.

And so I think there was this real push there. Now, the question is, how long can you play atheist? How long could you play atheist before that seed starts to grow and bear some weird fruit in your own mind?

And so I do think that ironically, there was a lot of concessions made based on this approach, right? We're going to embrace the methodological atheism. We're gonna embrace even the cynical methodological atheism.

And we're gonna try to argue for intellectual integrity. And few people, except in philosophy of religion, this is where I think Alvin Plantinga, for example, or Nicholas Wolterstorff for exceptions, had the guts to just say like, well, I actually do believe in God. And I think a major part of your argument is not in fact an argument.

It's a presupposition that God doesn't exist and maybe we should start there. And I think there was a certain courage that was lacking in that, right? It was an interesting tactic that was being used.

But I think there are better ways to just go ahead and head on call out like the methodological assumptions and problems that are going on there. Now, of course, I also saw during this time, that was the thing that I first saw when I came into the evangelical world. I was like, okay, I come from, in retrospect, I realized, I come from a much more European sort of traditional world.

I've kind of stepped into this weird former fundamentalist world that I was never a part of. And I've seen the ways in which they're trying to sort of infiltrate the academy and gain intellectual ground and integrity. But then I also saw, and this was happening, I saw it happening in real time, the emergent church stuff that you talked about, because Rob Bell was right down the road.

Like I knew Calvin Seminary people who were falling all over themselves for it. And I didn't get it. Again, like I heard, oh, such amazing speakers and books.

And I read the books and I was like, what is this? And I went and I heard the talks. I was like, ah, that's what you're like falling over.

I'm a philosopher. What can I say? I wanted substance.

I didn't want flash and dash and show. But I could see that there was this thing happening where they're like, let's try to up our music game. Let's try to up our videography game.

Let's try to up our sort of like rhetorical game in terms of how we move people and things like that. And it seemed to me that part of what I saw happening, what I saw happening in the emergent movement was it was this a similar, it was almost like a cultural version of what I had witnessed on the academic side, where the idea was like part of how I show that I'm different. And this would later get made fun of like, I show that I've got tattoos.

Now, of course, like that's not really what it was about, but that was kind of what it was about in the sense that so much of the emergent movement seemed to be about an ethos, right? An ethos that we are open-minded, right? We recognize that life is grittier and people are more complex and these issues are more challenging and nuanced.

Life is messy. Unlike all of these other sort of stuff shirt, sort of academics or traditionalists or whatever.

[Paul Vander Klay] (30:52 - 31:16)

Or like the Seekers who, I mean, Willow Creek, Willow Creek is like, hey, we won the kingdom back for the boomers. Now we're gonna do it for the Xers. And so they had their Gen X service where they bring in this guy and they're gonna be gritty and they're gonna be slightly depressed like all the Gen Xers.

And it completely flops. It just completely bombs.

[Nathan Jacobs] (31:17 - 38:42)

That's right, yeah. Well, growing up in the Chicago area, I got to see that too. But yeah, so I think you're right though, a lot of, but so this was a lot of what the emergence stuff was though.

It was more ethos. It was more about- It was a vibe. Personal vibe, right?

It was, yeah, it was a vibe movement. Now, I think the thing that was interesting though was that started to attract a lot of people who, I think this is where, forgive me for anybody who, just gonna say it. Say it, say it.

It became even more shallow than what evangelical American Protestantism was before that. So if what you see happening is that you have this sort of like ancient and medieval stuff, which then is received and engaged in early Protestantism. Early Protestantism is scholastic.

Like people who have only read Luther and Calvin don't know that. But at some point, the Lutherans had to get their bleep together and like actually be able to engage in scholastic conversation because they were gonna go up against Roman Catholic apologists. And so like, if you really look at 16th, 17th century Protestantism, Lutheranism, reform thought, it's highly scholastic.

It's as sophisticated metaphysically, philosophically, all of that as any of the medieval stuff. Like that's the level on which it's engaged. And so when you jump over to American, all of a sudden like we don't need any of that.

And now it's just sort of this biblicism without philosophy that gets immediately more shallow. Well, like I said, that's the sort of thing that I had seen in the academy side of things when I encountered evangelicals who were trying to sort of push the academic envelope. None of them were going back to philosophy.

They were just sort of trying to do their systematic biblicism in a way that maybe could retain some intellectual integrity. But now what you have is like things get even thinner when it's like now it's about a vibe and we don't even have that level of sophistication, right? So the sophistication has diminished even further.

And I think what happens is what you're getting is you're getting a thinner and thinner, thinner tether, if any tether is left to tradition. And so what happens is over time, the doctrines and the beliefs of evangelicalism become just sort of very, very vague, thin back napkin sort of versions of their original self. So you'd sit here and go like, okay, so the Reformation, apparently the Reformation and Protestantism is a really big deal because you're still not back to the Catholic church.

So like clearly like this whole like faith works thing was like a big deal because it's still a thing, right? But if you ask, if you look at the scholastic versions of that, you're dealing in orders of loves and merits and demerits and transference of merits and all, it's a very sort of medieval discussion. When you ask like the man on the street version by the time you're to the emergent movement, like, so what's the difference between Catholics and Protestants?

And the answer is like, well, Catholics think you can earn God's favor and like Protestants don't. And that's like laughably superficial. Like it's absurdly superficial.

And so I think what started to happen is you had these sort of these just almost bullet point like super, super thin superficial pictures of what theology was. And the problem is that that becomes wildly vulnerable because once what starts to happen, and this is the thing that, you know, this is honestly how you and I first met Paul, right? You heard a talk that I gave on the nuns, right?

The religiously unaffiliated folks. And one of the things that is really evident when you talk with them is that at some point when they start asking the questions, right? They start asking the questions about why should I believe in God or why is that right and that wrong?

Or why should I tow this line on things? And you've gotten rid of all of that depth. There's nothing left, right?

You know, and so like when you had a highly biblically literate sort of boomer generation that was at least committed to like, because the Bible is the word of God and it says so, there was something to grab hold of. But then in the emergent movement, you're getting, and I watched that in real time too, because I was a professor that occasionally, you know, some of the schools I taught at were, you know, Protestant schools. And so I'd watch biblical literacy diminish in real time.

Where it's like, I could set up a question and say like, so what does Paul say about this, right? And when I first started teaching, I could do that setup and somebody would probably know the answer. By year three, I'm realizing I can't rely on somebody knowing the answer because, you know, I'm just watching it plummet year to year, the level of biblical literacy.

And so I think the problem is like, it used to be that like in the old European form, you had the biblicism, you knew the Bible, but you also had this philosophical underpinning. There was a whole fully or deep worldview. By the time you get to American fundamentalism, it's a pure biblicism.

Well, cause the Bible is the word of God and there it is. And don't talk to the atheists about why they don't think it's the word of God or anything like that. And you get into your bunker.

And then when you start to getting this vibe sort of thing, where you have a biblicism, but it's a biblicism with people who are biblically ignorant, now the sort of hold of that anchor that's left, it doesn't really hold. And so I think that's the progression that I see. And again, this is me speaking as somebody who's on the outside.

I've never identified as an evangelical. I've spent a lot of time in these different orbits, but that's the evolution that I seem to, sitting there as an outsider who's watching it happen in real time, that's what I saw. The reformed world is slightly different, obviously, because that's a version at least what I saw and you would be much more equipped to speak to this than I would.

But I could tell that there was definitely the remnant of the European Protestantism. Obviously, I studied under people like that, right? People who really wanted to say, look, it's important that you know Herman Bovink, right?

It's important that we train our pastors in the scholastic stuff and the systematic theology stuff. And they were really sort of trying to toe the line of like, let's stay grounded in 16th, 17th century orthodoxy, reformed orthodoxy. But you also saw the burgeoning folks taken in by the emergent stuff.

You saw the sort of mainline sort of more liberal trajectory that's like, well, maybe we should just evolve. And so that was sort of a different sort of thing entirely. It looked to me because it wasn't that fundamentalist thing that had undergone an evolution.

It was more of watching in real time, the European American sort of remnants going through that evolution. So those are some of my initial thoughts. Now, I'm happy to talk about how I think that sets the table for what's going on right now.

But what do you think of my assessment? Would you agree? Would you disagree?

[Paul Vander Klay] (38:43 - 39:53)

Yes, it sounds very accurate to me. And I loved what you did with the emergent movement because it's funny, because you would think Rob Bell, tried to play his hand with Oprah, didn't really succeed, didn't take like I'm sure everyone hoped it would take. Nadia Bolts Weber becomes the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, gave her a title.

I don't remember what that title was. It was basically she's our preeminent missionary. We as a denomination want to put Nadia Bolts Weber up and say, this is exactly how we are going to, this is what evangelism means in America is Nadia Bolts Weber.

And she's of course, probably the most well-known, famous red Lutheran minister in their denomination. And she's got tattoos. And she got the little thing from Gloria Steinem that was the, everyone melted down their purity rings.

And you remember that?

[Nathan Jacobs] (39:53 - 39:55)

I don't remember that, but.

[Paul Vander Klay] (39:55 - 47:47)

Oh, search it. She got, she and Gloria Steinem, everybody melted down their purity rings from their Evangelical Fundamentalist Church. And they made a vulva, and that was the trope.

I mean, you cannot make this up. You Google it, it is there. And so, but so you've got, so if you, and then you've got Mark Driscoll and both Mark Driscoll and Rob Bell named their churches Mars Hill.

Right. And they start fundamentally the same time. They are, so you've got these three and they are sort of the figureheads of the emergent movement in many ways.

And you would think, what do Mark Driscoll and Nadia Bolts Weber have in common? They have in common the same thing that both sides of a coin have in common. They are two sides of the same coin.

So you have the cussing pastor who was instrumental in the young, restless and reformed movement, but really the lights of that movement, Tim Keller, John Piper, they always looked at him like, that really one of us. And so now he's in Arizona doing whatever the heck he's doing. So, and now we're at this moment now where some of the things that strike me about the moment, about sort of this metagelical, I, you know, this is a little box I put on my theoretical workbench and I put things in and I see if they fit or they don't fit and then I have others play and they sort of put things in and out.

Is it or isn't it? Cause we're just trying to discern what's happening. And so definitely, so now I'm in conversation with all kinds of people who are, or want to, or say they are either, you know, sort of trad cath or orthodox.

And, you know, I look at Word on Fire and it's like, isn't that a parachurch? Isn't Word on Fire really a parachurch? They're not an order.

They're not ecclesiastical in that sense. Now they're connected. They've got a bishop and he's a real bishop and he deserves to be a bishop.

I mean, Robert Barron is a serious man, but Word on Fire, they're parachurch. And it's interesting looking at the orthodox, who represents orthodoxy to the young YouTubing, Americans who are coming into the orthodox church. Jonathan Peugeot, it's you, it's Jay Dyer.

Yeah, you've got a couple of clergy there, but that, you know, so I picked up, shouldn't have put it in the bench. I picked up, oh, oh, oh, oh, come on, where did I put it? What now?

The sociologist wrote a book in 88 about the changes in American religion. And so we contrasted like in 1946, you had 90,000 participants, brass bands, floats in Brooklyn, New York, part of the Sunday school association. I mean, and this was massive.

And you would have at that point too, you would have old immigrant communities, you'd have Roman Catholic processions in certain parts of the country. I mean, the ecclesiastical institutions were the containers of the religious life in America. Part of what happens then as you get then into the fifties, and then especially when you get into the Jesus movement and the counterculture and all of this in America, evangelicalism sort of emerges with the parachurch.

This is not an ecclesiastical structure. Some people might have theological degrees, but again, in the Protestant world, your theological degree and your ecclesiastical status live in two different universes because your theological degree is within modernity and your ecclesiastical status, well, what is that really? Especially in the Protestant world, because I've lived in African-American communities and you have an accident on the street, chances are good you hit a bishop because they're all over the place.

Or a doctor bishop or a reverend bishop or a reverend doctor or something like this. So, and everybody knows that if you're a Christian, if you're a minister and you sort of leave the ministry, you got nothing on a resume because you got no status in this world. So, what I see happening, there's no question in my mind that the internet, YouTube especially, is fueling this moment in orthodoxy in American culture now.

And there definitely is a vibe to it. And same thing with the trad cats. I have a, I know a young man, married.

He was at a relationship with this church via family. He went to an evangelical school, was sort of progressive evangelical emergent for a while, married a girl who grew up reformed, but she was teaching in a Roman Catholic school in the Bay Area and just absolutely horrified at what goes on in a Roman Catholic school in the San Francisco Bay Area in terms of the Catholicism that is actually or not actually there. She's just shocked at that.

And they went to my church for a while, but he had a friend who went to seminary that he, so then, and he was trying to get something going at Sacramento, so we went to his church and I married them. They've got some kids. And then he called me about six, eight months ago.

He said, oh, pastor, let's get together. Yeah, let's catch up and we get together. And I was just sort of waiting.

Where are they worshiping now? Traditional Latin mass. Traditional Latin mass, just sort of going great guns and everybody is just thrilled at, we're running a traditional Catholic mass where we're standing up to the man who is probably an archbishop.

And we're, but all of our services are full and the priests are young and we're full of children. And then I go to this Orthodox Church in Riverside, California, sort of a tail end of one of our conferences and same vibe. And now, and I've not been complaining about this.

For me, I'm a pragmatic American. It's like you go into an Orthodox church, amen. I hope you have a good priest.

I hope you confess your sins. I hope you go to mass all the time. And so my buddy goes to TradCath service.

I'm like, praise God. You just keep going to that TradCath service. And God is clearly working in your life and he's clearly working through the Latin mass.

I don't know how, because I know none of you know any Latin at all, but hey, I'm not gonna fight you, my friend.

[Nathan Jacobs] (47:47 - 47:50)

Yeah. And it violates canon law of Nicaea, but anyway.

[Paul Vander Klay] (47:52 - 51:02)

But anyway, so we're in this moment now where, I mean, part of what happens, if you read Mark Knoll's thesis on Americanization or what happens to the church in America, is that for a while in the colonies, the institutions came over with America, as amusing ourselves to death. Massachusetts is the most literate place in the world in the colonial period, in the early American period. I mean, and tremendously educated people.

But everybody's just itching to, part of the reason to kick out the British is we're really itching to get over the Appalachians and get our hands on some of that sweet territory that there's no way the Indians are gonna defend from us. And we are just gonna keep moving West until we hit that next ocean. And Mark Knoll basically says, you wanna know why American religion is the way it is?

It's because you can't carry books across the frontier. And you kinda wanna have a church. Well, you've got all of these pieces of who knows where, but you're in this little village and you only can put up one building.

It's gonna be a church and a school. And well, you need a Bible to learn to read English with. So let's use the Bible, the book.

And so then you have American religion. So all of this stuff has history. And so now it's just very interesting that I listened to someone doing, someone actually thinking about the practicalities of growing the Orthodox church in America.

And it's like, do you know how many priests we don't have? Do you know how far you have to drive if you want to go to an Orthodox church, if you live any place that you can get YouTube? Do you know how many Orthodox baptisms or re-baptisms are happening in troughs, the same place that the Protestant church planters are buying their troughs for their baptisms?

I mean, I'm watching this happen and it's like, oh, this is interesting. And how will former, and these are my friends. I'm not talking ill about these people.

I love these people. I celebrate what they're doing. But it's like how, you look at Richard Rowland and growing up in the hardcore fundamentalist evangelical way he did.

And now he's nerding out over Dante and Beowulf. And it's like, what is American Orthodoxy really going to look like?

[Nathan Jacobs] (51:04 - 57:29)

All right, well, Paul, there's so many things in there that I really am dying to speak to. So I mentioned that, I don't know if you remember this. I don't know if you watched all three talks that I did.

So I remember that the first time you and I encountered each other, it's because you made me aware that you did a response video to the lecture I gave to the Midwest clergy convocation, where I was a speaker to all these different clergy in the Midwest, bishops, priests, deacons. And I was talking about the religiously unaffiliated. And I gave three talks, which I think Ancient Faith still has up.

I don't know, they're probably online somewhere. I know you were responding to the first one where I walked through the worldview of the nuns. I don't know if you watched all three.

I watched, I know I watched the second one. I probably watched the third one. Well, in the third one, I talked about this very problem.

Because I talked to them about this whole question of, it's one thing for me to talk about orthodoxy. And it's one thing for me to talk about the beauty of the orthodox church and orthodox theology and all this sort of stuff. But I was like, on a practical level, I was raising this question of like, can they find it?

If they do find a parish, what do they find? Do they find a thriving parish? And I was really sort of kicking that over to the clergy themselves saying like, this is the problem you guys really need to look at seriously.

Because if I'm right, and I think I have been shown to be right on this, I was like, there's gonna be a massive wave of people moving in your direction. And I don't know that you guys are prepared for it. And that prediction had to do with the fact of what we're seeing now.

So when I, on my YouTube channel, I did two talks on the nuns. One of them is very much like the same sort of stuff you would get from the Midwest clergy convocation where I'm just talking about contours of belief. The second one, I talked about the evolution of a nun and how they sort of evolve over time.

And I talked about something that I had predicted back then, in the 2016, which was that I was like, if you look at the way a nun, a religiously unaffiliated person evolves, you'll see that it starts with sort of switching because they're in some sort of crisis regarding their own experience. That's a prelude to dissociation, right? And so then if they can't find something that really sort of grounds them and feels like it fits what they're looking for, they'll pull out of it, right?

And this could be that they become nuns, they really abandon belief altogether. It could be they're duns and they're like, yeah, I'm still a Christian, but I don't go to church, but they're gonna pull out of it at some point. And one of the things that's interesting, and this is what somebody like Clay Rutledge had talked about, was the idea that there's sort of this movement from organized religion to disorganized religion, like occultism, right?

Paranormal stuff. And that's because most of the nuns still believe in spirits and spirituality. They're not atheists, right?

This isn't a bunch of new atheists are winning sort of stuff. But if you believe that the paranormal and the occult is demonic, then to no surprise, they don't find meaning, which is exactly what Clay Rutledge finds in his study where there's an inverse relationship between the pursuit of meaning there and the deeper they go into it, the less meaning they experience. And so at some point that disillusionment sets in and they leave that and where they go to next is usually some form of political activism.

And this is what I think is always, what's misdiagnosed is a lot of people will look at the unaffiliated and they'll presume, ah, they left because of these political issues. And that's where you get into the sort of culture war stuff of like, well, how much should the churches concede or not concede? Whereas, when you look at the evolution of this person, that's a symptom of an otherwise, a different search for meaning.

It's not the thing driving, those issues are symptoms that are not the driving cause behind it. And you can see that in the fact that, and there wasn't a lot of data on this back in like 2016, but I saw enough of it firsthand. And I would guess that you did too, that you could see where this is going.

They're not gonna stay there. They're eventually gonna come back. And there were certain people, like I know there was a dissertation done in Michigan by a Catholic gal about like people reconverting to Catholicism.

There were a few different newspaper articles about people becoming very traditionally religious and things like that. But I was like, I think that's just a prelude to what's gonna happen, which is that these folks are eventually going to also be disappointed by the activism and the culture of it. And they're eventually gonna find their way back.

But what they're gonna find their way back to is not what they left. They're gonna go to something that's much more grounded, historical, aesthetically rich, et cetera, right? They're gonna, because that's what they're sort of moving away from.

That's what they're looking for, this fully or not just worldview, but lifestyle and culture and tradition and all that sort of stuff. And so my prediction was they'll all become like very, either very traditional Catholics or Orthodox or something like that. And that's where they'll go to.

And sure enough, that's exactly what we're seeing happen right now. So when I look at that, I do think it should be no surprise that what's starting to happen right now is exactly that. All of these folks who are sort of left that, that they're making their way back to some form of tradition, right?

They're either becoming high church Anglicans or Latin mass Catholics or Eastern Orthodox of some kind. And I think part of that is tied in with the very sort of things that we talked about before. You know, they're looking for something that actually demands certain things in terms of lifestyle, right?

That it gives them a way of living and just telling them that they should, you know, like evangelicalism doesn't seem like a way of life, partially because of its worry about works righteousness. So there's not an emphasis on fasting. There's not a liturgical calendar.

I think it does have a culture, right? Whether- It had one, but in many ways it lost it.

[Paul Vander Klay] (57:30 - 57:30)

That's right.

[Nathan Jacobs] (57:30 - 1:02:37)

We've seen that in the Christian church. Right. So I remember like, I remember, you know, growing up watching my mom, there was a ritual to it, right?

You got up early in the morning and you read your Bible and, you know, maybe there was even like a, this daily bread or something like that, where there's a devotional and you say your prayers. You're probably in a Bible study, you know, like there were these elements, maybe you're being trained to go out, evangelism explosion, right? Go out there and you have like, you go on mission trip.

There was a culture to it, but I do think what, you know, when I talk about the ways in which you move to the emergent stuff and it became more authentic and more messy, there was a sense in which it embraced this sort of like undisciplined, like whatever the whim of the person may be. And so soon it just became the culture of hanging out with other people who are trying to figure it out and going to church on Sunday and so on. And so it became more and more superficial.

Like the boomers had a certain culture to it, especially the more traditional, you know, Protestants. But over time that eroded, and then what you ended up getting is you got this thinner and thinner and thinner thing. And also, you know, this is sort of a, one of the funny things about fundamentalism was when evangelicalism was trying to shun its fundamentalism, a big part of that, that's how you start to get a lot of the faith-based movies and music because it was like, well, well, we don't wanna tell people, we used to tell people that heavy metal was bad, but like, we don't wanna tell them that, like, cause some of them like it, so maybe let's just come up with Christian heavy metal. Right, we wanna, and it became this thing, right? Where it's like, well, we'll just give you the, video games aren't bad, here's a Christian video game.

Like it was this effort to like come up with the repackaged Christian label slapping that provided them a way to live like the world. But the result was at some point people were like, well, if heavy metal isn't bad, why am I listening to the Christian heavy metal, which isn't as good as the real heavy metal and I'll just listen to the real. And so over time, ironically, again, these are the things that start to backfire because what had happened was you ended up having more and more people who were like, well, I'm just living like everybody else.

Then I go to church on Sunday. And so like the erosion of that culture and that lifestyle and things like that, they didn't have it. And also then with the erosion, I had already talked about the sort of abandonment of some of the older, richer scholastic theology, and then it got into systematics and then it got thinner and less systematic and so on.

And so if you're looking for things like, I want some sort of groundedness in tradition, I want some sort of depth of worldview, I want some sort of depth of philosophy, I want these anchors, I want a lifestyle, I want all these sort of things. It becomes very difficult for a lot of folks to turn back to Protestantism because they feel like I didn't find that there. And even if you're one of those folks who is like, well, but I really like the 16th, 17th century scholasticism.

Well, okay, what reform church are you gonna go into that really is like this is the enfleshment of 16th, 17th century reform scholasticism? So you become this person who's hanging onto this like one moment in time that no longer seems to be lived anywhere. And so I think that's one of the reasons why when the people start to move back and they're searching for these sorts of things, they either find it in a form of Catholicism.

And I think it's telling that it's always Latin mass because it's like, it is almost like the, let's go back to the 16th, 17th century. It's like, let's go pre-Vatican too. Yeah, there's still enough of us that the pre-Vatican too Catholic church still exists.

It's us, right? Like it's that, or it goes Anglican or it goes sort of Eastern Orthodox. Anglicanism has its own sort of challenges because you've got the Anglicans who are trying to remain Anglican and differentiate themselves from the Episcopalians and all that sort of stuff.

So you have like Acna and Amia. I remember all the Anglicans trying to find refuge under like African bishops or something like that so that they could still live an older form of Anglicanism. Anyway, so you have that sort of retreat.

And I think that's one of the things obviously that's driving so much of the move toward Orthodoxy is that impulse that says, I want something that's grounded, that's deep, that's rich, that has tradition, that gives me a lifestyle, that tells me what to believe, how to live, has a culture to it, et cetera, et cetera. Now to your question though, about like what is American Orthodoxy start to look like? You're right that first of all, in terms of scaling Orthodoxy, it's really hard because you need a priest and where are you gonna get priests?

And like, and candidly, the problem is Orthodoxy and I think wisely so is resistant to like shotgun ordinations of people. Because I mean, if you look at it, you know, we in the Orthodox Church- And we want you to be resistant to that, okay? Like, let's keep it that way.

I'm not advocating changing that.

[Paul Vander Klay] (1:02:38 - 1:02:42)

You're a priest and you're a priest and you're a priest. Let's avoid that, shall we?

[Nathan Jacobs] (1:02:42 - 1:19:19)

We got lots of that in America. Yeah, let's not do that. But I mean, if you look at just the reception into the Orthodox Church, I mean, the wisdom of the early church, you see, I think it's in the serial of Jerusalem where he talks about that the time, they would make sure that people were catechumen, right?

This sort of engagement with the church before baptism. That would be minimally like three years that we wanna make sure that you really know what you're getting into and that you really wanna do this. And Orthodoxy, American Orthodoxy still does that, right?

I know people who have waited a year or something like that. Very rarely will it go three years, right? Normally it's like six months to a year is what I've seen.

I've seen some people go longer than that. But the point is like Orthodoxy is so hesitant to like even make you Orthodox. The idea that you would sort of quickly throw somebody into being a priest is completely contrary to Orthodox culture.

And I think should be, I think wisely so. Now the other challenge with this though, and this is something that I really, I'm trying to figure out what I can do to help with regard to this. But I think one of the challenges that happens in American Orthodoxy is the number of folks who step into Orthodoxy without fully abandoning their formal worldview.

And they don't even know that they need to do that, right? So obviously I spend a lot of time talking about the differences between East and West in terms of philosophy and its history, patrology and all that sort of stuff. And a lot of people, I get flack for that because a lot of people don't, they don't like, don't exaggerate the differences.

I'm not exaggerating the differences. Like these are real differences. But for so many converts, what happens is they're looking for refuge.

Something about Orthodoxy grabs them. They see the liturgy and it's beautiful. And they're like, I don't know what that is, but I want that.

And I think there's something meaningful and right about that. They're seeing something really real that is drawing them in. But oftentimes the approach is to say, okay, I've got my checklist of things that I'm not comfortable with.

Convince me, right? Like, okay, I'm not comfortable with this Mary stuff. Convince me.

Okay, check. Okay, I'm uncomfortable with these icon things. Okay, convince me.

Okay, check. Prayer to saints. Okay, convince.

Check. Right. Tell me your theory of atonement.

You know, okay. Oh, I could live with that. You know, check.

And it's sort of got its list. And then it's like, okay, I've got over those hurdles. Now I come in.

Now there's a couple of problems with this, right? Like the one problem is that oftentimes what happens is they come in with some sort of syncretistic Orthodox theology. It's not true Orthodox theology.

You traded out a few of your systematic points for Orthodox points, but because they're still sort of stuck in your Catholic or Protestant, you know, puzzle, it's really sort of a distorted, not really Orthodox theology. And it takes, speaking as somebody who like did this professionally, right? It takes years and years and years of turning over that soil before you're really, and candidly, it still happens, right?

You'll still, there's the theology of the Eastern Church Fathers is not shallow, right? Like this is not something you master overnight and voila, I've got it. Like it's years and years and years of turning this over and changing how you think about that.

And that's fine, right? I'm not saying don't become Orthodox until you do that, but there is wisdom to becoming Orthodox and closing your mouth and just learning and going through that process, recognizing that you still have a lot of baggage, you know, to work through here. And I think that's fine.

But I think part of the problem is a lot of people don't do that, right? They sort of treat it the way, there's something weirdly Protestant about it. And this is gonna get to the second point I was gonna mention, which is that Protestants who have done church shopping, right, are accustomed to the whole idea of, well, I like the preacher, you know, he's pretty good.

Music wasn't bad. Let's look at their statement of faith and see how many things I can sign off on. And like, and it is, it's a checklist.

And like, okay, once I, if I can sit here comfortably, and I know we have disagreements, but like I'm comfortable enough within this box, like I'll sign off and we can go to church here. And they're kind of doing the same thing with the Orthodox Church at that point. They're not really sort of saying, well, you are the ones who are the keepers of this tradition and I'm to sit here and learn from you.

And it's not that I'm supposed to be comfortable with you, like I'm supposed to actually be submitting to you. There's a shift. And that is a shift that needs to happen, right?

The shift that says like, okay, if you're really Orthodox and you're thinking, you've gotten rid of the whole, I'm my own Pope thing or whatever it is. Like you've gotten rid of that way of thinking. And you've said, well, I believe that the church is the one, you know, the pillar and foundation of truth.

And I don't think that's the invisible church. I'm talking about a visible church. And I'm submitting to you as the shepherds who are supposed to guide me.

And I'm letting you shape me. And that doesn't mean I can't voice things that I'm confused about or uncomfortable about, but I'm approaching that with a certain level of trust in you as the person who's here to guide me. And so ironically, the ways in which it's sometimes approached to sort of get over the hurdles and become Orthodox is a Protestant approach.

And I think that's really the sort of second thing that even if the theology, even if you successfully went through the whole checkboxes and, you know, like you have a really Orthodox theology, the very fact that you're going through those checkboxes and doing this in that sort of way is a Protestant approach to the whole thing. And so my concern is, I have concerns where my concerns about a lot of like American Orthodoxy is the need to avoid some sort of weird syncretism. And I think this is where it's really important that more and more Orthodox people recognize the importance to, you know, sort of to learn and to submit and recognize, you know, that I'm in a position as a student or as a sheep, right?

To the shepherd, rather than I'm the arbiter of them and sort of I'm calling balls and strikes with them. I think there's that shift that has to take place. I think there needs to be more people who are aware of the sort of syncretism.

And I know that I'm aware of it because I've, you know, I come out of the Western training, but I also, you know, have the training in the East. And so like, there's this, you know, I'm able to see and translate really well, you know, like, okay, I know how this person over here as a Protestant hears this thing and what they're thinking over here. I also know where they're disconnecting with this, right, thing over here.

And so that's one of the reasons why so much of the work that I'm doing is trying to help people see those differences so that they're fully turning over that soil and coming back to it. But it's also really strange, you know, and I don't know that this, what I'm about to say has to be abandoned. I'm sort of still, jury's still out on this for me.

But it is interesting that another thing that is very, very Western about the ways in which we approach religion is that we approach it primarily as an intellectual exercise, right? And you look at the rest of the world, there are so many people who, I mean, Luther obviously had a doctrine of implicit faith. That's part of how he justified infant baptism.

The infant just accepts whatever his parents give to him. And so he has an implicit faith in whatever their faith is. Well, you can understand why somebody like Luther would make that argument if you've seen religion at play in other parts of the world, which is that you'll meet a very, very devout, you know, babushka, some old lady who is like, couldn't be more devout, you know, in her Orthodox faith.

And if you ask her a theology question, she'll be like, I don't know, like whatever the church says. And she's not troubled by that. And so there really is this deference to the church, right?

Like I believe whatever they believe. And if I was troubled by that question, I just asked them and I'd accept whatever. But people in the other parts of the world approach religion very differently, where it's like, I embrace the, I just sort of accept it for what it is.

And I move into it. And it's more about the action. It's more about the sort of participation in it than it is about me sort of schematizing it and parsing it and approving it and things like that.

Now, where I say I'm on the fence is like that's another thing where it's like American Orthodoxy is very different in that way because everybody in America is entering Orthodoxy through their head, right? And that's what I mean by a very Protestant thing. Now, I will say this.

I said I was on the fence about whether or not that's a bad thing. And here's what I mean. I am not of the mind, there are a lot of different myths that float around the internet about Orthodoxy.

And one of the myths about Orthodoxy is like, well, Orthodoxy is all about mystery. And then like, and then the West is all about like philosophy and that's rubbish. I mean, like if you've read Gregory of Nyssa, really?

You think Gregory of Nyssa is just like punting on topics and not doing philosophy? Are you out of your mind? Yes, when I read John of Damascus who gives me like an encyclopedia of philosophical terms with all of their definitions.

Yes, he seems just like he's just punting to mystery. Like that's ridiculous. Plus it also misunderstands what the word mystery means in the church fathers.

I mean, when people say that they usually mean I don't know what, right? But in the church fathers mystery, like it has to do with orientation into, like the term emerges because from like Mysterion, right? Like to shut from mystery cults and then Moustakos, which is the mysterious one, who is the one who's been oriented into mystery cults.

And then it become, then you get like the mystery of that's talked about in the New Testament and then in the church fathers, which had everything to do with somebody who has been oriented through baptism and charismation and can now see and understand the patterns of the Old Testament and things like that. Like it actually has to do with understanding, not a lack of understanding, right? That you've been oriented to see and to understand, not have a lack of understanding.

So it's sort of like a weird misuse of that. But it also then like, it also pits in a weird way, like reason against reality, which the church fathers don't do, right? So there's this sort of weird, like push in that as if I always get the impression, whoever's saying this really didn't like their philosophy class, did they?

Like that was, this is like, because it seems like they just don't like to engage in metaphysics or analytic philosophy or anything like that. So it's like this anti, it's always funny. It's like the orthodoxy is anti-scholasticism as if scholasticism is, scholasticism is just a method of talking about a thing.

It's like, there is no substance to, it's just a way of asking a question. Are angels made of matter? Well, it seems they are.

Here's all the arguments. To the contrary, they're not. Here's all the counter arguments.

I mean, that's all scholasticism is. But like, and so, but it's usually like this weird claim that suggests that somehow like orthodoxy is anti-philosophy or anti-metaphysics or something like that. And I think that's a further misunderstanding because yes, it's true that the church fathers will talk about like noose and they'll, you know, mind and they'll use noose as more than just analysis, right?

That's true. And they do differentiate the higher knowledge of God. That's the sort of born out of intimacy.

But to pit that as if that means that they have no room for the analysis that precedes the intimacy or something like that is to misunderstand them. Clearly people like Gregory of Nyssa and others, Dionysius, whoever, they want to say like philosophy does help you understand the structure of the world and it elevates your mind up. But at some point, the knowledge of God has to sort of leave behind analysis and enter into the actual intimate relationship with God.

And so what they're suggesting when you read the church fathers is even, yes, even the Eastern church father, they're not saying like philosophy is a bad thing. It doesn't have a place, right? What they're saying is that Aristotle's knowledge of God is a lower form of knowledge that is different and lesser than the sort of knowledge we're talking about, which is much more intimate, right?

And so it's interesting. I remember, I think it's Basil of Caesarea, it's Basil. Basil of Caesarea, when he's talking about like Paul and he talks about like the wisdom of the world and things like that.

I know that so often in the sort of anti-philosophy Protestant world, like the wisdom of the world means falsehoods, right? Like it means that stuff that people say that isn't true, right, and we have the true stuff, like the true wisdom of God. And that's not how Basil reads the term.

He understands the wisdom of the world to be true philosophical insights about the structures of reality that discern the fact that the world is not chaotic and random, but is actually ordered by a mind, namely God. But he differentiates that from the wisdom that gave rise to that wisdom, which is Christ, right? And so he's not saying that it's false stuff, right?

He's saying that's true, but it's just less than the sort of knowledge that the Christian is called to. You're called to have an intimate connection with, right? Sort of like the way the Hebrew talk of knowledge, like there's knowledge in the sort of intimacy sense of knowing a person versus knowing about, right?

And that's really what the church fathers do. And so the reason I bring that up is to say that when I look at that sort of stuff, I say, well, Eastern Orthodoxy, Eastern church fathers definitely have a place for analysis and for philosophy. And we have plenty of church fathers who I'm big fans of, right, who do that sort of thing, who engage in philosophy.

So I don't wanna say that has no place in Orthodoxy. So the idea that you would have a whole crop of converts who think that that's valuable, I think could be a good thing if, and here's the big if, if they also recognize that that is a lesser form of religion, all right? Because sometimes in the West, religion can be reduced to just a battle of worldviews.

And now it's just an intellectual exercise and it never moves into that higher form of like knowledge of God and intimacy and true mysticism, right, in the sense of like participating in these realities and things like that. So the way I look at that as I go, the one danger with that where I say I'm on the fence is that I think it could be a good thing if it means a revitalization of, you know, very sort of patristic like care for philosophical engagement, while also recognizing that the true purpose of this religion is to know Christ and participate in Christ and partake of Christ. The danger of it where it could become a bad thing is if it just becomes a Western intellectual exercise.

And now you've just got a different form of Protestant systematic theology going to war with other theologies and things like that. And that would be a bad thing. So I mean, there's a lot of, the jury's still out on a lot of this stuff, Paul, because we're pretty early in this like new wave of things that's happening.

I mean, I know which way I hope it goes. I hope the Orthodox Church can find a way to scale. I hope that there can be a rootedness in tradition where there's a true turning over of worldview.

I hope that the analytic side ends up becoming an appropriate servant to a higher knowledge of God. And that, you know, Orthodoxy in its sort of truest form, as you see in the patristic world is, you know, is lived. That's what I hope for.

But it remains to be seen. We're still pretty early in this story.

[Paul Vander Klay] (1:19:20 - 1:31:55)

Yeah. It's, and a couple of things, one of which is we are also living in a world that is mediated through it's not mediated through books. It's not mediated through the printed text.

And in that sense, Orthodoxy has a degree of, I'd say at least familiarity, and that Protestants who sort of turned away from image based transmission, but you could never get rid of it because it's just how we work. We are image, deeply image oriented. So on one, well, I guess there's three points actually.

I'll just lay them down and you can pick up any one that you want. In my experience, preparation of clergy is one thing. Communion of clergy is probably more important than preparation because let's say you're in, I was in, you know, you're in seminary two to four years, depending on how far you go and what pace you go.

You're as you're living as a clergy for 30 to 40 years. And you hopefully will learn, you will not stop learning when you leave your formal education. And that requires a community around you that hopefully integrates all of the different, all of the different levels of what in a real life you have to deal with.

So that's, I mean, it's interesting listening to orthodoxy in America now facing the clergy, the clergy challenge, which quite frankly, every other American Christian group and probably every other American religious group is doing it because of course, clergy have lost their place in the overall stack of cultural hierarchies. So that's one issue. Second issue, globalization.

We live in a world now where ironically, people who get excited about orthodoxy, they've discovered icons, they've discovered the divine liturgy, they've discovered that having, that building a cathedral or a building with, because obviously orthodoxy is in three dimensions, whereas often Protestantism is highly, merely mental. And so they look to the old world and say, there you've got the cathedrals, there you've got Mount Athos, there you've got all of this, but then they say, well, what's happening between Russia and Ukraine? And exactly what percentage, so for example, in this little corner, which is the ongoing conversations among people sort of in my space, you've got people who are living in Tbilisi, Georgia.

And when you ask them about the health of orthodoxy in Georgia, they laugh, which then makes Americans say, wait a minute, if we're just sort of out here on the frontier of orthodoxy trying to get it right, shouldn't it be the case that if I go back to the homeland, I mean, for, it wasn't until probably the 80s or 90s that Christian reformed youth growing up who are going to try to ascend the Christian reformed church hierarchy stopped going to the free university in Amsterdam and just started going to American graduate schools.

But that transition was key in terms of what you talked about of the Christian reformed church, where is it and what is it and how does it relate to American religion, et cetera, et cetera. You know, for example, when my father graduated from seminary, he had a, he never took it, but he had a scholarship to move to the Netherlands and study at the free university for a number of years and then come back to America and be either an elite pastor or an academic in the Christian reformed church. He decided to do what he did.

So you've got the one challenge of Orthodox clergy, clergy of every kind, probably more important for the ongoing health multiplication of your clergy is not just their preparation, but the community in which they minister in terms of their peer groups. What are they reading? What are they learning?

What's forming them spiritually, et cetera, et cetera. Second issue, what is the health of your network? And part of what's interesting about Orthodoxy in America is, well, they're Greek, they're Antiochian, they're Russian, they're Ukrainian.

That's Orthodox church in America, which is, I don't know what. And so, you know, Paul King's North is in a Romanian monastery in Ireland. And so globalization is then asking, okay, what is like all these flavors of Orthodoxy, like all these flavors of Presbyterian?

Because actually, you know, the reformed, the Dutch, but then the Presbyterians and the Presbyterians and the reformed are sort of. And so, you know, I watch people go into this, say with the eyes of a pastor and sure, I come from a confessional tradition. So I pay attention to sort of the confessional boxes they're taking.

But long ago, I noticed that when the internet happened in the United States, that churches of various confessional positions within Protestantism were simply cutting and pasting their statements of belief to basically 11, I would call them evangelical points, because, and then in the 80s and 90s, churches sort of shed their confessional, their denominational, everybody took it out of their name. Now we're rivers bend church and we're really Southern Baptist, but the preacher has sort of had, you know, was sort of getting excited by John Piper. And today we have a musician that's really leaning hard into Hillsong.

And so, you know what I, all of these forces are at work right now. And they're strong in terms of the, you know, I would imagine someone 100 or 200 or especially 500 years ago, growing up in Tbilisi, Georgia, they were within a deep Armenian culture where, you know, even one of the guys who sort of chuckles at the Armenian church in Georgia says, yeah, but you wouldn't toy with a priest because, you know, the priest has roots and, you know, the cops could show up at your door because the priest said something about you. I mean, you have that kind of integration into the culture and in a place like the United States and probably Canada and most of the English speaking Western world, I think Latin America would be different, but you've, things are, things have been, things have moved so fast for the last two centuries and things have moved really fast in terms of religion in the West for the last 70 years.

It's like, wow. I mean, the Christian Forum Church has plenty of its own challenges, but when I look at what, taking something as ancient and deep and sophisticated as orthodoxy and all of its various relationships between them and saying, we're going to do this in North Texas now, I just think, I don't know if I'd want to change my set of challenges for yours because I, you know, and again, as a pastor, I just know that, and I'm also in a position now where I get, you know, anecdotal information. Sure. Some woman contacted me and I got to be really vague on the issues because she had some real serious health issues.

She had a complex marital, romantic sexual situation. She wound up in an orthodox, in an orthodox church and that priest was very used to being highly directive in terms of the details of her life. And there were complex medical issues involved and the priest basically is like, you need to do this and stop doing that, which had medical, economic, marital, significance in there.

And she basically called me and said, to what degree should I, should I do this? Because if I, and she wasn't entirely convinced of his credibility and honesty, which of course may gave her the pause of, I don't know if I should submit to this, but if I don't submit to this, what does that mean about my, the path that I have taken, and I think you articulated it well, the path that I have taken from being a nun. And so then, and we had a conversation, but because, you know, she had roots, she had roots in my denomination, but not a good, it didn't go well.

I didn't get along well with her. There was a reason she left. So, but at the same time, just talking to her, you can tell.

She's deeply formed by, I wouldn't even say hardcore feminism, but just by sort of the American package of implicit feminism that everyone has. That's right. And so, I don't know, I'm not asking you to answer this because of course you can't, but I'm, it's, it's, it's, I sit in a fascinating seat watching, watching, on one hand, I'm, I'm tremendously excited about the arrival, the serious arrival of orthodoxy in America now, because I think it has the potential of improving American Christianity.

But the, and this is where I get back to this metagelical word, the platforms by which this is going to happen are in some ways similar to the kinds of things that we saw in the mid to late 20th century with respect to evangelicalism and Protestant, but now they're happening with Catholics and Orthodox and even people at the fringes of Christianity. So, wow.

[Nathan Jacobs] (1:31:56 - 1:32:35)

Yeah. Well, so I can speak anecdotally to some of this, right? But like to your point, like I can't, I can't really address all of it.

And, you know, nor do I think you expect me to, but so I'll just say like starting, I'll go sort of in reverse because there's sort of like the global issues that you're talking about, right? And then there's sort of this, this small scale micro issue. Like I stepped into a church and, you know, I have a priest give me certain advice and I don't know what to do with that sort of thing.

And I think it's interesting because you do see- Not advice, direction. Direction, yeah.

[Paul Vander Klay] (1:32:35 - 1:32:37)

There's another American thing.

[Nathan Jacobs] (1:32:37 - 1:32:38)

Yeah, yeah, right.

[Paul Vander Klay] (1:32:38 - 1:32:46)

Is the priest giving advice or is he giving direction? I don't think you're Orthodox until you understand it's direction.

[Nathan Jacobs] (1:32:46 - 1:36:02)

That's right. Well, and that's the thing, like a big thing with a lot of the church fathers and a lot of the saints, and you start to read the lives of saints and things like that, and you read lives of monks and all that, you end up getting, you know, that obedience is a big part of spirituality. And a lot of these stories, obedience doesn't always mean that the person directing you is giving you good direction.

Right. Right, you know, like there's this big emphasis on obedience. John of Damascus, who I dearly love, you know, Eastern church father, eighth century, big in the icon controversy, very well-versed in philosophy and things like that.

He intentionally chose the least educated monk he could find to be his spiritual director because he saw in himself a temptation toward pride and the fact that I know better and all this sort of stuff. And so oftentimes when you look at some of these weird, and I think this is a thing that, again, speaking of things that are so alien to the Western mind, you know, it's always funny to me that during Lent is a very common thing that Orthodox converts or not monks will read John Climacus' The Ladder of Divine Ascent, which is a rough book. I mean, like if you read this book, like all of the advice on detachments and things like that, like it's very rough.

But the funny thing is the part, I don't know how many people notice is in the early part of the book where John is saying like, I'm writing for monks. Sometimes people in the world come to me and they're like, you know, father, what should I do? And I'm like, I don't know, try not to cheat on your wife and like go to church and okay, now let's talk to the monks.

And like, it's so funny because right there, like John's admitting this is an instruction for monks. Now that's not to say that there's nothing to be gleaned from the ladder for the person who lives in the world and has a job and has a wife and kids or whatever, but it's just to say like to somehow read this and think you're supposed to somehow enact this is a very sort of, you have to actually recognize that it's speaking toward a specific group. And also again, there's a tendency and I think this is sort of like the deontological tendency in Western Americanism where we as sort of products of modernity, we're accustomed to, there is an abstract rule that applies to everywhere, everyone in all circumstances, period.

We're always looking for that abstract rule. And so much of like orthodox spirituality doesn't operate that way. They recognize that monks have different callings and different duties and things like that.

And that's one path to salvation. And you as a father, you have a different path available to you. And then there's people who are oddly called to be like fools for Christ.

And no, you're not supposed to act like that. That's a unique sort of thing that, that path that they're on. And that oftentimes I think messes with Americans who are accustomed to, if I read this story, I'm supposed to do the things in this story.

And orthodox spiritual writings don't really work that way. And that's, again, that's another one of these things that needs to be shaken.

[Paul Vander Klay] (1:36:02 - 1:36:17)

But you're right. That's a Protestant thing. I mean, Protestantism was about eliminating the two-speed religion and we're gonna make Geneva, you know, we're gonna turn Geneva into Mount Athos.

Right. Buckle up, boys and girls. That's right.

[Nathan Jacobs] (1:36:18 - 1:42:14)

And so anyway, so there's definitely things like that, but you're right that there's always, like obedience is a big part of orthodox spirituality. And it's not always obvious that obedience, you know, you're getting good advice in a lot of these stories. So that's definitely a thing there.

In terms of like culturally, again, this is sort of one of the fascinating things of watching converts to orthodoxy, which is that you see the several strands that you would expect to see in America, right? You see, definitely there's sort of the attempt to infiltrate and liberalize the orthodox church, which, you know, has been there in mainline Protestantism. Then you also have the sort of fundamentalist contingent.

And by fundamentalist, I actually don't mean orthodox fundamentalist. I mean, like they're actual fundamentalists they have a laundry list of things where it's like, I'm a short day creationist. And I think it's really important that we're all short day creationists.

And I read Sarah from Rose and he's a short day creationist. So I guess orthodoxy is short day creationist. So I'm gonna convert here because this is the place where I can pound that agenda.

And it won't get changed. And it won't get changed, right? You know, and meanwhile, they're shocked and scandalized to realize that like orthodoxy is not dogmatically short day creationists and there's a lot of people in there that don't believe that and things like that.

But for them, like they'll keep on pounding, right? All the church fathers think this sort of thing, which isn't actually true, but you know, that they've got their thing, right? I'm holding onto this.

And so they're basically, you know, like almost like one issue voters, right? Where I've got the one thing, I'm looking for the one church where I can be sure that I've got this thing and I can pound it. And so you do get those sorts of fundamentalist types.

Then you get a different sort of oddly fundamentalist types. And these are folks who are more orthodox than the orthodox church, where it's like they oddly will read canon law and the church fathers and all this sort of stuff in order to discern what orthodoxy is. And then they sort of protest the orthodox church saying it's not orthodox enough because, and it's like, you're still really a Protestant.

You've just got a different, now it's not sola scriptura, it's sola scriptura and canon law. And like, you're the new Protestant inside here. So you have like those sorts of folks.

And anyway, you know, this is one of the reasons why it's really important moving into orthodoxy that you find sober people who sort of display the type of orthodox, I'm gonna say orthodox ethos, like that you start to find in so many of the saints, which is when you read the dealings of the saints with people, there is this understanding of meeting people where they're at, of sort of easing them into things, of trying to give them, not overburden them and things like that.

And, you know, it's important to find those sorts of spiritual mentors so that you don't wind up in these weird, you know, sort of situations like what you're talking about. And I think the balancing act is the challenge, of course, is how do you do that as an orthodox person where I'm supposed to come in and have a priest? I mean, well, part of the benefit of orthodoxy is that, yes, your priest is your confessor and, you know, yes, he gives you the sacraments and things like that.

But orthodoxy with its tradition of spiritual, you know, mothers and fathers and things like that, there is oftentimes, right, like this, I have a spiritual father or mentor or somebody like that who is not my priest. And so it's not as if you have to, like, it's not as if your priest, because he's your confessor, is also de facto the person that you go to with all these sorts of things. And so, but again, all of that's kind of foreign to the Protestant mind and Western mind in general.

And so these are all part of the growing pains, I think, that come out of figuring out how to navigate this new burgeoning world of American orthodoxy. In terms of orthodoxy in the broader world, you know, it's tough to say because I've received anecdotal reports before, you know, from folks overseas before I had traveled overseas to see orthodoxy for myself, where it was a very negative assessment. Now, what I started to realize in retrospect is a lot of those assessments were from a Protestant perspective.

It was that, you know, my litmus test for how devout you are is how well you know your Bible and whether you, you know, do this thing and this thing and you guys don't do that thing and therefore, right, you're not really spiritual. And so I realized that there was something tainted about the report. It was reflective of a certain perspective, but I still went overseas expecting to find a lot of sort of dead orthodoxy.

And I will say, now, this might just be because of the ways in which I've traveled overseas. That is not what my experience was. Again, speaking anecdotally.

Well, my experience are, I developed a relationship with Mount Athos, right? So I was brought over to Vatopedi Monastery by the monks. I had that encounter there.

I was sent to Cyprus, you know, with the belt of the Virgin Mary to go on a pilgrimage with a bunch of monks and saw the ways in which all the people of Cyprus called off work and school and flooded the streets to come venerate and participate in the liturgy. I saw, you know, I went to Crete to where I met people who, you know, were, had deep ties to, you know, martyrs and, you know, revolutionaries and things like that, where it was all sort of very thriving. So I had a very different experience.

My experience of orthodoxy all throughout like Crete or Cyprus or in Athens or on Athos was obviously thriving. That could be based on the fact that I'm being brought around by Athos. And so I'm encountering the people, right?

Who are devout.

[Paul Vander Klay] (1:42:14 - 1:42:15)

It's their network.

[Nathan Jacobs] (1:42:16 - 1:44:15)

Yeah, had I dropped in out of the sky, out of nowhere, you know, and just sort of went around, maybe I would have a very different impression of that sort of thing. So it's tough, right? I'm just speaking anecdotally that I've seen that.

Also, it's also complicated because of when you start to go onto this global stage, you start to get factors like the Bolshevik Revolution, right? You have, there is a very real, we are still living in the wake of a communist, you know, revolution that went ahead and like tried to wipe out all Christians and implants, you know, operatives and all this sort of stuff. And I don't think, that doesn't change overnight, right?

Like you don't just decimate an entire Christian culture and replace it with state operatives and like kneecap their ability to train their people and keep them in ignorance. And somehow just because like, you know, the Soviet Union falls or something like that, now all of a sudden, like they're all educated, thriving, practicing Orthodox. And so I think we, and then also you have these really weird things like our Department of Defense financing schisms in order because they think it's advantageous.

Lord have mercy. I mean, like on the global scale, you get into these weird factors where it's like, I don't even know what to do with those, right? Like other than, you know, to not judge them and just sort of say like with so much of Orthodoxy, and I think this is a very real Orthodox perspective.

So much of Orthodoxy is, well, give it a hundred years. You know, like, you know, many of the heretics, one of the reasons heresies have trouble getting rootedness in Orthodoxy is because it takes so long that by the time anything would change, the heretics are dead. You know, they just sort of out, it just outlives, you know, when you operate by carrier pigeon, it's hard for things to.

[Paul Vander Klay] (1:44:16 - 1:44:19)

Hard to get a meme going with by carrier pigeon.

[Nathan Jacobs] (1:44:19 - 1:48:02)

Right, right. And I think this also even goes to certain things like, you know, you had talked about all the different sort of, they're not denominations just for anybody who doesn't know, right? Like when you're talking about Russian Orthodox or Romanian Orthodox or, you know, Antiochian Orthodox, these are all just, this is identifying what jurisdiction you're under, right?

Like it's essentially saying, yeah, we're all Orthodox, right? All these patriarchs are in communion with each other. We do have a common faith and a common history, but obviously Orthodoxy in Russia, when it's translated into Russia and you have Russian iconographers, it starts to reflect that culture.

And when it's over here with Arabs, it reflects that culture. And when it's over here with, you know, Romanians, it reflects that culture. But it's essentially, you know, just like if you give Bach to seven different musicians who have to interpret it, right?

You're gonna have a core commonality, but it's gonna sound different because it's gonna sound like that musician. And Orthodoxy is very much that way. That's why you can discern and be like, oh, that's obviously Russian iconography, even though it follows the same pattern as all the other iconography.

Like you can, that's kind of how it works. And so it's, these aren't actually denominations, but one of the reasons in America they're all here is because at some point, the ways in which you move toward what's called autocephalies, where like now you actually have a region that has been fully handed over to one, you know, bishop, that's a very long process in Orthodoxy. And, you know, sometimes it takes hundreds of years for Orthodox, for all the patriarchs to be convinced that this is grounded and rooted and stable and fine, I'll relinquish my people over to this sort of regional, you know, bishop and now we only have, you know, American Orthodox, right?

And American Orthodox is actually originally Russian. So for people who don't know, if they're like, what's American Orthodox, it's because Russia sort of had like this sort of imperial class versus like lower, you know, peasant class in their Orthodoxy. And culturally they had that.

And so when both came over, they were given the option of, do you wanna be American and move toward autocephalies or do you wanna stay under Moscow? And Rokhor, Russian church outside of Russia, where the churches that said, we'll stay under Russia, and those tend to have this more sort of rooted in, you know, like sort of the older czar culture of, you know, Russia. And then you have the peasant churches, which is one of the reason OCA is often like pretty impoverished in terms of the denominations, which was grown out of that.

And then has now a lot of converts that are in it and things like that. But I mean, if Orthodoxy continues to grow and thrive and things like that, hypothetically at some point, all of these churches become American Orthodox, but it has to be that they're convinced, right? They're convinced that it's rooted here, it's grounded, it's thriving and it's growing.

And this is where a lot of those sorts of questions that I'm talking about, of the things that remain to be seen with American Orthodoxy are so important because it's an important part of that. How does it become established and eventually become homogenous? Not homogenous with the rest of the Orthodox world, but homogenous in the sense that Russian Orthodoxy looks a certain way, right?

You know, Romanian Orthodoxy looks a certain way. At some point it sort of stabilizes and takes on the flavor of that particular culture. And so a lot of those, it remains to be seen elements are definitely there in spades in terms of how that story will ultimately pan out.

Wow.

[Paul Vander Klay] (1:48:05 - 1:48:08)

Wow. Well, you gave me more to think about.

[Nathan Jacobs] (1:48:09 - 1:48:11)

Well, it was a good topic. I'm glad you picked this one.

[Paul Vander Klay] (1:48:12 - 1:49:31)

Yeah, well, you know, I'm just looking around, watching and thinking, boy, it's an interesting world. And it's the church in America is, it's a very interesting place. It's, you know, it's a very, it's a very living place, church in America.

Long, it's a long time been a very living place. And so, and it's, you know, obviously I wouldn't have known anything about any of this Orthodoxy. Well, I knew a little bit about it because one of my friends was friends with an Orthodox priest up in the suburb of Sacramento where he pastors.

But, you know, obviously getting to know Jonathan Peugeot and then all of this stuff, you know, then I watched your thing and it was crazy. It was like, oh, I got my PhD at Calvin Seminary. It's like, what?

PhD program was a rather controversial thing in the denomination. And because everyone said, no, you should have started an MDiv because that's where you make the money. But, anything, I've got, I got people coming in because I am a pastor in a church.

That's right. Yeah, that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Anything you wanna, your podcast is still, how do you feel about your podcast?

[Nathan Jacobs] (1:49:31 - 1:51:55)

I mean, it's growing, I'm pushing along. I mean, so yeah, the Nathan Jacobs podcast, that's available to folks, you know, Spotify, Apple, YouTube, wherever they listen to podcasts. You know, I told you that for a long time, I was, you know, I was getting nudged by people like you, like Jonathan, that I should put my voice out there.

And it was ARC that was so important to me making that decision, because I was looking at it going, I had just sort of sat back and I said, look, you know, I'm an academic. I got too many things going on. And I just thought, does, there's enough people talking, like, does my voice really add anything?

And before ARC, I remember you reaching out and being like, I think your voice is an important one to add to this mix. And I was like, I appreciate that, Paul, but yeah, really, I don't know. And once I was done with ARC and we had spent all that time talking, I was like, no, I really need to do this.

I really need to do this. And so I'm putting my voice out there, as always happens with these things, as I'm sure you know, like there's finding your footing, finding your voice and those sorts of things. I think it's coming along, we're growing steadily.

And I wanna see that continue to grow because I did it, not for me, right? I did it because my hope is that it helps other people, that it speaks into the conversation that people can benefit from it. One of the other things that just is interesting, and I wanna talk to you offline about this.

We didn't talk about the training of pastors and seminaries. I have some thoughts on that, but I can't yet talk to the broader internet about this, but I would like to sort of clue you into some of the things that are burgeoning and maybe down the road, we can have a conversation. But I will just say, if anybody is interested in taking a class from me, even though I rarely teach these days, I am gonna be teaching a class, three credit hour class accredited, all that.

People can audit it if they just wanna sit in on the lectures, they can take it if they wanna get credit and transfer it someplace. I will be doing that. What the class is, that's still to be determined, but with the episode I just dropped today, the Mary episode, there is a link to a survey where I'm giving six options for the class.

And that's because I'm gonna teach the class that people are most interested in. So if you're potentially interested in taking a class from me or just sitting in on the lectures.

[Paul Vander Klay] (1:51:55 - 1:51:57)

Is this gonna be online? Where's this gonna be?

[Nathan Jacobs] (1:51:58 - 1:52:33)

It's probably going to be largely online unless there's a significant contingent in Nashville, then it could be hybrid, but I'm anticipating that it's largely gonna be taught, sort of over Zoom type thing. So there's that. And then there's always my sub stack and things like that.

There's plenty of stuff happening with film, but nothing yet worth plugging. I'd point people mainly to my podcast. And if they're interested in that class, they can go find that survey.

So anyway, that's what I got for you.

[Paul Vander Klay] (1:52:33 - 1:52:52)

Well, Nathan, it's been wonderful and thanks for entertaining. I mean, when I put this word out on Twitter and YouTube, a bunch of people are like, oh, but it's like, no, I wanna talk about this because this is- Hold on to it. It's not too bad.

Yeah, whether the word will live or die, I'm not.

[Nathan Jacobs] (1:52:54 - 1:53:19)

I'll give you a word you can try to popularize that I'm just trying to popularize is what today's episode, which is, I don't know if this comes out, but I've started to refer to Hollywood taxidermy, which is what happens when you're like, hey, let's buy Tolkien and then let's kill it, skin it and stuff it with whatever we want. That's Hollywood taxidermy.

[Paul Vander Klay] (1:53:19 - 1:53:20)

I like that.

[Nathan Jacobs] (1:53:22 - 1:53:25)

So should that be relevant? You can popularize that.

[Paul Vander Klay] (1:53:25 - 1:53:26)

That's a thing.

[Nathan Jacobs] (1:53:26 - 1:53:34)

That is a thing. That's in Star Wars, that's in Marvel, that's in Tolkien. That's in most things these days.

[Paul Vander Klay] (1:53:35 - 1:53:39)

That is. You take a living thing, you kill it, but you say, that's a badger.

[Nathan Jacobs] (1:53:40 - 1:53:50)

That's a badger. And people will pay to see a badger. That's right.

How about we just stuff it with whatever we want? But we can still say it's a badger. They'll still pay for it.

[Paul Vander Klay] (1:53:50 - 1:54:30)

Oh, Hollywood taxidermy. Yeah, there's a lot of that. Yeah, there is.

Well, I will end the recording now and we can chat a little bit. But thank you, Nathan. And I'll put links to Nathan's podcast below.

And of course it's easy to find. And I was really glad you started making some little shorts because you've got like the big things. And I'm always weighing with those kinds of questions on my channel.

But I think shorts are really helpful because obviously within two hours, a lot comes up and it's kind of handy for people to find something. And then if they find the little thing, they're like, well, maybe I'll devote myself to the whole thing then, so.

[Nathan Jacobs] (1:54:31 - 1:55:10)

Yeah, yeah. Thankfully we are starting to do that more. Are you doing this by yourself?

Do you have people with you? I have a producer. I mean, like the hope would be, but it's still, it's a lot.

To do shorts, to do Instagram, I think we're on X, plus to do all of these episodes, do some interview episodes. So you're doing Instagram, like really, really short and then these YouTube shows. It's a lot, right?

So my hope is that at some point we can expand the team, so to speak. But at least for right now, it's just two of us plowing through, so. All right, all right.

Yeah. Well, thank you very much, Nathan. Thanks for having me, Paul.

I will end the recording.