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Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. Visit us online at faith.yale.edu.
Brad East: It's not a bug. It's a feature of Christianity that you only can see Christ in the truth of the gospel, in the lives of witnesses. whose lives, all too fallen, all too frail, are a kind of testimony to the gospel and in that way make it plausible, or to use a different word, intelligible. For those of us who are drawn into church history and church tradition and to reading theology, there is very little as transformative as realizing history is populated by women and men Like us, who tried to follow Christ in their own time and place and culture and circumstances, some of whom succeeded.
And looking at the saints, they make me want to be a better Christian. They make me want to be a saint.
Evan Rosa: This is For the Life of the World, a podcast about seeking and living a life worthy of our humanity. I'm Evan Rosa with the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. It's not that kids today are illiterate. They just don't read books.
And they don't read. Let alone write letters. Our guest on the podcast today points out that there's probably a better word for this, that we're seeing evidence of a post literate society, as in books or beyond that. How does this approach to literacy, technology, And the contemporary reckoning that's seeing droves of young people leave Christianity to become spiritual but not religious.
Well, the theologian Brad East of Abilene Christian University points out that Christianity was here before us, it was here before the age of literacy, and it will be around well beyond us, literacy or post literacy. That's because the best argument for Christianity, he says, isn't going to come in the form of a text, but rather the beauty in the life of an individual Christian.
In his recent book, Letters to a Future Saint, Foundations of Faith for the Spiritually Hungry, Brad addresses future generations of the church, offering a transmission of Christian faith from society today to society tomorrow. Written as a fellow pilgrim and looking into the lives of saints in the past, he's writing to that post literate, post Christian society our children are growing up in.
Where the highest recommendation of faith is still a beautiful, transformed life. Today Drew Collins welcomes Brad East to the show, and together they discuss the importance of being past and passing on Christian faith, the post literacy of Gen Z and Gen Alpha, digital natives. God bless. and the role of literacy in the acquisition and development of faith, the significance of community, the question of apologetics and its effectiveness as a mode of Christian discourse, the need for beauty and love, not just truth, in Christian witness, how to talk about holiness in a world that believes less and less in the reality of sin, the difference between Judas and Peter, and what it means to study the saints and to be a saint.
Thanks for listening today.
Drew Collins: Thank you so much for joining us, and thank you for this book. I devoured it in one sitting. It's so beautiful, and it is such a moving
Brad East: Thank you for saying that. I appreciate that.
Drew Collins: Where did the idea for this book come from? This is especially perhaps a surprising book from an academic.
Brad East: I'll give you two origin stories that were happening at the same time.
One, I had some nephews as well as godchildren get baptized in a relatively short amount of time. I say this briefly somewhere in a letter in the book. And for each of them, On their baptism day, I wrote them a personal letter about what was happening that day. And the age range was from very young, almost newborn, to maybe 10 years old.
And I didn't write it for them to read when they were in middle age, but I also didn't write it for them to read in kindergarten. A single page, you know, double spaced, no jargon, for, you know, maybe before they leave the house, middle or high school. And it was, A deeply challenging exercise. As you well know, Drew, academic theologians are not known for their prose, much less for their clarity.
And so it was extremely challenging, but in a really fruitful, productive, and joy filled way. I just loved it. And I've always written letters to my kids that they haven't read yet. I typically do so on their birthdays and it kind of got me in that mode, but thinking about spiritual things. Well, I've also been teaching undergraduate students here in West Texas.
in sort of the last bastion of cultural Christendom in America. And I've got a bunch of Jesus loving 20 year olds in my classroom who have to take a bunch of courses in theology, Bible, and so on. And they come to me, and two things are true about them. One, they love Jesus, and they want to follow Him, and they would say they would identify as Christians.
And also, they don't know much. They don't read much, and They haven't been in a word I use in the book. They haven't been catechized. There are lots of reasons for that, which we could go into or not, but this book was an attempt to marry the form of writing, uh, to these godchildren and nephews, and even my own children, uh, with the matter that I want to see, uh, The students of mine receive, and then to say, to force myself to write in such a way that this could be placed in the hands of a 16 or 18 or 20 year old, and they could understand it and hopefully have your reaction, which is to be drawn into it.
Drew Collins: Yeah, for, as you say, not only are I think academics and maybe academic theologians not taught. Or even maybe encouraged to write in this kind of way. I think we're actually often rewarded for writing in inscrutable difficult ways. Right.
Brad East: Must be profound if you can't understand it. ,
Drew Collins: you said it and I do actually.
I mean I, I'd love to hear your thoughts on why this book now you mentioned. The sort of the gap or the sort of absence of a certain form of catechesis. Who did this for you? Did you have somebody writing letters like this to you in a, in maybe in a more metaphorical sense?
Brad East: Yeah, I was catechized by many people in a variety of ways.
I have to begin both with my parents who were absolutely catechists in different ways. And my church as a congregation, as a community did this very well for me. In particular, uh, the name of, I would say the name of my catechist in these letters, I signed the letters, a fellow pilgrim. So this was my fellow pilgrim catechist.
His name is Spencer Bogle. He was my youth minister. I think I was in eighth grade. Since I was theologically precocious, I had, I was full of questions and they weren't doubts. They weren't forms of crisis. And I wasn't even challenging authority. I just wanted someone to like, I assume you guys have the answer.
So let's talk about him. And he would take me out and we would talk and he would put starting in eighth, ninth, 10th grade, he was putting Bonhoeffer and Lewis and Chesterton and Kierkegaard in my hands. And he's the reason I'm a theologian. He's the reason why I went on and got degrees and why I'm doing what I'm doing, what I've done.
You've read my very first book on the doctrine of scripture, and it's dedicated to him. Because he's the reason that I'm in this business at all, not to mention a Christian. He showed me that, that Christianity has the resources to answer or at least to explore the mystery of difficult and profound questions about the meaning of life and the nature of existence and who God is and.
Why we are here, etc. And so I'm not, I wasn't consciously sort of imitating him, but very much in all that I do, it's rooted in that example. And I'm trying to do that for others. And not every young person, Christian or otherwise, needs what I needed from him, but he was exactly what. I needed at the time.
And in a way, this book is meant to either play that role or to be a resource or a tool in the hands of a pastor, a college pastor, a youth pastor, to be able to hand on, you know, I have a, I have more than one friend who is in ministry who ha who have already begun Using this, reading it alongside their, you know, 15 year olds or 20 year olds at the And that's very much the idea of the book.
The book is very much written for a young ish audience. Really, it's written as much to 20 and 30 somethings as it is to teens, but it's secretly written for their parents as well. And ideally it would be read by both together.
Drew Collins: And what do you see as the situation of catechesis, sort of discipleship?
Brad East: I'll boil it down to two or three things.
One is technological, another is cultural, and we'll see if we get to a third. Technological, our children, Gen Z, Gen Alpha, and maybe Millennials to an extent, have their lives and their attention spans have been colonized by screens and social media. These devices that monopolize their eyeballs and their ears as well.
They're hours in the day. And all of a sudden, we find ourselves in church traditions that prioritized literacy and made literacy the heart of what it meant to be a disciple of Christ. And our children and young people are not illiterate in the literal sense, in the technical sense, but in a certain way, they are post literate.
They are not reading for hours at a time. They're not reading long, demanding novels, and they certainly are not reading the Bible as the principle or even only way of knowing God. That is not the way things work anymore. I don't know what the future holds, but that's where we are now. And so I do think that Technology and technological change has played a crucial role in the transformation of catechesis.
Second, I'll just say generationally and culturally, the chickens have finally come home to roost. You know, in the 1960s came for. The mainline liberals, and then it came for the Catholics and it's finally coming for the evangelicals. And as many people have written over the last, what, 25 years, is it 40 million Americans have left church, something like that.
That's going to have downstream implications for the younger generation. But that even includes kids like many of my students who have grown up in what I call the orbit of church. They go once a month or they go with their friends to Wednesday night youth group, or they go for the big holidays. And so, and they like, they're warm towards Jesus.
They're spooky. They believe in manifesting and the occult and witchcraft. They're open to weird stuff. They're not new atheists, but they're also not really well informed, literate, doctrinally sophisticated Christians. They're on the fence, leaning towards Jesus. But someone needs to push them one way or the other.
And this book is meant to be that push, hopefully towards rather than away from Jesus.
Drew Collins: Yeah. It feels like every week there's a new article about the crisis of reading, you know. And I read a quote somewhere from 60 years ago that said, every generation discovers the crisis, a literacy crisis.
Brad East: Yeah, I saw that.
And I have to confess, it's not the same. It is, it is not the same. We are not being chicken little and we're not just being old fogies waving our canes on the lawn. It is, it is, I have had students come into my class who have never read a book before in their lives and they are in
Drew Collins: college. Yeah. The problem is, as you say, it's not that they're illiterate.
It's that they're post literate in the sense of they're not being asked to read a book from cover to cover. They're being taught to read in these sort of extractive, instrumentalizing ways, trying to take out certain sort of points and, and that's, you know, that to me is a helpful way of thinking about why this book is sort of counter cultural in a really positive kind of way.
Because this is not, although the book is shaped sort of following the Nicene Creed, Right? And it's got sort of doctrinal and dogmatic touch points all along the way. This is not a book outlining Christian doctrine.
Brad East: Yeah.
Drew Collins: Yeah. It would
Brad East: have been a failure had it been that, I think.
Drew Collins: Yeah. Yeah. And so you're sort of, you know, it's, it strikes me that in a way without saying it, this is a plea and a sort of a flare calling us not to read the Bible.
And that way that when we read the Bible, when we read, yeah, when we read scripture, it is, we're not. The task is bigger than that. And I wonder if you could just, yeah, maybe say a little bit about what are we reading for?
Brad East: Yeah. Early on in the book, I say that I'm going to tell the, that my correspondent, my fictional correspondent, what Christianity is.
What Christians believe and what it means to live as a Christian. And the second, let's call it doctrine or, or beliefs. The third is ethics or, or a larger sort of form of life, way of life. But the first is a way of saying that Christianity pre exists you. Christianity is not something. that you and I are invited to co construct.
It was there before we were born, and it'll be there after we die. It's a thing that you can be welcomed into, but that there is a way of being received into it. And there are expectations for both belief and practice once you enter. So regarding, so that's just a way, that's just a way of saying, yeah, I didn't want, I didn't want the book to be a, a survey.
Yeah. As you say, a survey of doctrine, a textbook on, you know, what Harawas likes to quote Alice in Wonderland, you know, is it the queen? I think who every morning believes 20 absurd things before breakfast. And that's not the strategy here. We do, Christians do believe some wild things you could say, but the point is not to sort of emphasize like the 17 or the 100 propositions that are just oddball.
You know, this is an entire collective way of life, uh, rooted in truth and generating practice. Okay. So that's not really the question you were asking. You're wondering about scripture. What I've meditated on this a lot because of my students. And I know that some of them, it is my goal to make them readers in as much as I can, but I'm also aware of my limitations and even the limitations of the university.
If every professor shared my goal, we wouldn't all be successful. But as you know, Christians, Christianity, talking about Christianity pre existing us, it certainly pre exists mass literacy and the printing press. If Christianity flourished in pre literate societies, in which 60 or 80 or 95 percent of people were not literate in a strong sense, then it can also flourish in a post literate society.
And there are ways of responding to the challenge that do try to address literacy because, like, we cannot have a global church that can't read or doesn't read. That's not going to work. But also doesn't try. in the language we always use to turn back the clock, as if we're going to get to the typographic culture of 1850 in Neil Postman's phrase.
Well, that's not, we're not going to be there either. We do live in a world of TikTok. I want all my students off it, but even if they all got off it, as I instruct them to do, they still would live in a world. And I'm still hashing that out, to be honest. You know, in my own house I'm raising readers, but I'm not, uh, you know, I'm not in everybody's house.
And not everybody, not every young person or mature adult is meant to be a fan of doky in the evenings. A fan of 19th century British poetry, that that's not, that's not what it means to be a Christian. We have to have a vision of the Christian life that is much broader than. College and master's degree.
And yeah, we're all eggheads and intellectuals and bookish nerds. No, it's got to include all of us, both in terms of our vocations, but also in terms of our interests and aptitude. And so I'm still figuring that out to be honest, but I do, it does absolutely inform how the church needs to respond in its corporate worship and in the liturgy and devotional habits that we encourage that we don't equate I have 20 minutes of quiet Bible time in the morning, therefore I'm a faithful disciple.
That can't be, that can't be all that we say. If we ever said that, we shouldn't keep saying that.
Drew Collins: Yeah, but that's actually, you know, that's, that sort of calls to mind your previous book, right? On, on the doctrine of scripture and one of the, one of the, Most emphatic points in that book is sort of communal and ecclesial context.
Brad East: Yeah.
Drew Collins: For the reading of scripture. And it's something you alluded to earlier when you're talking about this book. And again, that's sort of points to the uniqueness of this book as a book that is meant to be read alongside. Right. With people, parents and children. This is a sort of a, a, a communal project.
Brad East: Yeah, that's
Drew Collins: right. And so I wonder if you could say a little bit more about, yeah, it seems to me that in a lot of the sectors of the church of Christian faith that take catechesis and the, and holiness seriously, there is often an accompanying emphasis or frame of sort of individualism Work out your own salvation, you know, this is, this is sort of you and Jesus.
What is the role of the church and sort of community in sort of Christian formation and catechesis as you see it?
Brad East: Yeah, I'll give you two answers that come to mind that I emphasize to my students. One is, I call it Cartesian Christianity. So, so thinking of Rene Descartes, who, you know, puts himself in a dark room alone and he thinks and thinks until he can justify that he, and demonstrate that he in fact exists and therefore God exists.
And many, at least evangelical or low church, nondenom, type of Christians, but probably most Christians in North America, at least are individualistic in the way that you describe. And I describe it as Cartesian because it's like me alone in a room and God beams me up, Scotty, like Star Trek, and that's my salvation.
But I'm alone, maybe with a flashlight in the Bible and that, and then if I need community. If it turns out that I need other human beings, like I can go, I can quote unquote, go to church. And as I emphasize here for precisely those, those readers, and in particular, not just individualistic, but you know, what folks like Tara Isabella Burton call
I'll be home and maybe I'll, maybe I'll stream, I'll live stream something, you know, somewhere from the continent, but it's me and Jesus, baby. And maybe the Bible at most. And I emphasize in the book, that's again, that's not what Christianity is. If you want to make your own thing, go for it. But that's not what, that's not, that's not what the deal is.
The deal is that God, the God of Abraham calls a people out of the world to be his chosen people. and beloved people whom he will never forsake or abandon. And through Christ, you, if you are a Gentile, are welcomed into that by baptism and by faith. And it is this community that will carry you all the way to the promised land, right?
Israel in bondage in Egypt is not saved individually. They don't walk one, like they don't take their separate paths to Canaan. They go through the waters. They make it and make their way to Sinai to covenant with God and to receive his vision for their moral and religious life together. And then they journey as a collective to Canaan.
Life with God in the land. And the church has always taken that as a figure, as a type, an image of the Christian life, that we go through the waters of baptism, having been delivered from the bondage of sin, death, and the devil. And, and we receive the Lord's instructions and the Sermon on the Mount and scripture, and we are covenant with him and we're head bound for the kingdom of heaven, but we've got to cross the Jordan and the Jordan is death.
And so we are in the wilderness, and while we're in the wilderness, the Lord feeds us with manna from heaven, namely the Eucharist. But we are pilgrims as long as we are here, and we are only pilgrims together. We are pilgrims together or we die alone. That's the Christian life, and that's what we, as you say, that's what we need.
I told you I had a second point. But I got caught up in, in typological readings of the Old Testament. And so that's going to be my only point. Well,
Drew Collins: I'm going to, I'm going to have to move on because otherwise we would stay there all day with, this is a very much a shared interest of ours. Um, so actually, let me, I mean, just, you mentioned something earlier about the sort of the Alice in Wonderland.
kind of approach to construing Christian faith, this idea. And now I confess when I was in divinity school, I, in a homiletics class, I preached a sermon on precisely that passage as the sort of the topsy turviness of through the looking glass and the way in which that is, uh, at the time I thought a helpful way of thinking about the nature of Christian faith in contrast to the past.
epistemic, you know, models that we get in the world today. I've since repented of that framing. And you've just mentioned similarly, that's not the way. You think about Christian faith and then the nature of belief. This is not a work of apologetics, you know, in other words, right? It's not an attempt to make plausible Christian faith in a sort of comprehensive way, but there are different places throughout the book where some form of.
To use a phrase of Hans Frey's ad hoc apologetics crop up. For instance, in your discussion of miracles, where do you see the need for apologetics today? And how do you think that relates to Sort of, yes, the way we think about and approach catechesis and discipleship.
Brad East: Gosh, I have no one has asked me that question.
That is such a good question, and you're absolutely right for listeners. This book is not an attempt to persuade an uninterested bystander in the truth of Christianity. It's meant to Speak into the life of someone who wants to believe in Christ or does believe in Christ, but wants to move from milk to meat and doesn't want to be lukewarm and wants to switch metaphors, wants deep roots, or at least wants to, I don't put it this way, but in effect, even if they wanted to leave, they would know they were leaving.
They understood what they were leaving as something that people are willing, not just to live for, but to die for. And I, I mean, that's, I think, according to Revelation chapter three, that's what Jesus wants. He doesn't want people on the fence. He wants all or nothing. So to your point, I do at this, this time, I do want to get both points out.
So I'll say them early rather than wait to forget one. On one hand, I don't think apologetics can be the primary mode of public speech, even evangelistic speech on the part of Christians today. But on the other hand, I have my, I have. If not changed my mind and my heart has been warmed over by observation of certain apologetic figures and approaches.
So I'll try to say, I'll try to address One on the one hand, well, no, I'll start with a second. Uh, you know, I think of someone like Gavin Orland, who, I don't know if you know, know who that is, but he has a podcast and he has, he does YouTube and he is, he has a PhD. He knows the church fathers, he knows an Ansel and so on.
And what I see him doing is. Actually taking seriously the spiritual, moral, and intellectual questions, just like my youth minister, Spence, responding with pastoral warmth, but intellectual integrity. He's not, I mean, I think he's done debates and stuff, but he's not trying to beat anyone over the head or to show that any rational person, any rational person with half a brain would become a Christian tomorrow.
Should, you know, but simply to, it's sort of like, A ministry of Q& A, you know, and not leaving people of any age, but in particular, I think teens and 20 somethings sort of in the wilderness. Um, I think I was not raised in a context where apologetics even existed. And as I got my training over the years, it was a dirty word.
I think it was a bad word. It was sort of sub intellectual, certainly sub academic. And I think I've repented of that simply by actual familiarity with some of the better folks here. I think if you know William Lane Craig, whose work I do not know well, but I did read his book on the historical Adam earlier this year.
I thought it was excellent. I mean, I mean, astounding as a, as a work of scholarship, but just very serious and worth taking seriously and worthy of. respect. Okay. But I have not seen this video, but a friend told me that in a public conversation, not debate between Bishop Robert Barron and William Lane Craig, a Baptist was talking about apologetics and truth and reason and rationality and persuasion.
And Barron, Bishop Barron says, you know, maybe there was a time when this was different, but at least now people are not going to be one to the faith. Through argument, they're going to be won by beauty. And apparently Craig just gives him a look like he's talking gibberish. And I am 100 percent with Barron on that.
And beauty broadly construed, not in the elite, elitist sense, but by the beauty of lives well lived in the beauty of integrity and virtue in the beauty of having something to live for. And as I emphasize in this book, the opening letter and the final letter are about martyrdom. And martyrdom is a, in its own way, a beautiful witness in a fallen world to the power and person of Christ, because it shows you that not only is there something beyond this world and this life, which is full of so much pain and suffering.
But what lies beyond this world is available in part in this world and so good it's worth dying for. And that's, that converts, you know, our arguments rarely cut to the heart, but that cuts to the heart.
Drew Collins: Yes, it struck me then that often the sort of systematic apologetics that you're talking about, I worry that sometimes it's more for us already, the believers, than it is for the unconverted.
Right. It's preaching to the choir.
Brad East: With what I'd want to say is that's okay. Like we, man, like we need that. But to be aware in a way that is what we are doing and that it's not likely to be the primary instrument. of drawing people to Christ. And that's an important distinction, I think. And you start doing, yeah, God in the gaps, and there are ever fewer gaps to fill, and the God in the gaps just seems smaller and smaller and less and less interesting.
Drew Collins: Right. But on the other hand, as you say, it seems, you know, that sort of plausibility for us and for others, And one of the things that I see you doing here is expanding the scope of what constitutes apologetics. And I think you, you said something really important. It's a sort of these real examples and the possibility that of lives lived in the light of what you're describing here, that a person's life can be a sort of its own form of apologetic argument.
Yeah.
Brad East: Yeah, that's right. And yeah, and witness, witness and mediation. I'm channeling Harawas again, as well as Bart, to an extent that the way that it is not an, it's not a bug. It's a feature of Christianity that you only can see the light of Christ and the truth of the gospel. in the lives of witnesses whose lives, all too fallen, all too frail, are a kind of testimony to the gospel.
And in that way, make it in your language, plausible, or to use a different word, intelligible. That this isn't, that all of a sudden, that this life that I'm looking at, whether past, you know, dead and gone and someone I didn't know, or someone I do know who's alive, like their life, is not intelligible apart from Christ.
And if true, then that calls for an account. And that account is the beginning of a conversation.
Drew Collins: Yeah. And also a call to us as believers, right? I mean, one of the upshots of that sort of Cartesian Christianity and that the apologetics approach there is that it seems to put the emphasis on just right belief and right belief only.
Brad East: Yeah, right. We don't want to live. We don't, you know, and what's Jamie Smith's line? You know, we don't want to be brains on sticks. Like we don't want to imply that Christianity belongs between your ears. It's found in, I mean, this is why the early church, the first name for the early church was the way it's a form of life that is Distinguishes itself by the character of a community and people, people sort of squint.
This is, I mean, this is Division of Sinai, uh, division of Leviticus. You'll be holy as I'm holy. You're the, the world is going to look at you and you're not gonna have to call attention to yourself. You're just gonna look bizarre. . The nations are going to see that you are different and they're going to knock on the door, and your response to them is what Jesus says.
The opening chapter of John. Come and see. You know, I'm not going to begin with the argument. You'll have questions and we'll get to that. And if you, if you really want to study, but most, you know, the bulk of you, I can, this is something that you're open to transforming your life. Come and see. Come and eavesdrop on how, on, on our speech, on our worship, observe us.
And if this is, if you see something unique or uniquely powerful here, then stick around.
Drew Collins: Something beautiful, as you said earlier, I think it's completely that the significance of beauty. in Christian worship and Christian faith as a sort of category for understanding who we believe in, what we believe in, and what it means for us as we, you know, seek to align ourselves more is such, I think it's so important as a category for witness.
Yeah, exactly. And I actually, I mean, but just to stick with this, then this category, there's this idea of the importance of lives. Lived and the influence of those, one of the things an another sort of, I'm using the word countercultural here. I don't mean that in a, I mean in the best possible way, right?
Yeah, yeah. Um, you know, aspects of this book, I think is, it's the emphasis on well twofold ways on Saint Saintliness. The first question I wanna ask you about that is certainly in a lot. And most of Protestant Christianity, it feels to me increasingly like the saints play a diminishing role in our, in our understanding of Christian faith and how it, how we relate to it and what it means for us.
You, you talk a lot about saints here, not just the idea of saintliness, but, but as an individual saints, what role do the lives of saints play for you in your own faith? And how did that become awakened in you? Because again, it seems to me like there are a lot of us who go about our daily lives as Christians and even as theologians, not thinking much.
about the saints. And at various points, you talk about the cloud of witnesses and the importance of that, you know, both as a present reality that we need to think about the saints sort of looking down on us, but then also looking to their, the past narrations, examples of their lives.
Brad East: Yeah.
Drew Collins: Where did that, where did you, where did, how did you come to that?
And, and why do you think it matters?
Brad East: Gosh, yeah, this is, I have monologued more than once so far, and you're tempting me to just full blown capital M monologue. I will try to reign it in. First, the, you know, I take my lead from the French writer, Leon Bloy, who has a very famous quote, which I think is sort of elaborated in the English translation, but that the only tragedy in this life is not to have been a saint.
And that's what I have in mind. And I think I also quote Francois Mariac as an epigraph. He says, it is never too late to become a saint, which is just a great line. I actually was reading, I think he writes that in Reflections on the Eucharist. And I read it like after this book was almost in press and I got to sneak it in.
But anyway, so that's sort of the framing. The goal of the Christian life is holiness. is to have been a saint is retrospectively to be recognized as having been made holy as the intelligibility of one's own life is only, it makes no sense apart from the work of the spirit of Christ in one's life. Okay.
So that's sort of the frame I'll speak personally. And then maybe say a bit conceptually, personally, this was brought home to me most powerfully In a rereading of the confessions while I was at, while I was at Yale, I actually remember the room I was in at YDS reading alone. I had read the confessions before I got there and before I was a father.
And then now I was a father of at least two at the time. And I got, I got through books eight and nine and I can't put into words what came over me. I just, and it, brought home to me, and I've retained this ever since, I guess it's been probably a decade now, that the protagonist of the Confessions, the created protagonist, obviously God is the protagonist, is not Augustine, but Monica.
The story is about her, and every reading that sidelines her, much less stereotypes her as the nagging mom, is just misreading. Augustine quite explicitly writes the book so that you will pray for her soul and so that you will give thanks for her and for her husband who was not a faithful Christian. or a good husband or father.
So you will pray for their souls and recognize the work of God in her life because it took a mother's bloody tears for 30 years to make a stubborn, I'm trying not to swear, a stubborn sinner like Augustine into a Christian. That's what it took. It took her on her knees. Praying every day. She's the widow in Jesus's parable in Luke 17.
She is banging on God's door every day and every night. And Augustine wants you to see he's not the hero. He's the stubborn sinner who hates God and hates grace and just wants to steal Paris for the fun of it. But it's his mom who gets it and works. And through her, God works a divine miracle, which is The conversion of someone like Augustine who didn't deserve it.
And then of course, he's also aware of his reputation in a weird way. He's almost aware of what we're all going to think of him for the coming centuries. Maybe the greatest intellect, maybe the most influential writer, the most beautiful Latin prose writer in Christian tradition. We're all still Augustinians and he wants you to know, you know what got me into heaven?
It was her. I just sat there weeping and I told, I mean, I just felt like, I want to be like Monica when I grow up. I want to pray for my children and to care enough and to believe enough in the mercy of God that he will hear me and that this is what God wants out of me. And in fact that I don't just want that.
I want St. Monica to pray for my kids right now. That is the autobiographical part. of where this comes from. And as I will say, just as a much briefer conceptual or theological matter, again, I keep saying, as you know, just because I don't want to act like I'm telling you something that you don't know from personal experience.
For those of us who are drawn into church history and church tradition and to reading theology, there is very little as transformative as realizing history is populated. by women and men like us who tried to follow Christ in their own time and place and culture and circumstances, some of whom succeeded.
And it makes you, what's the, you know, what's the Jack Nicholson line? And as good as it gets, you make me want to be a better man. Like looking at the saints, they make me want to be a better Christian. They make me want to be a saint. That's what went into
Drew Collins: the letters in this book. Did you have any worries about framing Christian faith and life in terms of saintliness, that that might be a barrier to some folks, or maybe put another way, how do you think we should talk about saintliness and the possibility of holiness in a world that seems to believe less and less in the reality of sin?
Brad East: I think, as we were saying earlier, I think people are more interested in a Christianity causes some friction that seems a little weird rather than just whatever they've heard before, whether they're an insider or an outsider. So to that extent, I think a title and language like this piques curiosity rather than turns folks away.
At least I hope. You know, my first thought as you were saying that is probably one factor, one variable in why holiness or saintliness It maybe is out of fashion. You do the, you know, you do the Google track of the mentions in print. But if we did a mention in sort of oral speech as well in church, I would guess that at least in some subcultures, holiness is an, a synonym for purity.
And so holiness In the mind is connected to, if not purity culture, then at least to sex or put differently that moral holiness and its moral aspect is connected to don't have sex before marriage and don't get drunk, you know, don't in high school or something, you know, like that. And maybe don't gamble or dance.
And if those things, if those admonitions are out of fashion, then holiness is going to go with them. I bet that is at least partially true for some subcultures. More broadly, holiness is. a quirky term and concept for us because it is very difficult to describe. We know, I, we know this, I've mentioned Hauerwas and I just thought of, I, I just thought of an interview he did maybe 15 years ago where he was on, he was on an interview with some other academics, but none of whom were religious.
And I think they were trying to throw him a bone and they said, well, well, as you know, Dr. Hauerwas would recognize, you know, like all humans are holy. And he said, holy, only God is holy. Humans aren't holy. What are you talking about? It was this great corrective. And that came to mind because holiness properly is an attribute of God.
It's something that God calls us to. And through the work of the Holy Spirit makes possible in us and grows in us and moves us towards, and the word sanctification, that our lives are one long process of sanctification that will not be complete in this life, but only in the next, but what does that mean?
It means, in a certain way, to be like God. It means, I think, most concretely, in this world, to be set apart. To be set apart from sin and evil and wickedness and ungodliness. I've been meditating on Psalm 1 and Ephesians lately, and both of them use the language of walking. Walk in this way, but walk in this way.
And that's the unholiness versus holiness. I guess the last thing I'll say is, holiness is In a way, it gathers all other terms to itself, precisely because By rights, it is God's alone. It is both moral, so it contains the virtues, but it's also spiritual, so it contains what we might think of as not really matters of ethics, but matters of relating to God and God likeness.
And it draws all of them to itself, and it becomes an identity, and that identity in a word is to be a child of God, or a brother or sister of God. of Christ to be conformed into his likeness so that we are not only truly human, but in a, but in this deeply mysterious way, truly God's divine. We're truly divine.
We're not only truly human or truly divine in this participatory way. We're partakers of the divine nature. We're conformed to God's life and God's joy. And we will discover What that means, what holiness means once, only once we arrive. That really, yeah, that, you know,
Drew Collins: it strikes me that in underscoring the significance, the importance of holiness as the sort of paradigm for the orientation of Christian life and faith, and really, you know, In some ways, drawing our attention to this is an inescapable framework, right?
A way of, uh, uh, this is the vector on which we're, we're, we're called to travel the path. You also at the same time, make it much more, bring it closer to home. It becomes much less lofty
Brad East: at
Drew Collins: the same time. And I, and one of the places where that came out, there's two places. One is the, I found one of the most moving parts for me was the letter that you, where you mentioned your grandparents and you describe the sort of every day.
Saints.
Brad East: Yeah.
Drew Collins: And just that idea that there are saints among us and they, it might be, might not look like the sort of,
Brad East: yeah,
Drew Collins: Julian. Yeah, exactly. And they might be people whose names remembered. They're not up in lights. Yeah. That's something. No, that's right. I
Brad East: mean, I'll say a word about that, which is just that the danger I recognized as I was reading and revising the manuscript, that the danger was precisely what you say, which is that readers would get the impression that What it means to be a Christian is to be part of the Navy Seals of faith, and it's the elite few.
And so, yeah, St. Augustine and St. Monica and St. Thomas. And, you know, Julian is not a saint to my knowledge. I don't know why. We gotta, we gotta rectify that ASAP. Start that
Drew Collins: campaign, yeah.
Brad East: But these martyrs and heroes, I was like, well, that's not me. You know, that's not my life. I know my own inner life and the way I treat people.
That's not me. I'm just a normal person. And so, yeah, I included that letter and a few others to emphasize that all Christians are made holy by the Holy Spirit of the Holy God in baptism. And we are being made holy and we will be made holy. Sanctification is not something we do. It's a work of God. It's a miraculous work of God.
And it begins in the waters in an utterly passive act. We receive it. And as you say, we, I have this letter about not only my, my maternal grandmother, but my wife's many grandmothers and all beloved women and all the ones I write about are all now deceased. And they lived varying lives of worldly success.
Let's say some had many kids, some had few, some lost children, very young. Some got divorced more than once. Some were in the wilderness for a while in various kinds of ways. But they all, they all died in the arms of Christ. And the goal of this life, if I had to put it that way, is to die in the arms of Christ, not to live a quote unquote successful life.
We're all going to live lives that are failures in one way or another. And if we make the measure or the bar, the standard, some kind of extraordinary heroism where the history books will write about me, then we have, we've erred and we should follow Augustine again. We should learn from Augustine that even knowing that the world knew his name and would know his name, he made sure that you knew the name of the one who made him possible.
And that in my own way, of course, I'm not, the analogy here is not between me and Augustine, God forbid, but the analogy is between Monica and these grandmas. You gotta know, I'm thinking of them as much as I'm thinking of St. Therese of Osu or St. Ignatius of Antioch or St. Polly Carp or Joseph Ratzinger, you know, Ich liebe dich, I love you, Jesus, are his final words.
That's what I want my final words to be. And I think those were the final words, literally or metaphorically, of the women I write about there.
Drew Collins: You know, the other place where you upset. The apple cart is your reflections on Peter and Judas, which helps me articulate some things that I've been thinking about a lot lately and the relationship between them.
And I was wondering if you could just say a little bit more about how you see The similarities and differences between Peter and Judas and what they mean for us as we think about how the risks of becoming like Judas, I suppose, and the hope of becoming like Peter.
Brad East: So it's, it's building off of a Lucy Shaw poem and I'm going to read it cause it's short.
And it's what prompted the letters here. The poem is titled Judas, Peter, Judas, Peter, because we are all betrayers taking silver and eating body and blood and asking guilty, is it I, and hearing him say, yes, it would be simple for us all to rush out and hang ourselves. But if we find grace to cry. And wait, after the voice of mourning has crowed in our ears clearly enough to break our hearts, he will be there to ask us each again, do you love me?
Doesn't require a comment from me. I'll give it anyway. This is, I use this as a point of departure, as you say, both to offer, there is a way to fail as a Christian, but not because you have failed to perform something or that your goodness didn't. meet at least a minimal standard. It's to despair of the possibility of Christ forgiving you.
That's the only failure. That's the blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. There is no other possible failure for a Christian because Christ can always forgive you again. And this is modeled for us. We have two betrayers, not one, but two betrayers in the gospel accounts. All of them agree on this, that Judas hands him over and Peter denies him.
Judas does not return to Christ. He goes away and he falls into the pit of despair. And he doesn't make the voice of the psalmist his own. He doesn't cry out and beg for mercy and forgiveness. He hangs himself. Whereas Peter, sees the Lord, returns to Him, and is restored by the, you know, by the Sea of Galilee, by Christ Himself.
Do you love me? Yes, you know I love you, Lord. Three times, just as he denied knowing Him, three times. And do my best there, following the poem, to say, What it means to journey as a pilgrim towards holiness is not to get everything right. It's every single day to pray the Our Father, to say, forgive us as we have forgiven others, and to look into the eyes of Christ.
And when you look into the eyes of Christ, you will see nothing but love and forgiveness waiting for you there. The other literary figure I use there is K'iche in The Shusaku Indo novel, Silence, or folks might know it from the Martin Scorsese film from a few years back. He's a Japanese Christian who constantly betrays his fellow Japanese Christians and the Portuguese priests, but he keeps coming back.
He keeps returning on his knees, penitent, asking for forgiveness and receiving it. What I say is we're all Kichichiro. We're all Peter and Judas. We're all bad Christians. There are no good Christians. We're all bad in that sense. The whole point of Christ is that we're all in this condition and we all need help.
It's not as if this is a surprise to him or it's, ah, the seventh time, the ninth time. Jesus himself is the one who says, not seven times, but seven times 70. And so that's just to say that this poem elicited me, who shared with me by a friend named Kester Smith. He shared it with me and I just knew I had to put this in here because it encapsulates perfectly.
The vision of what Luther calls the constant return to baptism. You never go past baptism, you return because everything is found there. You receive everything you need there. And so you constantly return to baptism where the forgiveness of sins is found and where the voice from heaven that says, this is my beloved child.
is heard. And that's what we need over and over again in those cycles. And those cycles constitute our days, which become our lives. And those days and lives lead toward sainthood.
Drew Collins: Well, Brad, I, I'm so grateful that you've been willing to take the time to have this conversation with me. There's one question that I wanted to ask before, before we wrap up, maybe to some extent, like, like sermons, um, the books we write are often I have books that we want to read, that we need to read.
What work has writing this book done on you?
Brad East: First, it was, at times, it was deeply emotional. Just in the same way that the letters I wrote to my godchildren and nephews were. Because I could imagine someone hearing some of these words, the truth. And I'm so grateful that my words were falteringly trying to be a vehicle for the first time.
For me, I am not someone who has difficulty talking about, you know, the 20 absurd things. I'm not someone who has difficulty or doubts about the so called spooky or wild things, the miraculous. The resurrection is not. quote unquote difficult for me to believe, but sometimes it might be difficult for me to believe that God loves me.
That's a different, that's a different kind of difficulty. And there are a lot of people out there who can believe in some kind of sense, just some metaphysical wild propositions, but may not think of themselves as having worth or value are being created by someone who wanted them around. And so imagining that even one reader would hear some good news in what I wrote was very, like I say, it was overwhelming at times by comparison to writing academic or hybrid stuff that I care about and enjoy, but is not going to have the same existential import.
Second, it brought home to me how, just speaking for myself, though I think it applies to many of Just how important our languages and the craft of writing is for those of us who use words, who work with words for our living, talking about God. And it renewed, redoubled, maybe tripled, quadrupled my efforts in everything I write, no matter how scholarly, no matter my context.
Um, my commitment. to writing with clarity and I hope sometimes a measure of beauty. about the thing that I think most important in the world.
Drew Collins: Thank you for this book, sincerely. Uh, and thank you for this, for taking the time to have this conversation. This has been really wonderful.
Brad East: Yeah, same. Thanks for having me, man.
Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture at Yale Divinity School. This episode featured Brad East and Drew Collins. Production assistance by Alexa Rollow, Emily Brookfield, Kacie Barrett, and Zoeë Halaban. I'm Evan Rosa and I edit and produce the show. For more information, visit us online at faith.yale.edu or lifeworthliving.yale.edu. Online, you'll find podcasts, articles, books, and other educational resources that help people envision and pursue lives worthy of our humanity. If you're new to the show, remember to hit subscribe in your favorite podcast app, so you don't miss an episode. And if you're a loyal supporter and a faithful listener, all we're asking today is.
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