Beeson Podcast, Episode #043 Name Date >>Announcer: Welcome to the Beeson podcast, coming to you from Beeson Divinity School on the campus of ɫƵ in Birmingham, Alabama. Now your host, Timothy George. >>Timothy George: Welcome to the Beeson Podcast. Today I have a special guest to talk with. He's a new friend to me, but a person I have admired, whose work I've admired for a long time. He's Dr. Jason Byasse. Jason is Research Fellow in Theology and Leadership at Leadership Education, a program at Duke Divinity School. Welcome to Beeson Divinity School, Jason. >>Byasse: Thank you so much, Timothy. >>Timothy George: One of the things I've admired about you, you're a writer as well as a scholar and a teacher and a person who thinks about leadership, and you've written for the Christian Century a number of times and many other things, but you have some books. And I want to ask you just to say a little bit about some of your books. You seem to have a passion to introduce some of the great classics of the Christian tradition to people in a way that it's accessible. And say a little bit about your book on the Desert Fathers and also your book on Augustine's Confessions. >>Byasse: Well, you're kind to ask, and thank you for this invitation. I was struck when I was writing my dissertation. I was also pastoring a little church. And I had a deep sense that if what I was doing in the classroom wasn't helpful to God's saints who are also tobacco farmers and people who live in a small rural county in North Carolina, then what good is it? There's a clear order of judgment, it seems to me, between the seminary and the local church where if the seminary's not serving the local church, then God doesn't need it. But I also had this deep sense that the treasures that were being unlocked for me in the seminary were treasures that were the church's treasures that often, they haven't been introduced to these local church folks, right? And I would teach from these North African desert living monks and the tobacco farmers would find it fascinating and interesting and lo and behold, it works, right? So, you're right. I guess I hadn't really noticed it in quite the way you put it. I have had this interest in introducing people to literatures they're unfamiliar with. And part of that, if there's a unity to my work, it's in some ways disparate, it's that I think the Christian life is a matter of learning to be surprised by Jesus again. It's very hard to be surprised when you're expecting to be surprised. But Jesus is always coming to us in new guises, in places in the scriptures we didn't expect, in the poor, in people who need to be introduced to Jesus. And so, coming to see the world as a Christian is coming to see where Jesus is coming toward us in ways that we weren't looking. >>Timothy George: I remember Fred Craddock's great classic sermon, you know, “Overhearing the Gospel.” Comes at you by indirection. And the Desert Fathers would not be well known, I think, to evangelical Christians, generally speaking. >>Byasse: Or for indirection. >>Timothy George: So, when I teach church history here at Beeson, I always have my students read St. Anthony, The Life of St. Anthony by Athanasius, which is just a great classic. And it's so interesting to hear them get into that material. What's going on with this guy? Is he crazy? Does he need a therapeutic examination? Are there really demons out there wrestling with him? So, it opens up all kinds of worldview and spirituality dimensions. >>Byasse: I love the beginning of Roberta Bondi's great book, To Pray and to Love, about the Desert Fathers. She wrote that in 1986. My book came out in 2007. Someday I'll have a book that's like introducing an idea like she did. She begins with the young monk who comes to the older one and says, I've done everything I can. I've prayed as much as I can, and it's not working. And the older one says, here's the trick. And he stands up and his hands become ten flames of fire, and he says, if you want, you can become all a flame. What I love about that story is partly that the desert fathers are very suspicious of miracles because they know they're living in the desert and they're not eating enough, and you see stuff. They're also fully aware that the demons can do miracles, both biblically and in church tradition, right? So, the question when something like that is displayed is what's the actual teaching going on? They're not surprised by miracles. What they're interested in is whether that whatever happens plunges people into the depths of Jesus and his word in his church more. What's going on in that story, I think, is that God is saying, I always have more for you. And that's specifically the case when you're in these long doldrum periods where you're praying as hard as you can and nothing happens. If that's the case, take heart because something is happening. You're growing in maturity. You're not someone that I have to show up for every day to motivate, right? You're someone who's growing in grace. >>Timothy George: And we all have these desert places, you know, the dark nights of the soul, whatever language we use to describe it, where we need something more than, you know, what we can bring to the table ourselves. >>Byasse: Yes, absolutely. And the teaching there is that precisely then God will show up for you. I mean the great black church saying that he doesn't always come when you want, but he's always on time. >>Timothy George: Yeah, that's great. >>Byasse: It sounds like the desert to me. >>Timothy George: Now, we could talk all day about the Desert Fathers. They're deep and rich and interesting and eccentric, but I want to focus a little bit more on Augustine today. Augustine, here at Beeson, is a real biggie. We have a portrait of him in our chapel. There's one of him here in my office where we're talking right now. He's a name, I would say, that's generally known, but a great deal isn't known about him in particular. And you've written this book to introduce the Confession, so give us just a thumbnail sketch of who Augustine was and what the Confessions are about. >>Byasse: Augustine was a man who lived in North Africa from 354 to 430, and he's someone who was waylaid by Jesus in a way that he didn't expect or plan for. He was a precocious student, a smart young man who was lucky to have someone fund his education. So, he goes off to school and he's very happy to get away from Orthodox Christianity when he leaves his faithful mother, Monica, at home. He says, I'm not interested in that. I'm going to live with my girlfriend. I'm going to party with my friends. He sounds, in fact, a lot like lots of students who show up on our college campuses. And then, lo and behold, he realizes as he's done with his education and as he becomes a speaker on behalf of the emperor, which is a great job for an ambitious young man, that uh-oh, the Christianity that I left behind might be true. And so, I often think of Augustine as a young man who leaves a trailer park in Arkansas and gets to go to Harvard on somebody else's nickel. And then at Harvard he realizes, uh-oh, the people who taught me Christianity back in Arkansas, they're right. And now not only that, I've got to go back there and be a pastor among them with this Harvard education. And so, where he ends up serving, there's not a deep intellectual Christian culture. He essentially has to create it whole cloth. And so, lots of the huge amounts of writing he's doing is trying to integrate the kind of faithful but relatively simplistic Christianity of his mother, Monica, with the faith he's learned at the feet of Ambrose, one of the great thinkers ever in Christian tradition. So, it's a little bit like the integrative move of the seminary and the local church that we were talking about before. That's partly why I think Augustine's work is so fruitful. >>Timothy George: Yeah, and the Confessions that he wrote, that's an interesting word, confession. We use it in all kinds of ways in modern English today, true confessions. We had a speaker a few weeks ago who said, you can do confessions online now. There's this kind of, on YouTube, whatever. >>Byasse: You can have an app on your phone for it. >>Timothy George: So, what is confessions? What does that word mean? >>Byasse: It's a great question, and especially as you say, in our sort of sensationalized era, we have a version of confession, essentially, where you go on television and say everything you ever did, and it's tawdry and ridiculous. What Augustine means by it is, first, he's confessing the faith that's delivered to the saints that he's learned from the church. So, confession is first about a lifting up of praise to God. Someone said if you try to count all the references to the Psalms in Augustine's book, Confessions, you'll run out of time. There are too many. And so, it's essentially the telling of a story of a life through the Psalter. If you even look at the first paragraph of the Confessions, it's almost nothing but Psalm citations. So, one great Augustine scholar likes to say that if there are any salacious parts of Confessions, he hasn't found them yet. So, he has a strange reputation as somebody who dishes on a kind of immoral life. And what he really does is he's confessing his sins, is he's not only saying, here are ways that I was running from you, God, he's also saying, I thought I was running away from you, but lo and behold, I was running right towards you because you were in charge of this thing the whole time. Augustine has this wonderful place in the city of God where he talks about how the saints in paradise will rejoice over their sins because it allowed more of Christ's grace to cover them. That's potentially a dangerous teaching. It's borderline, but looked at in the right way, I think it's beautiful. >>Timothy George: Now, you know, Confessions are often called the first autobiography. Also, the fact that it is a prayer, it is addressed to God. As you point out, that is the basic meaning of confession, praise to God. That makes reading the Confessions today a wholly different kind of experience, it seems to me, from a lot of the spiritual literature that we encounter. >>Byasse: Yes. I've written a book that's partly memoir on my pastor in a small church, and I'm stunned by how hubristic and arrogant it is to foist on an audience stories of your own life when they don't even know you. Now, in a way, that's not what Augustine is doing. In a way, he's doing something very similar to what Israel does in Israel's scripture. Most people, when they write stories of their nation, write about how great they are, right? This is what nations do. This is nothing new or old. This is what nations do. This is nothing new or old. This is what they do. Israel writes its story about its nation, and it says, and then we did this, and look at this horrible thing we did, and isn't this humiliating, and then we screwed up this way. And it goes on and on like that for hundreds of pages. Augustine is somebody who's been foisted on a church. He's been ordained against his will. He’s been sent to this place where they don't know him, but the people who sent him said he's talented, you'll like him. And then they start talking, right? They say, you know, this guy was a heretic for 10 years. There's a kid with a woman he was never married to and there are other women, and have you met his mother? I mean, this is the kind of thing they're saying. And Augustine does something remarkable when he writes Confessions. He says, you've heard how bad I am. I'm going to tell you how much worse I am than you thought because then you will know how great and forgiving our God is. Now that's a remarkable kind of claim, right? He's saying both there's something true to what you're saying and there's something truer in God's economy about me that I'm going to show to you. >>Timothy George: In Augustine there is this, I'm not sure exactly what to call it, but this sense of desiring God. You've written also about the beauty that is a major theme in Augustine, but I'd like to read a passage from the Confessions and have you comment on it. I didn't tell you I was going to do this, but you've read the Confessions, so you should be able to handle this. >>Byasse: Once or twice. >>Timothy George: This is actually from Book Ten. It's one of my favorite passages in the Confessions, where Augustine says this, "But what do I love when I love my God? Not material beauty, or a beauty of a temporal order. Not the brilliance of earthly light, so welcome to our eyes. Not the sweet melody of harmony and song. Not the fragrance of flowers, perfumes, and spices. Not manna or honey. Not limbs such as the body delights to embrace. It is not these that I love when I love my God. And yet, when I love him, it is true that I love a light of a certain kind, a voice, a perfume, a food, an embrace. But they are of the kind that I love in my inner self, when my soul is bathed in light that is not bound by space, when it listens to sound that never dies away, when it breathes fragrance that is not borne away on the wind, when it tastes food that is never consumed by the eating, when it clings to an embrace from which it is not severed by fulfillment of desires. This is what I love when I love my God." Jason, what does that mean? >>Byasse: Well, as far as I'm concerned, you could read it again and we could just listen to it. There's an old way of reading Augustine that would say that Augustine read a whole lot of Platonist philosophy, and that for Platonism, physical things are not nearly as important as spiritual things and they're over against one another. And so, to attend to spiritual things, you really need to neglect and in fact even put down the physical. You could read the first bit of what you read that way, what do I love when I love my God, not something physical, not something you can see or touch or taste or smell. And then he has that wonderful “and yet” that you so rightly emphasized, where he says, it is a sort of light, it is a sort of fragrance, it is a sort of eating where you don't consume what you're eating. It's as if to say that our bodily senses can certainly mislead us, right? Our bodily senses, as Augustine knew well, can drag us into sin that we feel like we're powerless over against. And yet, what does God do with creatures God has made who are so powerfully drawn by things we desire with our senses? God becomes physical. God becomes sensual in the incarnation. God becomes one who can be seen and felt with our hands, as 1 John says, right? So, it's certainly true for Augustine. You learn a great deal from philosophy. You learn that God is not an object like other objects. God is not someone you can pick up off the table and move over to the mantle. Then he'd be a creature, somebody not worthy of our worship. And yet the one who created all creatures, to whom all creatures bear witness, whether they mean to or not, also himself becomes a creature, also himself becomes one who can be touched and tasted and smelled. So, I think those descriptions both suggest the incarnation and they also suggest worship. So, another place, late in Confessions, close to where you read, Augustine thinks on the price of his redemption. He eats it. He drinks it. He serves it to others, right? I mean this is clearly a kind of suggestion of his work as a pastor, breaking the bread and pouring out the wine of the Eucharist. Look at a God who is so far beyond the physical, who's not bound by the physical, that he could freely enter in and become physical in order to bring our physical body, our soul to himself in salvation. And so, I think actually contrary to an old reputation of Augustine, there's a way of reading Augustine that suggests he thinks that the physical creation with a kind of luxury bears witness to the God who became creature for us. >>Timothy George: That's great. I remember when I was a student reading Augustine and taking lectures on Augustine, we had this debate, was he a Neoplatonic Christian or a Christian Neoplatonist? And there's no way to read Augustine without being aware that he's read this material, he's appropriating it in certain ways. And yet you've pointed, I think, to the one place in the Christian faith that Augustine found incompatible with full-blown Neoplatonism, and that's the Incarnation. Neoplatonism is about our ascending to God, the soul, the many to the one, whereas Christianity is about, of course, the great descensus of God into our history, into our lives, which happened once and for all in Jesus Christ. “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us,” John 1:14. And I think Augustine really got that, and it thankfully helped him to temper some of the Neoplatonism that would have taken him in a very different direction. >>Byasse: Yes, indeed. There's a marvelous place. And he struggles very, pretty mightily in Confessions to figure out what exactly should we glean from this philosophical tradition and where does it fall short. And so, one of the ways he puts it is in his philosophical learning, he finds himself mentally stretching his capacities, and it's almost a physical description, where you're standing on tiptoe to catch a glimpse of a God who isn't physical, who isn't bound by space or time, and yet we can sort of imagine for a second a God who created everything that is, who defies all of our categories. And so, we're really reaching hard mentally and then we trip over the crucified slave at our feet as we're trying to strain ourselves upwards. So, there's something to be gained by bringing the best philosophical learning to bear on the Christian tradition and gleaning it. Augustine is convinced that God has left treasures for us in all kinds of places in creation. It's like the plundering of the Egyptians. All truth belongs to God anyway. You should pick it up. God left it there for you and the pagans, even though they were totally unaware of this. And yet, the one thing we really need is Jesus. And without Jesus, all the good things we might glean from pagan philosophy or really even from scripture are not saving truths, are they? So, you've put your finger on an important question in interpreting him, and one that I think you're right, he gets exactly right. >>Timothy George: Now, several years ago, you wrote a really fascinating book. Some of the books we've talked about you've written are kind of introductory volumes to introduce the great literature. This is really a scholarly work. It came out of your own doctoral research. It's entitled, Praise-Seeking Understanding, Reading the Psalms with Augustine. And I'd like to spend a few minutes just talking with you about how Augustine read the Bible, particularly the Psalms. That's the focus of your study. And what you seem to have an insight into, and that is the whole question of allegorical exegesis. Now you know as well as I do, that is a dirty word for a lot of evangelical Christians and Protestants generally. So, tell us a little bit about what you discovered about how Augustine read the Bible and the value of allegorical exegesis for us today. >>Byasse: Well, and I'm deeply sympathetic with those who would find it a dirty word. Insofar as allegory can sometimes mean a trick for reading, a sleight of hand by which you show someone that a text means something other than it means, right? So, I think that's an important witness within the tradition to listen to, even as I'm praising allegory for what it has to deliver us. Augustine finds the Bible maddening, and he's right to find the Bible maddening. So, he tries to comment on Genesis five or six times, and he's never happy with his approach to Genesis. He keeps quitting and starting again. Right when he's ordained, he tells his bishop, okay, I'm in love with Jesus. I'm here to serve in the church. I don't know anything about this Bible I'm supposed to preach from every day. day, can I go away for a while and learn some stuff? And the bishop says, no. You'll preach, you'll learn from it that way. But the bishop does say you should read Isaiah. And Augustine, trained in all the best philosophy of his day, reads Isaiah and he's like, I can't read it. It doesn't make any sense. Now, what happens when he reads the Psalms is something clicks with the Psalms. Lots of the ancient church reads the Song of Songs, the Song of Solomon, and they immediately say this is Christ and his love affair with the church. And they can read every line of the Song of Solomon that way, fruitfully. It's the same reaction Augustine has to the Psalms. This great motion of prayer, of lament, of cursing, of blessing, of story about the God of Zion and his relationship to the people of God, Augustine sees all those movements in the Psalter as movements of the church's relationship to Christ. So, all the laments in the Psalms, all the downward motion in the Psalms, Augustine reads those as God's downward motion to us in the Incarnation. All the great upward motions in the Psalms, praise, the Psalms of ascent, the Psalms that Israelites would sing as they mounted the steps to the temple in Jerusalem, Augustine sees all those as the great movements of ascent in the Christian life, of praise, of being joined in Christ to the Father, of ascension, of progression to glory, and they're all right there in the Psalter wrapped up in one another, just like the Christian life is. And what's striking to me again is that Augustine preaches from the Psalms allegorically at morning prayer, and people come to church on their way to work to hear him. And so, you shouldn't think of academic listeners. You should think of his mother, Monica, hearing him in church. So, he makes huge intellectual demands on his laypeople. I mean, he doesn't hold anything back from his arsenal, and yet it's all in the service to people to have their own souls be joined in these great motions that the Psalter narrates. >>Timothy George: One of the lines in your book, I want to ask you to comment on it. I found it very interesting, thought-provoking. You say, "Because of our liturgy and our canon, Christians cannot but practice allegorical exegesis. Since modern biblical interpretation frowns on these sorts of exegetical approaches, what we have in modernity is unrestrained allegory." Talk about what that means. >>Byasse: You're kind to point that out. One of the criticisms of allegory, a smart criticism, has been to say that it can justify any sort of reading and that it's arbitrary. What I found in reading ancient Christian allegory is that it has rules. Therefore, it's not arbitrary. And the rules, they're not simple. They're difficult rules, and they have to be learned in a community. And so, it takes a community together to discern whether a reading that's being proposed of a passage of Scripture is a good reading or not. My sense is that this ancient library of books in our Bible, for that to make a connection with people reading it today in Birmingham or Durham, some steps have to be made, and those I describe as necessarily allegorical steps. If we say you're not allowed to read Scripture except in the context in which it was written, we've ripped out any potential tools students might have to make those connections to the very congregations they're being called to preach to. So, they're going to end up doing allegory because there's no other way to read the Scriptures with reference to our life today. But they'll be doing it without any of the aids that the church has laid down over the course of its history to do it well, without any way to tell whether a reading is a good reading or a bad reading. And there are those structures in place that we can lend to them. I think we need to reteach this tradition to be able to tell when are we reading well, and when are we offering a reading that should be given thanks to but then denied and turned down. This doesn't lead to holiness. >>Timothy George: I hear an echo in what you're saying of a very well-known article by a mutual friend of ours, David Steinmetz, your colleague at Duke. And David was one of my teachers at Harvard many years ago, a great teacher. And in 1980, he published an article, an essay that has become really quite famous in this whole field of history of exegesis entitled, “The Superiority of Pre-Critical Exegesis.” It got a lot of comment at the time and since. And he makes sort of the same point you're making here, that if we strip away from Scripture, this kind of deep textured richness, then essentially, we're taking the Old Testament away from Christians. We can't read it anymore. >>Byasse: Yes. It's not our book. >>Timothy George: Yeah. So, say a little bit about Steinmetz and his essay and kind of how you appropriate that, and if you see problems with it, where you would want to correct it. >>Byasse: There's a reason I sound like Steinmetz. It's because that essay set me on the course working on these matters. It's an amazing essay and there's a cautionary tale there. He describes the way he wrote it. He was angry after seminar at a graduate student who was making fun of ancient exegesis, went back to his office and dashed off this essay in, you know, as long as it takes to dash something off before you get home for dinner, you know. >>Timothy George: And it reads that way, doesn't it? It has a kind of polemical bite to it. >>Byasse: There's a fire in it that most academic essays indeed don't have. There are lots of strong arguments in the essay. The strongest one for me is the description of the way Christians have found our life of faith described in the Scriptures for so long, and if you remove the tools to have access to those descriptions, then you've left us without anything to offer people, right? You've left us in a place, as Jesus says, to offer lay people a scorpion when they've asked for an egg, right? Part of the reason the essay works is that it's so funny, right? I mean, it's bombastic, and it’s, he raconteur in there. And he has a follow up essay that I find, it’s not nearly as famous but I find also stimulating, where he describes reading the Bible as being like reading a mystery novel and then reading it again. And so, the second time you read the mystery novel, you know who the murderer is, but this time you're noticing clues that have been left there by the author. Wait a minute, why is that handkerchief in that room and then here it's in that room? And that has to do with what's going to happen later. Christians are people who are reading the Bible again and again and again and again and again, and we have for thousands of years. Now that we know the end of the story, as people to whom Christ has revealed himself, we look back at Leviticus differently than if we didn't have this for the end of the story. And the thing is, that's the same way the Jews read. The Jews know the end of the story in terms of their community, and to ask Jews to read Israel's Scripture without reference to the Torah that forges their life together in faith, you've done an act of violence to them. You've said, you can read this book, but you can't read it with reference to the faith that gives you life, right? That's what we're saying when we say you can only read Scripture with regard to its original historical context, only deliverable by scholars in the academy, by the way, right? We've said, you can read this book, but you can't read it with reference to the faith that you would live and die for. >>Timothy George: I just want to ask you to comment, because what you're saying will be heard by some people to say that the historical, literal meaning is unimportant, or even, you know, we can demythologize it. That's not what Steinmetz was saying, and I don't think it's what you're saying, is it? >>Byasse: Indeed. My sense, one of the great things about ancient ways of reading is that they're open to varieties of interpretations. And none of them has to necessarily win or lose. Now we exclude lots of readings, but multiple readings can sit alongside one another without necessarily ruling each other out because they don't believe there's only one reading that's exclusive of all other readings. Every reading that's delivered by historical criticism, by efforts to get at the plain sense, and so on, can be admissible as the Church determines the best way to read the Scriptures. And so, I think what we can really view the last 200 years as is the genesis of a fascinating set of readings, a proliferation of readings that's mashed under the rubric of historical criticism, many of which have been enormously fruitful for the life of the church, and we'd never want to discard. And yet we also don't, I think, want to say that historical criticism offers us the literal sense and other senses come by other means. One thing that struck me about Augustine is often he reads the Psalms Christologically, but he's not aware he's doing it by allegory. He just thinks these words have reference to Jesus as their literal reference. So, this is why I describe allegory as Christological literalism. It's paying attention to the letter in light of Christ. Now we have readings that Augustine never had access to via modern ways of interpreting and Augustine is never afraid of new ways of learning. In fact, he's often frustrated, how come I can't get a better manuscript? These words don't make any sense. Jerome, translate them better for me. And then Jerome translates them better, and he says, this is worse than the ones that didn't make sense, right? I understand the sentence now, and I don't like it. So, I often think Augustine would love to spend time at any of our academies for the riches of language and manuscript tradition that we have. And then he would also want us to learn from him the kinds of Christological ways of reading that he’s so good at. >>Timothy George: So, you're presenting, Augustine, as a teacher of the church to whom we should listen and with whom we should be in dialogue. Not necessarily the only voice that's out there by any means, but an important one, and one that's had enormous influence both in the Latin West within Catholicism and in the Reformation among Protestants, too. You have this interest, which I really share, in encouraging pastors to draw on the history of biblical interpretation for the sake of their ministries. Say a little bit about what fuels that and where that should go. >>Byasse: You're working on this Reformation Biblical Commentary Series, which I so look forward to seeing. And I'm working on a new book now on this topic, and so I've spent a lot of time reading ancient approaches to Isaiah. And I'm struck, reading especially now the early parts of Isaiah, the way the church's life together is already an exegesis of Scripture. When Isaiah is writing chapter 6 with the vision of the worship in the throne room and this acclamation, holy, holy, holy, he's not thinking about the Eucharist. Or maybe he was, I don't know. How do we know it was in someone's mind? Especially an inspired writer of Scripture. Anyway, there's mystery to these things. And yet the church has said, for more years than anyone can count, that when we have the Eucharist together, we should sing these lines. And something has already happened, in other words, in the church's worship that's a reading of Scripture. It's added a layer on whatever was already there and you actually can't find the bottom. And I'm struck when I read these ways of reading. So, Isaiah 1:3 describes the ox and the ass not recognizing their Creator and their Lord. Well, what happens in Christian iconography around Christmas? The ox and the ass are beholding their Lord and coming to understand. And so ancient Christian readers say the ox and the ass, there's one unclean creature, there's one clean creature, this is a sign of Jews and Gentiles. These ways of reading, obviously they're imaginative. The imagination present is luxurious, and yet they're biblically attentive. They're trying very hard to pay attention to the letter. So, I'm always struck with these readings, not always, there are some readings in this tradition that we would want to exclude very quickly and that have been very harmful. But I'm often struck in these readings just how beautiful they are and how they make me want to love God more. And that's the entire point of the Christian life. And so, as a preacher, I want to crack those open with the people listening because I'm supposed to want them to love God more, right? And I'm struck by how much mystery there is and how that happens and how we come to love what we love. And yet for generations the church has said, read this way and people will fall in love with Jesus. >>Timothy George: We're almost out of time, but I want you to say just a little bit about the work you're doing at Duke Divinity School now in the leadership program that you're a part of. Leadership's a big word, almost a buzzword today in theological education and really in our culture. Lots of books on leadership. What is leadership, and what are you trying to do to encourage ministers of the gospel to take that seriously? >>Byasse: It is striking. I've seen the description that there's something like one and a half million books out there on leadership, right? There would be a dangerous way to approach leadership that would speak of it as a kind of trick to make everything right that's not now right with the church. But the church knows in its bones not to trust quick fixes for leadership. When we try and take shortcuts, we end up doing damage to ourselves and our worship. But we're also struck, leadership education at Duke Divinity came out of continuing education at Duke. And we were hearing from pastors to whom we had taught what we think is quite excellent theology and Bible and biblical languages and preaching and all of the wonderful things we teach in the seminary, and they had said, this is really good, and now I've just moved from a church of 400 people to a church of 800 people. What do I do? Right. So, read this in Hebrew again. I mean we want to continue to read, them to continue to read this in Hebrew and they also need help doing the things that any organization does that secular leadership approaches can help with. And yet secular leadership approaches are never enough for people who worship a God who took flesh and became our servant and rose for us. So, we want both, sort of like Augustine, to draw from the very best of what's out there in the secular arena, and we want to see ways in which the God who saves us in Christ is turning those things upside down or is plainly present in those approaches to administration and leadership in ways we should cherish and be grateful for. >>Timothy George: Great. Well, I wish you well with this very important work you're doing in leadership, and I also want to encourage you not to quit. Please don't quit thinking about the early church and how to read the Bible with Augustine and the Desert Fathers and all the others. I think that maybe says something to each other, these two emphases that are so important to you. But it's been a great pleasure to have you with us here at Beeson Divinity School. Thank you for coming and for this wonderful conversation. >>Byasse: Thank you so much for having me. It's been a great joy. >>Timothy George: And now here with a special announcement is our Beeson Director of Admissions, Sherry Brown. >>Sherry Brown: I want to invite everyone that is interested in Beeson Divinity School to our preview day. The preview day for this fall is Friday, September the 16th. It's a day-long opportunity for you to learn more information about Beeson than you might be reading on the website, but also an opportunity to attend a class, to meet with current students over lunch. We also give tours that day. We also give you opportunities to meet with faculty. Most importantly, if you have not yet completed your application interview, that's a great time to do that as well and just to have an opportunity to spend the whole day with our staff, faculty, and students. You can register online at our website, which is www.besondivinity.com. >>Announcer: You've been listening to the Beeson Podcast with host Timothy George. 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