What Does It Mean to Be a Person? A Conversation with Paul Louis Metzger

The world is becoming increasingly proficient at telling stories that deny God. As such, we need thinking Christian to become as natural as breathing. Welcome to the Thinking Christian podcast. I'm Dr. James Spencer. Through calm, thoughtful theological discussions, Thinking Christian highlights the ways God is working in the world and questions the underlying social, cultural, and political assumptions that hinder Christians from becoming more like Christ. Now, on to today's episode of Thinking Christian. Hey, everybody, welcome to this episode of Thinking Christian. I'm Dr. James Spencer, and I'm joined today by Dr. Paul Louis Metzger. He is the professor of Christian theology and theology and culture, theology of culture at Multnomah University. And he's also the director for the Institute for Cultural Engagement, New Wine, New Wineskins. In addition, he's written a new book. And that book is called More Than Things, A Personalistic Ethics for a Throwaway Culture. And so I'm really excited to have this conversation with you, Paul. Thanks for coming on the podcast, man. How are you doing today? Thanks so much, James. It's great to be with you. And it's rainy out here in the Pacific Northwest, but my spirit's in a good place. That's normal, right? That's pretty normal for out there. That's normal. Something's wrong if it's sunny. Something's wrong if it's. Yeah, yeah. I learned that from the Twilight movies, I think. So, well, hey, let's just dive in, man. I love the book. I think, you know, it hits on a lot of themes that I've researched and read about. And the first chapter, I think, is just really foundational for everything else you're saying. And so you deal with this issue of recovering personalism. So let's talk a little bit about what do you mean by personalism? What is that? What does that look like? And yeah, we'll start there. Again, thanks so much for having me on the show, on the podcast. And it's great to be with you, James, and your audience, the community. And so one of the key themes that I'm accounting for in More Than Things is that we need to move beyond reductionism. That's a key theme, moving beyond reductionism. So we're more than things. We're made for more than things. And so often, whether it's in the realm of social sciences or natural sciences, the humanities, as I indicated with human sciences and the like, there is an emphasis not to account for our personhood. It could be our genetic makeup, which is important. Our genetic, our biological makeup, our consumer appetites, our socio-demographic aspects to our being, none of which are unimportant. They're all important. But we're more than that. So we are gendered, and that's a complex issue, you know, in terms of how people frame gender, but we do account for that. We're sexual beings. We have consumer appetites. We're biological, etc., etc., etc. But we're more than that. And so personhood emerges from all of that, to use the kind of language of Christian Smith in his book, What Is a Person?, University of Chicago Press. Personhood emerges from this. So we are more than our racial dynamics. That is important, but we're more than that. We're more than our sexual and gender dynamics more. So reductionism tends to make us that. We see this in someone like Richard Dawkins with The Selfish Gene, that the gene is the fundamental aspect of reality. And I think you see this even with 23andMe, you know, that whole thing about know your genetic makeup, your DNA, and then you know your reality. It kind of unlocks the universe. Well, our DNA is part of us, you know, and we have to account for all of that, but we're more than that. So that's in part what I'm dealing with. And then I go into, as you know, pop culture to show that it's not just academic research going on, but even in pop culture, we find indications, whether it's on Netflix, Amazon Prime, etc., etc., where people who have no Christian appetites or antennae whatsoever are concerned about this very issue. So I'm happy to riff on that if you think that that would be helpful. Yeah, let's talk a little bit about it. Let's dig into a couple of examples, just so people get a good sense of it. I mean, I think Smith's work on personhood is really fascinating, but I also think that person versus, like, let's say, individual or, you know, just human, number one, it's getting more and more confusing these days. It's a tough philosophical argument, you know, to dig into. And so, yeah, let's try to give a little more clarity and maybe just some specific examples of personhood so that it's more than the sort of various characteristics that we often think of when we think about describing ourselves. I think that's a fair summary of what you just said. Is that correct? Yes. And so let me just first speak to how this is showing itself in pop culture, and then I'll go on to define personhood, all that is involved in it. And it'll account for some of what I just discussed, but it'll be more. And it also accounts for what you had just said about relationship and things of that sort, both on the vertical and human level. So, you know, Netflix has this Ozark series that is quite troubling, quite disturbing, and it all takes place in middle America. And, you know, people can just go on and see what it's about. But this businessman, he and his wife, who has a career in politics and such, they get caught up in a drug cartel and they're doing money laundering and such. And at one point, Wendy, as her name, is having a conversation with the drug Lord. And she says, you know, we're business partners. And he there's a pause, I believe. And he goes, Wendy, we're not business partners. I own you. Now, that's maybe an extreme example, but as the cover of the book More Than Things illustrates, we're often reduced to play off that reductionism thing to what we do, our usefulness, our efficiencies, how we benefit the GNP. And so there's a sense in which our places of employment, the market, a market society can own us. So it's not always this overt kind of drug lord owning a business person, but it can be even more subtle ways. People were not made for the market. The market was made for people to riff off Jesus. So another illustration would be Macklemore. It's a bit dated, but I think it has pertinence. I grew up in the Chicagoland area. I know you've spent a lot of time there. I'm a Bulls fan, but Air Jordan sneakers back in the day when I was younger, kids would kill one another for a pair of Air Jordans because it was a status symbol. And Macklemore does this song Wings with Ryan Lewis. And there's a line there. We are what we wear. We wear what we are. We're reduced to things we wear, to brand name and such. It could be like, and it's not an illustration that I give, but Taylor Swift, looks what you've made me do, where she has this video rendition with all these personifications of herself. And which one is the real Taylor Swift? And it's all her fame that's projected. Do we really ever meet the real Taylor Swift? Is she simply a personification, which is not the same thing as a person? The last thing would be to play off the movie Her, which is a fascinating philosophical movie, featuring one of my favorite actors, Joaquin Phoenix. And he falls in love with his voice-activated operating system. The voice is Scarlett Johansson. And, you know, there's a sense in which all of his emotions, his values, and such are downloaded, and then she disappears. She's actually is the voice in relationship with millions, hundreds of thousands, not millions of people. And he gets sucked into this vortex. And in a sense, his personhood, shall we say, in quote marks, is lost. So those are examples of where Hollywood and such is really reflecting on, no one wants to be treated as a thing, but it's very difficult for us to treat one another as persons. So to get more into it, if it's okay, James, I'll just define how I see personhood. Yeah, go for it. You know, we're defined in relationship to God, vertically. We're created in the image of God. The Judeo-Christian heritage, the Christian heritage, emphasizes that God is three persons, three divine eternal persons in eternal communion. It's not one God over three. It's not three over one. It's, as the Cappadocians said, we must always talk about God as one and three at the same time. So there's a sense in which we have to account for that God is supremely personal. There's not this faceless monad or, you know, entity behind the persons. God is Father, Son, and Spirit as the one God, one God, three persons. And so we're created in the image of God. We have this, whether we sin against God or not, we're still God's creation. We're still created in the image of God. And so that we are created as persons and in a community of persons on the divine and human level. And we can sin against one another, but we can never take away one another's persons. We can sin against God, but we can never take away God's person, personal being. So there's this...

this vertical communion, there's this horizontal emphasis that God says, love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, love your neighbor as yourself. And so there's the vertical, and then there's the horizontal. That doesn't take away from our individuality, our agency. We are all of that, but we never exist as islands unto ourselves on a personalist framework. We always exist as persons in relationship to others, and that includes embodiment. As I said, our agency. It entails for humans, consciousness and self-consciousness. Now that's debated. My son is minimally conscious due to a catastrophic brain injury that I allude to at the outset of the book. So I don't think that one's personhood is taken away based on one's consciousness and level of consciousness. And that's not simply because of my son. I thought that for a long time. But the point here is that humanity does entail consciousness and all of the other aspects that I've already alluded to. And then there's dignity. As you know from Christian Smith's book, What is a Person? He says dignity is really hard to define. It's like wetness to water. We don't really know how to define wetness, but we know water is wet. And so personhood has dignity. And so we're unfathomable in our worth. As CS Lewis says, you've never met a mere mortal in weight of glory. We are invaluable. Even if we sin against one another, we can't take away that we are creating the image of God and we have that distinctive identity for all eternity. And then lastly, I'd say we're unrepeatable. Just as kids are taught, you know, every snowflake is different, so every individual person is unique. We've never met someone who's just a cog in a machine. We are persons who are unfathomable, unrepeatable, and unviable in our worth and dignity. Do you think, yeah, I mean, you know, it strikes me, you know, when you're talking about dignity and sort of that sort of what, you know, we know water is wet, the wetness of water is sort of this, we can actually, we know it when we feel it, right? But nowadays, it sort of feels like what's happening is we're developing an imagination that is making it far more difficult for us to even understand what human dignity is. And so it isn't just that it's hard to define. It's almost as if it's being, what I would say is almost leveled down so that it's even with everything else. And it just sort of ends up falling in underneath all of these other things. I don't recall you dealing specifically with that in the book, but it seems to me that it's sort of a corollary that the- Let me ask you a serious question. If something triggered a major market drop in the coming months, would your retirement be ready or exposed? With inflation, market volatility, and ongoing global uncertainty, more families are taking a closer look at whether their retirement plan is truly built to hold up, and many are finding that adding a layer of protection makes a lot of sense. Sanctuary Metals is a Christian-owned company that helps families strengthen their retirement savings with physical gold and silver through a gold IRA. During uncertain times, many people look to precious metals as a way to add stability when other assets may be under pressure. If you'd like to explore whether a gold IRA is a good fit for your situation, Sanctuary Metals makes it easy to get started. Text GUIDE to 94878 to receive your free retirement defense guide or call 888-958-6579 to speak with one of their knowledgeable team members. Again, text GUIDE to 94878 or call 888-958-6579. context in which we're in our culture is going to make it either easier or harder to recognize human dignity in a variety of ways. So could you just comment on that a little bit? Certainly. As Michael Sandel in his book, What Money Can't Buy, The Moral Limits of Market, says, and I reflect at length at various points about what he's contributing to the discussion. He has no trouble with the free market economy, but a free market society where the only thing that has value is that which has a price tag attached to it so that humans are reduced to their value of what they contribute to the GMP. That's part of the problem with, I think, with what you're rightly alluding to is that it's like Goethe's sorcerer's apprentice that Fantasia picks up with Mickey Mouse and the broom that he gets the broom to fetch the water and to clean house, but the broom actually gains the upper hand. We can have this in social media where, you know, it's supposed to be social, but it can become, if we're not careful, anti-social media where our creations get the upper hand and then end up controlling us. We can see it even with transport where, you know, you could take the nicest person in the world, put them behind the wheel of a car. Once that metal and glass is there, we become monads. We become windowless, you know, monads where, or windowed monads where we, we don't really see our connection to one another. So it's nothing wrong with the automobile, but as Karl Barth says in his church dogmatics with these structures, that it's like we have to go to places faster and faster. And the question is, why do we have to get there so fast? And that, as Colin Gunton mentions, even time where when we've displaced eternity, we make an eternity out of time and as, as a result, we become controlled by it. And I think the work you're doing on technology that we need to be calm. And I thought, wow, that's, that's good for me. I need to become a calm person. But, you know, calmness and, you know, our technology can control us if we're not careful. Technology can be good, but it's always a means, not the end itself. And so I think these are things that can easily cloud personhood and take away our dignity. And that's why we have to understand people in storied context. People are storied beings. And so when, when I go beyond demographics to understand a person's individual story, things change dramatically. Well, I think it's really interesting. I mean, I'm glad you brought up the emphasis on story. I mean, some of the work that I've done on, on technology, like with Albert Boardman's Technology and the Character of Contemporary Culture. One of the things he argues is for the distinction between a thing and a device. He argues that a thing allows for a certain sort of human interaction around it. And he uses the examples of a wood-burning stove. And all of the activities that are required to even get heat into that wood-burning stove. You have to now go out and cut wood, and maybe there's a, a father-son relationship where they're going out to cut this wood together and they're learning about that. But then even once the heat is there, it's generally something where people huddle around that heat. They're cooking around that heat. They're eating around that heat. Like that becomes the center point for social interaction versus a device like the thermostat in your house, which now you can run on an app, but there's no real social interaction to just going by and flipping the heat up or flipping the heat down. You lose a lot of those social interactions. And so one of the things that I've been thinking about a lot is, you know, if we've lost this idea of a storied personhood more generally, we are going to have a lot more trouble even understanding and filtering what might be good for us from a technological perspective and what might be bad for us from a technological perspective. And I think your book takes that and says, okay, it's not just technology, it's all of these other areas as well. Once we lose sight of our personhood and who we are, and we don't understand that story, it's easy to sort of degrade it, degrade it, degrade it. And so maybe that, that storied person that you lay out in the first couple chapters, even the second chapter where you talk about faith, hope, and love, I think is really crucial for understanding how this can connect to people's everyday lives and the decisions they're making about what they're going to, what platforms are going to be on, how they're going to use them, what devices they're going to pull into their lives, all those kinds of things. Do you maybe just talk a little bit about that or respond a bit? Sure. Yes. Thank you, James. When we think about the matters of the story of scripture, you know, God names us. You know, I was fascinated looking at some, what some rabbis articulated with whether it's the Tower of Babel and making a name for themselves and the people, according to background studies, according to some of these Jewish scholars, you know, there's the people were treated as nameless and, you know, a brick that would fall and break was cried over more than a slave whose back was broken in building that tower. And you go right from that story there of Babel in chapter 11 to God making a name for Abram in chapter 12, that from a nameless people to a named people, the nameless empire and the name God who names his people and draws them into covenant. And, you know, empire with Pharaoh, you know, who is the Lord, which is his name. That's God's personal name. It's not simply a title, the Lord. I am who I am. I will be who I will be. God calls the people of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob to himself. So it's a story. And we go this,

Through the Scriptures, the Kingdom of God is bound up with a storied people that, you know, Jesus throws a party just so he can be with his people. I mean, you know, and I think that's where we're going to go toward in the kingdom of God to play off the thing and device issue, you know, it's not to have a party just to have a party, it's to have people, and we're, as people, we're going to be at the head table, not the angels. The angels long to look into these things. So just to play off that backdrop of that context, and if God is always engaging in story, like we see throughout the Scriptures, so much of it is narrative, and God names people, and God shares his name, and we partake of God's name. We're God's named people. Well then, I need to get to know people's names. I need to get to know their stories, and so when my wife and I go to my son's care facility, we'd really like to know the staff by name. We like to get to know, in appropriate ways, the staff, not to find out every detail about their lives, and we want them to know about Christopher. We want them to know he's married. We wanted them to know this is his daughter. The picture there is of his daughter. And once they start getting to know that this is not simply a TBI, you know, incident, but this is a person with a story, and I get to know them, and they get to know me, it often changes the dynamics that there's more glue, relational glue, there, and that's ethics. That's bound up with ethics, which is the point of this. And just if I could play this off in terms of medical ethics for a minute. One of my mentors who's been with us through thick and thin, Dr. Robert Potter, is a known personalist ethic, one of the pioneers in palliative care ethics in the nation. And the three questions, and I frame them in the book at times, and I think students have found this always helpful. His three questions that he hammered out over decades, he's retired now, but decades of medical ethics. When he goes into the room is, what is going on here? Both medically, individually, with the patient, the family, everything. He has to know as much as he possibly can. Talking to the nurses, learning from the nurses, etc., and the family. What ought I to care most about? And for him, as a pioneer in personalist ethics, it's not the doctor, it's the patient. And he fought hard for that. One of the pioneers in this, he fought hard for it's the patient who's the most important in this. What does the patient want? And then lastly, what is the fitting response? So it's getting to know the story. You can't make good medical decisions just by looking at a chart or even doing a personality study, you know, MMPI, as important as that is. We've got to know the story. We have to have dialogue. And I just think that's something that has to be taken up in so many contexts. And technology, to play off the point of some of the work you're doing, if technology is meant as a cover for personhood and story to guard against that, at what cost to our persons does that lead to in our community in the end? Well, I think I actually highlighted those three questions in the book and wanted to kind of come around to them. So this is a good point to do that. But I think when we look at his second question, you know, what's going on here is a big question, right? There's a lot going on in the world. And so there's probably some sense in which that needs to be narrowed down as we look out at the world, correct? How would you, any practical suggestions on how folks might do that? Well, you know, if we're talking about medical ethics, for example, you know, what is going on here? And that's the first question he asks, you know, the lay of the land, what's going on? You know, it's not going to be necessarily everything in the care facility. He's thinking ultimately, what is going on here related to the care for this patient? So that's part of the narrowing down that occurs. And so what ought I to care most about? The second question, that's already in mind in making these decisions. But, okay, so working with a patient that has TBI, you know, there are certain things that are going to be the focus in that. Not necessarily, you know, to put it crudely, does he have a broken toenail? I mean, but, you know, it's really what's going on here with the TBI that that'll be the focus. And I think that gets extended out in other matters when we're thinking about drone warfare or space exploration. From a personalist vantage point, that's already there in the quote-unquote optics. You know, how is this going to bear on personhood? So that's how I frame, ultimately, ethical issues. Not even the big three, and I can just reference them for the listeners and viewers. And that's deontological ethics, and the way I frame that is what is the good ideal? You know, Kant is one of the most noted deontological ethicists, often referred to as one. What is the good ideal, that ultimate moral maxim, shall we say, like his categorical imperative? That's important to me, but it's more than that when I'm thinking personalism. It's more than consequentialist ethics. What is the good result? Or virtue ethics. What is the good person? I think all of those have their place, and they can all be framed personalistically, but personalist ethics already focuses my attention. What bearing does this discussion have on the persons who are before me? And so that's already going to privilege prejudice in certain ways, and we're all prejudiced. We're all, you know, privileging certain things over others. The question is, what is it even to get at that? Is it going to be the insurance company? And the bottom line is the bottom line. And that's important. Money's important. I'm not taking away from that, but how does money serve people versus how people serve money? So right then and there, I'm already thinking with that first question, what's going on here as it relates to the person in need? And that should be in any situation. Teaching a class. If I have an issue with a student, do I really know what's going on in the student's life? I mean, they might be reacting in certain ways. I have to be thinking, okay, I can look at the symptom, but what is really going on? Maybe they're really struggling in their relationship with their parents or, you know, psychologically in different ways. And often I'm really bad at discerning from just the surface. I have to understand story and to not make quick reactions. So to privilege the person that's behind the symptom and not reduce the person to the symptom or the outburst or whatever and to, in a sense, give them a second, third, fourth chance. And that takes time. And that takes reliance on God because we don't have it in ourselves to really operate in a personalist way. It takes too much energy and courage that's beyond me. I need the spirit of God. Yeah, and I think, no, I think, you know, as I've thought through this in the past, one of the things I've tried to really cultivate is deep care and curiosity for other people. And what I denote in that, I think, is what you're talking about with the personal aesthetic or at least connected to it. So what I would say is when I run into, like, let's say a problem student or a problem person, right, who ordinarily maybe I'd just react defensively and be really frustrated and, you know, wonder what their problem is kind of thing, you know, in a negative mode. If I can refocus and say, no, I should have a deep care and concern for this person. Let me try to figure out how do I react to them such that I understand I can articulate my care for them and satisfy my curiosity to some degree about who they are. Now that gets to this point of I don't actually have to react to their whatever it is that they happen to be doing, whether they're acting out in class, whether they're, you know, driving like a crazy person, whether they're, you know, saying something rude or whatever, whatever it might be. Right. Now I can dig a little deeper and not take offense at that. Is that in line with kind of what you're talking about? Well, absolutely. I loved your points on care and curiosity, you know, empathic care. I mean, what a need today for empathic care because again, and objectivity has its place. No, no question about it. And scientific and, you know, technological objectivity are vitally important. But there's another component that's so important as well for ethics. You need both. And that's the subjective component and that empathic care and the curiosity and like, what is going on here? What, what ought I to care most about? And that's going to be the person. And I have to account for the symptoms, but you know, to, to try and hit the pause button, to create space between the vehicle in front of me and myself, so to speak, to play off that, um, and, and to have that sense of calmness that you talk about in, in your whole podcast venue, that calmness that, you know, we hit the pause button and I love how Viktor Frankl said that even when it related to his internment. And that's about this inviolable worth. He couldn't control what the Nazis did to him, but he could control his response. And I, I need to not react, but, but

and curiosity or care and curiosity, we have to hit that pause button and say, do I really know what's going on here? Am I really caring about that one who matters most and then to have a fitting response to address that, not just the symptom. So that, yeah, I think it's exactly on point what you're saying and what I'm saying. I think they mesh. Yeah, I mean, I think when some of these questions, as I thought through these three questions, right, I felt good about it on an interpersonal level. Like, I understood a little bit better how in a narrow situation, like dealing with a single person or a single situation, I could get my head around it. When I try to expand it out and say something like, I've been talking a lot about politics lately. And so one of the questions is, well, who should Christians vote for, right? Which I almost never answer anyway. But you just look at that question and you read it through these three questions. Like, what's going on here? What should I care about most? And what is the fitting response? I mean, that gets real complex real quick because you can look at it from so many different angles. And I personally think the biblical teaching on it is, you know, not super clear, but I think there are aspects of the biblical teaching that we've really neglected in this whole realm. And so I've been trying to focus on those and try to help people sort of look at this in a different way. But I think as we broaden this out, does it... Am I wrong? Does it just get more and more complicated? How does that personalism ethic sort of play itself out on a global scale? And you discuss it in some of your chapters. I'm just trying to get you to maybe give a little generic remarks on it. Yes, so if you don't mind, I'll start out by saying how I frame the book. Not to focus so much on the book, but it's in answering your good question. You know, I start out with, you know, matters closer to home, like the individual person and their individual relationships, family relationships from beginning of life to abortion and Down syndrome to end of life care, euthanasia issues and physician-assisted suicide. So that's the second major section after the foundational chapters. And the last section, the third major section is about from racism to space exploration. So starting closer to home, America, and then going to matters of immigration reform and drone warfare, and then out there to the whole globe with environmental stewardship and then space exploration. So from beginning of life to end of life, closer to home to outer space. And so when we think about, let's say, for example, immigration reform, you know, I think the complexity is just different. I don't know if I would say it's more so, it's just a different set of aspects. Of course, it's dealing with persons and in larger communities. But how I engage, let's say, politically on matters of immigration reform, I think it's Jonathan Haidt. You know, I've heard different pronunciations of his name, Jonathan Haidt. But he has some great TED Talks where he's dealing with a lot of themes, like even how we engage politically with one another. And he calls for empathy. He calls for empathy that we need to try and understand the moral intuitions of others. So yeah, we're in a polarized society. And if I'm dealing with persons, okay, what moral intuitions, to use Haidt or Haidt's language, are manifest in this particular conservative Christian or liberal Christian for this person from across the spectrum, maybe not associated with Christianity, conservative and liberal and anywhere in between. And so I think just trying to understand, I have limits in terms of how I see life. They have limits in how they see life. So matters of, you know, honoring taxpayer dollars, honoring keeping families together, honoring matters of, you know, fairness and equity, and also the laws of the land. All those things have their place, and they're going to be looked upon differently from different people. But if I come away saying to myself, look, Paul, you do not see things from a God's eye point of view. And I need to see other people's perspective. It doesn't make it wishy-washy. It's to complexify and expand the discussion. I think part of the problem is we oversimplify. I think part of the problem is we so go to Twitter. We so go to whatever can be the kind of most edgy in-your-face statement gets the most traction. And I find that diabolical in many ways that we fall prey to and we get caught up in it, all of us do. And so I think we need to complexify and say, even our people who are political opponents, and we can easily reduce them and see them no longer as persons. And that's part of the problem. So I think I could expand on that in all kinds of directions, but I think that's just a practical point to try and see what drives these people. And is there something I can learn from them on matters of loyalty, authority, equity, fairness, and see that we all operate in a fragmented way. And then that will keep us from saying, to use the language of a previous election cycle, oh, you're diabolical or you're despicable or just because you vote for that person. And it's like, they don't know me, I don't know them. And it's just like those things really harm our collective good together, both here and abroad. Just like I don't know many Iranians. I don't know many Russians. How many Palestinians and how many Jews living there do I know? You know, it's like to complexify, as Dr. King said in his sermon on Vietnam War, we need to know our enemy. Diplomacy is so important. Yeah, there's something about particularizing the other people on the other side as opposed to maybe stereotyping them. Actually having particular people you're having a conversation with as opposed to a generic straw man or, you know, just a generic persona, right? But we're not particularly good at that. Oftentimes, we tend to assume the stereotypes and can never get past them almost. If you don't mind, James, I know my boss is a very good friend of yours, Aline. And so, and I know he listens to your podcast and, you know, he and I constantly play off this that, you know, our 600-year history, Aline a Romanian, myself a Hungarian. And, you know, if we just play off that the whole time and never get to know one another, it's going to be really bad. And I'll be on the losing end at Multnomah because he's been my provost. So I've got to get to know the person. So that's a shout out to Aline. Yeah, no, it's good to shout out to Aline. That's good. He'll appreciate that. We'll see. We'll see if he does. Let me ask this, because I think, again, implicit in your book and oftentimes explicit, but, you know, Christians almost have to, because we're embedded and embodied within a different story, we almost have to think differently than the world around us thinks. And so, you know, part of that is motivated by this sense, I would guess, or I guess I would argue, you know, that we have the peace that surpasses understanding, right? We are part of an unshakable kingdom. You know, we could throw a number of different Bible verses at that, but the reality is that our security and stability is only partially, I would argue, found in the things of the world and ultimately rooted in what God is giving us and how God is, you know, what God is giving us. And so there's a lot to parse out there, so I'm just trying to sort of summarize it. But the general idea is that we're not looking at the things around us thinking that they're what are sustaining us. They're what God has given us to sustain us. Whereas people who don't really have that framework and that story, they are not going to be able to learn that lesson. And so all of this starts to feel a little bit inevitable. Like, it's always going to roll down the hill toward I've got to take care of myself. I have these insecurities. I have these vulnerabilities. I've got to take care of them in a more, maybe we've answered it, a more efficient manner. Is that the inevitable answer, do you think? Or is that like our answer? You know what I'm asking? That we would fall prey to that kind of thinking that this is inevitable. Yeah, and like even the, maybe not even that kind of thinking, but even just the efficiency aspect of this. You know, that, like you talk about a lot, that ownership idea that you spoke about earlier. You know, so much of this becomes about what is efficient for me, what is profitable for me and how I can get the most security the fastest way possible. Is that, do you think, unique to us? Or is this something that's more of an inevitability out of that sort of vulnerability that we're ultimately going to feel because for the people in the world, they just don't have any other source of stability? Is that a fair? Yeah, thank you. Thank you. So one way

the way I guess I would look at this would be, you know, the way in which our insecurities manifest themselves will change from time to time. And so, you know, Jacques Ellul, as you know, talks about this culture of technique or efficiency, that that which is most efficient is right. Well, in that case, if I just bring that optic to bear on my son, well, goodbye to him. I mean, how efficient is he? He's not very efficient at all presently with his traumatic brain injury, with the feeding tube and the trach and, you know, bedridden and minimally conscious. So, and again, I'm not trying to prioritize just my son. Of course, he's priority number one for me in many ways in terms of my, my daily life. But I would say that's true of everyone, that I don't think we should ever look at people primarily in terms of efficiency. Of course, we have to have efficiencies in work, and of course we have to optimize. Let me ask you a serious question. If something triggered a major market drop in the coming months, would your retirement be ready or exposed? With inflation, market volatility, and ongoing global uncertainty, more families are taking a closer look at whether their retirement plan is truly built to hold up, and many are finding that adding a layer of protection makes a lot of sense. Sanctuary Metals is a Christian-owned company that helps families strengthen their retirement savings with physical gold and silver through a gold IRA. During uncertain times, many people look to precious metals as a way to add stability when other assets may be under pressure. If you'd like to explore whether a gold IRA is a good fit for your situation, Sanctuary Metals makes it easy to get started. Text GUIDE to 94878 to receive your free Retirement Defense Guide or call 888-958-6579 to speak with one of their knowledgeable team members. Again, text GUIDE to 94878 or call 888-958-6579. With various kinds of concerns for that, but when the ultimate reality becomes efficiency, that's the problem. And I think that can very well manifest the deep-seated insecurity that we have. And so I often want to talk when I reflect on it in the book that, you know, we have secure attachment to God. I might not use that language of secure attachment, but that vertical dimension that we are created, just like, you know, the nameless people in Genesis 11 with the Tower of Babel, and what God does, he's not trying to ruin the party. They're not following through on what God wants for them to flourish, to have dominion as in stewardship of the whole earth. They're staying put. And then he says, Abraham, I'm going to bless you, make your name great in relationship to me. Talk about security. Talk about secure attachment that God provides. And even if we are raised in a way that we don't have that security, the church is supposed to be that context where we can be secure in relationship to God and one another, accept one another then, just as Christ accepted you in order to bring praise to God. And when we grow in that and when we live into that security with God and one another, we don't have to take matters into our own hands and try to own everything. And I love how Jesus says, I believe it's in Luke 12, says, you know, because the kingdom has been given to you, you can share with the poor. And it's because God has given us the security of attachment, we can share with others. And that leads to a profound sense of securing others' well-being, not just our own, and to consider others better than ourselves because, in Philippians 2, because we already have that fellowship with the Holy Spirit. We have been loved by God in Christ and Christ lays it down for us so that we can lay it down for one another. So I think whenever we don't have that secure attachment, it leads us to take matters into our own hands and it can show up in all kinds of things like the technological society. Yeah. You know, as I was reading your work, this old essay came to mind. Stanley Hauerwas' book, Community of Character, and he had an essay in there called The Storyform Community. I don't know whether you're familiar with that essay, but he does a little riff on Watership Down, the story of rabbits trying to find a home. And one of his points is that, you know, he goes through all the different types of warrens that they try to travel with. But as he talks about this journey of these rabbits trying to find their home, you know, he highlights the idea that the vulnerabilities of some of the rabbits became part of the story, right? That they forged this community where the weaker rabbits were still vital to the community. And it didn't matter that it took them longer to get where they were going or where, you know, it created inefficiencies or that it, you know, made the whole community really in some sense more vulnerable with the way they were going, at least within the context of that book. And as I was reading your book, a lot of those lessons just came back to mind. It's this idea of there is, there almost has to be for us a slower process if we're going to bring people along. Because there's a sense in which efficiency people, just you and I, aren't that efficient. Right. I mean, we're, you know, we have our... We've been talking to Alina about me having you. We've been talking to Alina about you. Exactly, right? Well, I mean, it's just, you know, everybody's got their hangups, right? I mean, everybody's got their weird little things that they have trouble getting past and the thoughts that they can't, you know, turn the corner on. And so you're constantly trying to be patient with or cajole or sort of convince people of certain things. We're all inefficient in that way. Absolutely, yeah. We're not, you know, we're not data centers. So I don't know, any thoughts on that as we kind of transition into some of the other topics I hope in your book here? Yes. And again, I love the reflections and how you were riffing off of Hauerwas in that piece. I like to go through this with my students. Two questions I'd like to ask them. Two of many. And it's, they're in the reader's guide that is available to people, a free download. But one of the questions is, what are the issues that you most prioritize in ethics? And this is returning to a previous one that I'm going to come right to your point. But I think about them together. And it's interesting. If students have had, you know, personal experiences with racism or immigration reform or a family member who's died tragically, the issues that we discuss or that I discuss in those particular chapters are higher on their list. And I think that's simply because we're all persons. So we all have personal stories and it's not to relativize the issues. It's to personalize them. And the issues that they have no experience with don't really even rise to the occasion. But then when it comes to disabilities, for example, and I allude to that when it comes to inefficiencies, you know, in the third chapter, the discussion of the Down syndrome advantage, the disability paradox that often with Down syndrome, at least, families can be enriched, not to make it a consequentialist argument primarily, but I am engaging Richard Dawkins, who calls himself a utilitarian consequentialist. So I'm saying, okay, let's take it on your terms and let's engage. But that we find out that sometimes life is so much more profound with the inefficiencies. And again, it's case by case, of course, when we think about this, but when it comes to space experts, and I asked the students, so if you were to go into space and we could only get one spaceship into space and planet Earth was disintegrating, like Stephen Hawking and maybe Elon Musk and others are concerned for. And I'm not trying to demean that consideration or concern, but I think who gets to go? Is it just going to be the billionaires like Warren Buffett? Is it going to be the scientists, you know, the Albert Einstein, so to speak, et cetera, et cetera, of our world? Or would there be people? And it's amazing what people will put forth on the list. And usually it doesn't start out with people with disabilities or the animals with the story that you shared who have the greatest inefficiencies. But often those who've had to cope with their own situation of major inefficiencies with their own disabilities are often more able to cope in life and find hope amidst distressing situations than those who've not had those difficulties. And not everyone who's a billionaire on this planet is going to be a billionaire on the next one. And if they haven't had compassion here, usually the poor give more percentage-wise than the rich, then we're in trouble if it's only the rich going because they might not develop soon enough that compassion that they need, and we're all going to have disabilities if we want to use that language on another planet. And so maybe we need more people, not, again, in a utilitarian or a consequentialist argument only, but I'm just trying to help people think just like we need to be amongst people with inefficiencies to learn our own inefficiencies and how much we need one another, how much we need God. So I love that point that you're making, and personhood is not a kind of Nietzschean superman. And himself was by no means.

he was defining that category altogether. But, you know, I find the more I think about these issues and like, like we said, you know, whether it's technology or politics or whatever it is, one of the things that I think we're just missing is, and I think I saw this in a lot of your chapters, you know, especially the first several on life and, you know, euthanasia and all those kind of different chapters. I don't think we have a real good category for pain and suffering other than to overcome it. And, you know, I've been, you know, it's almost a trivial example in a lot of ways, but personal training is kind of where I came up. I was an exercise physiology major in college. I did personal training for five years after that. And, you know, I never brought a client into the weight room and said, okay, your workout for the day is just to stand in the corner and watch me lift weights. Like, that's not how it works, right? Your body's not going to develop like that. And so, but I don't think we have that real category for that pain and that suffering. And I would argue that that fits within a broader category maybe of inefficiency. You know, that sort of deeper friction that slows us down and forces us to either leave people behind or to just take a step back. And I wonder how much you ran across that in some of your research and your literature, like how pain and suffering just is something to be overcome as opposed to be something to shape and form us into people we wouldn't otherwise be. Well, absolutely. Yes. And, you know, well, I have great respect for Aristotle, and it's by no means the case that he didn't have a place for affirming suffering with the heroic individuals that he celebrates and like. Nonetheless, the approach to suffering will be very different than what you find in Jesus or the Apostle Paul. And I love how Alasdair MacIntyre, who's a Thomistic Aristotle, after virtue, he talks about Aristotle would have struggled with Jesus and he would have been horrified with Paul because, you know, weakness and foolishness is the power and the glory of God, namely Christ and his cross, which Nietzsche mocked in his reflections, just mocked that kind of approach to Christianity with his own form of noble humanity, the suffering individual who rises in a pure isolation over the masses. But what I find here is when you look at the Beatitudes and I spent, I invested time in the Sermon on the Mount at different points, including in chapter 2. And I just, you know, I'm just struck over and over again that Jesus, when he invites people to consider what it means to be a citizen of his kingdom and describing the citizens of the kingdom and what the kingdom is about right out of the gates is blessed are the poor in spirit. And the Romans were thinking, what? Poor in spirit? I mean, as John Stott would say, the spiritually bankrupt. Blessed are those who mourn. Blessed are the meek where they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. There's a lot of suffering there. And, you know, Luke 6, blessed are the poor, a companion to that Sermon on the Plain. So you see blessedness not like hashtag blessedness in Christian culture, like, and even with God is good, God is good all the time. What do we mean by that? Of course, God is good. God is good all the time. But I think what we mean often by that is very syrupy, very simplistic, and it doesn't account for the book of Job. It doesn't account for the Psalms with lament. And we often have a society and a church liturgical culture of celebration that doesn't have lament. And so we're trying to get past the suffering to blessedness. And Paul says, I want to go through the cross to get to the resurrection. And it's going to be with the nail marks, the spike marks for all eternity. I mean, it's a cruciform glory, not a glory that leaves the cruciformity in the rearview mirror. So yeah, to your point, complete agreement. Well, how do you see that connecting? And we're getting kind of close up on time, so I don't want to keep you too, too long. But here would be sort of maybe our final question. When you think about something like one of the chapters I found fascinating in the book was the drone warfare chapter. I just thought that was really interesting because of the distance that it creates between people, even on the battlefield. And so I'm wondering, how is it that we are trying to, do you see that or how does that connect with this idea of distancing ourselves from suffering? I think there's a really interesting way in which it does, but I'm just wondering what your reflections on that might be and how that really plays into your overall argument in the book. Thank you very much. Excellent closing question. And it comes back to those kinds of reductionistic categories we talked about earlier, and it applies to technology, right? So I'm just going to quote, it's in the reader's guide, but I'm going to quote what I write here, that the category of drone essentialism, drone essentialism, it's the presupposition in a technological society that drone technology dictates or determines its application. So because we have it, we just follow it. This presupposition fatally presumes that drones are incapable of civilian casualties. It also fails to account for the human element in technological applications like drone combat, including human error and the required relational resources, namely proximate bases from which to operate drones in the region and local partners who will assist in drone strike operations. As noted in the app in the chapter to err may be human, but to consider drones in abstraction from the human relational component is also erroneous. And I'm not even making a case for drone warfare as such. I'm just saying these are the categories that are often discounted because we think if we have it, we should use it. And what we're learning from even scientists, thinking of CRISPR, is that they don't have the answers. They know what to do, but whether they should do it, those are ethical questions, philosophical questions, religious questions. And the same thing applies with drone warfare, drone technology, whatever its application, drone technology. It's like just because we have it doesn't mean we use it and it doesn't dictate its use. And how do we frame these in a relational construct? And that might even lead us to say we need to back away completely from drone warfare. And, you know, Star Wars is accounting for those types of things. It's like we need to account for them with, you know, with our considered science fiction is often ahead of us, whether it's Star Wars or the Martian Chronicles, one of my favorite works, great Bradbury. Yeah, no, it definitely is. And I think I read a book called Seeing Like a State. I don't know if you've ever run across that, but James Scott wrote this book called Seeing Like a State. And part of what he talks about is as we're, as the state needs to administrate all the different aspects of its, you know, environs that it controls, part of what it does is it looks at a forest and says, well, these aren't trees anymore. They're yards of lumber, you know, and there's a conversion that happens. And I really see that coming out in the work on drone warfare. It's like these, we have a high degree of risk in depersonalizing those who are on the other side of this, because now they're no longer people that we're going to encounter on a battlefield and, you know, sort of physical combat sort of way. They're now just dots on a screen. Right. Yes, absolutely. And the same thing goes for how we approach church growth. So whether it's trees and lumber or people and drone combat or church growth, you know, the language of giving units, you know, scripture primarily, if not exclusively, talks in organic relational terms like the body of Christ, the bride, the bride of Christ, the children of God, even the temple is framed relationally. The household is framed relationally in scripture. But giving units, I'm not meaning to mock church leaders in this, but we have to be very careful when the language we start using is non-relational, non-biblical categories. And, of course, we have to account for the economics, but never to reduce the body of Christ or trees or people in combat to potential body bags or giving units or lumber. Yeah, it's a tough needle. It's tough to thread the needle, but I think that, you know, what we might be able to say, and you see if you agree with this, but what I would say is if we focus in on the personalism, if that is what we're going to ride, let's say, it isn't that everything else will take care of itself. I think we have to avoid that sort of consequentialist notion of, you know, if we do this, then all of this will happen. I don't think that's quite it. I think we have to really wrestle with the idea that this is the only way to do it, whether it works or not. And that's very difficult in organizational context because, to your point, you do have to be concerned about the money. But I think, you know, if we can't make it...

Work correctly. There's no need in making it work incorrectly. There's there's there's something in me that just feels like that's what we're, you know, that's what we keep doing. We're like, well, this isn't working right, but if we stay the course, God is using this in some way and obedience is our sign and our strategy. And, you know, like this is what we do. But then we want to, but then we skip over, you know, and so I don't know whether you'd agree with that in general, but it's just something that goes through my head an awful lot when I'm working with churches and trying to figure out, you know, how do we measure the success here? The normal success metrics really don't lean back into personalism. They they lean into something else. So yeah, closing thoughts on that. I completely concur. And it takes a lot of courage that again, it's beyond us. I think the courage comes from God. I think it comes from being in community where, you know, we may be crazy, but we need people around us to say stay crazy in terms of fighting for it. It's not to fight against others, but to fight for this. And Dr. King was one of the greatest personalists of the 20th century. I'm so thankful he didn't give up on his vision when he was being attacked from the KKK and white moderates and black nationalists. And the last few years of his life, King in the wilderness, HBO film. I cried all the way to Baltimore and back to Portland watching that incredible movie where he stayed the course, though he was so unpopular in those last three years of his life. And his message that I really inspired the book more than things. We need to move from a culture of things to a culture of persons. And people would have looked at him as naively optimistic that it doesn't work. And the question is, as he says, we need to think through like longer term optics. The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. And so I think, well, it doesn't mean we just scoff at matters of economics or efficiencies. We have to account for them, but we have to reframe them too in light of what are we really about? Is it the people for the efficiencies and the economics or is it economics and efficiencies where appropriate for the people? And that's riffing off of Jesus where the Sabbath was made for people, not people for the Sabbath. I just think Jesus was the ultimate personalist indeed he was. As T.F. Torrance says, he is the humanizing human and the personalizing person. And I say, amen to that. Very cool. Well, I'm going to end there. Tell us a little bit about where we can get the study guide, the free guide. Where is that found? And thanks so much for the excellent questions and just the rigorous reflections in conversation. Dr. Spencer, I really enjoyed this time. Yeah, this was great. Yeah, I loved it. Well, if people go to More Than Things at IVP Academic on the page for it, they will find a link to the reader's guide. They can go to it there or they can go to InterVarsity's website and just look for reader's guides and supplements, and they should find a link there with all the other reader's guides they have for books. But I developed it in conversation with some other colleagues and it's about 75 pages, but it's there just as a tool and it's free as an access point for individual, small group and class use. So thanks for asking that for the sake of the viewers. Yeah, absolutely. And I just encourage everybody. I mean, I did not download the freebie. I got the copy of the book. So if you're looking for something to read, go check out More Than Things. It's worth the time to read through. It's a fantastic book. Loved it. And download the free guide and then also check out New Wine, New Wineskins. So all of those will be included in the links for the show notes. So I'd encourage you to check out the book, download the free option and then check out New Wine and New Wineskins. They're doing some cool stuff as well. So and thanks, Paul, for being here. I really appreciate it. This was a great conversation and I just I loved having you on. These are these are topics that are kind of near and dear to my heart. So I really enjoyed the book and enjoyed the conversation. So thank you. Yeah, thank you so much, James. And if I remember going to get a trainer for my workouts at the gym and I need help, I'm going to go to you. So thanks so much, sir. Thanks a lot, man. Hey, we'll catch everybody on the next episode of Thinking Christian. Just want to take a second to thank the team at Life Audio for their partnership with us on the Thinking Christian podcast. If you go to LifeAudio.com, you'll find dozens of other faith centered podcasts in their network. They've got shows about prayer, Bible study, parenting and more. Now and it shows he would say that Pat Boone, he's so religious. I shook hands with that boy the other day. My whole right side sobered up. And I would repeat that in my act. And I said, you know, it did. And then I'll go ahead and sing my song. Pat Boone shares some of his incredible life story on The Walk, a podcast for worshipers. Join us weekly to hear conversations and devotionals from the artists of the church. The walk can be found on LifeAudio.com, WorshipLeader.com or your favorite podcast platform.