#227 | A God-Centered Life In A Self-Centered World with George Marsden

Both the left and right. Political Christianity, you get, you know, ideological. Ideological Christianity rather than relational Christianity that's biblically grounded.

And that's what Edwards. One of the things Edwards, I think, offers a guide to. He doesn't have all the answers, but it's. It's a good reminder that this is.

This is where the core, the chorus should be. And this is what a Christian and a Christian community should look like.

Watering time, everybody.

It's time for Apollos Watered, a podcast to saturate your faith with the things of God so that you might saturate your world with the good news of Jesus Christ.

My name is Travis Michael Fleming, and.

I am your host. And today on our show, we're having.

Another one of our.

Deep conversations.

One of my favorite passages is from Hebrews, chapter 11, verse 4. And through his faith, though he died, he still speaks.

That is a great segue into the life and thought of Jonathan Edwards, the greatest American theologian.

Our times are confusing, but every so often, we need to hear from someone outside of our own time who can give us a God's eye view of who we are and how we are to order our lives to follow him. That's why reading or delving into the thought of Jonathan Edwards is so important for our time.

Not only was he a theologian, but he was a pastor and he was a revivalist, really in touch with the spirit of God and helping really to fan into flame the first great awakening, delivering perhaps what is known as the greatest American sermon ever delivered sinners in the hands of an angry God. Edwards is a monumental theologian. He requires a monumental historian to help us understand his thought and its significance for our day.

That's why we have, as today's guest, Dr. George Marsden. George is Emeritus professor of History at Notre Dame and is one of the most influential historians of our time.

He's an expert on the intersection of Christianity and North American culture, specifically American evangelicalism. He is known for his biography on Jonathan Edwards entitled Jonathan A Life, which won him a bunch of different prizes.

I mean, he has authored other books including the Soul of the American University, Religion and American Culture, and the one that I got to know him through fundamentalism and American Culture. He's also written biographies on C.S. lewis. I mean, this is a guy that has published widely and also has deep heart for God himself.

So he's not just a historian, he's a man who loves Jesus.

And I wanted to talk to him.

About his newest book on Jonathan Edwards entitled An Infinite Fountain of Light. Jonathan Edwards for the 21st century.

Listen in as this distinguished historian takes us on a journey into what America's greatest theologian Jonathan Edwards has to say to us and Christ Church today. Happy listening.

George Marsden, welcome to Apollo's Watered.

Thank you. My pleasure.

It's a real joy to have you here today. But before we get into our conversation, are you ready for the fast five?

I don't know.

I think you're going to do just fine. If you could bring back one thing from when you were a kid, what would it be and why?

Yeah, I don't know. I guess my grandmother and because she was just a great person we lived with. Yeah.

Here's the second question. What's the one non biblical book that has influenced you the most and why the most?

I'm sorry, I'm having trouble thinking one. One book that I give that.

What's a few? Give me a couple of them that come to mind.

Talking about Jonathan Edwards today, his religious affections is really an important book.

Here's the third question. What's your favorite period of history to study and why?

I think I'm most interested in 20th century, 21st century things because as a historian I see my role as to try to help understand what's going on today in terms of the historical factors that have shaped it.

And particularly a lot of evangelical Christianity sees itself as shaped by the Bible alone, but in fact it's shaped by all sorts of cultural assumptions. So my job is to sort that out and try to sort out the gold from the dross.

What is the one historical figure outside of the scripture? Out of all the figures in scripture that you would love to grab a.

Cup of coffee with and why probably St. Augustine. I see him as the sort of the central theologian that shaped things.

I guess to answer your question, if you're going to have a cup of coffee or other beverage, I think C.S. lewis would, would be more fun than just about anyone else you could, you could think of and you know that spend an hour with C.S.

lewis would be, would be amazing whereas you know, in Augustine it would take a while to figure out differences in how to communicate. But yeah, I did a little book on about mere Christianity and, and I just loved reading everything that, that Lewis had has written.

So how about this one? This is the last question. What's the one historical figure you want Christians to learn more about today and why?

Well, today since we're doing this interview, Jonathan Edwards would be a good candidate and I think he has some wonderful things to say to all of us and not everything he says is wonderful. But some of the things really are. And I think any Christian can learn from his insights. And it happens to be someone that I've learned a lot from.

And so I've tried to share those, those insights from Edwards to see what, what really translates well for Christians today. And C.S. lewis has said every theologian needs a translator. And I see myself as a translator of Edwards.

So I'm writing Edwards for the 21st century in order to say, here's what you can find here in this person that might seem far away and obscure and sometimes off putting.

Let's get a little bit of your bio. Where'd you grow up? How'd you come to know Jesus? And what led you to become a historian?

And I know I'm asking you to summarize several decades right there in just a few moments, which is hard for a historian to do, but I believe.

You can do it, actually. I grew up in, in Middletown, Pennsylvania, which Harrisburg. My father was a. Had been the pastor there and then he became an executive.

He was a mission. When I was young, very young, he was a mission secretary for the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. And so I grew up in an Orthodox Presbyterian situation.

I also grew up in a home that was very old, was built in the, in the 19th century, and had been a family home for many generations. So I was surrounded by history.

But the, the history that I knew best was the history that shaped the Orthodox Presbyterians leaving the Main Presbyterian Church. And so that was part of my atmosphere when I was growing up. And I was.

We had a Christian school and that was emphasized just constantly an issue in sermons. So I was intrigued by that. I was gripped by it. I had essential faith or commitment as I was growing up. But I also had a lot of questions.

And I went to a secular college, Haverford College in Pennsylvania, wonderful place. And so I was confronted by the best of contemporary learning. And then big question in my life is how do you put these two things together?

Here is classic Christianity that had been central in Western culture for a long time, Central and American culture for up to 100 years ago. And then now it's considered to be quaint, out of date.

And there's this whole other, at that time, I thought very positive sort of humanist outlook, and how do I fit those two things together? So that helped shape in my faith journey. I went to Westminster Seminary for a year to try to work that out, and that was very helpful.

I learned from Cornellius Van Til and Edmund Clowney and a number of other wonderful professors there. And that gave me a grounding or a deeper faith.

Then I went on to graduate school because I was on this quest to say, how does the culture and the faith, how do they interact with each other and how does the faith be shaped by the culture? What's essential and what's peripheral?

In the course of that, I ran into reading Jonathan Edwards, who was actually revered in Maine American history at that time as sort of the greatest early American thinker. And I, you know, and I thought, wow, this stuff is great in kind of illuminating the Reformed tradition that I was part of.

So that became one of my anchors in my faith commitment.

So I took on the task of how do you understand where fundamentalism came from? What is it? How did it get shaped? What's it doing now? How has it gotten changed since then?

I wrote about fundamentalism and I wrote about the neo evangelical movement and Fuller Theological Seminary. And that was a major agenda, trying to understand that tradition.

And then I went on to try to understand the other culture that I was part of, academic culture. And where does Christianity fit in academic culture.

And I wrote about a book called the Soul of the American University, How Christianity Interacted with University Education in America. And also that book called Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship said Christian scholarship isn't that outrageous. It's just.

It can be as academically solid as any other kind of scholarship, and it ought to be welcomed into the academy rather than simply being suspect. So those are the main things I've thought about. And then after that, I got into Jonathan Edwards about him and as I mentioned, did a book on C.S.

lewis. So it's all along that trajectory of trying to see what are the eternal truths that you can find in a very transitory cultural situation.

And we are very limited sorts of people, so we have to be very careful what we take as absolute. Nonetheless, there's enough there to make a real. A real faith commitment.

Let's then move into your book. As you're talking about Edwards, we have George Marsden, an infinite fountain of light, Jonathan Edwards for the 21st century.

What made you want to write this book? You've written on Edwards in the past, but what. What made you write this book specifically?

Actually, I ended up writing three books on Edwards that I. My friend Mark Noel had asked me to write a biography for a series of biographies for Erdman's. I said I'd do that.

This was in the 90s. And so I. That was too good a thing to pass up.

So I said okay, I'll do that then, but I'm committed to write for Erdman's too, so I have to write a shorter biography for them. So I wrote the big biography, then I wrote a shorter biography.

And then I was asked, after the big biography came out, I was asked to give a series of lectures, Stone lectures, at Princeton Theological Seminary. And so I lectured on Jonathan edwards for the 21st century. And that was what, 17 years ago.

And since then I've taken parts of those lectures and given them various places. So a few years ago I decided, well, I should put this together in a finished form. So I revised it pretty drastically.

But it's still essentially some of the ideas that I developed then of saying, on the one hand, here's a biography, on the other hand, here's what you can take away from it. And the things I think are really, are really important. Yeah, so that's where the book came from.

You start off the book talking about Edwards and its importance of first of all understanding history and studying history, but one of the things that you take pain to talk about is the fact that it's very difficult with how we in the modern world take our standards of today and then export those back on others time. Why is it so important to see Edwards in his own time?

The first thing you need to do when you're going studying people in another era is to think what did they take for granted and how is that different than things we take for granted? And for instance, we take for granted some sort of principle of equality, that equal opportunity and so forth.

And that's applied in all sorts of different and sometimes contentious ways. But it's an ideal that we all hold to.

Whereas in most of the history of the world, people have simply assumed that human society is hierarchical, there are some people who are in charge and other people who are subordinate and that that was the way God made things. And so someone like Edwards just automatically sees the world as hierarchical.

So that, for instance, in marriages, men should be in charge and women are subordinate and men go to college and get that kind of education. Women can be educated, but not informal ways. So there's some essential well, let's just say should women get educated?

That's something today everyone thinks, of course they should. Whereas for him that was not an obvious. It was rarely a matter of much dispute. I mean, I'm sure some women were disputing, but pretty rarely.

So it's just a different world and you have to take that into account and live with it and not say, well, if this person's wrong about that. I can't listen to someone who had that kind of view of hierarchy.

I mean, the general rule which I mentioned in the book is you can't say, I can't learn from someone who is wrong about X, Y or Z. You know, that might be the greatest thinker on all sorts of other things.

Just because they're wrong on one thing doesn't mean they can't be brilliantly right on something else.

And if the rule was you had to be bright about everything, then no one could learn from us either because we're flawed too and we have our blind spots. And people in other future generations will probably think back 21st century people were sure stupid about this.

So anyways, the idea is you don't dismiss someone just because they're wrong about something or other.

You wrote. And taking that thought into consideration, you wrote this.

In studying the Christian past, I have found Jonathan Edwards especially helpful both in challenging assumptions of our own age and in offering invigorating guidance in my own quest to follow Christ. What are some of the assumptions of our day that Edwards helps us to see?

Yes, well, I developed that as a. One of the central themes in the book. And I get at that by comparing the legacy of Jonathan Edwards to that of Benjamin Franklin.

Benjamin Franklin was born two years after Edwards in New England in a Calvinist family, very similar background. But Benjamin Franklin went in the direction of the Enlightenment of that time of more secular kinds of ideas, of a broader kind of.

He was, he believed there had to be a providence, some sort of God, but not following the Bible particularly. And Franklin became one of the progenitors of the American way of life.

The self made man at that time, person, as we would say, a champion of technology. Yeah, he was a great practical science shaping the American enterprise and shaping the early government and Declaration of Independence.

Franklin helped shape the modern world. And the modern world is our underlying assumptions tend to be essentially the real world is the material world.

And technology increases that kind of sensibility because if we want to solve a problem, there's a technological way to get it done. Look up on your phone or your computer and if you can get through on it, you can figure out.

You can figure out most anything, but it's a technical issue.

And so lots of people have observed we have a very materialistic kind of world, or what Jacques Lu called a technological society, where we tend to think of things in terms of technique. And so we look at people as, how can we use these people to shape our enterprise? And it becomes a matter of calculation.

Edwards, on the other hand, starts with and continues with God as the Creator and the sustainer of reality, that the real world is the world that was created by the creative love of God. And it's essential. God sustains the world. So the heavens declare the glory of God. The universe is God's language.

Creation is not something that simply happened back way back when and then God wound it up and let it go. Creation is an ongoing kind of thing. Your language is something that's continuing. So there's an essential living character to reality.

It's related somehow to. To God's sustaining it. And God is in sometimes very mysterious ways, revealing his love.

And the central revelation is the love of God in Christ, that the goodness of the universe is obscured by suffering. But this is a suffering God. This a God who knows our suffering, knows our. Is acquainted with sorrow and grief.

And that's what you should see in the reality around you. That's your. Should be part of your consciousness. When you look out at the beauty of trees around you, or whatever you see, Edwards saw it as.

These are glimpses of the divine light, of the beauty of God that you can see. You. You cultivate a kind of consciousness of Christ being part of reality.

And, and that, I think, you know, it's a difficult kind of sensibility, but it's a very helpful sensibility to counter the idea that everything's technological, everything, the material world is the real world.

And to think of oneself as in this universe, where God is not just a sort of an abstract principle, not someone who just worked long ago and did, you know, creation and then revealed Christ. But this is an ongoing kind of enterprise. The God is there. And so I find Edwards helpful in trying to cultivate that sensibility.

I know I don't always succeed in that, but that's. That to me, is a wonderful vision to try to have, and it's something that can be renewed from day to day.

You write about creation and you've referred to that, but you also refer to something that I think many Christians have a hard time seeing and understanding. When you talk about the beauty of God and his response to the beauty of God. It was just awaking this idea of transcendence.

Can you tell us a little bit about how he responded when he saw the beauty of God? You actually say that he responded to the beauty of God with singing.

Oh, yeah.

Which I thought was very interesting. I'd never thought of that before.

And then you actually kind of develop a little bit of a case for how they understood worship in the mid 18th century and how they didn't have oftentimes music, but it was very unusual for churches to actually sing harmonies.

Yeah.

So can you describe a little bit to us?

Yeah, well, yeah, I mean, first of all, the.

The basic thing is that Edward saw this response to God and he'd go out in the fields and contemplate God and Christ and look for sort of signs of what he called sign. He kept a notebook of signs of divine things. But then one kind of response would be just to be singing.

Because in classic Christianity, the creation of the world is often represented as like a symphony. The harmonies of God's goodness that can be seen in reality if we have the eyes to see it anyway, so. And Edwards loved singing.

He and his wife sang together. And in New England churches, the singing had been dreadful originally because the Puritans were very strict on the idea of the Bible alone.

If the Bible didn't prescribe something, they didn't think this should happen. So they sang only the psalms and they didn't have musical instruments for the first hundred years of Puritan settlements in New England.

They just had someone which a leader would start the song and then people would just sort of sing away without any tunefulness and apparently is really awful anyway. Edwards was part of a movement to at least introduce four part harmony. They still didn't have musical instruments, but they had four part harmony.

And if you've ever been to a Church of Christ gathering, they don't have musical instruments, but they have wonderful singing with the harmonies that acapella singing can have. Edwards promoted that in his. In his congregation as a way of. Of getting some spiritual intensity into the singing in the worship.

Of course, you know, since then we've. We've run with that sometimes well and sometimes not so well.

But anyway, his music was very important to him because he saw that is a way of seeing the harmonies of goodness, of proper relationship. Proper love is proper relationships and proper music is the right relationship.

He also thought, he observes, that in heaven the music will be way better than anything we can imagine because we're limited by, he said, the gross harmonies or the Harmonies limited to our gross air that there's only a certain number of notes that we can do, whereas if you have an infinite number of notes, you can have infinite kinds of music. It's interesting thought, but it does reflect how music and harmonies is a way of thinking about what are proper love relationships.

How should that work?

I particularly really enjoyed that part. I come from a singing background.

So this idea and being in having been in churches of Christ where they don't have that and, but also seeing some of those services that you said, there's some beautiful four part harmonies, but there's also some disasters. You, you take time to introduce a lot of these contemporaries as you've already alluded to.

You have Benjamin Franklin, who's the really ultimate pragmatist, the ultimate self made man, the inventor.

Then you, you also though bring in Bach, you bring in the musical part that he would have been somewhat, I think, familiar with box music in some way, shape or form. You also bring in George Whitfield. What was your point of bringing in George Whitfield into the conversation?

Whitfield is, he's another self made man, contemporary of younger, contemporary of Edwards and Franklin. And Whitefield is really the inventor of modern evangelicalism that developing a revival conversionist version of Christianity.

He'd preach in any church that would let him preach. If they didn't let him preach, he'd preach out in the fields. And it turned out preaching in the fields was even more popular.

So he'd sometimes have audiences of many thousand people that would gather to hear him preach. But he was the first celebrity evangelist and he was very traditional, orthodox, reformed in his, in his theology.

But his, his methodology invited what's become characteristic of a lot of avengerism, that the star, the, the celebrity, the, the other person who can draw a big crowd tends to, to shape the movement. And not all of them are as orthodox as Whitfield.

So you get eventually a kind of theological, I think anarchy is not too strong a word to say that a lot of good and a lot of mixed up with a lot of other things. But the marvelous thing is 300 years later there's still a recognizable evangelical message that gets through.

The core message survives, but it's a market driven kind of religion.

And the people who, you know, find out how to make churches grow better, how to have more popular music, more popular preaching, more popular promises of what people are going to get out of it, that's all mixed in with the gospel message.

I see Whitefield as a progenitor of that and Then that's in contrast to Edwards, who was very consciously trying to keep the message anchored in the church. And in the best thinking, sort of, as C.S.

lewis would say, the Christian truths that have survived through the ages can be found by looking at the best theologians. So Edwards is. Is seeing the job of the pastor as to be trained well and then to present that well.

And he was all for the revival, but with boundaries. And Whitfield tended to play fast and loose with the boundaries, which was wonderful in some ways.

That American religion, particularly has been very strong at the grassroots, and that's because of the strength of the evangelical tradition, that if you have a popular sort of religion, it can take deep root, but it's also populist in the sense that sometimes it picks up ideas that are very popular but not particularly Christian and weds them to the Christian tradition. So I see Whitefield as progenitor of the characteristic American style of religion.

And I think Edwards is helpful in saying, slow down and let's think about where the real center of this ought to be and not get carried away by popular fans.

How does Edwards act as a clarifier in helping us to really identify the authentic nature of Christianity as we observe what's going on in our. In our culture today?

Yeah, he doesn't answer all the questions. I mean, he's.

But he does address the question that was raised already in, in the Great Awakening when Whitfield did come through, and he was great supporter of Whitefield. But then there are other evangelists who are imitators who were already way off, off the track. And he saw a lot of people, some of.

In his own congregation, who, whom he thought had been converted and then 10 years later obviously hadn't happened. And, you know, but they, you know, they were professing Christians and. And communicate members.

And so he, in the wake of the revivals, he asked, what are the signs of authentic Christianity that we can look for, particularly in ourselves, but also in others? And he writes a book on fetus and religious affections or religious loves. And the signs of true Christianity are. Where are your loves oriented?

And I think of it as if you have this central vision of Christ, the revelation of Christ at the center of reality. That's what creation is, what God created.

And to reveal the love of Christ, then that ought to be a kind of like a planet that holds your other loves, your lesser loves in, or like the sun that holds the planets of your lesser loves in their right ordering of loves, which comes from Augustine. What does it look like If a Christian's loves are rightly ordered. So he starts with love to God and expounds on what that involves.

And then he gets to what are the qualities of a Christian person who's truly loving? And humility. He quotes Augustine and John Calvin saying one of the essential traits of Christianity says humility. Humility, humility.

It's like the builders, location, location, location. Humility, humility, humility.

That should be one of our central traits and one that I found particularly intriguing in light of a lot of discussion today is he emphasizes that the true Christian should have a lamb like, dove like character like Jesus.

And rather than emphasize, he says, because some Christians think that you need to be manly, warlike, but they're really mistaken in sort of translating those kinds of fierce qualities into the Christian character. And what you should be looking for, the Christian character, are childlike characteristics. You have to be like a little child to follow Christ.

And Christ is gentle and mild. And we lose sight of that all too easily. And then Edwards goes on with other trade ends up longest part of his treatise is charity.

Look for acts of charity. What are people doing for other people?

And that's really the best sign how much of your Christianity is self serving and how much is really serving others. And it can be very. The challenging thing to keep thinking about how much of what you're doing is to make yourself secure and comfortable.

And are you really reflecting the love of Christ and sacrificial love of Christ. That's a great challenge and a very difficult kind of thing. But I think that's Edwards is right. That's the kind of thing to look for.

And that's the sort of thing that can give depth to anyone's Christianity. I, I don't have a good idea how to solve the problems of all the problems of the church today, but those are good qualities.

And you mentioned moralistic, therapeutic, deism, deity. Yeah, yeah. A lot of people see Christianity as just sort of therapeutic. What, what do I get out of it?

Edwards is saying it needs to be oriented towards these loves first to love to God and then this rightly ordered secondary loves and get them in the right, right relationships and then, then there'll be beauty in your own, your own Christianity.

And, and I think one goal for any local congregation is to say people are drawn to Christianity often not by particular teachings or by arguments, but they say, boy, look at those people. There's something they're doing that's, that's just right.

And I'd like to be, I'd like to be part of a community like that, that's much more important than, do you teach this doctrine or this particular doctrine, but to develop a community that's known as a loving community. And that's the way people are very often convinced of things. That's the way we. To try to witness you try to be a winsome community.

And I think sometimes that gets lost, particularly in some of the. Both the left and right, political Christianity, you get ideological.

Ideological Christianity rather than, what should I say, relational Christianity. That's biblically grounded. And that's what Edwards. One of the things Edwards, I think, offers a guide to.

He doesn't have all the answers, but it's a good reminder that this is where the core should be, and this is what a Christian and a Christian community should look like.

We talk about Edwards and Edwards is this is kind of an interesting figure to speak to our current historical moment, as you've been serving for many, many decades. You were in your mid-80s, is that right? Mid-80s, mid-80s.

What are the changes that you've seen over time in how we express our evangelical faith that you think Edwards really speaks to?

And for a long time, that, I think was a good definition of an evangelical, someone who likes Billy Graham. Then there were also fundamentalists who were in various ways more conservative and more separatist, who was often suspicious of.

Of Billy Graham was a fundamentalist wing and the evangelical broader wing.

And that distinction has fallen apart to some extent, partly because in the 20th century, people stopped calling themselves fundamentalists ever since 9, 11. And use of it for Islamic, not the best term, but that's what people said. Islamic fundamentalists.

Christian fundamentalists have stopped using the term, so it's a little harder to identify. But it's also what's happened is a lot of the political religion has become intermixed with the.

With various Christian traditions, and churches become identified with where they stand on the political issues in a way that just wasn't nearly as prominent 60 years ago.

That churches, people in churches had largely conservative political views, but they weren't seen as an arm of anybody's politics, either on the left or the right.

And I think that creates a real tension, and that cuts across all the religious traditions that you can find it among Catholics or Protestants or any subgroup of Protestants that you look at there. They're not only divided from other denominations, but they're divided often among themselves.

And often it's the other political divisions that become more important. So I think one thing that Edwards is helpful for is to get away from that and to look for the more perennial Christian virtues.

And that's why in the book I invoke C.S. lewis often to try to get mere Christianity, that Edwards fleshes out some depth in what that means.

But the idea that you're looking for the essence of the Christian tradition and don't get caught up in some sort of sub movement that can look like you're doing the right thing, but then you're actually subverting the essence or alienating a lot of people, you shouldn't be alienating.

As we look forward, what do you see as the biggest challenges for Christianity moving forward in the next 50 or even century?

One thing that I tend to do, and I think a lot of people tend to do, is you think of Christianity in terms of, and particularly evangelicalism in terms of its American manifestations. If you switch your basic orientation to world Christianity, then you have a, a very different picture, one that I'm not especially expert on.

But, but the center of gravity moves away from the Western world, from the former Christendom, to places where Christianity has been growing of all sorts have been growing amazingly. You know, that's what's happened in the last 70 years. That's what's happened.

One of the big challenges is to say, how does Christianity in the Western world relate to Christianity and the non Western world, majority world? Yeah.

And I know you do a lot of thinking about that, and you probably know more about that than I do, but that seems to me to be a source of strength to say this is not a.

You look at the American situation, say church memberships declining and the like, but if you look at the world Christianity, it's overall, it's going up, it's flourishing. So how do we relate to that and what should that teach us? And that's for the next generation of historians to figure out. Beyond my pay grade.

What role do you see Western Christianity playing, if any, as Christianity continues to move forward and it continues to expand around the world?

Western Christianity has very rich resources to draw on from the grand Christian tradition. And so you need school, you need, like, theological education.

And I think that can be, you know, the west can, can help that in, in that, because they have a long tradition of that. And I know, I mean, in, in Edward Studies, the Yale center for Jonathan Edwards center puts all the works of Jonathan Edwards online.

And they have a, there are Jonathan Edwards centers around the world. There's a dozen centers, I think. And, and they get all sorts of hit on, you know, people looking, you know, using Edwards around the world.

And, and so that's, and it's taking, and that's probably true of lots of other great theologians. The west does have that to offer as part of what the universal church should be like and to keep it from being simply wildfire kind of growth.

You've also, as we've talked a lot about Edwards, but you've also alluded to CS Lewis playing a role in how the Christian faith is, I mean, moving forward in this mere Christian idea. What do you think Lewis has to say to us at this cultural moment?

Well, I think that the advantage of Lewis is because it's mere Christianity. It can appeal to people in almost any Christian tradition. And that's why Lewis's works have been so influential.

And I think Lewis can bring us together.

Well, like I have friends who work in Christian study centers at universities to say we represent mere Christianity, that's going to be a opening to bring people together rather than to divide them.

Where if you say we stand for the legitimate Reformed super Baptist Methodist group, then people don't know what you divide if you get too much into the particulars of your own little insights into things. So mere Christianity seems to me a real goal to work on cultivating and to say those people differ from us in some ways.

But on the basics of mere Christianity, we can, we can join with them and work with them. And, and I think that, you know, outsiders will find that more attractive as well.

What's a, what's a good water bottle for our people as we wrap up our time together today? What's a good water bottle for our, our audience, our listeners out there for them to sip on, to be spiritually nourished by this week?

Well, to get back to the core of Edwards, that the idea that the very reason God created the universe is to reveal the love of Christ, and I've put it as the universe is a product of the big bang of God's love, if you think of that as at the center of all reality and in some way radiating in reality, and even though it's obscured by sin and darkness and all sorts of other things, that for whatever reasons, God has permitted, nonetheless the revelation of Christ who suffered to share our pains and to forgive our sins and bring salvation. That's what reality is, is about. And that, that can be found in reality. You can see it.

If you step outside and look at the beauty around you, you can have that, you can cultivate that sensibility.

And this sensibility of seeing the beauty of the love of another person, that puts it in terms of when you see a, a beautiful person and you fall in love, you can't help it. And, and if you get a glimpse of the love of God, the beauty of God, you can't help it.

That, that, that's, you know, that's a way of explaining the sovereignty of God, how God's sovereignty relates to my free will. When you fall in love, it's all you. But you can't help it and appreciate the love of another person, that you respond to the love of another person.

That's what Christianity is essentially about. It's a personal kind of thing. We have a personal universe rather than an impersonal universe.

That is a marvelous thought to end our time on today. I want to thank you for writing the book and all of the books that you've written.

They have been such a treasure for Christians for the last decades that are going to nourish many for years to come. I want to thank you specifically for writing this book on Edwards for us today. And I also want to thank you for coming on. Apollo's watered.

Okay, my pleasure. And it's been fun. Thank you.

So many wise words. Both Edwards and Lewis, though dead, still speak to us today to help us see things clearly.

It is hard to see through the headlines to get our footing when there is some new scandal, trend or headline that takes up what little brain space we have left. Nevertheless, I am grateful for the clarity that men such as Marsden bring as they bring us Jonathan Edwards and C.S. lewis.

It reminds me that there is something.

More tangible than the crisis of the moment.

That God is sovereign over our time, that he's great and that he seeks a loving relationship with us so beyond what we see promoted by so many of our theologically allergic churches of today to be God centered, God saturated, enthralled by his love and then overflowing in love. To make that love known to others is just what our world needs.

I would encourage you to to check out Marsden's book An Infinite Fountain of Light or simply go to any of Edwards works because they provide a rich fountain for you to drink from. They're not easy reads, but they are God saturated reads. That's it. For today's conversation.

Be sure to connect with us on Facebook, Instagram or YouTube and get ready for next week's episode as I chat with Michael Graham, author of the Great Dechurching. It's going to be a conversation that you do not want to miss. I want to thank our Apollos Watered team for watering the world.

This is Travis Michael Fleming signing off from Apollo's Watered. Stay watered, everybody.