I don't even think about that.

Yeah, I mean, I think in one part, it's just an interesting kind of sense of our imaginary.

And what I mean is if you sat next to someone at a Twins game, Derek, of course your first presumption is just, this is just a regular dude.

Probably works at a corporate target or something like that, sells insurance or whatever.

But you might get clues that there's something or there's something there.

But more than likely, you would be...

I think I would be is if the clues were something cosmic, I would be, I would, I would think they're crazy, right? Like I would, I would, I would, I would disconnect from that.

That's a really interesting thing to think about that God has to also work within the confines of the imminent frame in that sense.

[gentle music]

[laughs] Yeah.

Well, I mean, a, a, a few things that rush to mind.

I mean, it, it's interesting that you kinda frame it, and I think others do, and there's, there's all sorts of stuff, you know, written and more and more being written around here, uh, ar- around the sense of, like, creating God, which in some ways shows, like, incredible philosophical slippage.

You know what I mean? Like, um, from just a kind of philosophical perspective to talk about what is God is like w- w- what, what is not created, the, the creator as opposed to the creation.

So to even like-- You've already fallen into big problems when you're saying, "Can we create God?" Like philosophically.

So you know, like that, that's interesting.

... to hear it articulated that way.

Moltmann is like, you know, you could read that in an afternoon no problem.

[laughs] Well, there you go.

So you could only take so much.

But Loader is really hard but really fascinating, and he's-- a lot of ministers, pastors, practical theologians don't read him because he's so hard, but he's really quite...

If you can get through the, the kind of difficulties, it's really, it is incredibly formative 'cause it's very unique.

And what he's doing in "The Logic of the Spirit" is he's trying to think about what it, w- what we've tended to think about as, like, human development, what it means to move in-- Well, let's, let's just put this kind of in the parlance of, of our time and say, like, what does it mean to grow up? And he's trying to think, like, how does the human spirit, how does the human spirit kinda move across its lifetime, um, in search for the Holy Spirit? And what really changes the human spirit? So he kinda, like, goes from infants through, like, preschoolers to, uh, uh, what he calls school-age kids, you know, like elementary-age kids, to adolescents, to, you know, uh, adults, to elderly people, looking at this kinda dynamic of how the human spirit works.

So there's a lot of social science, there's a lot of kinda conversations with Freud in it and things like that 'cause that was kind of, you know, the, the milieu in which he, he came of age.

I do, yeah.

And so basically, you don't have any sense of like a private and a personal self that we talked about before and yeah you just kind of have to develop this callus in order to like keep functioning and keep the stabilization going I think is what it really is when you boil it down to it but

Yeah, I mean, it's an interesting question of like, especially within, you know, both of us living around a kind of Lutheranism and at least are in some kind of dialogue with kind of Lutheran sources and stuff.

If we think of Luther in the kind of drives of the pastor, there is something about Luther.

the centrality of Anfaktum, of this sense of like, there's an admitting that you're going to get hurt, that you are going to have angstiness.

I mean, you can hear the echoes of this in Bonhoeffer in Life Together, where he's like, if you want To be in a church that never has the pains of discord, you definitely don't want community.

Because community is a messy thing.

And it is these people that you love are going to let you down.

It's like, as pastors, yes, we are a helping profession, but is there a goal associated with the ministry that we do beyond just being in a community of believers together? I think that's an interesting question, and I'd be really interested to hear what you have to think about that.

Andy, why is this the issue?

[gentle music] All right.

Fir- so first thing to say is, uh, this is, this is a quote that comes from "Logic of the Spirit." So if people have not read "The Logic of the Spirit" by Jim Loder, it's, it's totally worth reading.

And I don't know, Derek, maybe we can do this on the podcast, but, uh, a, a retired pastor named Rick, I was at an event with him, and he-- it was this, uh, like this pa- West Coast pastors event, and, uh, it's been going on since, I don't know, late '60s, early '70s.

And so they had listed every name that had given the lectures there, um, and I had the privilege of giving them in, I guess that, yeah, this year, so 2016.

Um, or 2016.

We'll have to edit that out.

You won't find the Left Behind books in our church library, right?

And modern consumer capitalism and our drive for ever increasing economic strength, not through cults, but through capital and markets.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, it is fascinating, you know, if you're down on Wall Street and you just see all these tourists taking selfies and pictures with this, you know, this raging bull that's right there.

And yeah, it just takes a little bit of reading of the, you know, the ancient Near East and the biblical text to be like, oh, my gosh, there's a there's a parallel here for for sure.

But I think one of the big the big moves for us or what As late moderns and as secular people, which is a very complicated word in itself, but I think one of the things that occurs for us is we disconnect our escalation, the stabilization of our society.

It gets disconnected from cultic practice.

Talk about why is late capitalism and the decline of the growth of the American economy since the 1970s, or at least the slowdown of its growth, why does that trigger a different approach to church in your mind?

If the growth stabilizer one and seeing more people show up at our services isn't the one that we should necessarily be putting first or second or even third.

Yeah.

Well, there's two answers to this, both probably unsatisfying.

So let's just get that out.

I'm sure I'll disappoint here.

But really the push here, and this is like Isaiah Berlin said, there are two kind of thinkers in the world.

There's foxes and there's hedgehogs, and the fox knows many things, and the hedgehog knows just one big thing.

How do you process that out for yourself?