Please note that due to the software used, not everything in this transcript will be accurate.

Deep Learning

John Dickson – Studio:

How does one learn? It’s a question we ask ourselves a lot at Undeceptions. Learning is the key to being undeceived, to letting the truth out. But in education circles, there are different approaches to learning. There are cognitive and constructivist theories, behaviourist approaches, social learning theories, and neurological and biological studies – just to name a few. But let’s zero in for a moment on what’s called the Zone of Proximal Development. In the 1930s, a soviet psychologist named Lev Vygotsky suggested that true learning occurs when students are supported by a ‘more knowledgeable other’. The Zone of Proximal Development – or ZPD for short – is the distance between what someone can and can’t do on their own. The ZPD is the sweet spot for learning. Picture this… Picture a child trying to solve a puzzle. If the child solves the puzzle without any trouble, no learning occurs. However, if the child can’t make any progress, even with hints, then the only thing likely to occur is frustration. But what happens when you introduce a ‘more knowledgeable other’ like a teacher, or another child who’s tackled this sort of problem before? Studies show that with that bit of prompting or modelling the original child is much more likely to experience true learning. In 1976, Wood, Bruner and Ross carried out the famous ‘scaffolding study’ where teachers were helping young children build pyramids out of blocks. Tutors adjusted their support depending on each child’s level of competence. Help was slowly reduced as the kids gained skill. The teachers’ experience provided the ‘scaffold’ to support the students’ learning. A lot of Undeceptions is about interacting with those ‘More Knowledgeable Others’ to help us – including me – to fill in that ‘Zone of Proximal Development’. In this episode, though, you might be surprised who our ‘more knowledgeable others’ are. We have an expert guest, of course. That’s one ‘more knowledgeable other’. But my guest suggests there are plenty of others who can provide the scaffold to all sorts of learning. If you’re someone like me, who often frets there are just too many things I don’t know and wish I could shrink my ignorance gaps, then this episode may just provide some signposts and supplies for the journey. I’m John Dickson and this is Undeceptions.

Undeceptions theme

John Dickson – Studio:

My guest today begins the book he’s written with a quote from Alvin Toffler, author of Future Shock. “The illiterate of the twenty-­first century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” Learning is at the centre of what my guest has to say. The reverend doctor AJ Swoboda is the associate professor of Bible and Theology at Bushnell University in Oregon. He’s taught at a range of institutions from the London School of Theology to Southeastern University, and he’s the author of 13 books, including After Doubt, and A Glorious Dark (Finding hope in the tension between belief and experience). In his latest book, A Teachable Spirit, AJ’s premise is that, in a world characterised by distraction and endless content, it’s essential to know how to learn, and who to learn from. Teachability, AJ says, is the foundation of wisdom.

John Dickson:
Cool. Hey, aj. Um, what is teachability as you are using it?

AJ Swoboda:
Whew. Well let’s jump into it. Um, yeah, well, um, there’s, I think there’s two answers to that. One is, um, probably a very. Personal, uh, one that, uh, has a little history in my life and one is, uh, a, a longer theological one on the personal side. For a growing leader is a leader who can be taught, um, a leader who has the ability to, uh, be corrected, to repent, um, to recognize that they’ve been wrong. So on a personal level, I would say teachability is, are those rare moments in my life when I choose to put my pride and arrogance and ego to the side and I let the spirit of God say things to me that maybe I don’t wanna hear. Um, on an academic, more theological side. I did a deep dive, uh, as I was reading this book. I was writing, uh, a teachable spirit on the history of that word teachability, and, uh, found that it’s, it’s actually very rarely used in the literature. And the earliest, uh, find that I could, I could uncover of the use of the word teachability, goes back to a sermon John Calvin gave on Deuteronomy chapter 10, uh, which is a sermon in which Moses goes up the mountain and God tells Moses to bring with him. Uh, some tablets that have no writing on them. And, uh, Calvin loved the sermon and he said that when, when, when, when Moses brought these tablets up to the top of the mountain, God wrote on them and he, and he preached the whole sermon on how a part of being a Christian is. Yes, what God writes. But part of it is you bringing the tablets of the mountain that God could write on. And it’s, and it’s this idea that in order for God to teach us something, in order for us to be teachable people. We actually have to bring something to be formed, to be shaped.

Media – The Ten Commandments

John Dickson – Studio:

That’s Moses receiving the tablets of the law from a pyrotechnical God in Cecil B. DeMille’s 1956 epic, The Ten Commandments. And epic is right – it’s a mind-numbing 220 minutes, which rested very much on a more Christian culture’s preparedness to sit through anything. Charlton Heston plays Moses, the most humble man who ever lived, according to Numbers 12. Charlton Heston is anything but – he’s more grumpy, serious Moses. But AJ says that humility is essential to the process of learning, but it’s something that Western culture has a particular struggle with.

John Dickson:
So, but what about, um, beyond? The sort of the Christian realm, um, you know, is being teachable beyond being teachable simply a Christian virtue, or, or is there something for my listeners who, you know, don’t, um, aren’t unsure? What to make of Christianity is teachability, you know, something they should be aiming for?

AJ Swoboda:
I would hope John, every human would be teachable on some level. Uh, I would say that that is, Lord willing. Part of the human story is that every human being, you know, theologians talk about what, what we call the noetic effects of sin, which is that sin, uh,  has the ability to make us, uh, self-centered, arrogant, um,  you know, hardhearted hard minded.

John Dickson:
Are there barriers to teachability that are peculiar to our Western moment? You know. I, I’m thinking of, you know, the proliferation of information, the culture wars Yeah. Et cetera. But don’t let me fill in the blanks. What do you reckon?

AJ Swoboda:
I had a friend  recently tell me, you know, as an American, by the way, I’m an American, if you can’t tell from the beautiful, uh, the beautiful beard and, and, and, and American, I guess American accent, although you sound, you never call it an accent when it’s just, it’s, you sound like yourself.  But, um, I had a friend tell me, you know, Americans struggle to say three things. Um, there are three, uh, phrases that Americans don’t know how to say. We don’t know how to say. I’m sorry. I don’t know how to say. We don’t know how to say, uh, we don’t know and we don’t know how to say, uh, Worchester sauce. Um, and that third one’s real hard. Most Americans – I can never say it

John Dickson:
Worcester.

AJ Swoboda:
Literally I can’t say it.

John Dickson:
But once you’ve tasted it,

AJ Swoboda:
Yeah. You never forget it. Do you? There is something about Western culture that privileges and prioritizes arrogance. We love being, you’ll see this, uh, in, uh, in origin stories of famous companies like Apple or, um, you know, companies that started in a garage. We deify the self-made prodigy who didn’t – they were self-taught. They didn’t need anybody to teach ’em. They were self-taught. This is why the internet is so dangerous for narcissists because it gives us all the information we want, but we never have to tell people where we got it.

John Dickson:
Yeah.

AJ Swoboda:
So we, it’s like the worst engine for narcissism because we make it look like we know what we’re talking about. When in reality, I just listened to a podcast yesterday, and I’m just telling you everything I heard in that podcast. I think the point is there is something in Western culture that prioritizes arrogance and a lack of humility. 

John Dickson – Studio:

A key to learning is humility. The logic is simple: people who imagine that they know most of what is important to know are hermetically sealed from learning new things and receiving constructive criticism. I see this at conferences all the time. Every conference seems to have a Proud Peter. He’s the guy in your organization who is moderately talented and charming but whose years of experience have created an inflexibility when it comes to learning from others or implementing changes. His natural wit is able to point out the smallest difficulty with a new idea, and so he quickly convinces himself and sometimes others that the old way—his way—is probably best. Perhaps it’s just my imagination, but I think I can often spot the Proud Peters when I address various audiences. He typically sits up the back with arms folded or behind his head, and throughout the talk he offers quips to his buddies, who politely smile. He never takes notes—that would be too keen—but he is frequently the first to raise a hand during the Q&A. I imagine he resists adopting any fresh insights. He is closed to new thoughts (that aren’t his own) and rarely submits himself to review or criticism. His pride impedes his progress. “Arrogant managers,” writes J. P. Kotter of the Harvard Business School, “can overevaluate their current performance and competitive position, listen poorly, and learn slowly.” If my account sounds uncannily accurate, it’s because “proud Peter” is my unfortunate natural tendency. I frequently catch myself at conferences—when I’m not the speaker—thinking of quips and devising critiques. I also sit up the back! Then there is Humble Heather. She is no less competent than Peter, and no less self-confident. But she has a keen awareness that what she doesn’t know and can’t do far exceeds what she does know and can do. She has an attractive mix of steely will and intellectual gentleness. She is not as popular as Peter, but she has more friends. People trust her, respect her and open up to her. And because she doesn’t come off as intimidating, colleagues feel free to question her. Over the years she has learnt never to resent this. Some of her best ideas came in a flash of insight after someone queried the wisdom of her first suggestion. At conferences Heather sits neither up the back nor at the front. She’s happy to go wherever her friends are. She takes notes. Heather follows the lecture so intently that the speaker–that’s me–uses her as a gauge of how well the material is going over. She smiles, frowns, concentrates and laughs. She whispers to those around her but only, I imagine, to confirm what’s just been said with some anecdote from her own experience. She is just as likely as Peter to ask a public question, but her tone is different. She might look for clarification about something she didn’t understand or just wonder out loud how the material applies to her specific situation. Her motivation is to arrive at the truth, and she usually gets there. Her humility often leads to new knowledge and methods. In his book Leading Change John P. Kotter explains how he tracked the careers of 115 of his former students from Harvard Business School. He tells the story of a Marcel, whom Kotter never really expected to show great leadership potential but who emerged as head of his own company and became very wealthy. At first Kotter wondered if the key was some “lucky break” that catapulted Marcel beyond his station. After discussion and reflection he ended up attributing Marcel’s success to the way he gave humble attention to the difficulties and mistakes he endured through the years. “He reflected on good times and bad,” writes Kotter, “and tried to learn from both. Confronting his mistakes, he minimized the arrogant attitudes that often accompany success. With a relatively humble view of himself, he watched more closely and listened more carefully than did most others.” Humility generates learning and growth. So, does that mean holding to a dogma, as the church is famous for doing, is an impediment for learning? I think it can be. So, I asked AJ, whether there is something inherently unhumble – and therefore a block to learning – in religious faith. 

John Dickson:
Now some might be listening to you and think actually dogma, like the whole idea of dogma, church dogma is a barrier  to learning because, you know, and they would point to the church being slow to learn all sorts of things and being anti-education and so on. Do, do you think there’s anything to that?

AJ Swoboda:
No. And we have conflated, we have conflated arrogance with dogmatism. Uh, dogmatism is a gift. Um, I want to be dogmatic and, and what I mean by that is. I, I want to be the kind of person that knows the difference between things that I, I’m open, open-handed about, and things that I’m non-negotiable about. I’m not, I am not open-minded about Jesus being the only way to God. I am not open-minded about whether scripture is inspired. I’m not open-minded about whether there’s a heaven and hell. I mean, I’m, I’m close-minded on these things, but when you talk about the nature of angels and Nephilim and what UFOs are. I hold that a little bit more open handedly. And you know what? It’s only because I know the difference between dogma and opinion that I can actually hold that other stuff open handedly because if I don’t know what dogma is, I’m gonna make everything a dogma to actually hold to dogma means there are some things that are non-negotiable to me. I will die on a hill for, but, but there are other things. I am wildly open handed about, there was a study, you’ve probably heard this study, John, so forgive me for repeating something you may have heard, uh, or your listener. But there was this, a really famous study that was done a number of years ago, uh, that studied, uh, fences around, uh, playgrounds.

John Dickson – Studio

The study AJ’s talking about was conducted by Peter Summerlin, an associate of the American Society of Landscape Architects. Summerlin was interested in whether physical environments could be designed to promote the early development of children. He arranged for teachers to take classes of pre-school children to local playgrounds, some with fences and others with no barriers at all. In the unbounded playgrounds, children tended to be more cautious and huddled around the teacher. In fenced environments, though, children tended to be more comfortable and given to exploring their environment.

A.J. Swoboda:
And this, it was a, it was a really interesting study. I think it was the University of Chicago. I can’t remember where it was, but it was this, the study about When there’s a playground at a school and there’s no boundaries. There’s no fence. The kids will play in the center. They won’t go out. They’ll play in the center and stick to the center. But if there’s a fence, then the kids will fill in the entire space. And I actually think that dogma, theological boundaries gives us the ability to be creative. It gives us freedom to actually disagree on things that aren’t as important because we agree on the central things. So no. Dogmatism and arrogance are not the same thing.

John Dickson:
Yeah. I mean, everyone listening, whether they believe or not should, should hope that a Christian was dogmatic about every human being being made in the image of God, about, uh, sacrificial love being the center of ethics. We, I imagine if we were all dogmatic about those things.

AJ Swoboda:
Yep.  Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, but, but, but of course you know this, um, the problem is that the church often has bad pr. So the people who who are arrogant get the microphone. Don’t, don’t steward those dogma positions with humility and kindness and grace. You know, I people in the last few years have been really mean to Tim Keller.

John Dickson – Studio:

For our new listeners, Tim Keller was a brilliant American pastor and theologian who founded Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan and wrote several New York Times best-sellers. Sadly, he died of pancreatic cancer in 2023. He was the public preacher I have admired most in the last 20 years. (Apart from all the dead ones—Cyprian, Lactantius, Augustine, Alcuin of York, and so on!) If you want to sample some of his wisdom, go to episode 63 of Undeceptions, ‘With Keller’—it was a great privilege to interview him before he died. Anyway, back to AJ…

A.J. Swoboda:
There’s been this kind of sort of throw like trash Tim Keller season. I don’t know why, but I’ll tell you what. Talk about a man who held faithfully the truths of the faith in a very hostile culture, and did it winsomely kindly, generously. There is a way to do this, and what stinks about it is often the church starts throwing rocks at you for being that way too. It’s so weird that Winsomeness has been weaponized as the problem. If, if we can’t find a way to be humble about the things we’re dogmatic about, um, we have no witness in our world today.

Media – Veritas Forum lecture

John Dickson – Studio:

A great question! That’s Professor Elaine Howard Eckland, a sociologist from Rice University, courtesy of the Veritas Forum. She’s speaking on not just the compatibility of faith and science, but why faith and science actually need each other. Her point is that this need is often overlooked because of the fear of what we might lose if we allowed faith and science to work together … a fear that is as much present in religious communities as it is in scientific ones. We’ll put a link to her full talk in the show notes, but that sort of fear has on occasion resulted in a white-hot anger in Christian circles towards ‘secular’ knowledge that seems to contradict Biblical teaching. As a result, there’s a sort of anti-intellectualism that has stained American Evangelicalism now for almost a century: when experts seem to disagree with the Bible, we should distrust the experts. Or, as the 20th century American evangelist Billy Sunday is credited with saying, “When the Word of God says one thing and scholarship says another, scholarship can go to hell!”

John Dickson:
Yeah, sticking with the church, um, some would say that evangelicalism and in particular US evangelicalism, uh, has been anti-intellectual and therefore, you know, unteachable in a, in a, in a, in another way. Uh, would you agree? Is it getting better? I’m thinking of the famous Mark Noll, uh, thesis.

John Dickson – Studio:

Just to interrupt myself… Dr Mark Noll is a specialist in the history of Christianity who’s a research professor of history at Regent College – we interviewed him for The First Hymn! One of his most famous works is a book called The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. In it, he explores a disconnect between faith and reason brought on by a failure in the evangelical community to engage intellectually. That includes a neglect of intellectual pursuits, a focus on personal experience over theological depth, and a tendency to prioritise cultural relevance over sound doctrine. Noll writes, “The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.” Ouch! 

AJ Swoboda:
Yep. It was so interesting when I did, you know, in, in America, uh, we, we get into fights about everything. Uh, we just have found a way to create cottage industries of, of fights about everything in the, in the world. And then we create communities over our, um. The little tiny things that we agree about or disagree about, and, um, grievance becomes the glue of our culture. It’s what holds everything together. Because if we can grieve about certain things and find grievance, then we can find, create a community about it. When I was doing my PhD at the University of Birmingham in Britain. I was writing on how Christians think about the environment and, and I was writing specifically about theological perspectives, biblical theological perspectives on caring for creation. I’m a deep believer that God’s people are called to care for God’s garden. It’s good. It’s God’s garden, it’s not ours, and we don’t get to treat it like it’s our garden. It’s his. Um, and it was so interesting in being just over the pond, as it were, being in Britain is in America. When you talk about creation. The immediate conversation is about how old the earth is, which I think is a very important conversation. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a very important conversation that we should get into good con, get, get into it. A, a good debate about, but what I found was that the topic of creation was so politicized that we couldn’t talk about it because it  became a political conversation. Whereas in Britain, there is no debate over whether we should care for creation or not. It’s not even a conversation, it’s like. It’s baked into the system. I don’t know. And that the difference between those two to me just illustrates one of the sicknesses of American evangelicalism is that we take issues that scripture speaks blatantly, clearly about, blatantly about, and addresses it head on. This is God’s garden, and we treat it as God’s garden, and by the way, the gardener is going to come back and judge us based on how we treated the garden. We take an issue like that and then all of a sudden put it into the political realm. And now we can’t have any conversations about it because we’ve made it into who’s right and who’s wrong. The Christian cares more about truth than they do about being right. And I think the American spirit is, we’re more interested in being right than the truth. And I say that as an American, I love my country and I’m grateful to God for this, this nation. Uh, but there is something baked into the culture here  that is very dangerous to the human soul.

John Dickson – Studio:

So, how do we avoid the pitfalls and become teachable people? Well, the answer is the same for sceptics as it is for people of faith. We have to develop a preparedness – a humility – to learn from others. That scaffolding thing again. And there are some neglected teachers AJ wants us to learn from. Some of them, we won’t even like! Stay with us.

Media – Stranger Danger school film

John Dickson – Studio:

Man, that’s creepy!! You should see the footage. Maybe we’ll put a link in the shownotes. It’s from a 1963 educational school film titled, ‘Say No To Strangers.’ You’ll be weirded out by the man in the bow tie who tries to give Wendy and Jamie a puppy. It served a serious purpose, I suppose. Children have to learn to be safe around people they don’t know. But should we carry the stranger-danger vibe into all areas of adulthood? AJ reckons this has given rise to an unhealthy culture of mistrust towards the ‘other’. The fact is: strangers have lots to teach us.

John Dickson:
Yeah. Often our, uh, best qualities are our worst qualities viewed from another angle, you know? Um, turning to the, um, specific content of your book, you, you, you talk about, um, learning from strangers. Um, what, what’s the special value of learning from a stranger?

AJ Swoboda:
There was a book, I read it a number of years ago, that that was, that was about the topic of what the internet has done to our learning. And, and the, this particular, uh, author, um, was talking about how we can now find whatever we’re looking for immediately. So like, if I wanna find any information about anything, I can find it immediately now go back 30 years. Um, I couldn’t, I couldn’t search Google for who the president of the United States was, you know, in 1850. I couldn’t Google who the shortstop WA  of New York. The New York Mets was in 1955. I had to do research. I had to go read books. I had to go to the library. And when you read, you know about something you’re trying to find. All of a sudden you have to, you write, you have to read a whole book. You order to find the information you’re looking for, and along the way you end up learning all this stuff. You are not looking for. Okay. Uh, Alan Jacobs, uh, Baylor University, he calls that serendipitous knowledge. And serendipitous knowledge is the, it’s, it’s the law. It’s the knowledge that you get that you weren’t looking for. Here’s what strangers do. Time and time and time again. I have found that in conversations with strangers, there’s people I don’t know, uh, people on the bus, people, you know, on the street that I’m talking to. Students of mine that I don’t know is that they don’t have the assumptions that I have. They don’t come with the same beliefs I have. They don’t come with the same worldview that I have, and they say things that I’m not looking for. I am confronted by somebody who does not share at all my life and that serendipity, that’s serendipitous knowledge. How many times does God, I mean, Jesus in the Emmaus Road story appears as a stranger to the disciple. Disciples, right? They, they welcome him, him in and realize this stranger, ah, is God. But it’s by welcoming the stranger that the revelation is possible. I, I think there’s something to be said about that, that Christ loves to use surprising sources to confront us in our, our bubbles. ’cause we all live in bubbles. We can now create bubbles for ourselves, but strangers do not say, they don’t think what I want them to say. And think this does not mean that every stranger is right, nor does it mean that every stranger is safe. You gotta be discerning. But reading, listening to talking to people you don’t know may end up actually popping that bubble, um, that, and help you to see things in a perspective you never could have imagined before. I think strangers are awesome. They’re terrifying, and I’m an introvert. Um, and I’d prefer to live in a room and read Karl Barth all day. But at the end of the day, strangers help me.

Media – The Lord of the Rings

John Dickson – Studio:

That’s Legolas and Gimli walking ‘The Paths of the Dead’ in a scene from The Return of the King. Its sense of horror is based on successfully evoking a very common feeling in cinema-goers. In the West, we often have an aversion to walking the paths of the dead—thinking or talking about death. And we seem to have a bias against listening to the dead, too. They’re in the past. What could they teach us. We’re the age of the iPhone and AI. We’re the pinnacle. The dead are behind us … beneath us. But that wasn’t the case in the early church … something I experienced first hand when I visited the Catacombs of Priscilla during the filming of the Centre for Public Christianity’s ‘For the Love of God’.

Media – For the Love of God

John Dickson – Studio:

One of the history tours I run through Greece and Rome includes an hour or so in the catacombs of Saint Sebastian. It’s one of those second-third century places where Christians provided Romans a place to bury their dead in a world where you could just as easily end up on a rubbish heap or the river as in a grave. And these underground ‘paths of the dead’ were where Christians worshipped and prayed and reflected – They maintained bonds with the dead. After all, according to Christian thought, we’ll be reunited with the dead in the resurrection. The dead are our friends. The dead can be our teachers. 

John Dickson:
Uh, you also say that we should be learning from the dead. I m ean, that’s a particular kind of stranger, I guess. Uh, this, this is hard for moderns, isn’t it? Because we, we’ve got this idea of, um, the progression of knowledge. So learning from someone you know, who’s been dead a hundred years is sort of difficult to see the wisdom of it, but you make the case. So I’m giving you the opportunity to make the case for learning from the dead.

 AJ Swoboda:
Yeah, well, um, you know, there’s a, a Roman Catholic scholar named SLA Pelican who once famously said that, uh, that tradition, uh, is the living faith of the dead, and traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. And his point is that actually tradition is a gift to the church. Um, listening to what the church has thought and taught and believed for 2000 years makes you a really wise person. I also would say as a Protestant tradition in the church has sometimes been wrong. Uh, we follow scripture above tradition, and we would say scripture is the final say, but tradition provides so much wisdom and insight in life. One of the problems I’m seeing, um, John, in my world is that for most evangelicals, most Protestants, um, we understand sainthood in a very different way than our Roman Catholic brothers and sisters would. Uh, saints are not dead. People who have done a couple miracles, who have been tested and tried saints. In our circle too often are people that have sold the most books and have the biggest churches. And the problem with our, our modern evangelical view of sainthood is that when we attach our faith to somebody whose story is not complete yet, we end up putting ourselves in damage of, uh, strapping ourselves to things that could. I think this is why we’re seeing a lot of people, uh, deconstruct their faith because they’ve strapped their faith more to their youth pastor than they do St. Athanasius in the fourth century. And my point is I think that we should strap our faith not just to the living, but to the history of the church.

John Dickson – Studio:

Athanasius of Alexandria, a bit of a hero from the 4th century, led the charge in the battle against Arianism – the idea that Jesus was a created being who was only like God, and not of the same substance. Friend of the pod, C.S. Lewis wrote an introduction to Athanasius’ work, On The Incarnation that not only emphasised the importance of learning from the dead, it provided some helpful hints too! I love this advice … 

Reading

There is a strange idea abroad that in every subject the ancient books should be read only by the professionals, and that the amateur should content himself with the modern books. Thus I have found as a tutor in English Literature that if the average student wants to find out something about Platonism, the very last thing he thinks of doing is to take a translation of Plato off the library shelf and read the Symposium. He would rather read some dreary modern book ten times as long, all about “isms” and influences and only once in twelve pages telling him what Plato actually said. The error is rather an amiable one, for it springs from humility. The student is half afraid to meet one of the great philosophers face to face. He feels himself inadequate and thinks he will not understand him. But if he only knew, the great man, just because of his greatness, is much more intelligible than his modern commentator. 

…

Naturally, since I myself am a writer, I do not wish the ordinary reader to read no modern books. But if he must read only the new or only the old, I would advise him to read the old. And I would give him this advice precisely because he is an amateur and therefore much less protected than the expert against the dangers of an exclusive contemporary diet. A new book is still on its trial and the amateur is not in a position to judge it. It has to be tested against the great body of Christian thought down the ages, and all its hidden implications (often unsuspected by the author himself) have to be brought to light. Often it cannot be fully understood without the knowledge of a good many other modern books. If you join at eleven o’clock a conversation which began at eight you will often not see the real bearing of what is said. 

…

It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between. If that is too much for you, you should at least read one old one to every three new ones. – CS Lewis, Introduction to On The Incarnation

A.J. Swoboda:
God’s people for 2000 years, the dead, have a ton of things to teach us. CS Lewis’s wisdom, in his introduction to Athanasius’s writings, CS Lewis says that for every new book you read, you should read two, three books by dead people. And I think that’s a good piece of wisdom because we are, um.  We are naively committed to new things being truer and better. It’s called presentism recency bias. Uh, Lewis called it chronological snobbery. We think that because it’s new, it’s right. Um, well, friends, you don’t have to work very hard to figure out that just because it’s new does not make it right in any way, shape or form. So we need a broader context for understanding truth other than just the living.

John Dickson:
Hmm. And that doesn’t just apply to the church, right? Um, society tends to reject tradition as well, but could learn from its own secular traditions. Do you agree?

AJ Swoboda:
Yeah, that’s a great question. Yeah. I mean, in a way I’m, I’m obviously uniquely interested, um, and focused on, on developing kind of a Christian understanding of, of, of learning from the dead. But, but in general, in general, western culture has been almost uncritically. It has uncritically believed the idea that if it, if it is, I mean even Google, when you Google something, it will give you the most, the latest results at the very top. It’s assuming the newest stuff is always right, and that’s a weird assumption. I mean, just one. I would say for a secular person or a Christian, we should ask ourselves the the question, why do we assume? That Now there would be o some who would say the opposite, that if, if it’s old, it’s true. And I think we could both agree, John. Uh, that’s an equally unhealthy perspective towards truth. Uh, when Jesus says, I’m the way, the truth and the life, he’s making a very important claim about who he is. And, um, he sees himself as truth. He is truth as a person. And so, um, truth is not exclusive to its moment in history. It’s eternal. It stands outside of time. And, um, sometimes the old, sometimes the new, uh, get a good perspective on it.

John Dickson – Studio:

Another great ‘old’ mind worth paying attention to on this subject is the essayist and novelist Gilbert Keith – GK – Chesterton. We’ve absolutely got to do an episode on GK Chesterton – got that one down, Producer Kaley? Anyway, Chesterton wrote that paying close attention to tradition — the democracy of the dead, he called it —  was a way of expanding our limited cognitive horizons. Take it away GK!

Reading

There is one thing that I have never from my youth up been able to understand. I have never been able to understand where people got the idea that democracy was in some way opposed to tradition. It is obvious that tradition is only democracy extended through time. It is trusting to a consensus of common human voices rather than to some isolated or arbitrary record. 

…

Those who urge against tradition that men in the past were ignorant may go and urge it at the Carlton Club, along with the statement that voters in the slums are ignorant. It will not do for us. If we attach great importance to the opinion of ordinary men in great unanimity when we are dealing with daily matters, there is no reason why we should disregard it when we are dealing with history or fable. Tradition may be defined as an extension of the franchise. Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death. Democracy tells us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our groom; tradition asks us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our father. I, at any rate, cannot separate the two ideas of democracy and tradition; it seems evident to me that they are the same idea. We will have the dead at our councils. The ancient Greeks voted by stones; these shall vote by tombstones. G.K. Chesterton – On Orthodoxy

John Dickson – Studio:

The church has occasionally displayed an unhealthy suspicion of ‘experts’ – living or dead! For our Undeceptions Plussers, I asked AJ what he would say to the Christian who doubted the value of deep learning. For the rest of us … Learning from the dead. Learning from strangers. Up next, learning from our enemies.

Media – My Fair Lady

John Dickson – Studio:

The cinematic classic My Fair Lady, based on the George Bernard Shaw play, Pygmalion. It’s a story of opposites where Sir Rex Harrison plays Professor Henry Higgins, a phonetics expert who bets he can transform a cockney flower girl, Eliza Dolittle, into a true lady – played by the mesmerizing Audrey Hepburn. That song, Just you Wait, is the only song Hepburn actually sung — or mostly sung. All of the really tuneful stuff in the film was dubbed by Marni Nixon because the music director thought Hepburn’s voice wasn’t great. My Fair Lady is, at its heart, a story about two people from opposite ends of the social spectrum – class enemies – who end up learning from each other. Eliza learns  … well, manners … and to speak real good … but also her own independence … And Higgins learns not to be a jerk … and to look at the humanity of others. It’s a little cute and predictable, but there’s something here for us … 

John Dickson:
You take this, uh, to an extreme by insisting that we learn from enemies that enemies have a special role in, uh, being our tutors.

AJ Swoboda:
Yes. Yeah. Yes. It’s funny ’cause of, of all the chapters, this is the one that people scratch the scratched their head the most. In fact, one of my endorsers basically said to me when he was endorsing the book, which he happily endorsed it. But he said, aj, I’ve never, you gotta be cautious. I’ve never heard a Christian argue we should learn from our enemies. I mean, that, that is a weird, and to my, my, my response to that is actually it’s, it’s built into our  history. The early church. Um, it turns out, I’ll give you a great example of this. Um, uh, the early church, 1945, there was a, a series of documents, a set of, uh, archeological finds called the nag hamadi texts. Uh, they were some of the most important, um, ancient. Um, non, uh, authoritative, uh, orthodox, uh, writings in, uh, in archeological history. And they were, it was a, a series of gnostic writings that were not orthodox. They were not a part of the original, you know, new Testament writings. They were not accepted by the church. So when these were found, this is so interesting, they took the n hamadi text, the go, the gospel infancy of Jesus, of Thomas. Uh, the Gospel, Thomas, these, these right writings when they compared the, the, the nag Hama texts with the early church fathers who were Orthodox, the, the, the folks that were proclaiming the truth, Athanasius uh, Irna, uh, Augustine, they found two things that were really interesting. Number one is it was very clear that the Orthodox, the, the true theologians were actually reading the writings of the people that they disagreed with. So they were actually in me. They knew what the heretics believed. They read their works. They were familiar with their works. They engaged with their works. This was even more interesting, the early church fathers, when they would quote that, the gnostic writers would always quote them faithfully down to the T, meaning they did not misrepresent their their enemies because they believed. Even the enemy deserved to be honored. You don’t twist their words to win a point. You honor their words to, to dismantle what they think. I think the earliest Christian witness shows us that the only way that you can confront falsehood is you need to know the falsehood.

John Dickson – Studio:

The Gnostic Gospels – the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Philip, the Gospel of Mary, and others – are not actually written by Thomas, Philip, Mary etcetera. We’ve spoken a bit about this before in other episodes but the Gnostic writers emphasised personal spiritual revelation over orthodox Christianity, and the contents of their gospels are not so much history as divine knowledge secretly revealed. AJ’s point is that early Christian critics of the Gnostics at least read these heretical works and had true things to say about them. Actually, some of the great Church fathers, like Augustine, insisted that we should read beyond our own tribe. He famously recommended that Christians ‘plunder the Egyptians’ — take the good things from any literature regardless of its sub-Christian source.

Reading

If those who are called philosophers, and especially the Platonists, have said anything that is true and in harmony with our faith, we are not only not to shrink from it, but to claim it for our own use from those who have unlawful possession of it. For, as the Egyptians had not only the idols and heavy burdens which the people of Israel hated and fled from, but also vessels and ornaments of gold and silver, and garments, which the same people when going out of Egypt appropriated to themselves, designing them for a better use, not doing this on their own authority, but by the command of God, the Egyptians themselves, in their ignorance, providing them with things which they themselves were not making a good use of. In the same way all branches of heathen learning have not only false and superstitious fancies and heavy burdens of unnecessary toil, which every one of us, when going out under the leadership of Christ from the fellowship of the heathen, ought to abhor and avoid; but they contain also liberal instruction which is better adapted to the use of the truth, and some most excellent precepts of morality; and some truths in regard even to the worship of the One God are found among them. St Augustine, On Christian Doctrine

John Dickson – Studio:

Augustine wasn’t alone in thinking this. Ancient and medieval Christian leaders were far more liberal in their reading and learning than we imagine. Cassiodorus was an Italian statesman and then scholar-monk in the 500s AD. He did his best to collect manuscripts of the best Christian and pagan writings, and then created a little group of monks to copy them. His most important work is called Institutions of Divine and Secular Learning. It’s amazing. It’s basically a ‘great books’ program of study he recommended for all Christian instructors, so that they could teach the faith to everyone. Book 1 lists and comments on all the Christian books one should read—it includes deep theological works, biblical commentaries, and even some geographical studies of biblical lands. And then book 2 lists and comments on all the secular pagan – Greek and Roman – works one should read. And there are tons of them, broken up into all the different topics, Grammar, Rhetoric, Logic/Dialectic Arithmetic, Music, Geometry, and Astronomy. Then there’s Photius I, the patriarch of Constantinople in the 9th century — he’s roughly the eastern equivalent of the western pope. (Sorry, my Catholic friends aren’t going to like that!). Photius left us some notes about his own recommended reading in a document known as the Bibliotheca. In it he summarises and reviews 380 books that he advises people read. 233 of the recommended works are Christian, Eusebius, Athanasius, Basil the Great, Gregory of Nyssa, and so on. And 147 of them are pagan or secular works, including Herodotus, Arrian, Plutarch, Philostratus, and so on. He frequently notes his disagreement with an author, whether pagan or Christian. But he still recommends the reading of each one. Learn from everyone! That was the basic vibe!

AJ Swoboda:
Now, here’s the deal. Don’t assume when I say learn from your enemies, that does not mean they’re right. In the Western world, we assume learning from somebody means we agree with them. Those are not the same thing. I learn from people all the time I disagree with. So to be able to learn from somebody does not imply agreement. Just as washing someone’s feet does not mean you agree with them. Jesus wash Judas feet for heaven’s sake, right before he got him crucified. So yes, should we learn from people we disagree with? If Jesus tells us to pray for our enemies and love our enemies. Goodness gracious, shouldn’t we also learn from them? And sometimes I think by learning from our enemies, it actually creates an an opportunity for conversation where I’m able to share the good news of Jesus with them. But if I’m unwilling to learn from them, why should I expect them to learn anything from me?

John Dickson – Studio:

Let’s press ‘pause’. I’ve got a five-minute Jesus for you. Here’s a strange thought. We know Jesus was a famous teacher, arguably the most influential teacher in world history, but was he also a learner, a student? I think the answer has to be yes. There are the obvious simple things like Jesus had to learn his own language, aramaic. He probably also learned a good bit of Hebrew and even Greek. I don’t think we are meant to imagine that the 2 year old Jesus knew the entire aramaic, Hebrew, and Greek dictionaries and grammar books. Even though the Christian faith regards him as fully divine from the beginning, equally, Christianity insists he was fully human. This means there had to be human limitations. Jesus could hurt himself and his body would have to heal. There were things he didn’t know, and had to be taught by others. In this same category I think you’d have to put carpentry.  Jesus was a carpenters son. He would have taken on that work from quite a young age, so he had to learn, as an apprentice, from his father. There are some crazy stories written more than 100 years later where Christians imagined that the boy Jesus could make bits of wood lengthen and shorten at will, but these have no historical basis, and I think they downplay the important doctrine that Jesus was fully human. There’s one line in the gospels that indicates we are on the right track in thinking Jesus was a learner before he was a teacher. In Luke chapter 2 there is that wonderful, quirky story of the 12 year old Jesus who gets separated from his mum and dad when they are at the festival in Jerusalem. Mary for example, but then finds the boy Jesus and we are told Jesus went home and was obedient to them. But the chapter ends with the strange statement “Jesus grew in wisdom and stature.” That’s interesting obviously Jesus grew in stature. That would probably just means he moved towards adulthood. But what about growing in wisdom.? Wisdom is the standard word for knowing important things about God’s world. We are told that Jesus grew – προκόπτω – in wisdom. This word means exactly what it sounds like: to increase, to progress. Luke is telling us that the boy Jesus developed in knowledge, just as he developed into an adult. And according to most Jesus scholars, we probably know the name of Jesus’ principal influence, the one who helped him grow in wisdom. John the Baptist. It may be too much to say with Kurt Rudolph (University of Marburg) that Jesus was “a disciple of John the Baptist” in the strict sense  but the evidence does indicate that, of all the Jewish teachers active in Palestine in the period, the Baptist was the one Jesus most admired and identified with before he launched his own mission to Israel. Paula Fredriksen of Boston University describes the scholarly consensus best when she says, “What we do know past doubting is that John had a crucially important impact on Jesus.” Several bits of evidence point in this direction. First is the simple fact that John’s ministry predates that of Jesus. We do not know how long John had been baptizing people in the Jordan river before Jesus went public but it is certain that his career was well established prior to AD 28 when Jesus chose to be baptized. And here is the second indicator: it is clear Jesus submitted himself publicly to John’s defining ritual. In the words of Mark’s Gospel, “At that time Jesus came from Nazareth in Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan.”  For Christians Jesus’ baptism by John is such a well known feature of the Gospel story that few pause to think what it must have meant, at the time. While it is true that John came to regard Jesus as the ‘greater’ of the two, the fact that Jesus chose to be baptized by John also indicates that he saw the Baptist’s particular vision of life as the starting point and launching pad for his own preaching. It is also interesting, thirdly, that at least two of Jesus’ first disciples came from the circle of John’s disciples (John 1:35-42. One of them was the apostle Andrew, brother of the chief apostle, Peter. The other is not named.).  This does imply a real overlap between John and Jesus, a handing on of the baton, perhaps, as the apprentice becomes the master. Just as revealing, fourthly (and finally), is that Jesus inherited John’s practice of baptism. All of this points in one direction for the majority of scholars. No more likely candidate for Jesus’ mentor emerges from the record than John the Baptist. Much of Jesus’ later ministry maintains the emphases of John the Baptist: his continuation of the baptism ritual, his frequent warnings of imminent judgment, his passionate plea that people return to their Maker and his promise of God’s forgiveness for those who repent. All of these reflect the teachings of Jesus’ mentor. But Jesus was no carbon copy of John; far from it. A text from Luke/Matthew reveals one very obvious way in which Jesus departed from John. Whereas John wandered in the wilderness living as an ascetic, Jesus toured the towns and villages eating and drinking with all and sundry. And both men were criticized for it by the establishment: For John the Baptist came neither eating bread nor drinking wine, and you say, ‘He has a demon.’ The Son of Man [that’s Jesus] came eating and drinking, and you say, ‘Here is a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners’ (Luke 7:33-35 / Matthew 11:19). At this point, Jesus has fully grown in wisdom–and he takes things in a very different direction from John the Baptist. The baptist emphasized imminent disaster and demanded asceticism, at least for himself. Jesus continued to preach judgment but went around eating and drinking, inviting those you might have thought were first in line for judgment to his table of friendship. Jesus has now surpassed his mentor. The learner has become the Teacher. And history would never be the same. You can press play now.

John Dickson:
Yeah. Okay. So that’s the Christian listener. What might you say to the more secular listener who doubts there’s anything for them, for them to learn from the Christian tradition? I mean, we’ve got science and ai. What, what do we need you guys?

 AJ Swoboda:
Yeah, I would say, look at your arrogance. It’s, isn’t it weird? Isn’t it weird? Don’t you find it weird that if you published, if you’re a a, a secular academic, that if a pastor preached a sermon and quoted. The literature of some of the smartest secular people in the world that makes you sound really smart. But if a really brilliant secular academic quotes a pastor in their academic paper, they won’t get it published. And my point is, isn’t it weird that we live in a context where, um, it is almost like it is, we’re not allowed to learn from the church. It’s almost as though the church has nothing to offer the world. And I would just ask, where’s that? Where’s that arrogance come from? Because that is arrogance. And at the end of the day, you don’t actually believe in truth. You believe in truth as it’s politically motivated, as long as it fits within your political motivations. Um, I, I’m a believer that the church has a witness to the truth that is unique and, and, and, and there’s something to be learned by people who are true learners to learn from. Even the church.

John Dickson – Studio:

And that’s AJ’s point, really. No-one is above learning … not even the academic who everyone goes to learn from. Learning from beginning to end is an exercise in humility. Something AJ learnt, first hand, in a kind of real life parable!!

 John Dickson:
At the very beginning of your book, you tell the story of the Philips head screwdriver, and I would just love that on tape and so that we can use it at some point. Tell us that the parable of the screw?

AJ Swoboda:
Philip said, screwdriver. Yeah. Yeah. Well, um, yeah, it’s, it’s probably the most vulnerable part of the book and I, I decided to put it at the very front end because I know just so many people that experience this sort of reality in their life. Um, so I’m, uh, kind of back my backstory. Um, I, I didn’t have a, as a grown up, didn’t have a, a dad that was super present. Um, and so as a result of that. Um, you know, a lot of the things that young boys get with a really super present dad is that I, I didn’t get a lot of those things and I wasn’t, you know, ever taught how to build things or, you know, fix a car or, you know, do quote unquote man things that men are supposed to do. So, a number of years ago, my wife and I, our son wanted a tree house and so we started building a tree house in our backyard and, um. W and it was my, our house had gotten too small and he was grown up. He was like five, four or five years old. He needed something outside to do. And so, um, we were out, uh, starting to build this tree house and my wife had this beautiful vision for it. She’s kind of the builder in our family. And she said to me, we’re, we’re out there. I’m holding up this, this, this piece of wood to go up to the, to, to the tree. And she says, can you go to the garage and get me a Phillips side screwdriver? And I said, sure. So I go to the garage and I’m going through the. The tools, and as of from nowhere, I mean, it came outta nowhere. Uh, John, I just started to feel these waves of emotions and I just began to cry. It was this weird, like, is this  a midlife crisis? Sort of. I honestly, it was, it was a, an enigma, and I sat down and all of a sudden it dawned on me. I didn’t know what a Phillips head screwdriver looked like. Nobody had ever taught me what a Phillips said screwdriver was, and I’m sitting there in this pile of shame because I knew I was gonna have to go back and tell my wife. I don’t know what it is, because I never had a dad who taught me. I, and by the grace of God, dude, I, I went back and I told her I was of tears coming down my face and I said, I don’t know what a Phillips said, screwed ever. And she was so gentle and so kind. And, and came and showed me. And you know, she’s taught me some of the tools these days. I know what a Phillips head screwdriver is

John Dickson:
I bet you’re an expert

AJ Swoboda:
I know, I know all Phillips head screwdrivers. But here’s what that, you know, what, what I experienced in that moment was not shame specifically as much as it was shame for not knowing something I was supposed to know. And I think when I, when I teach my intro to the Bible class at the university, I always tell that story because there are students who are Christians in the class. Who feel so much shame that they don’t know the Bible the way that they think that they’re supposed to because nobody ever taught it to them. And part of learning, being a learner, being a teachable person is first confronting the shame that we are not the people we thought we should have been. And acknowledging that and letting the grace of Christ meet us right in the middle of that shame. It’s, it’s true. None of us are the people that we should be, but that is exactly the kind of person that Jesus Christ loves to work with.

John Dickson:
AJ, thank you so much for your time.

Undeceptions theme

CREDITS

Undeceptions is hosted by me, John Dickson, produced by Kaley Payne and directed by Mark Hadley. 

Alasdair Belling is a writer and researcher. 

 

Siobhan McGuinness is our online librarian. 

 

Lyndie Leviston remains my wonderful assistant. 

 

Santino Dimarco is Chief Finance and Operations Consultant. 

 

Editing by Richard Hamwi.

 

Our voice actors today were Yannick Lawry and Dakotah Love.

 

Special thanks to our series sponsor Zondervan for making this Undeception possible. 

 

Undeceptions is the flagship podcast of Undeceptions.com – letting the truth out.