Water From A Deep Well | Introduction

[MUSIC] Welcome to Water from a Deep Well, a 12-part series on the history of Christian spirituality, where we will learn about church history, but not so much through the story of key events and dates and famous figures, but more through the lens of Christian spirituality. We'll look at our spiritual ancestors in the arena in 2nd century Rome, and out in the deserts of North Africa and 3rd century Egypt and the cities of Asia Minor and the 4th century and on the edge of the map in Ireland and the 6th. And we'll look at how faith lived in their bones, how they put flesh and blood on the way of Jesus. Their spirituality, what they thought was important or not, what they emphasized, how they read Scripture, what truths and doctrines and practices and models of community they passed on to the next generation. We'll look at 12 eras of Christian spirituality, starting with witness the spirituality of the early Christian martyrs all the way up to resilience, the spirituality of our time. And from each era we'll consider what can we learn from and draw on for our apprenticeship to Jesus today in the modern West and beyond. I'm John Mark Comer from practicing the way, and I'm your host for the next 12 conversations with Dr. Gerald Sitzer. Dr. Sitzer is a friend and a mentor and a long time professor of church history at Whitworth University in book Anne Washington, where in retirement he remains a professor emeritus. He's a widely respected academic, a pastor to pastors including myself, and a prolific author best known for his book, A Grace Disguised, which tells the story of the tragic loss of his wife and daughter and mother in a car crash early in his life. He spent 20 years following that as a single dad and a professor before remarrying. Together he and his wife Patricia have five children, all married now, and 12 grandchildren, and steward an amazing family legacy of faith. Dr. Sitzer, I can tell you from direct experience is that rare mix. He has a brilliant mind and there's deep well of learning to draw on, but it's all encased in a soft spirit that knows pain and suffering from the inside out, which means the history of Christian spirituality that we're going to explore over the coming episodes doesn't just live in his head but deep in his heart. Dr. Sitzer, welcome to Water from a Deep Well. My privilege to to be with you John Mark. It's really good to be with you. You know, before this podcast series, this all started for me many years ago when I read your book Water from a Deep Well, and I remember vividly closing the book at the end reading the last page, closing the book and thinking to myself, I wish every single Christian on the planet would read this book. By the way, I think that's a great idea, but continues. Yes, as the author, you're biased, but I'm not the author. No royalties involved. And, you know, if I were dictator of the Church of Jesus for a day, which by the grace of God will never ever happen, there's a short list of things I would make all Christians do. And on that list is read this book and really what I mean by that is learn the Christian story, learn where we come from, learn our spiritual ancestry. But we're not going to get everyone to read your lovely well written, but 350 page popular academic book on church history. So we thought maybe we can get them to listen to a podcast and a set of conversations. Our hope for those of you listening or watching is that you read the book as well. You can order it online wherever books are sold. We will map our 12 conversations directly over the 12 chapters in the book. So you can read a chapter by yourself or with a few close friends or your small group and then listen in to our conversation. Or, of course, you can just listen along. To start, Dr. Sitzer, before Water from a Deep Well was a book, it was an elective, right? That you taught at W. Worth. Tell us a bit about the backstory, the origin story of this work. I mean, it is very significant. So, 1989, it took a job as a professor at W. With the University. We move from Chicago where I got my PhD to Spokane, Washington. We had three children. Linda was pregnant with number four. She gave birth a few months after arriving. So we had a four ages six, four, two, and newborn. And we wondered what we were going to do for the jam terms that W. Worth offered, where you could be on campus, but more ideally, you could go off campus to study somewhere. And Linda came up with the idea that we'd go someplace where the whole family could accompany me. And that meant something that was probably stationary. What we had visited this camp in the in the beauty, the Cascade Mount Range, and she said, "Why don't you teach something there?" So I thought that was a great idea. And playing my course had it approved on Christian spirituality. And then four months before we were going to begin the first course there in January, she was killed in a traffic accident along with Diana Jane and my mother who was visiting for the weekend. So obviously that course was scrapped. But in the next year, I thought, "Why not just continue that idea that she implanted in my head." And so the following January with my three children and someone who's going to help with the kids a little bit of W. Worth student, I went up there and taught that course and it was magical. I mean, it was quite something. So I went for three, four weeks long. Four weeks and we lived in community with many students. How many students? No contact with the outside world, 20 students. No contact with the outside world. And we lived in community. We cooked together. We followed a rhythm of life more about that later on and studied great texts. And I, you know, I, the event time in silence every day. All right. Five hours to silence a day. So you actually practicing a lot of what we were practicing what we were learning. And they, and this is up in the middle of nowhere, right? The cascades for those of you not familiar. It is a very isolated word we were. We were in a valley of 2,000 feet with 7,000 peaks surrounding us. One year, several years later when I was teaching that, I did it about every other, every other year. 14 feet of snow fell on us while we were up there. You get the idea. Cross-country ski, snow shoes. Yes. Anyway, just glorious. But I began to study this. And it got inside me, John Mark. It wasn't just ideas. It was, there was something deeper and richer and more profound than that. And true for me and for the students. So years later, I started visiting and coming up with ideas and it led to a water from a deep well. Why do you think it's important for people today, followers of Jesus today to learn about church history? Well, to use an abstract term. None of us self-exists will come from somewhere and from someone. Yeah. Not just our parents, but our grandparents and our great-grandparents and our great-great-grandparents. I just found out three, about three years ago that my great-grandfather was an African-American and my great-great-grandmother was a slave in Virginia. Wow. I mean, that's amazing to think about. That's part of my DNA. We all have DNA, not just biological, but cultural and religious. And it's really useful for us to know about that. Yeah. When someone says to you, "Oh, Jair, you look like your grandfather, who might never have met." He died before I was born. That means something to me. Yeah. So we all have that culturally and religiously and ethnically and thumbagirly and so on. Yeah. So part of it is that we live in us, right? And a lot of the modern science talking about how, even if you don't know your great-grandfather, part of his genetic code and his way of being lives on in you. Not just appearance, but who he was. That's part of it too. And I see that, of course, in my grandchildren, no. Anyway, so part of that is studying the past just so we can understand ourselves. The past 50 years ago, in the past 500 years ago, a 1500 years ago. I mean, we call ourselves Protestants. Well, there was a period in history when there were no Protestants. Yes. Or Eastern Orthodox. There was a period when there was no Eastern Orthodox. Baptists are fairly new on the scene. Protestants think they've been around forever. They haven't been around forever. So there's a lot we can understand simply by studying the past for that reason. But there's a second reason that's even more important. A lot of this is lost to memory. And with the loss of memory, there's a loss of richness, understanding people and movements, and ideas and practices that are actually life-changing, that are really useful. I'll give an example of this later on in the series, but I mentioned to a person who was dying of cancer, the medieval practice of memento-mori. And I mean, this woman was under deathbed, and she just sat up and thought, "Why didn't I know about this?" Yeah. Two good examples right there. Yeah, growing up in the Protestant tradition, this is a caricature, but I think many people will relate. My kind of grasp of church history was, the church was awesome for two or three hundred years, and then it was horrible for a thousand years. And then Martin Luther nailed this thing on a door in Germany, and we've been right ever since. And that's a caricature. But that really was the gist of what I caught in my heart growing up in the Protestant tradition. And then learning, reading my way backward. into the Christian story has done so much to enrich and enlarge my faith. You talk in this book about what you call, and it's not a term that's original to you, but the great tradition. What is that? What is the great tradition of the church? I think we need to understand what happened to the apostles and get inside their world as much as we can. That is the first followers of Jesus, the originators, Peter and all the rest. Oh, John, the writers and he just asked. Right. But in the case of Peter and Andrew and so on, they meet this unusual man in Galilee, Jesus of Nazareth. And he is compelling right from the beginning, but they don't really know why. So they keep trying on terms to make sense of this man, Rabbi, but of course he's not a Rabbi. He never quotes rabbis. He's never in the school of rabbis. And he starts making claims that no rabbi would ever make. They try prophet, but he says, truly, truly, I say to you, he never says, "Thus sayeth the Lord." You get the idea, miracle work. Finally, Messiah, but Messiah's don't die. Messiah's win. And Jesus was crucified and across. So by the end of his life, that story is over. Their dissolution, they're broken. They thought it'd be another or a Messiah that might succeed and obviously he failed until three days later in the resurrection. And it wasn't a resuscitation. Jesus didn't die again. This was a whole new way of existing in the world as an embodied person. Jesus, who becomes now the Lord. Well, it took them about 300 years to work out the implications of all this because it was 600 years. Well, yeah, I mean, really 2000, but it was so dramatic. They had to revisit everything about human life. How do you make sense of God if we're calling Jesus God? How do we understand Jesus as human if we call Him Lord? What does it mean to be human? Right? What it means to be human, human community, the story that makes sense of our existence, the way we live in the world or understanding authority. I mean, it is a massive project. That is the great tradition, that early period of creativity, of working out what life means and looks like, what truth and goodness and beauty are in light of Jesus coming into the world as God becoming human. And we just say the great tradition at some level is what all Christians believe. I should hope so. That's our growth. That's our growth. Our issues we debate and we disagree on. But the great tradition is like the core of the Christian faith. It's the taproot passed down from the apostles and the church. All the ways. Now I see a calcedan, so on and so forth, and the church is wise when he keeps going back to it. Yeah. And not just the great tradition as a belief system, but early Christian practices. One example, so the didake, we were talking about this, is this early Christian manual written probably around a hundred and already by then a few years after the book of Revelation. Exactly. Yes. Even back then they are using the Lord's Prayer three times a day. And he outlines the two ways of life, the way of life and the way of death. And it's simply a revision, not a revision, but an elaboration of the sermon on the Mount. This becomes part of the DNA of the church right from the beginning. And this is a fantastic read, by the way, for those of you listening or watching, I mean, you can read it in what, 10 or 15 minutes. Yeah. I have a printed copy in my library, but you can read it for free online. And it just, you get a window into how the very first Christians are following Jesus and thinking about the faith. Yeah. Another very good short text, the so-called letter to digonitas, 12, 14 pages. And when you read that, you realize you're in the Christian world. Yes. It's rich. I mean, it has ran some atonement theology. It talks about early Christian behavior. It lifts up Jesus as the son of God. I mean, it's an amazing document and it's beautiful. I have two books that sit on my morning kind of table next to my chair where I read and pray in the morning. And one that sits there permanently is the Apostolic Fathers, which for those view watching is just a collection of writings from mostly the first and second century, right? And these are letters written to, for example, you know, Corinth and Philippi and Ephesus, like the churches in the New Testament, written now by the next generation of people like Arrhenius that were mentored by the Apostle John, right? And just getting into their mind, reading things that sound like, man, I could preach that today. And other things that sound so foreign and alien, which makes me think a little strange. Where have I strayed? You know, like if they're because they are closer to the source. Yeah, yeah, sure. You write in your book, every generation of believers faces the risk of becoming a prisoner to its own myopic vision of the Christian faith, assuming that how it understands and practices faith is always the best. Tell us more about that. Well, we have 2000 years of history behind us. And Christianity is evolved during that time. That doesn't mean it's improved. It's evolved. It's changed. It's adapted to different circumstances. The world is radically different than it was. It's very different. I mean, people living in the Middle Ages lived in a very different world from the reformers or the Enlightenment or the modern period with mobile phones. So Christianity has actually been very successful adapting along the way to different cultural circumstances. The problem is that the reason for that abdaptation gets lost. And then we become a prisoner to the abdaptation. And forget that there are other traditions and ideas floating out there that are actually really useful and can even protect us from becoming a prisoner to our, I'm going to call it narrowing tradition. It can set us free. It can spread the root system and drive it deeper into the heritage of Christianity that has unfolded over 2000 years. It's like going to a banquet who wants to eat just one food. But that's what we do. We eat one food. And we don't realize there are other really good foods there that can make us healthier as human beings. Well, the Christian tradition can make us healthier too. I use a phrase in the book, abuse is non-tolite uses. And what it means is, abuse is don't nullify the uses. It's a Latin phrase. It's a Latin phrase. Thomas Aquinas used it in 13th century. What he means by that is that at the heart of these various traditions that the Christian faith, there's truth and goodness there. They can become perverse over time. But what can't become perverse over time? Yes. And the perversion of something is not an argument against the thing itself. Paul said, "Overcome evil by doing good. Well, overcome evil by finding the good in the thing that has been perverted." And that's the job, I think, of Christians and especially Christian historians. There's such a fine line hub between adaption to the cultural moment and assimilation into the cultural moment. And it's not always black and white, right? And we drift, you know, slowly and almost imperceptibly. Well, I think we're kind of aware of the way our own conscience or lifestyle can be kind of slowly but surely denuded, you know, like you move to a new city and maybe there's more wealth or careerism there. And you begin to kind of slowly drift into materialism and your heart kind of isn't that awake to it the way you were. And then you wake up one day and realize, "Oh, wow, I'm not living the simplicity and generosity of the way of Jesus." But I think we forget, that can happen generationally too. It can. Where we slowly but imperceptibly kind of drift from the original kind of moment. And so I think reading church history for me is always like a good sign, not that they were always right and we're always wrong, but it can show me where maybe I've started to drift off anchor a little bit. Yeah, well put, that it's exactly right. I love this phrase in 1 Corinthians 3. Paul is dealing with Party Spirit in the Church of Corinth, you know, there were people who identified with Peter. Yeah, I called him the, I followed Paul. Peter the traditionalist, Peter the traditionalist, Paul the innovator, a policy intellectual, and they became groupies in a way. And notice their mentality was it's Paul, Peter or a policy. Yes. I want to suggest it can be Paul, Peter and a policy. And that's exactly Paul's argument. And at the end of this argument, he says all things are yours. What a great line. All things are yours. Take advantage, feast at the banquet, but don't stop there. All things are yours, but you're not yours. You're Christ's. Yes. You belong to him. All of this richness is there to grow you in Christ. Now at the funny thing is, you know, living in the modern world and the digital age, I think a lot of us think of Church history the way we think of technology. Like anything old is there for out of date or obsolete or not as good, you know, see us Lewis book of chronological snobbery. We think that newer is better than older. And that technological mindset is there. What damages that do? Like, I literally was chatting to somebody the other day about a book we love on fasting from the 1950s. And he grew up where they would not read that book. because anything less than 50 years old was considered a waste of time. They would not read CS Lewis, they would not read this book. And his pastor literally said to him, "Why would I read church history only to know what mistakes they made?" "My gosh, this is a far cry from the heart of water from a deep well." How is that technological mindset come into our mind? Well, I mean, it's part of the American way. We're a forward looking, not a backward looking people. We're not so oriented toward tradition, we're oriented toward innovation. So we like to invent things. And then we don't live with the consequences. Or when we face the consequences, we're always kind of surprised by it. Now, there's a lot that we don't want to go back to. I mean, I like mobile phones. Yes. And I like indoor plumbing and lots of other conveniences that are the result of progress, if you will. Yes. So it's not all bad, even those who are lulled-ite, you know, people who want to go into the past, enjoy all the benefits that they have and wanting to go to the past. So it's a little dishonest in a way. But we have to realize that there needs to be an anchor into the past that gives us wisdom and perspective that helps us see that there are things lost as well as things gained. Let me give you an example. So the mobile phone means we have all the information we need accessible to us. And so instead of learning something, we learn how to access that thing on the phone. Yes. Well, what happens is our brains become like deltas, river deltas, shallow, going everywhere. But we need deep neural pathways too. We need canyons that information can float out. Yeah, because in the moment of pain, suffering, temptation, you can't go Google what to do. Well, it's trying to be in your neurology. It does. It does. It does. It does. Yeah. And all of us see this happen when you go to a symphony concert in a person's playing the piano in a concerto. They're not flipping through a sheet of music. It's in them. It's in them. Come out. Athletes have it in them. A lot of life is improv. And the best improv people, whether musicians or athletes, like basketball players or soccer players, it's they have so much to do. Much internalized. They can rely on that when the field of play changes or something happens in music and they have to improv. Well, we need those. That kind of-- You're saying we need the history of Christian spirituality that deep in the mirror of our business. I think we do. So I had my total hip replacement done 18 years ago. And the surgeon did not consult a YouTube video. He had it in him. Yeah. And I walked a mile within four days. He put in the work to know what needed to be known. He was a master. Practice what needed to be practiced. And now it was in him. Mobile phones do not nullify the importance of mastery. And so we have to maintain and embrace the new with a critical eye. But also carry the old with us along the way. Well, what about-- there's lots of stuff in church history that is horrific or stupid or embarrassing or heretical. And we can't just pretend like all we have is this good legacy. What about all the horror stories of church history? Well, they're always the same ones, right? And I'm not cynical about it because it's legitimate. The crusades, the witch hunts, the inquisition, and modern day religious evangelical Catholic scandals. Yeah. It's the interesting counter to that. Why do you even call them bad? Where did you get that idea? I don't think Julius Caesar spent one night sleepless because he murdered about a million people in Gaul when he conquered Gaul. I don't think Genghis Khan was worrying about spreading his DNA over millions of people, or eventually millions of people, when he conquered Asia and into Europe. I don't think Hitler was worried about exterminating Jews. But when we look at those people, we pronounce judgment on them. It's odious to us. And true, even with our Christian brothers and sisters that did terrible things, the very faith that we believe gives us the right to critique the people who perverted the faith. Yes. Now, here's two counter examples. I love these two. So the Crusades, there was this mass movement in Europe to reconquer the Holy Land, which belonged to the church, not to Muslims. And this is roughly when? Well, they started in 1095 and the last occurred sometime in the 13th century. There were seven of them and the children's crusade on top of that. And they were a bismophailure and a lot of blood was shed and all it did was create enmity between Muslims and Christians, including Jews too. And Catholics and Eastern Orthodox as well. Correct. I mean, it was just messy. Anyway, you want to put it. Yes. Francis of the C.C. went down to Egypt, crossed and be like, I love this story. And was actually arrested and put in prison because he wanted to share Christ with the sultan of Egypt at the time. Here's another one. He went and was in the court for a while, right? It was. Another alternative for hop. And why do we call that heroic, I mean, there's a reason it comes from the Christian faith. How about this one? So Charlemagne was the first major figure who practiced what we call force conversion. Basically, when you conquer a tribe, it was convert or be baptized. And this is what it died. And 800 something. He died 814. And it kind of brings the Holy Roman Empire back after what we call the dark ages in a couple hundred years. Yeah, although they got dark again after that. But that's another story. Anyway. There's this, there's this monk and intellectual who lives in England. He's brought to the court of Charlemagne to reform their education system. His name is Al Qun. And he was deeply offended by this. He considered by a force conversion, forced conversion, counter to the gospel. Well, what is he going to do? He consults with a member of the court, tells him what he is going to do. And then write Charlemagne a letter. Very gracious. We have the letter in print. Very gracious, but very direct. This is not the way of Christ. Are you ready for this? Charlemagne stopped. Now look at that case study right there. You've got Al Qun, courageously confronting something that is clearly a problem in the world at the time. Confronting Charlemagne and Charlemagne pays attention. So that's the kind of drama in Christianity that I love or the history of Christianity. You can find it everywhere. One thing I love about the tragic chapters in the Christian story is that every single example that you mentioned, there are all examples of where followers of Jesus have drifted from the faith, not where they have been true to it. And they are critiqued by the very faith that they betray. We have a plumb line. Not just a plumb line of belief. Nice scene creed. We have a plumb line of behavior, a way of life, the way of Jesus. And we always have to go back to that and let that be our plumb line. And our lives will be judged against that. And sometimes we will run into severe interference. Think about Bonhoeffer and the Confessing Church movement. In the 1940s, think about the German church that just kept giving up more ground, inch by inch until they began to participate in what we think is unthinkable and thought they were being Christian. This is why the plumb line is so important because it's easy for us to look back on the German church in the 1930s and judge them, say you were far off the plumb line. But what we miss is that we in our own time face a different set of temptations. Correct. We're going to go around new postmodern ideas about the body and sexuality. It might be about nationalism and politics. But things that we are tempted to believe are good. The plumb line would say that is not good. That is evil. And so that's where this plumb line becomes so important. Otherwise, right? We're just zigging and zagging with whatever kind of the moral zeitgeist of the time is. So here's the dance in my opinion, John Mark. Christianity is highly adaptable in creative. It always has been since Acts 15. And it's the beauty. And it's the beauty of it. So why is global and multi-ethnic and every continent on earth? So the dance is to avoid severe isolationism, to remain pure but irrelevant or to overaccomodate, to gain and maintain popularity but at the expense of faithfulness. And we can do that. We have examples all through history that are going to show us how to dance in that particular way and therefore to be faithful witnesses to the gospel from one generation to the next. Really, history has great examples that show us how we can actually do that. Francis and Bonhoeffer and Alculean are only three. Now we're talking about the history of Christian spirituality. Can you define that word for us? Spirituality. We hear it a lot. We have a bit of a buzzword in particular in a place like LA where I live near. But I don't think it has an agreed upon definition. What do you want? mean by that. Well, I'm going to find it as I think a Christian ought to define it. And that is seeking, knowing, following the triune God and letting that play out in the world. So when we talk about eras of Christian spirituality, we're talking about how various generations sought God, how they knew God, how they understood God, how they lived it out in their time and their place. But the boundary lines are always the triune God as we know in Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And the fact that there's a way, there's a way of life. And that's going to vary. I mean, there are different practices and different needs and different challenges that each generation faces. And so you see a lot of variety back there. But there's always a taproot. There's always a center to it. Yes. And that is the great tradition of the Christian life. We are a part of something. So I remember that when there's loud voices demanding I shift on this that or the other that we are a part of something ancient and timeless is not rooted in the morning news or in the fluctuations of the market or the changes and ethics over the last few decades. It's rooted all the way back in the person of Christ himself. Now we need to be smart about it. I mean, abuses, non-tolate uses. That means there are abuses. And we have to acknowledge those and understand them. But always try to isolate the good that's there. So I look at it as a kind of dance between loving something and evaluating something, embracing something, but with a kind of critical faculty as we do it. So we have to live in some tensions there as historians, historians that want to be changed by what we learn. What should we keep in mind as we go on this journey of learning about the history of Christian spirituality? Well, there's always a context to something. Understand the context. Instead of dismissing medieval people as stupid and superstitious. All right. Understand what their conditions of life were. And then try to isolate what they believed and what they practiced. Those things that are rich and good and beautiful like momentum, or for example, and then recognize also how they were perverted. But you know, we have to do the same thing with ourselves too. And knowing the past gives us a fighting chance of even understanding our own time in age and the behaviors and practices that we inhabit some for good and some for ill. Yeah. What it's done for me knowing the past, knowing the deep well of the Christian story. One, it has revealed to me where I have been co-opted by culture, where I've been blinded, where I've drifted. And where not just me, but like the whole church tradition I grew up in drifted. And it has enriched and not just brought me back to the center, it has enriched and enlarged my experience of God, of seeking God and knowing God and understanding God. And I'm just, I feel now this profound debt of gratitude. That's good. And that is what we hope for all of you that are listening or watching is that you can begin to kind of know this plumb line that goes all the way back to Christ and the New Testament and that it would enrich and enlarge your faith. So join us as we continue to listen, we'll invite you a week after week just to prayerfully reflect on what is God have for me? What can I learn from my spiritual ancestors in this era or that era? To begin, you may just want to ask the spirit, what am I missing? What's missing from my faith, from my spirituality, from the way I'm following Jesus in community today? And just live with that question for a few days or a few weeks into the days to come. We'll be back next for the first era of Christian spirituality, witness the spirituality of the early Christian martyrs. Join us next time and thanks for listening. This podcast is from Practice in the Way. We develop resources to help churches and small groups apprentice in the way of Jesus. Work out from the non-profit so everything we make is completely free because it's already been paid for by the circle, our community and monthly giveers. Special thanks today goes to Tina from Franklin, Tennessee, Emma from San Monica, California, Darby from Huntsville, Alabama, Alicia from Beavitton, Oregon, and Zachary from Ventura, California. Thank you all very much. To join these friends in the circle or learn more about our resources, visit practiceintheway.org. Until next time, may the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.