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let's get started with our webinar for this morning. Again, I'm Margaret Aymer. I'm the Academic Dean, the Vice President for Academic Affairs here at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and we're glad that you have joined us this lunch period for cultivating new ideas. This time we have a special guest, and so I would like to introduce him to everybody because he is not a faculty person at Austin Seminary, but he is a wonderful, thoughtful ethicist and theologian.

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The person who will be speaking to us today is the Reverend Dr. Charles W. Christian. Dr.

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Christian has been a minister for over 30 years in the Wesleyan tradition. He currently serves 2 United Methodist churches near St. Joseph, Missouri, and simultaneously as a reporter and evening news anchor to News Press Group, which is a local affiliate of NBC, CBS, and Fox News. So we've got a TV star on our hands today.

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Dr. Christian has a PhD in theology and ethics and an MDiv. and a bachelor's in business administration in marketing with a music minor. He is a weekly religion columnist for the St.

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Joseph News Gazette and has written or contributed to three books in theology and ethics and over 100 articles and book reviews. He and his wife, Edna, over 30 years of marriage, live in St. Joseph and they have two grown sons. And his topic today is the body and ethics of diversity.

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And so he is looking at this question of diversity from a theological and ethical perspective. So we look forward to learning from you today, Dr. Christian. And friends, if you have a question that you would like to ask, please post it in the chat.

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If you would like to speak your question directly, please turn your screen on before you do so, we can see your face. This is being recorded. And if you don't turn your screen on, what happens is all we get is a black screen. So we'd really appreciate it if you're going to ask a question with your mouth, if we could see your face too.

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All right, friends, I'm going to turn it over to Dr. Christian, who is going to share his screen. Yes. Hi.

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Oh, let me unmute to make sure I'm already unmuted. You are unmuted. Good. Thank you.

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And thanks, Dr. Amer, and thanks everyone for letting me hang out here today with you from my basement here in St. Joseph, Missouri. Let me share this screen with you a bit.

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I don't always use PowerPoint, but it does keep me on track, and I want to be respectful of your time. You've heard a little bit of my strange background here. I'm a native Texan, so it's always nice to be connected with Texas and with Austin Seminary. I've got to adjunct an ethics course with CIM already, and I greatly enjoyed the students, and I've certainly enjoyed the interaction with faculty and staff so far there.

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And so I'll give you a quick little overview. It's kind of a, the first part is very much an overview of how academic research, like what the things I'm interested in, become a little more practical. So I'll just start with, let me make sure this is happening here.

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Pardon me. Let me, sorry. Ah, there we go. So

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So what? I always usually end with so what, which I'll do, but I want to start with so what. The so what of theological, ethical interests in any subject, especially the human being. You know, we hope would have a practical outworking in the church.

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I've been a pastor for over 30 years, and so And I've been in academics, either part-time or half-time or sometime, or about 26 or 7 years. And I love the marriage of both of those, because I believe that institutions like Austin Seminary serve the church in a very particular way. And the students who go through the seminary and the faculty who are involved with those students really are

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practicing care of the church. And so in the church, there's a lot of so what? And probably why I'm so interested in ethics as a pastor is because ethics is one of those disciplines where you can say, okay, so what? does this look like in real life?

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I have an academic interest. I have an approved topic. I can make a sound argument. Now what?

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That's kind of how my doctoral journey started. Is there a so what? Because I was pastoring during that time. So my academic interests

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had to do with, pardon me, the human being, who we are, what the Bible says we are, what historical theologians and philosophers have said we are, and what implications that may have for how we treat each other, how we interact with one another, and also just how we sort of move together through the life we've been given. So kind of how we got here, let me make sure, okay, is there are all kinds of ways of looking at how we are sort of structured as a human being. And so the Bible wasn't written in a vacuum and Christianity didn't just grow up in its own little niche.

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It grew up interacting with thoughts and people and ideas and experiences. So let me just give you a few things that have become pretty influential, especially in the places where I've hung out over the last few decades. Platonic dualism, That obviously, derives from Plato.

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That's where you get that. The spirit or the immaterial is the real. That is what is real. And everything else, the material is sort of just a pretty unimportant, maybe even vulgar at times, temporary,

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kind of thing. And so if you really want to get to the heart of things, you talk about the immaterial or the spirit. Christianity struggled with this as it addressed movements like, and you can Google these, but docetism in the early church, ideas that were heavily influenced by a kind of Platonic dualism about human beings kind of crept into the church. And it produced this idea

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In Docetism, for instance, it said, well, anything like Jesus couldn't really have been in the flesh. It was just sort of pretending or an illusion because really what he was, if he was divine, had to be spirit only. And so you can see how that kind of sounds nice at first, but it really became a struggle because the Bible itself for lack of a better phrase, it's a very physical document.

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It's very much about physicality. God created physical things and Jesus, you know, the famous John passage, right? The word became flesh, which would have been offensive to a very platonic way of thinking. Later on, much later on, centuries later,

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Cartesian dualism, Descartes, you've heard of Descartes, I think therefore I am, that guy. Descartes basically said, we're whole persons and all, but we have a soul or a spirit. There is a part of us that's immaterial. It's A self-existing, separate part of us.

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And then we have this thing called a body, and they sort of interact in a holistic way, but the real, the best part of us, the real part of us is our souls or our spirits or whatever. So this, again, he's not the only one who sort of said this, but he kind of tried to mesh these two together. It's like, well, they're not, the body isn't unimportant, but it's not as important.

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I think, therefore I am, right? I think that's an immaterial thing. Therefore, I know I exist. And again, there's some good in that.

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But again, it has become a very prep. Partesian dualism is the kind of dualism that has kind of won, or for a long time, has won the day, especially among, I know, in evangelical settings. And I was a part of an evangelical church for a while. I'm in kind of a mainline church now in the United Methodist.

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But The idea is we have a soul. And that's kind of the most, and again, there's nothing wrong with that per se, but there's some concerns about it that I'll address here in a minute. And again, this gets more practical in just a minute, so I'll hang in there.

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But we are whole persons, but we have a soul or spirit. This has become the most prevalent view, especially among modern evangelicals. And I cite some people who've written extensively on why Cartesian dualism is the way to go, the best, in their minds, it's the best way to interpret the Bible, for instance. And it at least takes seriously the idea of the body as important, although maybe not as important as I would say the Bible does.

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And here's one of the outworkings of that. The late 19th or mid-19th into the 20th century revivalism movements emphasized saving souls, which again, that's not a bad phrase per se, but the emphasis became basically just get them converted and then, you know, we'll do the best we can for them after that. It tended to neglect the poor at times. That mindset, that mindset also tended to be comfortable with racial and gender division.

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It tended to like let that kind of go in many circles, at least make it not as important because hey, at least their souls are saved. So, everything else will sort of catch up later. This created in the minds of many a very uneven approach to the holistic ministry of Jesus. and to the gospel.

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So what you had then from that is pushback. You had some pushback even from notable evangelicals, Carl F.H. Henry, who was a mentor for Billy Graham, who was the founding dean of Fuller Seminary. He wrote a book in the 1940s called The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism.

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And in that book, he really critiqued, he said, we're missing something here. Yay, that we're trying to preach the gospel and save souls, but we need to be critiqued because we're not being as holistic in addressing the needs before us. And remember, he was, you know, writing during a very kind of a transitional difficult time, even in America, in regard to economic downturn and racial segregation. and all that.

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And of course, then the social gospel movement, which is more progressivist movement of Rousenbush. So I won't go into all that. Recent note of evangelical pushback, philosophers like Nancy Murphy, she's a Fuller product. Well, she studied at Berkeley, I think, but she taught at Fuller.

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There are others from other disciplines who've come along within evangelicalism, within a more evangelical setting and said, wait a minute, let's rethink this. Does the Bible and does philosophy that is open or that is okay with Christianity, are this compatible with Christianity, does that lend itself to this very dualistic, you know, piecing us up into separate things? Or is there a more holistic argument we could make, both biblically and philosophically and all that?

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So she was a, she has become, or has been, I should say, for probably 30 or 40 years, a leading voice on this, along with people like Warren Brown, Kevin Corcoran. They have sort of critiqued, or not sort of, they have strongly critiqued Cartesian dualism and said, you know, there's a better way to read the Bible and to read what humans are. She calls it non-reductive physicalism for those, you know, taking note at home. But

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She's not alone. So for me, here's what that looked like, just for fun. My dissertation is called A Theological Arm Argument for the Unity of the Human Being, an Issue in Evangelical Theology. Again, at that time, I was in the Church of the Nazarene, which is kind of a more evangelical Wesleyan group.

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I'm no longer in that group, but I wanted to give my colleagues and even folks, you know, slightly outside that circle, maybe a reintroduction to some tools to kind of move away from a very dichotomistic, very, very chopped up way of thinking about the human being. Again, as you see, I wasn't the only one to do that. I'm not the only one to ever do that or any of that.

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I wish, you know, it'd be fun if I were, I'd write more books, but no, I'm not the only one to do that. But I wanted to make some contribution in that way to say, well, what if I took looked back at the Bible first, and then systematically sort of went, is there a way you can make this holistic argument, not just from philosophy, not just from historical voices, but from the text itself? And again, I'm convinced that there is, and my dissertation committee was convinced enough that there was reason to say there was, so they passed me.

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But You see that summary, let me start to go back. Now, there's that, but so what, right? What are some real life pastoral implications of viewing the human being more holistically rather than in part?

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What are some so what? So this is where we get maybe to the more fun, relatively fun part of the presentation, okay? The answer, there are many. So if you choose to look, to miss out on a holistic view of the human being, saying that when the Bible speaks of things like soul or spirit or heart or mind or kidneys even, I mean, there's all kinds of words that the Old and New Testament uses to

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discuss human beings, instead of looking at that as a separately existing or maybe superior part of the person, right? If you look at that instead as an aspect of our whole being, which certainly we have some immaterial things like thoughts, but we also are very physical beings. On purpose, we could say biblically, on purpose, Paul uses very physical language on purpose, like in a way that would be disturbing to maybe a platonic kind of thinkers or thinkers that want to see only the immaterial of us as good or real.

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Paul says, you know, in Romans 12, right, you turn to your body, somati, soma, the word for body, as living sacrifices, that kind of stuff. So that would have pushed back and said, look, our body, in 1 Corinthians 15, where it's the longest argument in the Bible, really, for resurrection of the body. And so if you miss out on that, then I would contend first, you miss the vast array of language about human beings, terms like soul, spirit, heart, kidneys, mind, body.

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I mean, there's a ton believe me, I had to learn the hard way. There's a ton of those in the Hebrew or Greek fail following request used throughout the Old and New Testament. They're sometimes used to refer to the whole person and other times they highlight a particular aspect of the person.

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They always seem to be holistic rather than partitive, like cutting things up. So for instance, when Jesus said, or when the Bible, when the gospels, you know, when Jesus is challenged by the Pharisees in Matthew's gospel, it says, He knew their hearts. What does that mean?

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Does he know it was a material part of them? No, he knew them like holistically, but heart, cardia, is often used for secrets. Like he knew they were secretly hiding something. That's what I think if you sort of just chop people up too much, you miss that vast array of description of human beings.

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Secondly, you miss making severe errors in regard to historical theology. I mean, what do you do with the resurrection of the body? You know, even if you say, well, and again, I'm not making fun of this, but even if you say, well, you know, her body's on the ground, but her spirit is in heaven. Well, pastorally, I don't know how satisfying that is, first of all, pastorally, having done a lot of funerals.

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Secondly, we do believe and confess resurrection of the body. So there is a, even if you say that and hold a dualistic kind of anthropology, so to speak, then you're, you still have to say, well, that's incomplete until there's some kind of physical form. And I just think a more holistic pastoral care to those who are grieving, which means a lot to people and certainly is a big part of what pastors are called to do.

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and search are called to do, elders are called to do, you sort of miss out on the fullness of resurrection that our folks in church confess, most of them every week, resurrection of the body, right? So Also, of course, Jesus's own physicality. Jesus had a physicality, come and touch the wounds, right?

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Come and eat with me on the beach. That's a very physical thing that Jesus was doing after the resurrection. Now, yeah, his body was able to do some things that ours can't do at the moment, but there was still a physicality, a recognizable physicality to it, right? And also, again, this emphasis on ministry

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proactive of a better phrase, to the whole person, not just spiritual deliverance. And again, I'm not against that. I'm a pastor. I want to see people, you know, come to a place where they are experiencing God in a very deep and intimate way.

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But I don't want to miss out on the sort of holistic ways of ministering to people. In fact, let me, I'll move on and say the teachings of Jesus that include the parables. You know, I've heard, and you've probably heard this too, I've heard the Good Samaritan over-spiritualized to, oh, it's just an allegory about the journey of salvation.

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Well, there's some of that there maybe, okay? Even some of the church fathers did this, some of the reformers did this too. But here's, I would argue, and I think Dr. Margaret Kramer would confirm this.

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I think she's a New Testament scholar here, but I really believe, pastorally speaking, that the Good Samaritan is about have compassion to the poor, neglected, the outcasts, and even your enemies. That's the point of the Good Samaritan. It's not simply just the spiritualized journey of salvation. It's about a guy who's dying in a ditch and what are you going to do about it?

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Okay. I believe that's why it had such impact when Jesus preached that parable. And I believe it will have greater impact if we are honest about the more holistic approach. Same way, you know, this is a big one.

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I actually wrote a portion of a chapter on this and done presentations on this. the rich man in Lazarus parable is... not simply about the inner workings of the intermediate state between now and resurrect. I've heard that aspect.

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Well, so a preacher, a well-meaning preacher, and I don't go around making fun of preachers, by the way, because I am one, but you know, I've read and heard sermons about, okay, here's the rich man and Lazarus. What the Bible is telling us here is that you'll be conscious when you die in some intermediate state and you'll be consciously either suffering or in the bosom of Abraham? Well, okay, maybe or maybe not, okay?

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But I think the big point of that parable is not this sort of immaterial, over-spiritualizing aspect. I think it's treat poor people well, don't ignore them, right? I mean, that's the point, because what did the rich man get in trouble for? He walked by Lazarus at the gate every day and didn't do anything to

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minister to this poor person, even though he could have. I think Jesus was teaching, don't neglect the poor, don't neglect those who are in need, especially when they're right in front of you. So again, I think just in practical, very preacher type ways, the depth of what we preach is expanded when we take seriously a holistic view of the human being.

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And here's the big one today. I wanted to emphasize that, you know, kind of our biggest focus here today and a particular interest for me as an ethicist is we can neglect the poor and there can be racism and there can be misogyny that historically, you can trace to this partitive view of the human being. Again, not everybody who holds a, that we have a soul or whatever, instead of we are sort of a body that has immaterial aspects to us, which is my view, more holistic view, in my opinion.

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But not everybody who has a part of you neglects the poor and is a racist and is misogynist, okay? I'm not saying that, but I am saying that way of looking at human beings has historically often led to these three things and even more. So as theologians in the last century especially have reminded us, especially those identified with liberation theology and overly dualistic anthropology is what that would be called, tends to emphasize spirit as superior to body and that kind of stuff.

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It sets the tone for classism, racism, and sexism. The plight of the poor, as I've just mentioned in those parable examples, gets spiritualized, right? I mean, save their souls and maybe later we'll get around to feeding their bodies. Jesus had a more holistic ministry.

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When he fed the 5,000, he didn't just go, hey, you got your sermon. Now go home. Good luck. Hope you get some food, right?

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He didn't say that. The plight of people of color is neglected. I'll talk about that just in a second. Those who work the land versus those who of us who are sort of in academia and academia and or in the sort of the realm of the mind tend to

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become elevated over those who do physical labor. Why? Well, because the immaterial is more important than the physical. I mean, again, in that view, right?

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So that's a danger. And again, I'll, here's another. Women whose bodies are more aligned with nature or natural cycles or cycles of nature often get relegated to lower status. Why?

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They're more earthy. They're not, they're more tied to the physical. or whatever. So let me just give you some examples.

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This is Dr. Gutzabo Gutierrez here that, sorry for that, the words are over him, but that's whose face you see there. I'll just give you a quick quote from him. The spiritual pursuits in regard to the poor do not eliminate their hunger, and we must keep both dimensions before us.

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That was Dr. Gutierrez's way of arguing for a more holistic anthropology. basically, so that the poor don't get neglected, or those who work the land. He writes about that too, and so does Bonino and some of the other great writers in Liberation Thought.

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Associating those who work the land is less than those who engage in the work of the mind miss the point of, I believe, what the Bible is trying to teach us about who we are as humans. More examples, Dr. James Cone, who just passed away recently, I did part of, I did my major theology paper on Dr.

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Cone's theology in seminary. And fascinating, of course, historic figure in theology. But I'll give you a couple of quotes from him. Here's

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The Spirituals and the Blues is a great book of his. It's a little over 50 years old now, but black music is unifying because it confronts the individual with the truth of black existence and affirms that black being is possible only in a communal context. And then he says in another book, a very famous book, The Cross from the Lynching Tree, unfortunately, during the course of 2,000 years of Christianity or Christian history, the symbol of the cross, It means the cross, this symbol of salvation has been detached from any reference to the ongoing suffering and oppression of human beings.

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Again, I think that's those two examples are Dr. Cohn's way of saying, number one, in regard to music, right? So both the blues and church music. He argues that for people who are oppressed, especially,

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and maybe he says it ought to be this way for the whole church, that our music should not simply be an escape. And I think of hymns that are, or gospel songs that I grew up hearing in a more white church setting, mostly. I pastored in multicultural churches, but I grew up in mostly white congregations. Like, I'll Fly Away is a great hymn, and I still like it.

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but it's really more about escape. Whereas other songs that may come from, historically from the African-American traditions would be something like, precious Lord, take my hand, lead me on, let me stand. I'm tired, I'm weak, I'm worn. I think there's a distinction there.

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I think there's a holism there in the second example. that says, don't just like, let me just escape. I mean, my theology is not about just escaping the body and being some, flying away. And again, I'm not making fun of I'll fly away.

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I'm just giving an example. But instead, Christian spirituality is about, I'm tired, I'm weak, I'm worn, I'm in this, you know, I'm A holistic being, take my hand, lead me. So for Cone, Neither spiritual nor blues music is an escape from the body.

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The cross is not to be divorced from the physical realities of existence. Sitting there for a minute. Here's another one. This is Susan Brooks, Thistlethwaite.

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And I did get her name right. I embarrassed him the one time, did not. But anyway, All day long, all night long, every day and every night, the bodies of women and girls are turned into battlefields.

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It's important to understand the war on women from the perspective of the body as a battlefield, because that is where we can actually see the carnage and acknowledge the pain. So the idea in her work for a long time, again, has been relegating women to less than status because, for instance, their bodies may be more in tune with the cycles of the earth or material reality. again, misses the point of God's purposes or anthropology for us as human beings. So here's a quick summary, and then I'll be open for questions.

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Obviously, you know how it is. I feel like we could always say more. There we go. Sorry.

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I accidentally unshared my screen, so let me reshare it one more time. Sorry about that. And here we go. So, viewing the so I can see, sorry, viewing the human being in parts, especially with an emphasis upon the immaterial as the real or authentic self, I would say is biblically unnecessary.

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It's biblically unwarranted. It's not some kind of unpardonable sin, believe me. I'm just saying there are I'm just saying there are better ways to read the Bible than that.

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I think there are more, there are richer ways, there are more ethically helpful ways to read the Bible than to read human beings as a very partitive kind of thing. Secondly, presents, or it presents problems in both the Old and New Testament hermeneutics and application. It takes away practical aspects of the work of God in full liberation.

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That's the one I think as a pastor and as an ethicist theologian, that stands out to me the most. I don't want my congregation to say, well, as long as we've shared with them, you know, how to be saved, then that's our, that's all we we need to do. And I mean, if we can throw some food here and there, that's fine.

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Or give some, I really want a more holistic ministry because I believe that's the ministry of Jesus and a ministry the church is called to, even in the book of Acts and beyond. And And I believe the great, honestly, leaders of our time, in my case, John Wesley, the Wesleyan revivals of the 18th century, not only saw a lot of people become Christians, which is, I mean, wonderful, but it also helped defeat slavery, it helped build hospitals, it helped build orphanages, it helped, you know, You get my point.

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It was really about, I mean, Wesley's famous phrase about, if you don't know where the poor are, go out and find them. Or he wrote to one congregation, thank you for the money you have sent through me to this. It was a place that took care of the poor there outside of London. And he said, but I would be most pleased if you came with me.

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and to see them yourself and administer themselves. So anyway, and then finally, it tends to relegate persons to a less than status based upon race, class, or gender. So there's my thought on that. That's where I've been hanging out in the last, well, long time, really, if you talk about my dissertation, I have made, you know, other kind of U-turns from there, but my own

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next couple of writing pursuits will probably take this pretty seriously. So there it is. Thank you. Thank you so much, Dr.

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Christian. I am going to ask you to stop sharing your screen now and let's see if there are people who would like to ask some questions. Let's get your screen unshared. Let's see.

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Stop your sharing there. Beautiful. And Dr. Christian has laid out a case for understanding human beings as not simply souls, but that in understanding that we must think theologically of people as whole beings, soul and body, and that to do anything other than that can lead us to denigrating the person

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in all sorts of ways. What do you think about what he has said? Are there questions that come up from what he has said? And I'll start with one.

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Practically speaking, how would you see this connected? You've spoken about race and you've spoken about gender, biology. How do you see this connected to what seems to be a very hot button issue right now, which is the welcome of folks who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and other forms of gender difference? I think it.

00:36:04.640 - 00:36:36.320

Go ahead. Would you speak about how you see it? Yeah, and I could have included, and I probably should have, and I have, I've been in conversations both in my former denomination and now in the United Methodist Church, which, as you know, has recently formally voted to be more welcoming or welcoming to the max of folks in the LGBTQ plus community.

00:36:38.080 - 00:37:04.560

I think those conversations do often end up going back to look, we're looking at the whole person. An overall denigration, is that a good word? Overall denigration of sex itself has a, as you know, a very strange history in the church, sadly, a very up and down kind of history.

00:37:05.120 - 00:37:40.160

And I would argue that a part of that, of course, would come from this fear of physicality, I'd say, or this downgrading of physicality or lack of a holistic anthropology. So, you know, sex itself is already this very difficult topic over the last, especially 100 years or more in Christianity. You add the fact that, and this sounds a little tongue in cheek, but

00:37:40.880 - 00:38:01.720

I grew up in a culture where it was hard for heterosexual ministers to talk about heterosexual sex. It was, that was already tough. I remember as a teenager just sitting in a youth group going, what is this guy talking about? You know, I mean, why, I mean, why is he, you know, struggling with this so much?

00:38:02.240 - 00:38:31.440

And then you add sexual expressions that are, different, I mean, from that heteronormativity, right? And so then you get this, oh, well, man, we, I'm tongue in cheek a little bit, but man, we didn't even know how to talk about heterosexual sex very well. Boy, we are just not prepared for discussing that.

00:38:31.600 - 00:38:59.480

So that's one thing. Secondly, I think it has to do, again, when you're not partitive, not only does it make you cause you to elevate the immaterial, but it can cause you, again, to denigrate the physical to the point where you get phrases like this, well, you can't identify as a gay Christian because, you know, being gay is not really a part of identity. It's, you know what I mean?

00:38:59.480 - 00:39:33.520

It's a sexual preference or whatever. Well, no, I think what you do, instead what you have is a holistic view of the human being that says we are a very complicated mix of both sort of physical or material and immaterial aspects, okay? And if we could see that in the light of the compassion of Christ, the tapestry of creation,

00:39:36.400 - 00:40:14.520

who we are as human beings in the kingdom. I think that's, I think that opens the door for a healthier interaction about sex in general, welcoming attitude toward those who, you know, who have attractions that are different from heteronormativity. So I think those two things definitely, I guess, in answer to your question, I think it is, you're right, in my opinion, that is a natural progression in the discussion that really does tie back to, again, the dangers of this partitive view of the human being.

00:40:16.200 - 00:40:23.120

There's the best answer I have right now. All right. Are there other questions for Dr. Christian?

00:40:29.680 - 00:40:49.280

And if you have a question, please take yourself off mute and turn your camera on. Yes. Well, it looks to me like all hearts and minds are clear. So thank you very much for sharing this with us, Dr.

00:40:49.280 - 00:41:17.040

Christian. And We are very glad that those of you who are able to join us joined us today. Those of you who are watching this on recording, we hope you find this a helpful conversation and a help for your ministry as you go forward and you think about how you preach and teach about salvation and about people as moral agents and moral parts of the community of faith.

00:41:18.080 - 00:41:26.080

And that, I think, will do it for us today from cultivating new ideas. Thank you all very much, and I will see you another time.