Mr. Steve Robinson:

O heavenly King, O Comforter, the Spirit of truth, who art in all places and fillest all things, the Treasury of good things and Giver of life, come and abide in us and cleanse us from every stain, and save our souls, O gracious Lord.

Good afternoon, and welcome to this edition of Our Life in Christ. I’m your host today as usual, Steve Robinson, and I’m in the studio with Bill Gould again, as usual.

Mr. Bill Gould: As usual. [Laughter]

Mr. Robinson: Well, not “as usual,” actually. You’re still recovering from that kidney stone incident.

Mr. Gould: Yeah, well, you know. Hopefully we’ll have this taken care of this week.

Mr. Robinson: I hope you have this resolved. Yeah, get that resolved this week before the show.

Mr. Gould: I’m feeling pretty good today, Steve.

Mr. Robinson: Well, yeah, those little pills that you took before the show… You’re really happy today!

Mr. Gould: I’m not responsible for anything I say today on this show.

Mr. Robinson: Bill, before the show, says, “Well, this is going to be really interesting.” I said, “Well, that’ll be a change!” [Laughter] Hopefully we will have something interesting for our listeners to hear today.

So, Bill, we have finished up our series on sola scriptura, and we want to begin a new series. We’re going to be talking about shaping a Christian worldview from an Orthodox perspective.

Mr. Gould: Yes, that’s right.

Mr. Robinson: This is going to involve a lot of stuff, Bill. I mean, I don’t know that we can finish a series in twelve months on this topic, because it really is the entirety of the Orthodox faith. This is essentially how we view the world, is encompassed in everything and in every aspect of the Orthodox life.

Mr. Gould: That’s right.

Mr. Robinson: It’s going to be kind of difficult for us to whittle this down into bite-size chunks for about 45 minutes a Sunday—but we’re going to give that a shot anyway. We’re kind of stupid! [Laughter]

Mr. Gould: Yeah, there is some deep water here.

Mr. Robinson: There it is.

Mr. Gould: If we get a little wet going in, and it gets a little, ah…

Mr. Robinson: We’ll try to let the listeners up for air once in a while.

Mr. Gould: That’s right, but we hope you’ll hang with us and see how this plays out.

Mr. Robinson: Well, this is important stuff. We listen to Christian radio, and we listen to Patriot and all these stations, and people are basically talking about: How do we understand the world? How do we frame the world in a moral, ethical, Christian, Judeo-Christian kind of way? And I think that’s essentially what we are going to try to do here, is say: How do we in fact do that? Because I think most of the time when we hear these kinds of discussions, essentially it’s focused on issues. We hear the talk in terms of abortion, the ten commandments, prayer in school…

Mr. Gould: Social justice, all these things.

Mr. Robinson: Sure, but there has to be an overarching framework. There has to be a way for us to understand the world, the entire creation, the cosmos, including ourselves, including government, including politics, including morals and ethics, in a framework that is from God, from God as we understand him as Christian people.

Mr. Gould: Right, and so we’re going to start and take some of the core doctrines of the Orthodox faith and then work through them and hopefully arrive at something that is distinguishable as truly Orthodox in terms of the way we actually live our lives and think about the world. I think we could sum that up essentially by saying that Orthodoxy is maybe peculiar compared with other worldviews in that we have what we call a sacramental view of the world. We’re going to try to explain that as we go along—

Mr. Robinson: That’s going to take a few weeks to unpack that one.

Mr. Gould: Right, but that’s where we’re going with this.

Mr. Robinson: Well, Bill, one of the things that you mention when you say “an Orthodox worldview,” we could look at that in two ways: one with the small-o, and one with the big-O. [Laughter] The small-o is, I think, orthodox Christianity, what most people who are Christian in the sense of that word loosely defined are in fact orthodox. Of course, we would exclude people, like most people do, which would be like the Jehovah’s Witnesses…

Mr. Gould: The cults.

Mr. Robinson: Yeah, the cults, the people who don’t believe in God in Trinity…

Mr. Gould: Islam.

Mr. Robinson: ...the incarnation of the second Person of the Trinity, Jesus Christ become flesh. Those are things that would put people, as Hank Hanegraaf says, “outside the pale of orthodoxy.” So we are going to work from a framework that all of us agree on, that I think we can all approach, that we can say, “Yes, we all believe in God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, who exists in three Persons in one essence or one nature, and that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, the second Person of the Trinity, become flesh.”

Mr. Gould: That God has in fact been incarnate and continues to be incarnate.

Mr. Robinson: Yes. And so that’s the framework we’re going to work from. But, as we always say, the Christian East has delved into the meaning and the ramifications and the issues that we face as human beings that flow from that proper definition of who God is and who Jesus Christ is, and consequently who we are. And those are the things that we hope are going to bring a uniquely big-O Orthodox perspective to how we understand the world, how we understand our relationship to God in creation and how we understand God’s relationship to us as human beings, and what does it mean for us to be created in his image and likeness and for us to be saved in Christ and be reunited to God. That’s the big, big picture, but, Bill, before we can get to that, we’ve got a whole lot of framing and issues and some things that we need to talk about to basically lay some foundations, some groundwork for how and why we even talk about these things.

Mr. Gould: That’s right.

Mr. Robinson: These are some deep things, and as we said, these are not things that you’re going to get usually in Christian television, radio, something like that, but I think there are some things that we can talk about, that we can discuss, in a way that isn’t going to be too overly intellectual, too philosophical. We’re not going to have footnotes on the show or anything like that, so ultimately it’s going to be eminently practical.

Mr. Gould: That’s right. We promise not to wax philosophical. That’s death on the radio, I’m sure. [Laughter]

Mr. Robinson: It’s death to me because I don’t think I can do that, even with a script in front of me. So, Bill, before we begin our first segment, let’s talk about sayings from the Fathers.

Mr. Gould: Yes, we have today Father Dorotheos of Gaza, who was eminently practical. He has some couple sayings that we’ve got for us.

As shadows accompany the bodies that cast them, so temptations accompany the fulfillment of the commandments.

Mr. Robinson: Wow. Now if that’s not practical, I don’t know what is, because one of the things that we constantly wrestle with in our spiritual walks, in our attempt to be obedient to God, is the fact that no good deed seemed to go unpunished. [Laughter]

Mr. Gould: Well, it’s true. If you’re trying to live the Christian life, it is a fact that you will be tempted.

Mr. Robinson: Yes, and you may even be persecuted. Peter says, “All those who desire to live godly in Christ Jesus will be persecuted.” That’s a promise. He doesn’t say we’re going to be wealthy and handsome and marry well and live up in Troon.

Mr. Gould: No, there’s no guarantee of that.

Mr. Robinson: No guarantee of that.

Mr. Gould: Exactly. And you’re right, that persecution can come from a number of places. It can come from members of our own families, people whom we know in the workplace, people whom we don’t know. And I think we can also—and I think Dorotheos implies that it can also come from the invisible realm and the spiritual powers that are arrayed against us as Christians.

Mr. Robinson: I think C.S. Lewis talks about this when he says if somebody wants to really resist temptation as Christ resisted temptation, perfectly, then in order to do that, you have to resist the temptation to the max. So we don’t really experience the spiritual discipline of keeping the commandments until we’ve resisted to the point of shedding blood, as Hebrews says. So if we really do try to keep the commandments, then what will happen is we will be tested as whether or not we can really keep the commandments. It’s no virtue to [lie] down when the temptation comes and just kind of blows us over with a gentle breeze; it’s when the temptation comes as a hurricane and we can stand, is when we have truly been tested.

Mr. Gould: Right. Well, we have another one. This is a little different. It says:

It is no great thing not to judge and to be sympathetic to someone who is in trouble and falls down before you. But it is a great thing not to judge or to strike back when someone, on account of his own passions, speaks against you, and to disagree when someone else is honored more than you are.

Mr. Robinson: Oh boy!

Mr. Gould: So in case we get puffed up by our temptations and are standing in temptations, we have this reminder that we can… It’s easy for us to judge when things aren’t going quite so well.

Mr. Robinson: You know, again, this is eminently practical, because I think all of us have been in a relationship where we know people who are, at least in any worldly sense of the word, a very sharing and caring and non-judgmental kind of person, but when push comes to shove and that person is in fact attacked or unjustly accused or somehow gossiped about or slandered unrighteously or somebody else gets recognition that they don’t, the true colors often do come out. In fact, that comes out in Christians.

Mr. Gould: It comes out in me. [Laughter]

Mr. Robinson: Yeah, it’s easy to be sharing and caring and put on the facade of being non-judgmental and very merciful when it’s convenient for us, but the real test is when we are on the receiving end of injustice, of bad things, and testing and trials. Very practical.

Mr. Gould: Yes, we tend to self-justify when things go bad.

Mr. Robinson: Instead of, Paul says in Romans, letting God justify us; let God vindicate us, we really need to vindicate ourselves or take that away from God. [Laughter] So, Bill, [when] we come back from our first break, we’re going to talk about dogma.

Mr. Gould: Dogma.

Mr. Robinson: Yeah, dogma.

Mr. Gould: Is that a female canine, or?

Mr. Robinson: Yeah, well, I think a lot of people have fear of dogma, so we’re going to try to allay that fear when we come back. You’re listening to Our Life in Christ. We’ll be right back.

Mr. Robinson: And welcome back to Our Life in Christ. I’m your host today, Steve Robinson, and I’m in the studio with Bill Gould. We are featuring today Romanian Byzantine chant.

Mr. Gould: Oh, neat stuff.

Mr. Robinson: Well, yeah, you know, it’s an acquired taste for some people, Bill. [Laughter] Some of our listeners are probably going, “What is that?” and some people are going, “Wow, that’s cool.” But this is a reality in the Orthodox faith. A lot of it comes out of the Eastern Bloc countries, the Middle East, and this is part of the rich liturgical tradition of the Orthodox Church. We have music that spans basically about every genre: Western, Eastern.

Mr. Gould: Yeah, and hundreds of years.

Mr. Robinson: Thousands of years, actually. Two thousand years. So anyway: Romanian Byzantine chant, beautifully done.

Bill, before the break we were embarking on a discussion of dogma.

Mr. Gould: Yes.

Mr. Robinson: Now, what is the importance of dogma? Well, another word for that would be… “Dogma” is kind of a scary word, because when we say “dogma” we often think about dogmatic theology, systematic theology, and those great big thick books that are in your pastor’s office that he has there but probably has never read.

Mr. Gould: Right. Well, another word for “dogma” is “doctrine.”

Mr. Robinson: Just “teaching.”

Mr. Gould: That’s right. There are some places in the New Testament where actually that word, “teaching,” refers to something that we would consider to be doctrine—sometimes it doesn’t—but those two words—actually three words—are somewhat interchangeable.

Mr. Robinson: Yeah, and the importance of that is I think summed up in Titus 2. Paul tells Titus:

In all things, show yourself to be an example of good deeds, with purity of doctrine, dignified, sound in speech which is beyond reproach, showing all good faith, that you may adorn the doctrine of God our Savior in every respect.

This is a really interesting passage, because a lot of times we think about doctrine and dogma as intellectual, philosophical. We think of it in terms of just heady things that are for pastors and PhD candidates.

Mr. Gould: The real smart folks.

Mr. Robinson: Yeah, the real smart people, and really doesn’t have much to do with us. We’re just more interested in the practical kinds of things. But what Paul is telling Titus here is that dogma and doctrine is practical and that we are to conduct ourselves in a way that adorns or makes ornate the doctrine of God or the dogma of God.

Mr. Gould: Right, so we’re to live out the doctrine that we receive.

Mr. Robinson: Now that right there, Bill, I think is the crux of the matter, that we are to live out the doctrine that we receive, because otherwise what really sets us apart from anybody else in the world? What really sets apart the Christian life from anything or any philosophy, any world religion, any kind of moral or ethical system? If you end up with good people…

Mr. Gould: Right, we can invent a lot of things ourselves, but in this case we’re talking about having received it from somewhere.

Mr. Robinson: And this is ultimately the revelation of God to humanity, that God has revealed himself to us, as we say in our hymns every Sunday morning in our Matins service: “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.” So God has revealed himself to us; God has given us his self-revelation. He has given us a doctrine, a teaching, about who he is, and he has defined himself for us in the Person of Jesus Christ. And how we understand who God is and who Jesus Christ is is what we are supposed to live out in our daily lives, in our walk in this world.

Mr. Gould: Right, I mean, we just spent four weeks talking about sola scriptura. Of course, many of our audience would probably say, “Yes, the source of dogma is in fact the Scriptures,” and we would agree that a source of dogma is the Scriptures, but dogma also comes to us through the oral teaching of the apostles and through the life and practice of the sacramental life of the Church. We have a number of different sources for our dogma. But I think the defining feature of the dogma that we have is that it doesn’t change. It’s something that, in fact, has been given by God, either through Christ or through the Holy Spirit, and it’s basically stuck in stone, and it’s not going to change; it’s not going to get “developed,” but it basically is given and we discern what it is and we declare it as doctrine, as dogma.

Mr. Robinson: I think that’s a very, very important point, Bill, because when we talk about tradition in the broad sense of the word—tradition which includes Scripture but also includes the inner life of the Church that we’ve been talking about as you say in the series on sola scriptura—that we’re not talking about things that are added to, things that change, or things that redefine God as he is revealed himself in Jesus Christ. This dogma or this doctrine has been delivered to the saints once for all, and anything that has been said through the centuries, across the centuries, by ecumenical councils, by Fathers of the Church, by Mothers of the Church, by any of the great teachers, the theologians of the Church, they have not changed that doctrine or that dogma, but they have elaborated it, they have expounded upon it, but they are affirming that one true faith that was once for all delivered.

Mr. Gould: Yes, relating dogma perhaps to certain issues which arise with respect to false teachings or different things that have come up.

Mr. Robinson: Yeah, so you will never find in the Orthodox Church a change in the apostolic teaching of the Person and nature and work of Christ, the Person of God, the nature of the Trinity, or anything like that. This is not going to develop and morph into some kind of a New Age kind of whatever.

Mr. Gould: It’s not like a dialectic and synergy working together to try to come up with the truth.

Mr. Robinson: No, the truth has been established, and all we can do is talk about the truth in a way that speaks to the culture, speaks to the spirit of the age—but that truth will never change. So that we need to put on the table up front.

So, Bill, when we talk about the doctrine and dogma of the Church, basically when we talk about what is the foundation, what is the very core and the root and the cornerstone of everything that we talk about in the Orthodox faith, it is God, God in Trinity, and the incarnation of the second Person of that trinitarian God, who becomes flesh and lives as a human being, is crucified, is raised from the dead, and ascends back to the Father in that incarnate body.

Mr. Gould: Right, and then of course the procession of the Holy Spirit and his presence with us in the life of the Church as promised by Christ himself. So there you have all three Persons, and that’s how we relate everything in our life.

Mr. Robinson: Everything comes back to that. Without that, the Orthodox faith—and the Orthodox faith, again, if you visit a church and you go to a worship service, you’ll go there and you’ll see worship as you’ve never seen it any other place on earth. You will see an expression of the Christian faith that is just not on anybody… You couldn’t make that stuff up. [Laughter]

I was on worship committees for a lot of years, Bill, and I never touched the hem of the garment of what you find within the liturgical life of the Orthodox Church, and yet it’s a continuation of the early Jewish services, the early Jewish ways of worship and this style of approaching God.

Mr. Gould: Informed by the dogma of the Church.

Mr. Robinson: Informed by the dogma of the Trinity and God and Christ. So we have to look at how the Church has in fact responded to this great revelation of God in Christ. This is what the Church is all about. This is the response of human beings to the doctrine, dogma, and teaching, and the revelation of God in Christ. This is what we have now in response to that great dogmatic revelation of God in Christ. So we cannot escape the very practical, fundamental—for lack of a better word—lifestyle. I hate that word, but essentially that’s what we come down to is that when we encounter the living God in Christ through the Holy Spirit, we enter into a way of life, a way of existence, a way of being that is transformed by that fact.

Mr. Gould: Well, we might even say in fact that human beings generally—not even generally, specifically—live according to a particular dogma. They may not realize that they live according to that dogma… We enter into understanding more of what that dogma is when we become a member of the body of Christ, when we are illumined by the Holy Spirit. It’s not that there is actually a different dogma. There is only one truth. As Christians, we believe that it is the truth of the Gospel.

Mr. Robinson: Yeah, exactly. So, Bill, we’re coming up on our second break already. [Laughter] When we come back from the break, we’re going to talk about the modern world, and as we mentioned, this dogma-phobia, this fear of dogma that we have, and yet as you stated, everybody really does have a dogma. Everybody really does have a way of understanding the world, and everybody really does live according to their personal—whether it’s articulated or not—understanding of how they explain the world to themselves. So when we come back from the break, we’re going to talk a little bit about the modern spirit of the age and the dogmas, and how do we get over this fear of dogma, and how do we in fact then come back to creating a Christian dogmatic worldview. You’re listening to Our Life in Christ. We’ll be right back.

Mr. Robinson: Welcome back to Our Life in Christ, and I’m your host today, Steve Robinson, in the studio with Bill Gould. Bill, we’re talking about dogma. One of the things that people think about when they think about dogma is college lectures and big, thick books and a lot of long 25-cent theological words.

Mr. Gould: Yeah: boring.

Mr. Robinson: Yep, boring, exactly. But, you know, I think dogma itself is not boring. It’s usually people who talk about dogma that are boring, because dogma ultimately is eminently practical, because dogma is really what shapes the entire world. It’s what shapes everybody’s behavior. It’s what shapes everything that we do. It shapes what we think, it shapes how we react to things, it shapes our politics, it shapes international politics. It’s shaping the whole Middle East. It’s shaping our response to the things that went on… 9/11 was a product of dogma, and our intervention in Iraq is a product of dogma.

Mr. Gould: Yes, that’s right. So even if people don’t know how to articulate their dogma, everyone essentially has a worldview. We’d say that a lot of people don’t and aren’t able to articulate their worldview, or they aren’t able to live consistently by the worldview that they articulate, and that’s even true for a lot of Christians. It’s very difficult to espouse a set of dogmas and then also live consistently by them at all times.

Mr. Robinson: Yeah, but I think a lot of ways you can look at somebody’s life, and as Paul tells Timothy, we do in fact adorn our dogmas by the way that we live. You can tell what somebody believes or what somebody thinks about the world, about other people, about themselves by how they react to things.

Mr. Gould: That’s right. Jesus had a word in fact for a person who espoused a particular worldview and didn’t live by it.

Mr. Robinson: Yeah, he called that a hypocrite.

Mr. Gould: He called it a hypocrite, exactly.

Mr. Robinson: And we have those in Christianity; we have those in the world.

Mr. Gould: We have probably a few in the room here, by the way… [Laughter]

Mr. Robinson: Yeah, that Ryan…

Mr. Gould: I’m pointing at myself! Oh, Ryan, that’s right. [Laughter]

Mr. Robinson: This is really where the rubber meets the road, because, again, we can talk about world history, we can talk about the great political machineries that have even come across us in the last century—the Communist movement, the Holocaust—these are all products of dogma. As we said, the current situation in the Middle East, that’s a product of dogma.

And then you get down to individuals. You remember—oh, gosh, it must have been 15 years ago or so—the Hale-Bopp people. Anybody remember those guys? They found them all castrated, and I guess they all drank the Kool-Aid or whatever it was, and killed themselves, because they had a dogma.

Mr. Gould: They believed their salvation was wrapped up in the comet.

Mr. Robinson: And when the comet came around, they killed themselves because they thought that the aliens were going to come and take them away, and that their bodies were just canisters for the spirit. All they did was… And this in some sense, you go: this was nuts, but they had the integrity to actually live and die according to their dogma. Their dogma was the body is a canister for the soul, and this is just old, old Gnostic heresy, but they believed that the body was evil in and of itself and that the soul needed to be set free from this canister, this material thing that was holding it down. All they did was rid themselves of the canister. They poured the Coke out of the can is essentially what it was.

Mr. Gould: Yeah. I guess we could almost say that actually philosophy is one way of expressing platitudes or standards to live by, but when we apply them and when we live by them and when we express them through our lives, then for many that becomes dogma. It’s something that they’re going to hold to in the face of something opposing them or the fashion of what other people may not believe around them in their culture.

Mr. Robinson: And here again we have philosophical or dogmatic worldviews that often clash. Again, we don’t want to keep coming back to the current political situation with the Middle East, but this is really a clash of dogmatics. When you look at Mother Teresa who is ministering to lepers in India—or who was—why is she over there, helping lepers, when this Hindu nation is not? Why is Mother Teresa seeking to comfort and heal and aid and minister, and the Hindus with their religion do not?

Mr. Gould: Because it’s not part of their worldview, not part of their dogma.

Mr. Robinson: Exactly, because if you help somebody who is a leper, then you’re messing with their karma.

Mr. Gould: I think this is why it’s so important for Christians to get their dogma, to live out their dogma, to get their dogma from Church, from Christ, from the Holy Spirit, from God, from revelation, as opposed to merely the philosophies of culture, the philosophies of men.

Mr. Robinson: And I think this is where… I don’t want to get started on a rant here, Bill, but I think for the most part our culture derives its dogma from the media. This is where I have a real, real issue with Christians who are in a sense really uninformed about what’s really being fed to them and their children through the media. One of the statements that Yoda makes in the current… [Laughter] He probably made a lot of them, but one of the ones that he makes, he says, “Only Siths deal in absolutes.” Well, this is a dogmatic statement. This is a philosophy. I’m afraid that most of the people in our current culture get their philosophy—they get their worldview—from television, from Yoda, from Obi-Wan Kenobi.

Mr. Gould: Relativism, basically, essentially, yeah.

Mr. Robinson: But what else do you have if you don’t have the Church, if you don’t have something that says everything is relative to God, who is absolute? Apart from having that foundation and having that absolute and that boundary that says, “This is light and this is dark; this is evil and this is good,” you’re left with Yoda, and you’re left with Obi-Wan, and you’re left with Sex and the City, and you’re left with The Lion King...

Mr. Gould: And Nike commercials and the rest of it.

Mr. Robinson: And our media just bombards us with dogma. It bombards us with a spirit of the age, it bombards us with a philosophy that tells us certain ways to understand creation, the world, ourselves as human beings, to understand even God.

Mr. Gould: If you were to listen to these guys and distill it down, basically what we are is materialistic, pleasure-seeking…

Mr. Robinson: “Go for it.”

Mr. Gould: …basically animals, which by the way G.K. Chesterton reminds us that we’re not, right?

Mr. Robinson: Oh, yeah, G.K. Chesterton, he’s one of my favorite people. He actually predated C.S. Lewis. He was early 1900s. I think C.S. Lewis actually holds a second candle to G.K. in my mind, but G.K. Chesterton has a great quote, Bill, and he’s talking about this notion of dogma, and he’s talking about what it means to be a human being, because he’s confronting the same things that we’re confronting today. He’s talking to people who believe that “oh, the human beings are all evolving to a higher plane of spirituality, and we’re constantly moving forward and we’re rising up to higher levels of consciousness” and all this kind of thing, but there was always this kind of relativistic thing going on even back then. But G.K. Chesterton has a great quote in a book called Orthodoxy: The Romance of Faith. Bill, do you want to read that? This is great.

Mr. Gould: Sure. He says:

Man can hardly be defined as an animal that makes tools. Ants, beavers, and monkeys make tools. Mann can be defined as an animal that makes dogmas. He piles doctrine upon doctrine, conclusion upon conclusion, and creates some tremendous scheme of philosophy and religion, and in doing so becomes more and more human. When he drops one doctrine after another, declines to tie himself to a system of religion, says that he has outgrown definitions, and in his own imagination sits singularly as god of his own, holding no creed but only examining and contemplating all, he cares then for the vast and universal church of which he is the only member, and then he is by that very process sinking slowly back into the vagueness of the vagrant animals and of the unconsciousness of grass. Trees have no dogmas. Turnips are very broad-minded.

Mr. Robinson: [Laughter] I love G.K.

Mr. Gould: “Turnips are very broad-minded.” [Laughter]

Mr. Robinson: I guess Yoda would be a turnip then! He does kind of look like one, doesn’t he?

Mr. Gould: Albeit a green one, yeah.

Mr. Robinson: But G.K. really… I mean, this could have been written yesterday. This is really striking to the very heart and the very core of the philosophy of the age apart from the revelation of God in Christ, because what he’s talking about here, again, is this person who omnisciently, as the god of himself, sits in judgment of all things and in total relativism, in total self-absorption, makes himself out to be god, and falls for the very first temptation, that he is God, knowing good from evil. And essentially that’s where we all end up if we don’t accept that we have a God, our Creator, the one who has ordered our lives, who has given us lives, and in whom we live and breathe and have our very being.

Mr. Gould: In whose image we have been created.

Mr. Robinson: And if we’re not in that image and if we don’t live and breathe and have our very being in a God who is above us, beyond us, and our Master and our Creator, then this is where we end up. We can only see ourselves as evolving to some kind of ethereal “godness” of our own. [Laughter] And as G.K. says, ultimately by ridding ourselves of doctrine, by ridding ourselves of dogma, by ridding ourselves of absolutes, we eventually become moral, ethical, religious, and spiritual turnips.

Mr. Gould: Fields of grass.

Mr. Robinson: And as Paul says, just kind of blows about with everything and just kind of comes along. That’s what wheat does; that’s what grass does.

Mr. Gould: Good picture there.

Mr. Robinson: Everything that blows this way or that way, it just kind of goes with the flow. That is a biblical warning. We have to pay attention; Hebrews 2 says we have to pay attention to the doctrine lest we drift away.

Mr. Gould: I often hear on the Patriot—I think it’s in one of the commercials—where it says that people who do not believe in anything will fall for anything.

Mr. Robinson: Exactly. Bill, we’re coming up on our last break here. When we come back from the break, we’re going to wrap up this section on dogma. You’re listening to Our Life in Christ.

Mr. Robinson: And welcome back to this final segment of Our Life in Christ, and I’m your host today, Steve Robinson. I’m in the studio with Bill Gould, who’s doing remarkably well. [Laughter] This has been interesting.

Mr. Gould: Except for some lapses here and there, I’m doing okay.

Mr. Robinson: Anyway, we’re talking about dogma. The thing that we have to understand is that we all live in the same world. We all live with the same phenomena; we all live with the same experiences as human beings. We have to make sense out of all of these things. We have to make sense out of where life comes from; we have to make sense out of why life ends, what happens after death. We have to make sense out of sickness. We have to make sense out of evil. We have to make sense out of goodness. Why is there even good in this world?

Mr. Gould: Like, why does Geraldo Rivera keep getting jobs on television? [Laughter]

Mr. Robinson: Why is Keanu Reeves a movie star? I mean, these are eternal questions? [Laughter]

Mr. Gould: We have to make sense out of this.

Mr. Robinson: But these are things that we just have to explain, and we explain them through dogma. At the core of our dogmatic questions is: Is there a God? And who is God?

Mr. Gould: And is there one God? Or are there many gods?

Mr. Robinson: Is there one God who is infinite in power, or is he limited in some way? Or are there, as you say, a lot of gods, all who have a little chunk of the universe that they wield power over, like the Greek gods?

Mr. Gould: And is he a good God or is he a bad God? Is he evil and good at the same time?

Mr. Robinson: And is God even a nice guy? [Laughter] And how do we interact with these gods? Is God just a cosmic force? Is it something that’s just out there and it’s nebulous and just kind of this ethereal something, impersonal, that controls the universe? Or is it a personal God? I guess the big question is: Are the gods like us? And if they are, maybe we can give them some Prozac? [Laughter]

Mr. Gould: It would calm them down a little bit.

Mr. Robinson: It might help them!

Mr. Gould: We need to manage them better than we’re doing.

Mr. Robinson: Well, the big question, too, is: Do the gods even like us? If there is a God, does he like us? Does he love us? And if they don’t like us, will a nice gift appease them? Can we do something to make them like us? These are all things… It’s kind of a comical way to put it, but those are really the questions that we’re all asking. How do we relate to whatever we perceive or however we understand the thing that controls or runs or creates or maintains the universe? Do we have a relationship with that?

Mr. Gould: What is our purpose in light of those things?

Mr. Robinson: And ultimately, how we define God for ourselves is ultimately how we will define the world, how we will define ourselves, how we will define ourselves, how we will define our relationship, how we define a worldview.

This is one of those things where I think we quoted G.K. Chesterton a few weeks ago, and it’s like: Everything matters except everything in the post-modern world. The bus system matters, art matters, whether or not they put a freeway through your neighborhood matters, whether or not you can afford to buy spinners for your Hummer matters—those things matter, but the thing that doesn’t matter is an overarching worldview. So everything matters on the minute level except for everything on the maximum level. This is ultimately what we have to get back. We have to understand everything on this maximum level. We have to understand dogma and doctrine, a framework and understanding of the universe and of God in order for us to define the minimal things.

Mr. Gould: Of course, and if God is for us ourselves, then that’s going to mean certain things. But if God is God of the Scripture, and if God of course is the trinitarian God that we recognize in Christian faith, then that’s obviously going to mean some things to us in how we live and how we work our dogma out, practically speaking.

Mr. Robinson: And in the post-modern world we just cannot accept that your dogma is flexible and can change from one minute to the next depending on whether or not you’ve had one beer or four, or a relationship with somebody or not. [Laughter] These things are not up for grabs. These things are not something that are flexible, that can wave in the wind.

Mr. Gould: Well, for some they can, unfortunately.

Mr. Robinson: Unfortunately, yeah, and it manifests itself. That doctrine gets adorned by how these people live. So ultimately we just have to understand as Christians that dogma is not just an abstract. Dogma is not merely philosophy. It’s not theology. It’s not for the ivory towers. It’s not for college professors. It’s not for the pastor. It’s really for all of us.

Mr. Gould: Yeah. Right, it’s for you and me.

Mr. Robinson: And what we really, really want to come back to is the statement that I heard—I can’t remember where I heard it recently, but somebody said—“The Incarnation changed everything.” And that is such a powerful statement; that is such a true statement, because what it means is—we keep coming back to—God, the second Person of the Trinity, Jesus Christ, becomes flesh. He enters the created universe that he created out of nothing, and he redeems that back to himself, through his eternal love for that creation which includes humanity.

So essentially what we’re going to embark on here, Bill, for the next whoever knows how many weeks is defining who that God is, who Jesus Christ is, who we are, and what does it mean for God to change everything? Is it really everything, or is it just everything?

Mr. Gould: And we’re going to define him according to the dogma of the Orthodox Church.

Mr. Robinson: Yes, and according to the dogma that is accepted universally by most Christians in the world today, again, except for the cults and all of those people, but we all have this foundation that we can work from. But what we’re going to talk about is the practical implications, the real grassroots, the real fundamental meaning of what it means for us to exist in God in Trinity, in whom we have our very being, in whom we move and breathe and live. And that’s where we’re headed, Bill. This is tall stuff, but ultimately it’s practical.

Mr. Gould: Well, that’s it. We don’t want to be like the grass that blows about, or turnips that are broad-minded. [Laughter] We want to know what we believe, and we want to be able to understand how it is that we should make decisions and act and behave in accordance with the great truths, the eternal truths, the dogmas of the Church.

Mr. Robinson: Yeah, and I think that’s where a lot of people today… We have this fear of doctrine, we have this fear of dogma because we understand it to be in some ways maybe creating divisions, that it’s a little rigid, that it makes people judgmental, that it somehow sets up barriers to fellowship between people. But that’s really a wrong view of dogma, because what dogma protects and what dogma ensures and what dogma tries to bring about is in fact union. It is in fact communion, and it is in fact unity and harmony and peace. Those are the boundaries that dogma sets so that these things can actually happen. That’s the hard part for us as modern people who are, all of us Sith warriors who only deal in absolutes! [Laughter]

Mr. Gould: I was going to say that it’s true, though, that many people tend—and this is just a problem that comes from our fallen nature, I think—we get these truths, we get these dogmas, and then we tend to be judgmental.

Mr. Robinson: Yeah, we beat people with them rather than use them as a way to draw people in.

Mr. Gould: Exactly, so we’re going to try to beat you gently with these dogmas. [Laughter]

Mr. Robinson: We want to draw the circle where God has drawn the circle. That in and of itself is a way of understanding God and a way of understanding how God has related to us and how he has in fact drawn us to himself through the love that he has manifested through Jesus Christ—incarnate, crucified, resurrected, and ascended.

So next week we will start on God as Trinity, and we will talk about people, personhood, what it means to be created in the image and likeness of that God. You have been listening to Our Life in Christ. Thank you for joining us today. Have a blessed week, and we’ll see you next week!