Video Transcript: Henry Reyenga and Dr. Roy Clouser Discussion

Henry - Okay, so in this class, I have the privilege on many of these lectures, I'm listening to them while they're being done, and I'm fascinated, and I'm going to  reflect some of this from the ministry's training point of view. So Dr Clouser,  religious belief. I mean the word religion is a hang up to many people in the  world. Why do you think that is?  

Dr. Clouser - partly because people don't have a clear definition of it, so it gets  used in all kinds of different ways, many of which are incompatible with one  another, so it just creates confusion. Okay, people can just, they don't, don't  know how to react when you use the term, because they don't know which of a  half dozen or a dozen meanings you intend, right?  

Henry - Okay, I guess let's say religion, spiritual. Okay,  

Dr. Clouser - yeah, okay, okay, so  

Henry - like, do you know what II'm talking about here. It's like there's people  talking about religion and then they also talk about spiritual, like it's the exact  same thing. Is that the same thing? No, no,  

Dr. Clouser - no, because they don't define spiritual either.  

Henry - So do you have undefined definitions of spiritual religion?  

Dr. Clouser - Okay, in one sense, spiritual with the capital S, okay, in Christian  tradition has always been infused by the Holy Spirit of God, inspired by the Spirit of God, protected by the Spirit of God and but with a small s, it's been used,  especially since the 19th century, to mean cultural things of higher culture, the  arts and so on. Schleiermacher defined religion once as the sum of all higher  feelings, and that's close to the same sort of thing. I don't know whether higher  means above the belt or below, but it's probably something close to that. And so  it's anything that's not having to do with matter and physics or medicine or the  body or death, and that's not, right, religion encompasses all of that because it  has to do with how everything else depends on the divine. And when you  understand the proper relation in which things should stand, the divine includes  the spiritual and the non, right?  

Henry - So a lot of times, even when people throw around like religion or  spirituality, they might be talking about something so far away from our religious  understanding that I've seen too in witnessing people like well, I have my own  spiritual thing. Yeah, of course. No, it's often a it's often a undefined spiritual  thing. It has nothing to do with anything. But they continue to believe this 

anyway. Yes, that's right now. Okay, so you, you've talked with a lot of people  over the years. Do you remember any examples where you the wrong  understanding of religion hurt them? The wrong understanding of spirituality hurt them. Where you could see, you know, this is damaging?  

Dr. Clouser - Yes, sure. Mainly what occurs to me are times when people gave  up their Christian faith altogether because of a really serious misunderstanding.  I remember long ago when my youth, I worked for two churches without, okay, I  was never a member of either denomination. I was never ordered ordained.  You're just in pastor of one of the assistant pastor of another. And I remember a  woman who came for counsel one time because her sister had been murdered.  And, of course, that's just tragic and terrible. And then she went on to say so,  you know, I won't be back anymore. And so I said, Well, wait a minute, it might  have been, I didn't get the connection there. Did you believe that if you worship  God, that nothing bad would ever happen to you? Is that it ah, and apparently it  was, it was like a magic amulet. So if I go to worship and I support the church,  then my family will be protected. Nothing bad will ever happen. Good Lord. How  could anybody get that impression from reading the Bible? Right? What ancient  Jew wouldn't have fallen on the floor laughing. We're God's people, and look  what we suffer. Where does it promise? Where does God promise? Nobody will  ever suffer unjustly? No way. Right? It says God will give you the fortitude to  stand up to it and things like that. But it doesn't deny the evil in the world, right?  And, and I think that's a that's, I think what a lot of people are getting at when  they say spiritual is they want to ignore the evil in the world, and just talk about  the art and the higher forms of this or that, poetry and things like that, and just  not think about the evil in the world. There isn't a world religion that does that.  They all have a very clear answer to why, to the recognition of. The evil in the  world. The Hindu Buddhist tradition says the evil in the world is part of the  illusory world, though, oh, it isn't real. So. But then, then in a in the most  profound sense, neither is this table or you or I, or this building or the walls or  anything else. This is all the illusory world, because this stuff appears not to be  self existent, and it appears that way because it comes in the being and passes  away. It also is not real because some of it's pretty wicked, so you say. But that's the unreality. See, what you have to do is get yourself to the point where you  see the divine behind everything, and you ignore the non divine, to the extent  you're attached to the illusory world that will determine how you're reborn into  the next life, and until you become totally deep, detached, until you get to the  point where you really don't care about anything, right? You're going to be  reborn and more into more lives of suffering. When you get to that point, though, you will not be reborn. You will be absorbed into the divine, into nirvana, and  then there will be eternal bliss, which is hard to make sense of, because you're  no longer an individual. You're right? You're absorbed into the divine the way a 

drop of water is into the ocean, right? So you as an individual don't exist  anymore. Now  

Henry - this is crucial, because as our world becomes more multicultural,  pluralism, immigrants, moving various places, these are the kind of ideas that  are out there. But somebody may say, Dr Clouser, really do I have to study the  aspects of comparative religions. What's important about that? I mean, why  does that help me as a Christian leader, I believe the Bible, the Bible is all I  need. I don't necessarily need to deal with all this other stuff. And yet, in this  class, we're dealing with comparison religion. Why do we bother with this?  

Dr. Clouser - Well, a number of reasons. The first one is curiosity. People really  want to know about other religions. I was taught this, but I know that Hindus and Buddhists have something different. But what is it? So? What do they say  instead of this? And that's just natural, and there's nothing to matter with that. I  think people ought to know about that. And I've argued for a long time that  churches ought to teach, that they ought to teach comparative religion in their  adult education classes. So that's one answer. The other answer, the other reply is something you touched on. The people are much more mobile now all over  the world. So whereas 100 years ago, my grandparents, your grandparents,  never met a Buddhist, never met a Hindu, today, never met a Muslim, right  today, they're more than if they live in a city, they're more than likely to have a  Buddhist temple and a Muslim mosque. They will run into this stuff. And so it  becomes something that they would deal with. If they deal with those people, if  they're proclaiming the gospel, they have to do so in distinction from them, not  condemn them. But just this is what the gospel is. It's not that. And then the last  reason has to trades off of that. They tend to bleed into each other. When  they're close together, there are Christian elements that have penetrated into  Buddhism and into Hinduism. There are Hindu elements that have penetrated  into Christianity, true. And you can say, I've got my Bible, yes. But then when  you read someone who's interpreting it and helping you to understand it, has  that person really smuggled in a without knowing it. Yeah, but in a Hindu idea,  this would, this would be a Hindu take on that. But that's not what a Jew would  invent, which is where these writers are. Yes, that's that's kind of thing that you  need to be aware of and be clear about. And it's a benefit from knowing what the other guy has to say.  

Henry - Now it John Calvin said that there's a seed of religion in everybody. Yes, that that, you know, as we talk about the definition of the seed of religion, do you think that's true?  

Dr. Clouser - Yes, I think that religion is an innate, an inborn tendency in human 

beings to direct themselves toward and I'll use that expression, because that  covers all kinds of ways direct themselves toward the divine. Right to discover  the divine, to know the divine, to stand in proper relation of the Divine. It's not  inborn. There isn't necessarily an inborn tendency to worship. Sometimes  people put it that way, but to find the divine, to identify it, yes. And I remember  one student that I had one time in the advanced courses at the college I did  philosophy of religion, and this very bright fellow said, Well, I don't I was raised  Christian, but I don't hold anything now. And he said, and I pointed I made the  point that I made in the last. Talk, but something's got to be self existent. That's  not an invention, right? What it is you may make up, you may make up a  description or that it divides itself into many gods and things like that, but not the idea of divinity itself. It's really not possible to avoid that. And he said, Well, I  think it is, he said. He raised his hand. He said, I think it is. Why can't I just say I  agree with you that it's nothing about the world, and when you try to turn that  into something self exist and make everything dependent on it, it doesn't work,  right? And that I haven't made yet. I've made that that's coming up in other  sessions. Okay? That'll Wait, barely come up, but, but he said, I think that case  is right, but I just won't put anything there. I'll just refuse to make it any part of  this world and not put anything there. Can I write my final paper on that? I said,  Yeah, sure, you can. And I said, But, but you must understand that I don't think  that there's anything logically wrong with that proposal? What's wrong with that  proposal is that it goes against human nature. It's not that you can't try to  maintain that position, it's that you won't be able to Okay. The longer you try to  put nothing in that spot, the more you'll be inclined either to lapse over into  making it some part of the creation that fits that, a naturalist alternative to  Christianity, or you'll be drawn to say it's God. So he said, Well, I'm going to  write my paper on that. And he did, and he wrote a good it was very thoughtful  paper. He got an A. He got an A in the course. And some years later, I heard  from him. He sent me an email, and he said, You know what? You were right  about that. I tried real hard to keep nothing there, but God came back, and I'm  now at Princeton seminary, studying for the ministry.  

Henry - Wow, see. Okay, so we're gonna include those section by going into a  culture for 500 points. Okay? And let's go to music for 500 points. So now, in  songs that people listen to, in the these cultural songs, you know, do you feel  like they all have a religious belief? So let's just take a Beatles song, all you  need is love.  

Dr. Clouser – No, I don't think every song is religious. Okay?  Henry - We don't think that do that. Usually authors have a religious perspective,

Dr. Clouser - yes, and sometimes it it shows in what they do, and sometimes  not. I, when I wrote The Myth of religious neutrality, I didn't mean to say that  everything we ever do will show what that belief is. So we add up a column of  figures. We balance our checkbooks anyway. Everybody else does. But when it  comes to theories of math, right, what you regard as divine plays a crucial  difference. That's a coming lecture treat coming up. I'm going to put one and one is two on the board and show you that, although we all agree that. So when it  comes to the question, what's a number, right? How do you know that this is  always true everywhere it's a religious place, it's determined by what you put  your answer to that is determined by what you regard as divine. I'll show you the some of the major differences. So it's not that how you write music, or the words of a song, how to show it, but if you came to a theory about where music fits into aesthetics and aesthetics into the rest of life, then it's going to be guided by the  Divinity belief, whether that's conscious to you or unconscious, but so  

Henry - so on that. So let's go back to the Beatles. Yeah, I want to you know. So  you know, there's cultural icons everywhere, and they have, they speak from a  voice. So can you write a song neutral? Can you be devoid of religious belief in,  you know, like in our popular culture, you know, art and all of these things, is that is a religious belief like that pervasive, that it actually will go down to almost  everything we do.  

Dr. Clouser - We can still, to use your example, we still we can write a song  about anything we want. It can be boogie woogie beautiful has nothing to do  with religion. Doesn't express our religious belief, and it's not intended to. That  doesn't mean that the person that wrote it has no religious belief. It doesn't show here. That's fine. That can happen all over the place, but like the analogy with  adding up your checkbook. Yeah, we do it the same. We have that this in  common. But when it comes to asking, how do we know this, and where does it  fit in? How does it fit into the rest of life, those answers are guided by some  divinity, belief or other, whether the thinker is conscious of it or it's unconscious.  

Henry - So eventually, essentially what we let's go to culture, to music. A lot of  people write a lot of songs, and many times they're not self aware of the  religious belief that actually. Drives them  

Dr. Clouser - no though the Beatles you mentioned that knew what religious  belief they were, what was voting but motivating them, and some of their songs  were religious. There's one. I don't remember the title of it. I remember some of  the words, just John Lennon wrote it. And it goes, imagine, oh, there's no  heaven. Imagine there's no heaven. There's no hell. There's nothing to live or  die for. Yeah, well, that's Hindu all the way. Man, sure, this world's an illusion. 

Why would you die for anything any cause here? That's just that you're too  attached to this world. Yeah, interesting. Yeah. And, and, and, this is the heard  Christian events play that music, right, right as background of their dinner or  their their when people come in for the meeting of the whatever it is, as though  this is, this is nice, this is good stuff. It's anti Christian, right?  

Henry - So there was a really good example of how, in that case, that's very  John Lennon wrote a song, and very much was religious.  

Dr. Clouser - And very consciously, yes, yes. Remember, they were conferring  with the MaHA Maharishi. But they, they made a big point of that, that they went  to India, and they became disciples of the the teacher and and then brought that back to Britain.  

Henry - So your definition of religion? I mean, look at what's at stake here. You  know you're listening to the radio and you have an ear that's discerning, and  keep studying this and really get to the definition and really know the difference  in spiritual capital, s, spiritual capital, small s, religion that is a world religion, or  religion as like the seed of belief that that there is not all else depends upon, I  mean, in a lot of ways, What we're dealing with here, because starts becoming  subtly practical. Beyond our imagination.  

Dr. Clouser - Yeah, I thought of another example of it becoming practical, and  that was at the close of World War II. Douglas MacArthur was put in charge of  the the Allied occupational force in Japan, and the first thing that he did was  insist that the Emperor go on national radio and admit that he was not a God,  and he, MacArthur, understood that that was key to any kind of cultural  reconciliation, at least sufficiently that he could govern. Okay? In Japanese  tradition, there's the divine and then there are the gods, right? And the gods  have more divine in them than humans, but they're not divine per se. They don't  bring they don't create everything else. So it was reasonable they thought for to  regard the emperor as having more divinity in him than the average guy has in  him. The same way, the Roman emperors claim the same thing for themselves.  They claim to be a mortal, a mortal god, right? The only difference between me  and the other gods is I die and they don't. And some of them wrote, that's not  fair, because I have all the stability in me so so pursue that for a moment  Caesar, when Octavian won his battle and he became emperor, he took the  name Augustus increased. That's what Augustus means. What was increased,  his Numen, his divinity. That's why we call the month August. August. It was a  day was taken away from another month that in August, it got increased. So  there's 31 days in August, so that the Augustus thought he had more Numen.  And right away he he wrote that he was a god compared to other men. So this is

not unusual. That's what the emperor in Japan was. He's a god, right? And, and, but, but MacArthur recognized that unless that was diffused, right, people would  continue to to resist in secret by any means, right, any kind of rule and  reconciliation for the going forward, because of loyalty to the Divine, right,  

Henry - right? Well, now think about this, how important this is, as you read the  Bible in the days of Caesar, Augustus, yes, there was a tax to be world. That's  right, you know, so Joseph and Mary and I mean, all of these issues come  together. And in even the very incarnation of Jesus, Christ and coming to earth  was in the context of someone who, you know, has increased Numen.  

Dr. Clouser - And just think of this, the Christian gospel hits the street right after  Christ's resurrection. Yes. Disciples thought they had made a huge mistake, and now, whoa, No, he doesn't a huge mistake. Here he is, okay. And what? And  what are they teaching that God is incarnate in this man, right? That means this  man not Caesar, right? And the Roman officials recognize right away. Get out of  here. It's only Caesar that we and because, and they even the the Jewish elders that condemn Jesus at his trial, yeah, when, when Pontius Pilate wanted to let  him off right? Said, This man says he's a king, right? We have no king but  Caesar. Who are you going to be loyal to now? And when this news gets back to Rome, how is it going to be reported? Yes, and we know from history that Pilate  was already under suspicion. There had been a plot to overthrow Caesar, and it  was discovered and the ringleader punished, but on the list of appointees the  ring leader had made was Pontius Pilate to Judea. So he had gotten his  appointment from the guy who was disfavored just tried to overthrow Caesar. He could not afford to have any disloyalty reported back to Rome,  

Henry - and providentially, our Savior died on the cross for our sins, rose from  the dead, ascended on high, but in the context all of this discussion about  religious belief. So okay, I know you're on to the next presentation now, but I  think these points are subtle yet vitally important in the making of a Christian  leader, yeah, so I'm glad this was great. I enjoy this, and I look forward to  hearing what you have next to say, thanks. Thank you. Bye.