Transcript
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And all of the people of God sing along.
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Pull up a chair across the counter your one-stop shop for a variety of perspectives around Jesus and Christianity.
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I'm Grant Lockridge and I'm here with Elias Dummer for round two, and Elias just released a new song, Manifesto.
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That was with his old band, but now he's rocking acoustic, so before this I was just talking about how that song absolutely slaps.
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So I would like to hear your thoughts on kind of why you decided to release it.
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Yeah, and we'll start there.
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Yeah, I mean well, thank you, Cause it's you gotta love when you do like a chill version of a big rock song and people say it slaps.
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That always amuses me, Like one of our first, one of the earliest reviews we had with the city harmonic, um, which just made my day.
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I think we made it our Facebook bio for a while.
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Um was the kids have never rocked so hard to music so soft.
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I love that, and I was like that's my entire identity.
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Now I don't I don't need more than that, but yeah and so.
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So this version is kind of like putting that into practice.
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Yeah, just kind of chill.
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You know, making it a little more chill, a little more accessible, slowed it down a couple BPMs so that people can breathe in the Lord's Prayer and, yeah, dropped it down a whole step.
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But I love it.
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It's really fun.
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Basically, I'm doing this series of kind of re-imagined acoustic versions of city harmonic songs and maybe some of my own.
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I'm working on a new record as well and it was just sort of like you know what?
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It's been a while.
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It's been two years since the work volume two came out and I've got a lot of writing that I've done and a lot of my mind.
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But it just seemed like the thing to do was to kind of remind people who maybe didn't know I've discovered, you know, when you're in a band for a long time and that band has a moment that's like public and people know about it, um, then you go solo.
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You're a lot of the time in the back of your head.
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You're like, oh they, if they just know my band, like they don't care about what I'm doing now.
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There's a real insecurity that kind of sits there with all of it.
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And then I've started to meet people who like know my solo stuff and didn't know the band, or or, or people who like know my solo stuff and know the band, but somehow it didn't bridge the two, like they didn't figure out that I was, that you know, and so this is kind of like a way of cementing that like no, I'm that, I'm that guy, um, partly because I think Christian music is really bad at helping people know who the artists are behind the music.
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It's kind of becomes a bit more of a cultural force sometimes than it is a artistic force, um, and that has benefits and consequences, of course.
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So you kind of have to work a little harder for people to connect the dots, I think, in Christian music.
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Oh yeah, I was singing along with my wife this morning, actually, and you got to hit me with one of those amens Like in the interview.
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Oh yeah, that's like your mom asking you to sing at thanksgiving.
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Dude, come on you.
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You gotta do it.
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No, I'm just kidding have you ever had that happen, where you do a thing and then your family's like come on, sing for aunt judy oh, absolutely I play drums.
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And this was when I was like 13.
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Yeah, my aunt and uncle were in town or whatever, and they all, like, came in the room and they were like play me some drums.
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And it's like the drum isn't exactly, you know, like a instrument, so it's not, you know, you could play whatever.
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And they're gonna be like great job, little buddy yeah, yeah, exactly, I think that's drums.
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You hit them, congratulations yeah yeah I struggle with home shows, like house shows, for the same reason, because I feel like there's something about it that like there's like such a thing as too much pretense in a concert or too much pretense in like an, you know, a musical environment, but then there's also such a thing it's like too little, where it's like now this is too much overlap to real life and I can't like figure out how to bridge that.
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You know, don't know how to behave, cause I cause you know when you're a performer and when you play live, like you take on a whole persona in a sense, and it's still you, it's authentic, but you're not like being your normal self who goes to Walmart.
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You're being a different, a different version of yourself when you do the thing, and so when you're when you're, when you're kind of doing that in a normal environment, it can be quite disorienting, I think.
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Sing it for aunt Judy Exactly.
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Exactly it's great so maybe I'll just like if I think you say something that I don't want to answer, I'll just.
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I'll just sing amen instead and that'll be the end.
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That will end the interview.
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That's awesome man.
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So what's been going on?
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You've been, you know, writing new music.
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What's been going on?
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You've been, you know, writing new music you've been, yeah, studying you know and doing statistics on christian music and and the like, which just sounds like a whole thing so thrilling I.
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I took a stats class in college and it was just like okay, great, yeah, I'm out.
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Like yeah, it is actually really fun work.
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I really, I really love the data work.
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Um, I'm not the main data guy on that project, thank goodness.
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It's actually not even a guy's Shannon Baker.
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So she does a lot of our kind of data analyst work, Um, although we all speak into it.
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But yeah, it's, it's fun we're.
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We're.
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We're kind of at a stage of, like, we have this great board of advisors now with I could name drop for days kind of thing, um, and it's pretty cool to have like folks who are in the academic side and looking at it critically and having folks who are like inside the industry and still looking at it pretty open, with clear eyes and kind of just trying to say, hey, how do we make this do what we want it to do and serve the church.
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So that's a pretty cool thing, um, and an honor to be a part of, for sure.
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Yeah, All right, so we were talking about this before and I've got, I've got to bring it back up again.
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You, you dropped something casually.
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You were like, yeah, I think I'm an annihilationist, so I gotta, I gotta know what kind of led you to that, because I truly would love to be one.
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Yeah.
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So hit me up with that Um well, I so I man, like 20 odd years ago again.
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I so I would say I hold this sort of thing pretty loosely oh yeah, um, how do you know, you know?
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yeah, although I think the I'm confident data wise in terms of, like what I've read from scripture and so on, um and or and around it, particularly around translation choices and and other things.
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Um, I think the thing that I struggle with is the like traditional view.
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I mean there are certainly ethical moral questions that people ask around, the theology of, say, eternal conscious torment or that sort of thing, right, but for me it's more actually like it is hard to make that cohere with an ancient Jewish worldview at all, an ancient Jewish worldview at all.
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Like it doesn't seem like a natural next step to their progression of understanding around the afterlife, which was a lot more complicated.
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Like you basically don't see in the Old Testament anything resembling a disembodied heaven and a disembodied hell.
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You have Gehenna.
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You have debates about whether or not bodily resurrection was part of the afterlife.
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Not Gehenna, sorry Shoal.
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You have debates about whether or not bodily resurrection was part of the afterlife, not Gehenna, sorry Shoal.
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You have debates about whether or not bodily resurrection was fundamental to the afterlife.
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And the Christian argument seems to be that bodily resurrection is fundamental to the afterlife.
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So the whole idea seems to be so Hellenized.
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That's not to say that it was totally foreign because Jewish thought was partly hellenized at the time of jesus.
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But it, but the likelihood that it was like a given that this was is.
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It's pretty pretty, not, pretty much not there.
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And there are a lot of like translation choices made throughout scripture in the english language that don't quite map very well onto that.
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And so I, 20 years ago, I read a book called four, four views on hell.
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One of the authors was actually a guy I went to church with and he did argue the annihilationist view, um, I would.
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I would call it like, uh, a conditionalist view, right, um, but so much of it stems for me from the uh.
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It's sort of like a view of, like, the human substance.
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It's like are humans fundamentally embodied or whole things, or are humans fundamentally disparate things?
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I have a body and a soul and a brain and a finger and that sort of thing, right, and it seemed I have a much easier time mapping a holistic view of humanity onto Christian theology than I do.
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A dualistic view of humanity, right?
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So you can't.
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Resurrection doesn't make sense with a dualistic view of humanity.
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Easter doesn't work.
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The tomb shouldn't be empty.
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Jesus should have been a blue version, now upgraded because he's the super Pokemon version, and his body should still be wrapped up in the tomb if dualism has any merit to it, right?
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And that's not what we have, and so a lot of texts that take Revelation that way are really misunderstanding what Revelation is.
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My view would be that Revelation is a largely pastoral book, with a little bit of prophecy in Revelation 21 and 22 in terms of things yet to come.
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It is a largely prophetic in the terms of pastoral instruction book and therefore is super applicable without us having to figure out who Putin is.
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In the grand scheme of things, there's just a lot that we kind of, in Western evangelicalism, take for granted, we borrow at random from other traditions, and so the idea like take the Greek Orthodox, for example the idea of like a sort of three-tiered version of reality or the afterlife, would be totally foreign to them.
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It doesn't map onto their sense of their cosmology at all, and so it should at minimum give us pause before we are too confident that orthodoxy with a big O has a and I guess I mean broad Christian orthodoxy relies on a particular translation of words and a particular choice around the afterlife that the Bible's much more fuzzy on than we'd like to admit.
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And so I find it easier to map the idea of a conditional afterlife which is anchored in resurrection, not anchored in consequence and that sort of thing.
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And by that I don't mean there aren't consequences, that's not my point.
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It's just that to me it seems clear that bodily resurrection is fundamental to Christian orthodoxy.
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It's in the creeds, and so therefore the idea that that is conditional from Genesis 1 all the way through Revelation 21,.
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That makes sense that it is God in Genesis who gives us eternality.
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It is not the nature of having a soul that gives us eternality.
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So there's why I'm at a more controversial take.
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I'm not necessarily sure that we have an immortal soul.
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I'm not sure that the Bible is as straightforward on that as we'd like to think that it is.
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It might be true, but I think we overstate what the Bible says and doesn't say on that topic, whereas in Genesis 1, we see that, you know, john H Walton argues that by eating the fruit of the garden is a big part of where the sense of Adam and Eve were gaining their eternal life.
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And in leaving the garden symbol or otherwise, in leaving the garden they left eternality because they left the reliance on God as their source of eternal life.
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I got to get.
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We've actually interviewed John and I got to get him back on here.
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Yeah, that dude is wicked smart.
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Yeah, yeah, I love John H Walton.
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So yeah you carry his thinking through to revelation and it seems that we have conditional eternality and then conditional resurrection.
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Yeah, I mean I'm not.
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I'm just now like scratching the surface of this stuff Cause I felt so dumb, but it was like I've thought about heaven and hell before, but I've never.
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Like I just took it at face value because it was right and that that seems silly, but it's just like, yeah, there's a heaven that goes on for eternity and there's a hell that goes on for eternity and you go to the good place or the bad place and that's pretty much.
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That's pretty much the done deal, and sinners and Jesus.
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And it's practically impossible not to map that back onto the Bible and assume that every reference to a thing that seems like it could be saying that must be.
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Yeah, and I'm just kind of scratching the surface on this as far as because, in one sense, it doesn't matter to me, because I'm still going to share the gospel, I'm still going to do all the things because I don't want anybody to be tortured for a second, or I don't want anybody to not be in heaven, if that makes sense.
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So I'm still like this doesn't change what I do on a day-to-day basis.
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Well, it very well could though, because if Revelation 21 and 22 and so on, if the end of the Christian story is not a whole bunch of Christians in robes and harps, but rather a city of God here on earth where things have been renewed and redeemed and put back to rights, as NT Wright would say right, If the ultimate outcome of the Christian faith is not escapism but actualization.
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Now, that changes stuff.
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What was that?
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That changes stuff, for sure.
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Because it changes how you approach ecology and the environment.
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It changes how you approach the question of culture and culture making.
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It changes a lot of things, and so that that, to me, has been a fundamental switch.
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Um, it was about 20 years ago, mind you now, but but that was a big change for me was that idea of like, oh, persons are whole persons, their brain and their body and their soul are a mess of a thing.
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Um, I call it like a Trinitarian ontology.
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If God is three in one, why the heck do we think we aren't like God?
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If God, the Christian faith which means that the idea of a disembodied self and a deeply embodied incarnate self, and the idea of generative will and order and a sense of chaos and what these are all like, these are all things that kind of map onto the human experience pretty well, but we've sort of written them out by basically picking one thing or the other in order to focus on Right, and I think that that then bleeds out to culture, our approach to others, our approach to the world, the environment, all of it.
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Yeah, I think that that's definitely valid as far as because that's something that always felt wrong to me You're not supposed to base your theology or whatever on feelings, which is real dumb, but just like that kind of question of you know, you kind of get the basically monasticism idea of just being like all right, I'm going to shelter everything and then beam me up later, kind of situation.
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And that just doesn't seem like.
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I'm not saying there's anything necessarily wrong with that, because the monks still, like you know, loved each other in the monastery.
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They did all sorts of cool stuff, but the idea of just actually making heaven on earth is completely different than OK, I'm just going to be sheltered, live my life, I'm going to be good enough that I can go elsewhere.
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Yeah, exactly, yeah, yeah, fire insurance and keep on cooking, and hopefully I don't sin enough to be out of God's grace.
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Oh, totally Well, it just seems so strange, like we're social creatures and I'm not.
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I think there is quite a bit of good in the monastic movements.
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I'm not actually countered to it, but but it is.
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I think there's a thing that people do and then I think the beauty of them is so often the role that they play in the wider community and and the service that they give to the faith community as well.
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I think that's a beautiful thing, yeah, but but I think like that.
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I just want to pick up on a little bit of what you were saying in terms of emotion.
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I think it's true that, like, um, we don't necessarily want to anchor our theological beliefs in emotion or on a rational like, if we're trying to think them through rationally.
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But I also would like to point out that it's practically impossible not to, because we are humans and like even just if you look at research around, say, head trauma victims, where emotion, mm hmm, choosing a from B is neurologically the wiring of your brain, fundamentally an emotional decision.
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Without emotion you cannot choose.
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So we have this version of ourselves where we are either brains on a stick or souls in a box, or all of this, and it's so much messier than that in reality.
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Yeah, and we can either give ourselves all kinds of cognitive dissonance and discomfort with the way God seems to have made the world to be and then tell God he's wrong, having made us that way, or look at the entirety of reality itself as some kind of mistake that God wants to oopsie one day.
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Or we could say, okay, god being God, knew that this embodied, complex, pseudo-trinitarian ontology idea thing like I'm a complex human who needs emotion to choose, who does have ideas and also has feelings and therefore needs to live this life of compassion, love and kindness in the world, bringing truth with me, in service of those things.
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I mean, that's what Jesus boils it down to right Love God with your all, all, all, and love your neighbor as yourself, and he actually connects them much more strongly than we would like to generally.
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And the second is, like it love your neighbor as yourself.
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So you can't do those things without ideas and emotion and a body and a sense.
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So there's this kind of like ascetic thing that we want to do that I don't think Jesus is telling us to do.
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Yeah, that makes a whole bunch of sense and the whole reason I went on, you know the thought process of heaven and hell and stuff was more of an emotional thing.
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Yeah, fresh out the gate of just like hey, is it?
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And I do believe the Lord is good One hundred percent, like anything he does is good.
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That's a fact.
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It's just.
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How is that playing out?
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As far as you know the heaven and hell bit?
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And I don't think we'll ever know the inner workings of heaven and hell, because that's to me outside of us I don't think we're going to get out a whiteboard and be like okay, I figured out this hell thing, I know exactly what's going on when I die.
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That's exactly my point.
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Yeah, I'm definitely agreeing with you pretty much the whole way down on most things you said, just because if you don't hold it loosely, then I think you're definitely missing the point of who God is, because if you just comprehend everything, then we're not creation.
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Oh yeah, no, I have too many limitations to have that much confidence yeah, I mean come on, yeah, well, and how?
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the heck do you talk to your neighbor if you're that sure of a particular translation of ghana or whatever?
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Like, like you'd have to be so sure of yourself that it stops being faith at all?
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Yeah, like, I think there's to me some relationship between faith and doubt that is necessary, um, where, like, if I don't have a modicum of you know, uncertainty in the things, that then then it's not I've, I've, I've, I'm worshiping a myth at that point of my own making I'm a human, I I myth at that point of my own making I'm a human.
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I can't know that much.
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Yeah, and so I have to be humble about it and kind about it and open-handed and gracious about it.
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Otherwise, one, how the heck am I going to live in a pluralistic world?
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And two, you know who do I think I am.
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you know that kind of thing yeah, and as far as which I know, you're on this train of the denomination bit.
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Yeah, it's to me shocking, but also makes sense as humans, how we base denominations off of things that we hold so tightly.
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Oh yeah.
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We think we understand it just in the mind.
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Well, I mean, like I attend a church now that we love and we love the spirit of the church, we love the culture of the church, but it's part of a denomination which has facets to their statement of faith that we can't sign off on.
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So I'm not like a member, I'm not a formal member of the church.
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Really, what are some of those?
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Ah, it's like eschatology stuff that I don't even remotely believe.
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So so it's, it's, you know, it's, it's more anchored into the tradition that the denomination came from and that sort of thing, Um, and certain angles on the afterlife that are just a little too confident for my liking.
00:22:33.445 --> 00:22:55.299
Um, but yeah, I, I, I, so I guess, like all that to say, like I think denominations are interesting in that, like, because you know, humans can only handle so much in terms of relationships, Um, like you know, somewhere between a hundred and 200 people that we can manage to be in community with.
00:22:55.299 --> 00:23:06.691
So denominations are kind of practical in a sense, but like a big global church which pretends that everyone thinks the same thing would be absurd, it's not, it's not true, it's not true of the Catholic church, you know.
00:23:07.092 --> 00:23:07.352
Whoa.
00:23:12.536 --> 00:23:15.077
I don't know a Catholic who would disagree with me.
00:23:15.077 --> 00:23:18.059
Yeah, I mean, evangelicals might not realize, but it's true.
00:23:18.059 --> 00:23:22.144
The Catholic Church has all kinds of houses within it, right, absolutely.
00:23:22.144 --> 00:23:30.672
And so there's a sense in which some of it's just inevitable when something's old and big and people are going to organize.
00:23:30.672 --> 00:23:41.601
So I think the fundamental question isn't which denomination is the most true.
00:23:41.601 --> 00:23:45.255
Although that's like nominally helpful, I think the more, the more useful thing is like well, what is it that we all agree to be true from Christian tradition and scripture?
00:23:45.255 --> 00:23:47.638
And what do we do next?
00:23:47.638 --> 00:23:49.303
How do we work together?
00:23:49.303 --> 00:23:52.154
How do we know when to work together and when not to work together?
00:23:52.154 --> 00:23:55.135
How do we decide how far is too far?
00:23:55.236 --> 00:24:11.559
And the movement that I'm a part of here in Hamilton, kind of the ecumenical local missions movement, I mean there are churches who've left over, say, the question of sexuality, even though the question of sexuality isn't necessarily creedal right, isn't necessarily creedal Right.
00:24:11.559 --> 00:24:18.801
So so you have this challenge of like well, okay, we're drawing a line there.
00:24:18.801 --> 00:24:24.644
I can see why we're drawing the line in terms of should we be the same church, should we belong to the same denomination, that sort of thing.
00:24:24.644 --> 00:24:28.724
But the question of like should we both give a loaf of bread to the poor?
00:24:28.724 --> 00:24:33.989
Yeah, I don't know, I could see.
00:24:33.989 --> 00:24:39.953
Hey, we're all Christians doing this thing together, sharing resources and doing stuff to feed the poor.
00:24:39.953 --> 00:24:42.876
In my city we've been in a state of emergency for years.
00:24:42.876 --> 00:24:48.261
We have a thousand people lining up at our downtown core to get free food every Saturday.
00:24:48.261 --> 00:24:52.747
It looks like a FEMA site after Hurricane Katrina Gosh, you know.
00:24:52.747 --> 00:25:00.967
So it's like the idea that we're going to be like particular about you know, that kind of.
00:25:00.987 --> 00:25:10.131
There's certain theological things that are like useful lines and I don't want to get into the specifics of that, but it is like I understand why we separate denominationally.
00:25:10.131 --> 00:25:12.550
I understand why different kinds of churches exist.
00:25:12.550 --> 00:25:13.693
I don't have a problem with that.
00:25:13.693 --> 00:25:14.676
That's very practical.
00:25:14.676 --> 00:25:16.631
Yeah, I understand why different kinds of churches exist.
00:25:16.631 --> 00:25:17.915
I don't have a problem with that, that's very practical.
00:25:17.935 --> 00:25:40.074
But whether or not we should work together despite those differences, as long as we have some base common ground which maps onto tradition and I think personally, you'd be hard pressed to come up with a set of rules beyond the creeds that doesn't erase a lot of Christian history Like you do, like the evangelical benchmark is probably not realistic because it doesn't map more than 300 years backwards.
00:25:40.074 --> 00:25:50.605
You lose a lot from the church fathers, you lose a lot from ancient Christianity, from both East and West, and a lot of good wisdom.
00:25:50.605 --> 00:25:56.698
If we decide that a real Christian maps onto evangelical standards, right, yep.
00:25:56.698 --> 00:26:03.596
So all that to say, like I think you know, we can't, really can't really do that.
00:26:03.596 --> 00:26:08.032
We have to sort of say, hey, the creeds, we stand on that, christians Cool.
00:26:08.032 --> 00:26:09.236
Now what do we do?
00:26:09.236 --> 00:26:16.576
And you know, like an awkward family dinner you avoid the topics that are a major issue who are you voting for?
00:26:16.596 --> 00:26:20.907
Yeah exactly, yeah, exactly In America, man alive yeah.
00:26:21.249 --> 00:26:25.278
Yeah, I don't know.
00:26:25.278 --> 00:26:32.974
I was talking to a guy yesterday and we got into the whole political nonsense and it's so hard to like, once you're in it, it's so hard to get.
00:26:32.974 --> 00:26:35.124
Once you're in it, it's so hard to get out.
00:26:35.124 --> 00:26:38.334
Yeah, be like, hey, we're talking about this.
00:26:38.334 --> 00:26:41.261
Can we just, can we just stop for a second?
00:26:41.261 --> 00:26:44.690
Yeah, yeah, I don't know yeah, it's like I.
00:26:44.770 --> 00:26:46.634
I would like to tap out of this conversation.
00:26:46.634 --> 00:26:49.047
How do I x this this thread?
00:26:49.047 --> 00:26:50.449
Because it doesn't.
00:26:50.548 --> 00:26:51.991
It doesn't bother me.
00:26:51.991 --> 00:26:57.180
There's just so much hatred there, like for everybody.
00:27:15.244 --> 00:27:15.685
And so it's just it.
00:27:15.685 --> 00:27:16.167
I don't know.
00:27:16.167 --> 00:27:21.666
I think it's more culturally true outside of politics too, where I feel like part of why we're unkind is because we don't realize how often we're doing philosophy.
00:27:22.307 --> 00:27:22.469
Yeah.
00:27:23.873 --> 00:27:35.349
It's like, hey, you know what, You're taking this, that, this, that for granted when you say that and and you shouldn't be able to simply take those things for granted if you don't even know what they are.
00:27:36.444 --> 00:27:39.134
Now, of course, we all do that all the time to some degree.
00:27:39.134 --> 00:27:48.395
We go around in the world assuming gravity is going to work and we go around assuming all kinds of things, and culture and our lives are training us to do that as we go on.
00:27:48.395 --> 00:27:57.988
But nevertheless, it's healthy and helpful for us to learn to see and acknowledge what those ideas behind the ideas are in our lives.
00:27:57.988 --> 00:28:05.951
But because it allows us to be a lot kinder to other people, you know it's like, oh, I can see, this idea led you to think that.
00:28:05.951 --> 00:28:08.198
Therefore, okay, yeah, I got you All right.
