Beeson Podcast, Episode #709 Name Date >>Announcer: Welcome to the Beeson podcast, coming to you from Beeson Divinity School on the campus of Samford University. Now your host, Doug Sweeney. >>Doug Sweeney: Welcome to the Beeson Podcast. I am your host, Doug Sweeney and I’m joined today by Dr. Mickey Mattox, the Flatt Family Foundation chair and professor of theology at Hillsdale College in Michigan. Dr. Mattox is this year’s Reformation Heritage Lecture speaker. He is well known around the world for being a Catholic Luther scholar and a fairly Lutheran Catholic. And he’s here this week talking about Catholic and Protestant receptions of and appropriations of Martin Luther, his reputation, his work, and his legacies. So, thank you Dr. Mattox for being with us. Glad to have you on the podcast. >>Mattox: Thank you very much. I’m super happy to be here. >>Doug Sweeney: Let’s begin by just introducing you to our listeners. >>Mattox: Okay. >>Doug Sweeney: How did you become a Christian? And how did you get into academic teaching ministry? >>Mattox: Okay. I have a full hybrid background. So, first, agnostic. That’s my family upbringing from when I was a child. My dad was an agnostic, nobody went to church. That was part of a situation within the family where his mom was very religious and very strong. And so, Grandma, on my dad’s side, was a Southern Baptist, really devout. Read her whole Bible every year. And there was a point in my young life where I went to live with her for a couple of years. And so, my brother and I were taken to church three times a week, which was a little bit of a disruption, you know. And so, Sunday morning services, Sunday night services, Wednesday night services, and Bible races and all kinds of fun things- >>Doug Sweeney: Aright. Good for you. >>Mattox: In the Southern Baptist tradition. And at some point, and I have in my mind and I’m not sure this is actually true, but I think I may have been baptized the night the Beetles played Ed Sullivan. >>Doug Sweeney: Wow. >>Mattox: So, I had made a decision for faith, come forward in a congressional service. I don’t remember Sunday night, Sunday evening. But I was baptized in a big tank in front of everybody on a Sunday night wearing blue jeans and a white shirt. And Brother Stringer dunked me three times. So, I became a Baptist. Family background was still conflicted. I wound up, you know, sort of wondering from that, and the word I think I used back then was backslide. So, I was backsliding. I don’t know, so a lot of backsliding, more just, you know, kind of going nowhere. And as a young man at age 19, I met a young woman. She became my wife and her family was Lutheran. I thought it was very weird, their religion, because they read everything out of a book. And low and behold, after a couple of years, maybe less than that, the whole thing kind of took with me and I became a Lutheran. We were married in the Lutheran Church. I became known as, and did you want to talk about education and that sort of stuff now? >>Doug Sweeney: Yeah. Let them know how you got from there to being a professor. I know you because we’ve been friends for a long time. You didn’t move straight into academics and theology and church history. There was more to your early story than that. >>Mattox: Yeah. I think my story illustrates how important undergraduate teachers can be for their students. So, I had a teacher named Manfred Fleischer and Manfred was from Livesicht in Germany and he was a classically trained German intellectual and I’d never met anybody like that. And he had us read books like Dante and I thought, oh my gosh, what is this whole new world that he was opening up to me. Meanwhile, I was majoring in agricultural economics, and I already had a job waiting for me by the time I was a junior, so I became a banker. I worked for a bank. I spent five years doing that. It was great fun, but I was very busy and active in our congregation. I was doing Bible studies and helping out in adult ministry. I was on a board of elders. All kinds of things. And at some point, I thought, well, maybe I’ll try, maybe I should go back to grad school and really fulfill the sort of impulses that were begotten in me by Manfred Fleischer. And so, I went on to graduate school. I did two MAs. The second was with you at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, which was fantastic. It was a wonderful and amazing place to be. And then I got pretty lucky and got to go to Duke University and work with a guy named David Steinmetz. And my old joke about Steinmetz, and he heard this, and he had got it as well, that is I say, I became a Catholic or I started really thinking about becoming a Catholic when he was lecturing in medieval theology and he’s a Methodist. So, that was kind of weird, you know, that my Methodist professor is making me think, well wait a minute, I don’t think we’ve got these Catholics quite right. And so, it took a long time after that. And I worked in Lutheran institutions, and I had a Lutheran public identity, and I love the Lutherans then, I love them now no differently. But in 2005, my wife and our two boys were received into the Roman Catholic Church, and I always say that I became a Catholic by affirmation and not by negation. So, I feel a deep gratitude for my background in the Baptist churches, for evangelicals that I studied from and learned so much from, and certainly for the Lutheran faith tradition. So, I consider myself a friendly along-sider. I don’t want to even say outsider. Kind of friendly along-sider with all those folks. And obviously, you know, our relationship would kind of epitomize that I’ve never thought less of you as a Christian by virtue of having become a Catholic. So, I just, if there is such a disjunction, I’m unfamiliar with it. Yeah. >>Doug Sweeney: Alright. And you taught several places. >>Mattox: Yeah. >>Doug Sweeney: But now you’re at Hillsdale College. >>Mattox: Yeah. >>Doug Sweeney: I bet lots of our listeners have heard of Hillsdale College. Tell us a little bit about it. What’s Hillsdale College? What was attractive to you about moving from our Marquette University to join the faculty at Hillsdale College? >>Mattox: Yeah. >>Doug Sweeney: What’s going on there these days? >>Mattox: Yeah. So, I could tell a kind of negative story here, but I don’t want to do that. I mean, there’s always a push wherever one goes, but in this case, there was also a pull and that was the big thing. So, I was at Marquette for a long time, had a great experience there. I love a lot of people there. But Hillsdale College is a very special place. There’s a great energy there right now. There’s a kind of Hillsdale moment, I think. And it has to do with a commitment to classical Christian education or classical education in a kind of Christian key. And being at Hillsdale, for me, from the moment I set foot on campus, was just a matter of being really comfortable, feeling surrounded by friends. I think the academic enterprise, one needs to feel a certain level of comfort. I mean, discomfort is important too and productive, but a certain level of comfort, that is to say nobody’s going to be coming after you. And I felt, at Hillsdale College, among friends. And I would say in the time I’ve been here at Beeson, I feel very much the same thing here, that I’m among friends, that I’m among people with whom I share a kind of common interest, a kind of common love. And so, yeah, Hillsdale’s a great place. >>Doug Sweeney: Super. >>Mattox: Yeah. >>Doug Sweeney: Alright. We said this a little bit already- >>Mattox: Yeah. >>Doug Sweeney: You’re doing Reformation Lectures for us. It’s interesting at a Protestant school that we’ve got a Catholic Luther scholar doing the Reformation Lectures. And you’ve kind of taken advantage of that part of your identity in the way you’re presenting to us because you’re talking about Catholic and Protestant appropriations of Luther, understanding the Luther, receptions of Luther. >>Mattox: Yeah. >>Doug Sweeney: These lectures are recorded and the people listening now, by the time this interview drops, can go on the web and listen to you give the lectures, so we don’t need you to give the whole lecture here. But how about a little teaser? What are you talking about this week and why do you think it’s important to talk about these things? >>Mattox: So, one way of saying it would be this; there’s a kind of settled impasse by the end of the 16th century where Catholics know who they are, and they know who they are not. And Lutherans and other Protestants know who they are, and they know who they are not. And there goes along with each of those things the Catholic sense of identity, the Lutheran sense of identity, a sense that we know who this Luther fellow is. And so, there’s some sense in which the kind of heretical villainess image of Luther that prevails among Roman Catholics is set at that time, and it stays there for a very long time. Likewise, on the Protestant side, there’s a very happy story of the Luther who discovered the gospel and the Luther who was enlightened, the Luther who was a great hero of faith who took a heroic stand. That understanding of Luther, that story of Luther, that narrative remained in place, and I think pretty much undisturbed, maybe developed, until sometime maybe in the middle 20th century. So, it just happens that in the early 20th century, the Catholic image of Luther was disturbed primarily by historians who first said, well wait a minute, you know, some of the stories we Catholics have been telling about Luther aren’t quite true. In fact, some of them are really not true at all. And likewise, but somewhat later, Protestants also began to recognize that their Luther was also a figure of legend and myth, and it was important to get beneath that to understand him better. And I think my point in all this is that when Catholics and Lutherans do those things together, and when they engage in a kind of common search for the truth about this man, Martin Luther, then the result inevitably will be that it brings them closer together. Yeah. >>Doug Sweeney: Alright. So, we all know Beeson Divinity School is the kind of place that teaches students a lot about the great tradition of Christian thought, a lot about people like Martin Luther, and the people listening to this recording are mostly Christian people who are theological spiritually minded church people who would love to know from a great Lutheran scholar, like yourself. So, what’s going on these days in Luther studies, in reformation studies that church people who care about theology and walking with the Lord need to know about? What’s some of the trends these days that our audience might appreciate? >>Mattox: So, I think probably, you know, the big year was 2017. It’s the 500th anniversary of the 95 BCs. There was a lot of activity, a lot of books were published, a lot of scholarly energy, a lot of energy of the people on all sides for knowing something about Martin Luther. I think some of that has dissipated and there’s also a kind of institutional decline of the centrality of Protestant faith, say in German or Nordic culture. And as a consequence, there’s a little bit less and Luther seems maybe less significant, and the world seems to have changed a lot. So, I would say that there’s a tendency among historians now to sort of discount the sort of great man theory of history so that Luther is, you know, he’s just a guy that did some things, sure. But history isn’t really guided by great men. So, if you look at it just sort of straight up historically right now, it seems that people are maybe a little bit like, well, who needs to know Luther? >>Doug Sweeney: And for the lay people listening, you talked about German speaking territories, Scandinavia. >>Mattox: Right. >>Doug Sweeney: That’s where a lot of Lutherans have been over the years. >>Mattox: Right, right. Exactly. And so, returning to that, I would say that on the theological side, there’s been a great deal of hubbub in Luther studies for the last maybe 30 years, since the mid-80s, over the issue of divinization. The sense in which the Christian, by virtue of faith, participates in Christ or in God or experiences the indwelling of Christ and this notion that salvation for Luter may have been not only say, imputational and forensic, but also effective. That is to say a matter of really becoming holy in Christ. That, I think, has been a very exciting moment, very controversial in Luther studies. >>Doug Sweeney: But it’s something that Bible loving Protestants can connect to because Peter himself talks about, is it 2 Peter 1:4? >>Mattox: I think that’s exactly right. >>Doug Sweeney: About the privilege of participating in divine nature and people have wondered for a very long time. So, what does that mean and what is that privilege? >>Mattox: Yeah. Yeah. Well, there’s a very interesting story behind that and I’m not sure how far you want to go with this, but the Finns, in their dialogue with the Russian Orthodox in the 70s and 80s, had a time when the Cold War was kind of at it’s height and there was a lot of worry about the big country, Russia, right on the Finnish boarder. They were in dialogue with the Orthodox and a fellow by the name of Mannermaa claimed to have discovered that in Luther’s theology, you also find a motif of theosis or divinization along side the justification language that is more familiar to Lutherans. And the reaction to that, almost instantaneously, was just controversy. A lot of people really unhappy about it. And that controversy gave a lot of energy to Luther’s studies for a couple of decades. I’ve kind of lost my train here Doug. Where am I going? >>Doug Sweeney: We were just talking about things going on in Luther studies, reformation studies that our listeners might find edifying or helpful. >>Mattox: Right. Well, my own work, I think I was interested in the development of the Christian exegetical tradition. So, how exegesis goes. And it turns out that a lot of times, you know, readers of the Bible have some theory about how the Bible does what it does, but more commonly, they read what other people have said about it. And so, that’s a historic thing as well and it turns out that Luther read people who had read the Bible. And sometimes Luther will talk in a way where you think, wow, he’s saying this so distinctively or he may dismiss what others have said or something like that. And you think, well, Luther’s genius is to be a creative original reader of the Bible. And my work was oriented toward uncovering Luther’s appropriation of Catholic traditions. And what I think I found when I was doing that was that Luther appropriated Catholic traditions as Catholic traditions but developed them in what you could call a distinctively evangelical way. So, his theology of word and faith was situated in this kind of solid Catholic long tradition ground. And that means that reformation is fundamentally Catholic, or at least Luther’s reading of the Bible was. >>Doug Sweeney: Yeah. Interestingly, this theme works well at even a Protestant divinity school like Beeson that is emphasizing, all the time with students, the importance of reading, interpreting, preaching scripture with the best of the tradition in mind, in a way that’s informed by, at least, the small “c” catholic tradition. And we thereby discourage people to go off in a corner and interpret the Bible they knew all by themselves, you know. So, it fits really well, what you’ve done. >>Mattox: Well, I think I read recently the book of Matthew Barrett, The Reformation as Renewal and a very fine book, really beautifully done, amazing energy and insight. Hats off, totally. And I think that what he wants to do there is reclaim catholicity for his own reformed Baptist tradition and my response to that is, go. That’s great. I do think if Protestant churches and Protestant Christians largely want to reclaim the name Catholic or describe themselves as Catholic, this can be confusing. But I’m not worried about that. It’s okay if it’s confusing. I think that what that would create would be an opportunity for us to dialogue about the nature of catholicity. What does it mean to be Catholic? How are you Catholic? What about this way of being Catholic? And so, I think then and more than that, to be concerned for the great long Catholic tradition as a Protestant, it seems to me, is a way of underscoring the real authentic continuity of the Protestant traditions to the Catholic faith. >>Doug Sweeney: And of course, that’s part of the message of our founding dean, Timothy George, a Southern Baptist who wanted Southern Baptists to know all the time, you can only grate tradition yourselves. Alright. So, we’re talking about what lay people ought to learn about, the reformation and how it can be helpful for them today, but I also want to tell our listeners a little bit about the current book project that you have going on or that your editors at Baker want you to have going on. >>Mattox: They’d like me to finish it, I think. >>Doug Sweeney: That has to do with Eucharist cosmology. Now, when you say it that way, lay people think, that’s not for me. But is there a way of communicating to our group what you’re trying to do in that book and why it should matter to people? >>Mattox: Yeah. I think maybe the broad motif is the God-world relation. And that sounds super abstract, right. But in Christian theology, there is God and not God. And God is God, and all other things are things that God has made. So, there’s Creator and there is creation. And so, you’re talking about relationship between God and the creation. And I think that Luther participates in that sort of old, C.S. Lewis called it the discarded image, an image of the cosmos as a whole, as beautiful, harmonious, a matter of wonder that lifts, inherently lifts, human eyes toward God. And that sense then that, and I think probably what goes with this is some kind of natural theology or theology of nature, and I think for a long time in Neo-orthodoxy in the 20th century, Berdyayev and Brunner and all those guys were a little nervous about natural theology and it seemed as if that was maybe the Protestant position. And my own reading of Luther is that he has a highly doxological reading of creation and he’s really happy at any time to extol the wonders of creation and the divine paternity, the fatherhood of God, shown in the goodness of all things. And this is important to me today, I think, because our own cosmology is so mechanized, so materialized, so kind of emphatical and lacking in say, beauty or wonder, but maybe being just straight up terrifying, right. And so, it seems to me that Christians today need to help articulate a view of the world itself and our bodies ourselves as good. And I think that what I want to show is that if you’re interested in that and you’re a Protestant, you have Martin Luther on your side. >>Doug Sweeney: Yeah. Wonderful. Alright, we’re almost out of time. Whenever we can in these interviews, we like to ask our guests how we, at Beeson, and how our podcast listeners can be praying for you. And maybe this would be an especially good opportunity to do it because we’re demonstrating our unity in the Lord here, you know, with a Catholic guest. How can we be praying for you, Dr Mickey Mattox, in days ahead? >>Mattox: Oh, well thank you very much. Wow. I think you’re so right. If we meet one another as Christians and if we pray for one another and pray together, right. Praying together is like the first thing. It assumes a kind of recognition of the separated other as Christian. And I think that’s essential to what we do, and I know that for your ecumenically Protestant divinity school, that that’s an important thing for you as well. For me personally, I think I’m at the tail end of my career. There’s no, I’m not ashamed to say that. Everybody ages, right. I’m still having a lot of fun. I’d like to keep doing this as long as I can. But as I do what I do, what I want more than anything else is to be able to pour out what I know for the good of those who are entrusted to me to teach. And so, if you want to pray for me, pray that I can offer a good sacrifice because that’s what I’m trying to do. >>Doug Sweeney: Alright listeners, please be in prayer for our guest, Dr. Mickey Mattox, this year’s Reforamtion Heritage lecturer at Beeson Divinity School. We know you’re part of our praying community. This is a community that values prayer, so please pray for our dear brother, Mickey in days ahead. Thank you, Dr. Mattox, for being with us all week long and on the Beeson Podcast. Great to have you, my friend. Listeners, we love you and we say goodbye for now. >>Announcer: You’ve been listening to the Beeson podcast; coming to you from the campus of Samford University. Our theme music is by Advent Birmingham. Our announcer is Mark Gignilliat. Our engineer is Rob Willis. Our producer is Neal Embry. And our show host is Doug Sweeney. For more episodes and to subscribe, visit BeesonDivinity.com/podcast. You can also find the Beeson Podcast on iTunes, YouTube, and Spotify.