Beeson Podcast, Episode #
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>>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'm your host, Doug Sweeney, and I'm joined today by my friend Ron Rittgers, who is professor of Reformation Studies and the History of Christianity at Duke Divinity School. Dr. Rittgers is this year's Reformation Heritage Lecturer at Beeson. We want to learn all about him and his lectures here this week, so thank you, my friend, for joining us.
>>Rittgers:
It's a great pleasure to be here. I'm just really grateful for the opportunity to give these lectures and just to be part of the Beeson community for a week or so. 
>>Sweeney:
Yeah, well they've been marvelous thus far. The more scholarly members of our community know about you already, but not everybody who listens to our podcasts are avid scholarly book readers, so let me introduce you to them as well. Would you tell us just a word about how you came to faith initially, and how you decided eventually that God wanted to use you as a historian of Christianity?
>>Rittgers:
Sure. First of all, I always have a foot in the real world, so to speak, because I was a first-generation college student, and so I always think of the academic world as a little bit foreign. I kind of feel like I'm a stranger in a strange world. And so those who are listeners who don't necessarily read my work - that's just fine with me. Those are the normal people. 
I remember as a young child, five years old, accepting Christ into my heart in Sunday school. And insofar as a five year old could understand something like that, I think I did. And a couple years later, my parents’ marriage fell apart, really tragic, hard divorce. And that led to a kind of period of wandering for me. But I came back to faith. I don't even want to put it that way. I think I've always had this deep longing for God. Ever since I can remember, just this deep longing for God, like Augustine, my heart is restless until it rests in thee. And I don't know that I ever wandered from God totally, but I was brought back. 
When my mother remarried and we started going to a church where the gospel was really preached, and I remember recommitting my life to Christ, and that
was real. I mean, I think the Lord is really in the midst of that.
>>Sweeney:
What kind of church did you grow up in?
>>Rittgers:
I grew up in an evangelical covenant church or a Swedish covenant church, initially, that eventually kind of evolved into an independent Bible Church. And then when I went to Wheaton College as a student, I kind of got on the Canterbury Trail with a lot of other Wheaties. And I was discovering the fact that there were faithful Christians between the New Testament and me. 
>>Sweeney:
How about that? 
>>Rittgers:
... that I hadn't heard a whole lot about growing up. And I thought, well, maybe I have something to learn from my brothers and sisters in the past. And so, kind of discovering the historicity of the faith, and the saints who had gone before me, and the richness of their spiritual life. There's also things that I don't emulate from Christians in the past. There's folly as well as wisdom there. And also, the sacraments becoming a more important part of my journey. It was at that point I discovered that I had actually been baptized as an infant.
>>Sweeney:
You mean you didn't know for a while?
>>Rittgers:
I didn't know for a while. And because we ... early on I was baptized in the Evangelical United Brethren, which was a forerunner of the United Methodist Church. And then when I had my kind of recommitment to the Lord, we were in a church that practiced believers baptism, so I was baptized again. And that's when I was 13 years old or so. And I didn't know about the infant baptism at that point. 
But as I got to Wheaton, and I was thinking more about the sacraments and adjusting my theology on the sacraments, I look back to that infant baptism actually as also being valid, also being real, an important, really important event in my life that I think gave me the grace to make it through some things that were difficult. Yeah, so that's something of a spiritual journey. 
>>Sweeney:
Yeah, I think I know about you that in college you were a psychology major. 
>>Rittgers:
I was. 
>>Sweeney:
And you wound up becoming a church historian. But you're interested as a historian in people's devotional lives, emotional lives. Is there a connection between the study of psychology and your development as a church historian?
>>Rittgers:
Yeah, there is. I got into psychology because I wanted to help people. I thought, okay, that's what you do. As I said, I was a first generation college student. So I really didn't know what I should do. When I got to college, I remember I got a B on my first test that we in an intro to psychology class, and I was so relieved, because I thought, okay, I'm not gonna flunk out. And then I realized okay I could actually do a little better than a B if I try a little harder. 
So I developed this deep interest in church history my junior and senior years at Wheaton and I had done a lot of the courses for my major and a lot of the elective courses I needed so I had space in my schedule. And I just started doing church history courses. And as I've mentioned, I was just transfixed. I was just fascinated by all these brothers and sisters in the past that I had known nothing about. In some cases, they actually knew the disciples. And so I'm developing this deep passion for church history. But I'm still asking a lot of the kinds of questions that a psychology major would ask about the care of souls, about consolation and the burdens we carry and true guilt and false guilt and that sort of thing.
And when I look back on the kinds of questions that have animated my own scholarship, I can see a real integration between my initial interests and forays into psychology, which were really wonderful at Wheaton, and me taking a somewhat different path to go into church history. And I'm still interested in issues of guilt and forgiveness and consolation and suffering and lament and remedies for it. So there's a lot of overlap there. 
>>Sweeney:
Yeah, I love the arc of your scholarly life and we're going to get to the present in just a few minutes. I'm going to ask you about your lectures this week and your book that you're working on and so on. But can you tell us, is it possible just in a few minutes, to describe how you got from your doctoral dissertation to the present, the kinds of things you've been working on and why you chose those things to work on? 
>>Rittgers:
Yeah sure. I should say that even doing a doctrine in the first place was something that was, it took a long time for me to think that this was even a possible road for me, a possible path for me. Again, because I just didn't grow up around people with PhDs. 
>>Sweeney:
Well, you went to Harvard. So all of a sudden, you're surrounded by uber intellectual people. 
>>Rittgers:
Yeah, and my wife and I, we both grew up in Marion, Iowa. My wife and I joked while we were at Harvard, and we've continued to joke ever since, that when we grew up in Eastern Iowa, crew was a haircut, not a sport.
(laughter)
So we always felt like fish out of the water there. What I wanted to say was that my calling to the academy to go do doctoral work was very much communally discerned. What I mean is, you kind of wrestle with, okay, what's the call of God in your life? Or what are the callings of God on your life? And I think our impulse is to go inward on that, do introspection. Okay, what do I like? What am I good at? What do I want to avoid? And those are, of course, important questions to ask. But I don't think they're finally the most important questions to ask. 
As important, or more important is what are the people around me who know me best and love me most seeing in me? And then listen to them, be humble enough to listen to them and they say, “Hey, I see this in you.” And so for me, it was teachers, it was professors who said, “Hey, Ron, you ought to think about this.” And they kept saying it until I finally started to say, okay, I'll at least dip my toe in the water.
>>Sweeney:
And did they say you ought to think about being a scholar because we see those gifts in you? Or did they say you ought to become a historian of Christianity? I mean, what specific was it? 
>>Rittgers:
Yeah, it was church history. “You ought to become a ...” Well, initially it was I should go into psychology when I was at Wheaton. And I went to Regent College ostensibly to get a further theological grounding to go do a doctorate in psychology. But that was just kind of a story we told our parents because we were really young when we got married and we just wanted to go have an adventure, actually. I mean, there was some truth to it, but it was still not something that we had sort of nailed down. But when I was a Regent and this kind of budding interest I'd had in church history at Wheaton really came into full flourishing. That's when some faculty around me said, you know, you ought to give this a try. You ought to give church history a try. 
And I got into the Reformation for three reasons ... studying the Reformation. One was I was just trying to understand the modern secular world and so I was reading people like Peter Berger who said, well you need to go back to the Reformation, that's where it all starts. 
I was also really fascinated by the intersection between medieval mysticism and Protestantism and a figure like Johann Arndt and also Martin Luther and then Luther's theology of the cross. I thought this is what my evangelical people need. They need an anti-triumphalistic theology. And those three things really drew me to the Reformation and have in many ways defined my Reformation, my scholarly agenda since Regent.
>>Sweeney:
Yeah, how did you land on the dissertation topic you wrote about?
>>Rittgers:
I wanted to write a dissertation on Johann Art, an early 17th century Lutheran pastor who was a mystic, but when I arrived on my doctoral program I realized somebody had already written the dissertation, I just wasn't aware of it. And so there was a big scholarly debate that I was just becoming familiar with about the role of private confession creating tortures of conscience, burdens of conscience, for people in the Reformation as a response to those burdens of conscience. And I thought, okay, well, that's an interesting debate and how many people could identify with Luther, was he a spiritual everyman or not? And then I was reading a book and I ran into a reference to Protestants practicing private confession. I said, no, that's wrong. They had to do away with it, but the book was right. 
And so I wrote a dissertation on private confession on the Protestant approach to it. And again, these earlier interests in psychology were in part informing that. And so I did a deep dive into what shape private confession took among early Lutherans. 
>>Sweeney:
So there are lots of our fellow historians who wouldn't like it if I asked them the question that's burning in my mind right now, but I think I know you well enough to know you'll engage it and you'll be fine. As you think about that question historically, the context of the Reformation, private confession, what do you think about with respect to the contemporary pastoral Christian living sort of implications of that material? Do you think about those things? Do you have an argument you'd want to make about recovering something like that in our practice today or not?
>>Rittgers:
Yeah, thank you for asking the question and yes, I'm happy to have a go at it. When I was doing my dissertation, I suddenly felt, I don't know, somewhat hypocritical, working on this topic, never actually having gone to private confession myself. And so I thought, I need to do this. And it was life-changing. It was life-changing. And I think that a lot of what goes on in modern society is because of the absence of the confessional in modern society. Blaise Pascal once explained the Reformation this way. The Catholic Church only asks us to undeceive one human being in our whole lives, our confessor. And Protestants can't even agree to undeceive at least one other human being in their whole lives. Okay, so I don't think that's a total explanation of Protestantism. But just going before someone and being brutally honest about how it is with your soul is so ... it's hard, but it is so deeply, deeply healing and consoling. 
And I think in the absence of that kind of experience, I think people are looking for absolution in all kinds of places they don't even know what they're looking for. They don't realize what they're actually seeking is absolution. When I talk to pastors, I'm not ordained, but I talk to pastors, I was just chatting with someone the other day here at Beeson who said, “Yeah, I can't get anybody to come to confession, but every time they come to my office, we would go out for lunch, basically what's happening is a confession.” And so a modern pastor has to be very adept at knowing how to offer absolution in a way that someone can receive, who doesn't even know that's what they were looking for when they first sat down. 
So my very first publication was with Crux, Regent College's journal, and it was an evangelical approach to confession where I took the research I had been doing on the Reformation and said, hey, I think we need today our skilled Protestant confessors who are doctors of souls, they're trained theologically, they're also trained psychologically. Because there is false guilt, that it is sort of, we have neuroses and these sorts of things, and we ought not to feel guilty for, and we haven't offended the Lord, we've been wounded somehow. And so, but then there's true guilt. We actually sin against the Almighty and need divine absolution. And we need clergy who know how to distinguish between the two, whose preaching is therapeutic in the classical best sense of the word, not in the kind of modern sense, kind of psychological.
>>Sweeney:
Yeah, well, and what about the person who's listening to us now and thinks, well, I confess my sins to the Lord, and He forgives me, and that works for me. Do you want to make a case for doing more than just that on an individual basis? Sounds like you do, but... 
>>Rittgers:
I do, I do. I mean, if your faith is strong enough to believe that in the quietness of your own heart or in your own prayer closet, you can confess to the Lord and you read scripture and it says, if we confess our sins, he is faithful to forgive us. Okay, great. Martin Luther said that almost no one actually has faith that strong. And that what we really need is to hear the word of absolution from outside of us. He was an implacable opponent of the sacrament of penance for all kinds of theological and pastoral reasons. He was also a deeply supportive fan of a reformed version of private confession that became a defining mark of the Lutheran Reformation for three centuries. 
And the emphasis in this Reformed version of private confession was on consolation. It wasn't on enumerating your sins or doing penance. It was on, yes, confess your sins, but the emphasis was on absolution, and that we needed to hear the gospel preached to us individually, because we're so prone to hide from God. We're like Adam and Eve in the garden. We're hiding, and we need a word from God that draws us out and that addresses us individually. So yes, I think whatever one's tradition is, whatever one's Christian denomination is, there needs to be a space where someone speaks the word of forgiveness to another person audibly.
>>Sweeney:
Yeah, I agree. Thank you for saying that. Okay, so we're almost to the present, but I want to make one more Beeson connection because I also know that part of your scholarly career has included work on the Reformation commentary on scripture that our own Timothy George helped to initiate. What did you do for that project?
>>Rittgers:
Yeah, I was really grateful to work on that project. I had been doing a lot with the history of biblical interpretation of the Reformation in my various projects, but to have a project that really invited me to just focus on that thing alone was super helpful. And I'm a complete believer in David Steinmetz's article, “The Superiority of Precritical Exegesis.” So the Reformation commentary on scripture just flows out of that article. I was responsible for the Hebrews and James volume. I got to choose which one I would do and I thought wouldn't it be interesting to see what the Reformers, how they try to put these two pieces together, these two books together, and that was a lot of fun.
>>Sweeney:
I used that volume not long ago in preparing a lesson for a Sunday school class I was teaching at our own church. Thank you for your work on it. 
>>Rittgers:
Well wonderful, you're welcome. 
>>Sweeney:
All right we probably got to get up to the present. The lectures you're giving here at Beeson this week have been marvelous thus far. We already know they're based on your current book project. Could you tell our listeners a little bit about maybe the book project as a whole and then I'll ask you just for a little teaser about the lectures.
>>Rittgers:
Sure, so the project has the working title, “The Enchanted Word of Early Protestantism.” And what I'm arguing in this book is that for early Protestants, the first couple generations or so, Scripture was not simply a source of correct, if contested, theological information or doctrinal information about God. It was more profoundly a place of encounter with God, even mystical encounter. So I've become really interested over the years in all the places I'm finding Protestant reformers using sacramental language for what Scripture is and what Scripture does. And I've also been increasingly persuaded that Protestants had their own version of enchantment. That is, there's the standard Weberian narrative that Protestantism leads to the disenchantment of the West, the de-magicking of the West, the separation of the natural from the supernatural, the earthly from the heavenly. 
There's something to that. But if you look at how Protestants actually, how the word actually functioned, I mean scripture and all its manifestations here, that's what I mean by word. These are portals to the divine, these are places where you encounter God. This is scripture, preaching especially, is the way that God can come and actually indwell you. And so, and scripture was everywhere in the Reformation, through preaching, through pamphlets, through catechisms, through hymns, inscribed on walls, painted on tables. And so, I think early Protestants saw those verses as alive, as full of divine presence.
And if that's true, then the disenchantment narrative really needs to be revised. So I think there were disenchanting aspects to the Reformation, for sure, as they launched this assault on what they took to be kind of pagan superstition in Catholicism. But there's also a re-enchantment part of the Reformation, or an Evangelical or Protestant version of enchantment. So I'm writing a book about that right now, both to try to understand how Scripture actually functioned in the Reformation and therefore give us a better understanding of the Reformation so that we can tell a truer story about the connection between Reformation and modernity.
>>Sweeney:
That's great and it sure did seem to me like you kind of had your audience from beginning to end here at Beeson, but I'm also thinking about some of the folks I know who listen to our podcast recordings, and I bet somebody's wondering, so what did he mean by mystical encounter? That doesn't sound like a very Protestant thing to me. Can you help us with that? What kind of mystical encounter is reformational and Protestant?
>>Rittgers:
Yeah, the term mysticism can be a stumbling block to some Protestants because it sounds Eastern, it sounds non-Christian, or maybe for some Protestants it sounds too Catholic. Mysticism has to do with an experience of the presence of God. Not just knowing about God, but knowing God. I think when Evangelicals talk about inviting Jesus into your heart, well, that means that the divine is actually entering you and you have an experience of the presence of the divine inside of you. That can be termed mystical. 
So mysticism has to do with an experience of the immediacy of God. It has to do with knowledge in the biblical sense, not just knowing about. And so for Protestants this means when during a sermon or reading the Bible privately or singing a hymn, something like that, they have an experience of God mediated through Scripture. And I think the term mystical need not raise hackles for people. I think when a devout Protestant opens his or her Bible in the morning for morning devotions for a quiet time What are they hoping happens there? That they that they get their doctrine straighter than it was before? 
Well, that's a good thing. It's good for us to think true things about God. But I think fundamentally what one is looking for is God. One wants to have an experience of God speaking to one, God reaching through the pages and grabbing one or consoling one, whatever one's need, of an experience of the presence of God through Scripture.
I think most of our Protestants would say, yeah, that's why I read the Bible after all. And all I'm trying to say is that's part of the original Protestant DNA. That's part of the Protestant birthright. The Bible was never just about, well, our doctrine is now truer than the Catholic Church. I think Protestants from the beginning have wanted to say, we're meeting God in a new way in Scripture. And there's all kinds of precedents for that before the Reformation, but the Reformers do something unique with it.
>>Sweeney:
Yeah, that's great. Okay, we're already onto the theme of the lectures themselves this week, but when we drop this recording in the program notes, we're going to encourage people to click and listen to your lectures. So let's just give them a little teaser.
What did you do today and what do you hope to do tomorrow that we want to commend to our listeners?
>>Rittgers:
Okay, so today in the first lecture I welcomed the audience into the scholarly conversations that are shaping my project. And what I wanted to demonstrate is the way that I'm shaping this project is it requires me to be in conversation, yes, with church historians, historical theologians, systematic theologians, but it also requires me to be in conversation with cultural historians and social historians. 
Because I’m trying to get a sense, what I'm trying to argue for is that this whole notion of an enchanted word, a sacramental word, a mystical word was not just confined to scholarly studies or a few theologians here and there. It was ubiquitous. It was all over the place. And so I've cast my net very broadly, very widely in terms of conversation partners and in terms of sources. So what I what I tried to do in the first lecture today was to explain the scholarly conversations that I'm involved with, to define the terms that I'm using, enchanted, word, early, Protestantism, to talk about scholars who have also worked on this whole idea of a sacramental nature of scripture and how my approach is a bit different. 
And then I concluded by talking about what does this have to do with the church today. And then in the Lunch & Learn session, I started looking at some sources from the Reformation that demonstrate the actual words that Protestants were using in a source called church ordinances had only ever meant things sacramental before, and they're applying it to preaching.
>>Sweeney:
Great, what about tomorrow? What do you hope to do? 
>>Rittgers:
And tomorrow, I'm going to try to provide some more evidence from the Reformation for seeing how widespread this enchanted word was and for nuancing a little bit more what I mean by it. We're going to look at three case studies, one from England, one from Switzerland, and one from Germany. Before I get into those case studies, though, I'm going to talk about the precedence in pre-reformation Christianity for what I'm talking about and then at the end of the lecture I want to ask a question, okay so what does all of this business about the enchanted word have to do with the way we think about the relationship between the Reformation and the shape of the modern world? 
>>Sweeney:
Sounds wonderful. All right, sadly, we're almost out of time. I do also know that many of our listeners like to pray for Beeson Divinity School, pray for its students, and even pray for its visiting lecturers. So let's conclude maybe with a question about if our listeners are going to be praying for Dr. Ron Rittgers in days ahead, how should they pray for you?
>>Rittgers:
Well, first of all, I would welcome the prayers. I'm on sabbatical right now and so sabbaticals are a gift and I would ask for prayer that the Lord would guide me in this project. Everything I do in my scholarship is both for the Academy and the church and so that I would be sensitive to listen to the Lord, how what I'm doing in this project can just help people's life of faith with Christ. That would be important.
>>Sweeney:
Thank you. Listeners, this has been Dr. Ron Rittgers, a wonderful friend of Beeson Divinity School, a professor of Church History at Duke Divinity School. He's here lecturing as our Reformation Heritage Lecturer this week. Please listen to his lectures, they've been marvelous. We want to let you know that we continue to pray for you and that we love you. We say goodbye for now.
>>Mark Gignilliat:

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 www.BeesonDivinity.com/podcast. You can also find the Beeson Podcast on iTunes, YouTube, and Spotify.