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Joe reviews a reflection by Pope Benedict XVI on “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” on how wisdom and knowledge help us encounter Jesus Christ.
Transcript:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer and as we end the advent season, it’s crazy to say that already and approach the Christmas season. I wanted to share a pair of beautiful reflections from Pope Benedict the 16th, and the launching point is this line.
He has, what is this wisdom born in Bethlehem and he’s going to explore this theme. If that doesn’t make any sense to you, that’s okay right now. I think you’ll see both that it’s a beautiful way of entering Christmas and is particularly appropriate for the kind of people who watch shows like Shameless Popery. And you’ll see why I say that now, that reference to the wisdom born in Bethlehem is the fact that during this part of advent, the last seven nights before we enter into Christmas, we pray what are called the Entons. Now many of you know these from O Emmanuel, which sets these to music, but at Vespers you pray for the coming of the Lord in treating him under seven different titles. And the one for this was actually last night. By the time you’re watching this, it’s tonight as I’m recording it the day before, it’s for December 17th.
It’s oh, wisdom from the mouth of the most high. You fill the whole world with strength and gentleness. You order all things come to teach us the way of prudence, or if you prefer it set to music, it’s oh come a wisdom from on high who orders all things mightily to us the path of knowledge show and teach us in its ways to go. And so Benedict asking a group of students in Rome begins his reflection, his homily at Vespers by saying, what is this wisdom born in Bethlehem? And it’s that prompt that I think we should start with. And again, the line is imploring him as the wisdom from the mouth of the most high. And this is coming from what are some things called the Sial books or the wisdom books of the Old Testament where there are these references to wisdom and we recognize these as a prefigurement of Jesus Christ.
And as Benedict said, this invocation becomes truly stimulated and even provocative when we find ourselves before the nativity seam that is before the paradox of a wisdom that from the mouth of the most high comes to lie in swaddling clothes in a manger. That this is what we want to keep in view as we approach the great paradox of Christmas that the eternal word who is with God and is God has become flesh and not only become flesh, but has become an infant in a manger. As Benedict says, the Christian paradox consists precisely in the identification of divine wisdom. That is the eternal logos. That word that in John when it says the word was with God, the Greek word there is logos. And even though it’s accurately translated as word logos actually means a little more than word is where we get words like logic.
And so it has the connotations of a plan, wisdom, et cetera. So the eternal logos with the man Jesus Christ and with his story that Jesus of Nazareth, this man who walked the seas of Galilee, who once lay in a manger is at one at the same time the divine wisdom, the eternal logos. And this is a true paradox that these two things don’t seem like they can both be true. And as Benedict says, a solution to this paradox cannot be found if not in the word love, love in the capital L sense in reference to a love that infinitely exceeds human and historical dimensions, that eternal love is big. It’s effusive, it’s eternally just pouring out and it pours out in history, so to speak, in the person of Jesus Christ. Therefore, the wisdom that we invoke this evening is the son of God, the second person of the most holy Trinity.
It is the work who as we read in John’s prologue was in the beginning with God or rather was God who was with the Father and the holy excuse who with the Father and the Holy Spirit created all things and who became flesh to reveal the God whom no one can ever see. That’s this beautiful paradox that within the triune relationship within God, you have this incredible infinite love and part of the way that you have so to speak, the outpouring of this love is in the incarnation that the second person becomes flesh takes on our full humanity. And so then Benedict challenges his audience. He says, dear friends, a Christian professor, a young Christian students carries within him a passionate love for this wisdom. He reads everything in her light, he finds wisdom’s in print in the elementary particles and the verses of the poets in juridical codes and in the events of history, in works of art and in mathematical formulas.
So I want to think about the way he’s situating this. I think it’s really beautiful. Without wisdom, not anything was made that was made. He’s referencing here the prologue to the gospel of John, and therefore in every created reality, one can see wisdom reflected, clearly visible in different ways and degrees. So I went to ponder this passage just very briefly that if Jesus is the logos by whom everything in the cosmos is made, then every created thing should reflect in some way this eternal logos. That’s not to say that the universe is the logos, no. The universe is a reflection of the logos that the wisdom we see in created things points to the eternal uncreated wisdom of God. And that eternal uncreated wisdom isn’t just an idea, it’s a person, the second person in the Holy Trinity who is Jesus Christ. So at one and the same time, every brilliant thing you’ve ever discovered, every beautiful book, every mathematical proof, every scientific discovery, whatever it is, those things point to this eternal logos.
They show the wisdom and beauty that the entire cosmos is rooted in. And this is the same wisdom who is incarnate in the manger. And so everything you study, everything you dwell on, everything you research, everything you kind of discover in your daily life should lead you deeper into this mystery as he puts it. Everything understood by human intelligence can be grasped because in some sense, and to a certain extent, it participates in creative wisdom herein lies in the last analysis, the very potential of study, of research, of scientific dialogue in every field of knowledge that whether you’re a theologian or a mathematician, it doesn’t matter. Whatever truth you are discovering should point you to the ultimate truth of God. At this point, Benedict says, I cannot admit to reflect on something a bit disquieting but nevertheless useful for us who belong to the academic world.
So he just said, here’s this beautiful thing like you as someone who is a student, whether you’re a literal student like you’re at a university somewhere or you are teaching or involved in academia, or if you’re just like someone who you like to do things like listen to YouTube videos about brilliant theological topics, oh great, wonderful. That should lead you deeper in the faith. But in fact, even if you’re just like, I like to learn about history, I like to learn about science, whatever it is, wonderful. This is a way of coming to see the wisdom of God made more manifest the God who made all of this beautiful brilliant stuff. This should lead us into a deeper contemplation of him. But here is where we run into our first roadblock. Let us ask ourselves, who was present on Christmas night at the Gro in Bethlehem who welcomed wisdom when he was born, who hurried to see him, to recognize him and adore him.
They were not the doctors of law scribes or sages. They were Mary and Joseph and then the shepherds. What does that mean? He’s going to come back to this. He actually a couple times in December, 2009, he reflects on this same passage that Jesus in his adult ministry will later say, yes, father, for such it was your gracious will. You revealed your mystery to the little ones. So that raises this obstacle. It seems like the life of the mind should lead us into the life of God since all human wisdom, all of our understanding of the brilliance and beauty of the cosmos and all of its manifestations is evidence to us of the eternal and uncreated infinite wisdom who is Jesus Christ? And yet the Christmas story doesn’t show that the great philosophers were all at the manger. It doesn’t show that on the evening of Christmas, Jesus is being greeted by the great scholars of law or the great scientists or doctors of his day.
So what do we make of it? And you might be thinking, what about the magi? We’re going to get back to the magi in a little bit. Even with the Magi, their story’s a little more complicated for reasons we’re going to see they’re not Jewish. They’re gentiles who are using reason to come to knowledge of the God. But there’s kind of a two-edged part of that story. We’ll get to that. So you might wave the white flag here and say, I guess all of this is worthless. So Benedict poses that, well then does that mean there’s no use in studying or it’s even harmful counterproductive in understanding the truth because you’ll find Christians who have that mentality. You’ll find Christians who look really a scance at the life of the mind. They view it as an obstacle. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve seen critics of my own work who are quick to point out, oh, he was a lawyer, as if having that whole intellectual background is going to mean like, oh, you can’t trust them.
Now, I think a lot of that is just uneducated people not just have stereotypes about lawyers. I get that, but it points to a certain kind of anti-intellectual version of Christianity that can easily pop up and you see it over and over again. I don’t think I need to tell you this, that there are a lot of people who are prone to that and we want to both say what is the real thing? Maybe they’re tapping into that we have to be wary of if we’re more intellectual. But also why is that not a satisfactory resolution? Why is it not the case that the lovers of wisdom should just give up on studying or should treat the discernment of wisdom as somehow counterproductive to the contemplation of the logos? Well, Benedict puts it like this. He says, the 2000 year old history of Christianity excludes that hypothesis and suggests to us the correct one.
Studying entails deepening one’s knowledge while maintaining the spirit. Similar to the little ones in ever humble and simple seat like that of Mary, the seat of wisdom and the image there might be easy to miss. I’m very fond of there’s this movement in medieval Italian art of depicting Mary at the Annunciation where because we’re told that the angel Gabriel greets Mary and that the Holy Spirit overshadows her, we’re not really told what Mary is doing, but the medievals were fond of depicting Mary as seated reading scripture that in contemplating Christ in the word, the written word, the Old Testament Mary is being prepared for receiving Christ the word in her womb. And it’s a beautiful kind experience and a beautiful image that your contemplation of scripture, your contemplation not only of scripture, but really of all of the ways that you encounter the word in the world, should lead not only your mind in the direction of God, but should prepare your heart to receive our Lord, to receive them in the Eucharist, to receive them in prayer, to receive him in all of these different ways that there should be this relationship between the mind and the heart that our reception should be prepared.
The life of the mind should be used to prepare one to receive our Lord in an ever deeper way.
But Benedict says, how often have we, he means here, intellectuals been afraid to draw near to the grotto in Bethlehem for fear that doing so would be an obstacle to our critical sins and to our modernity that you can find, I mean people who are very bright and who might have a slight bit of even shame around their faith. They are Christians, but they’re a little uncomfortable about the fact that they’re Christians because just on the one hand you have Christians who are anti-intellectual, you have intellectuals who are anti-Christian, that the relationship of faith and reason is divorced in such a way that it can be like, well, here is my rational part over here that believes in science and history and whatever, and here’s this just faith part over here that is divorced from reason and I’m ashamed of it and the world looks a scan at it and that obviously isn’t the right way of approaching the manger.
Rather, Benedict says in that grotto, each of us can discover the truth about God and about humanity, about ourselves. In that child born of the Virgin, the two came together, mankind’s longing for eternal life softened the heart of God who was not ashamed to assume the human condition. I like the way I know that’s not literally, we’re not literally softening the heart of God, but it’s a beautiful expression of our weakness and our longing for eternal life is what the incarnation is a response to. And so we should see in here both this desire we have to reach upward, which is what all the sciences and all reason is oriented towards. I need to know more about this cosmos and I need to even somehow reach beyond it. You can read the writings of the philosophers to see this. They’re not content to just know how does the world work, but they want to know something beyond that.
Where did all this come from? Why do we exist? What is the purpose of life? What are these things that aren’t reducible to the information in front of me? What’s the deeper thing going on here? This reaching up not only through the universe but in some way beyond the universe, that that is ultimately this longing for eternity, this longing for eternal life with God, that God reaches down and in the person of Jesus Christ and the incarnation answers his longing and goes a lot further. And so Benedict says, dear friends, helping others to see the true face of God is the first form of love, and he suggests for those in the intellectual life for you, it takes on the role of intellectual charity that we as Christians should approach one another and other arguments, even arguments with which we disagree with intellectual charity, and I don’t think I need to tell you that can be very difficult to do.
We live in an age that doesn’t encourage reasoned charitable disputes. It encourages really aggressive over the top click baits, rum and that all of that. And we are called as Christians to something else precisely to show the true face of God even in the midst of disagreements. Okay, I want to then pair. So the reflection you just heard was from December 17th, 2009, which he was speaking to professors and students in Rome, but it pairs really nicely to something that he’d said a couple weeks earlier, December 1st to members of the, excuse me, international Theological Commission. So he’s speaking here to theologians, but he’s going to sign a lot of the same notes. And again, the passage that he clearly is preying on in this advent and he keeps going back to is Matthew 11 beginning in verse 25, where Jesus says, I thank thee Father Lord of heaven and earth that thou has hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to babes yay Lord or yay father for such was a gracious will.
But then he says in the next verse, all things have been delivered to me by my father, and no one knows the son except the father. No one knows the father except the son and anyone to whom the son chooses to reveal him. So it’s not just, oh, you get to know information about the world or salvation history or something like that, but no, it’s about really coming to know our Lord. And so Benedict reflects on this and he says, we’ve heard that our Lord praises a father because he concealed the great mystery of the Son, the Trinitarian mystery, the Christological mystery from the wise and the learned from those who did not recognize him. Now, I think that’s really worth reflecting on that Jesus is explicitly in Matthew 11 talking about how the relationship of Father and Son is something known by the simple and not the great ones of the world that you can find people including very educated people who just kind of scoff at the idea of the incarnation, the idea of the Trinity, et cetera.
It sounds ridiculous, and you can also find critics of the Trinity who act as if this is just like the workings of the philosophers, and it’s quite the opposite. It’s these simple people who come to recognize, yes, Jesus is Lord, the Father is God, Jesus is God. The philosophers are going to come along and help explain how all those things can be true. But the reality is something that the little ones, the simples saw right away, as Benedict puts it, he revealed it to the children, the nebi, to those who are not learned, who are not very cultured. It was to them that this great mystery was revealed that we don’t want to treat the great theological doctrines like the Trinity and Christology as either these intellectual pursuits that have nothing to do with real faith or as something that only the great learned people can understand because Jesus shows us it’s quite the opposite.
It’s quite otherwise that we should care about Christology having sound, Christology is not some optional thing for a disciple. Similarly, having sound Trinitarian doctrine is not some optional thing for the disciple, but neither is Christology and Trinitarian theology something that is principally an academic pursuit. It’s a matter of knowing God, coming to know the God you claim you want to spend eternity with. If we don’t want to know him, something is clearly wrong if we want to know him, that’s why we do theology. But notice that this is a theology that begins not with the great figures of history, begins with the really simple people with these words. Benedict says, the Lord describes in simple terms an episode in his life there already began at the time of his birth when the magi from the East ask those who are competent describes the exe where the birthplace of the savior of the king of Israel is located.
So I promise we’d get back to the Magi and the Magi show us a good example of brilliant scholarly people coming to follow our Lord. But they also are contrasted in Matthew’s gospel with the experts in Jerusalem. They’re consulted about where the Messiah is to be born and they can tell the answer to that question. They know the right theological answer and it doesn’t matter. And that should set off alarm bells because so often I think intellectual people want to turn salvation into a theology quiz. I’m going to go to heaven because I understand the nuances of Christ’s natures and wills better than you do and you are going to go to hell because you don’t understand those things as well as I do. And then I think we’re confronted in scripture from right here with the fact that here you have two different types of intellectuals.
We don’t often talk about the visit of the Magi in this way, but you have here two types of intellectuals. You have the major on the one hand, you have the scribes on the other, and the scribes are a cautionary tale. As Benedict says, the scribes know because they’re great specialists. They can immediately say where the Messiah is born in Bethlehem, but they do not feel it concerns them. For them, it remains an academic knowledge that does not affect their lives. They stay away. You don’t see them saying, oh, we’re going to go with you. You just told us the Messiah has been born. We’ve been waiting centuries for this. We’re going to leave Jerusalem and take the short distance over to Bethlehem. No, even though it’s a short journey, the major I’ve come from afar describes don’t even go the short journey from Jerusalem to Bethlehem.
They stay away. They can provide information, but they do not assimilate it and it has no part in the formation of their own lives. Again, this is a cautionary tale for us. Is your theological library just this thing that’s over here or is it integrated into your whole person? And if it’s not integrated into your, if it doesn’t make you humbler more charitable, more in love with Jesus Christ, something is profoundly wrong and scribes show us what that looks like, then flash forward to Jesus’s public life. In the words of Benedict, it’s beyond the learn it to comprehend that this man, a Galilean who is not educated, can truly be the son of God that they are struggling with the fact, I mean you remember in John one the line, can anything good come from Nazareth? Like Nazareth is this kind of hillbilly town. How can there be the Messiah of Israel?
How can there be the second person of the Trinity coming from this backwater town? How can the great Lord of the cosmos not be one of the great scholars of the law? It is unacceptable to them. He says that God the great, the one, the God of heaven and earth could be present in this man. They know everything. They know all the great prophecies even though Isaiah 53, but the mystery remains hidden to them. Instead, it is revealed to the lowly starting from our lady to the fishermen of the sea of golly. They know just as the Roman centurion beneath the cross knew this is the son of God. I think it’s a great contrast that you have at the crucifixion, different groups and among those groups you’ve got someone with the simplicity of the faith of the centurion. He doesn’t know all the Jewish prophecies, he doesn’t know all this stuff.
Almost surely he might have some exposure to the messianic expectation because he’s been living in this place, but he’s not himself Jewish. So he knows, as kind of an outsider knows, and maybe with that clarity of sight, he can realize, well, this is a guy you were waiting for. This is the son of God. And so he’s able to come to what appears like faith without nearly as many tools as described in the Pharisees had. So again, we hit a possible roadblock, but from all this, the question arises, why should this be? So is Christianity the religion of the foolish of people with no culture who are uneducated? Is faith extinguished where reason is kindled? How do we explain that? So again, should we just say, oh, I guess learning is bad and we should just embrace blind uneducated faith. Now, if you know anything about Benedict, he’s going to not say yes to that question, but he is going to acknowledge.
You can see why people would get there. There are so many smart atheists that you can think the problem is that they’re smart, and for some of them, their smartness does get in the way of accepting the truth about reality, and he’s going to have a beautiful expression to capture that using a fishing net in a minute. But before he answers that problem, he’s going to point us in a better direction. He suggested that we should take another look at history because what Jesus has said is true. It’s not just in the first century. We can see all throughout history the great figures and scholars whose lives don’t reflect what they should. I mean, he even gives the examples from theology. It’s not hard to find people like Peter Avalard who they aren’t living out the great theological truths. They are kind of promulgating. It’s not difficult to find bishops and theologians, et cetera.
Carl Bart had a big question mark about having maybe a several year long affair while he’s doing theology, and it’s this question of what do we do with those kind of stories? What do we do with these people who it’s clear they have great intellectual gifts, but they don’t seem to have the faith? Do we just say the intellectual stuff is in the way and we got to just move past that? Obviously not. We can acknowledge the truth of all that. Nevertheless, there is a type of lowly person who is also learning. There’s no actual contradiction between being one of the little ones, being lowly, being humble and also being brilliant, learned, educated in all this. And so at the cross, it’s true. We see this insur, we see the scribes, we see our lady, but we also see St. John who is rightly called the theologian.
Now on the one hand, he’s a fisherman from the Sea of Galilee. On the other hand, he is John the theologian as he’s known by the church, and he was really able to see the mystery of God in proclaim he’s eagle eyed. Now, this is a reference, and if you’ve seen the depictions of the four gospels, John’s gospel is identified with the eagle and the four living creatures in Revelation were believed by the early Christians to be the four gospels. And it’s pretty clear that eagle is John’s gospel. It starts at the soaring heights of in the beginning was the word and the word was with God, and the word was God. And then the eagle swoops down and the word is made flesh and dwells among us. You have this hovering all of history, hovering over all the cosmos, over all the universe, and then kind of swooping down into the life of Jesus of Nazareth on earth.
But constantly there’s this great kind cosmological vision in the gospel of John. So eagle eye enough to see the entered into the inaccessible light of the divine mystery. So John is one figure that reminds us you can be a brilliant theologian and still a humble disciple that the same John who’s doing this incredible theology is resting on the breast of our Lord at the last Supper. But then the other figure, of course, this St. Paul, now St. Paul is himself kind of a cautionary tale because as Paul explains before, he has this road to Damascus moment, he was acting ignorantly at the time. Despite his great knowledge, he’s very well without a doubt, the most educated of the major figures we’re introduced to in terms of having a rabbinical education. And at first that doesn’t help him. At first he continues to act ignorantly, but then the risen one touches him.
He is blinded, and at the same time it’s here that he truly gains sight. He begins to see the great scholar now becomes a little one, and for this very reason, he perceives the folly of God as wisdom, a wisdom far greater than all human wisdom. So Paul is able to point us to the fact that yes, this is true wisdom, but this is also a wisdom that goes beyond human wisdom. That doesn’t mean human wisdom is bad, but it means human wisdom needs to be wise enough to recognize its own limits and open itself up to something greater than itself. I love the image the Benedict gives here of a fishing net. I kind of alluded to that a moment ago. He says in the end, this is so in theology too. One fish is in the waters of sacred scripture using a net in which only fish of a certain size may be caught.
Therefore, a fish exceeding the size is too big for the net and hence cannot exist. Okay, let’s explain what he’s doing. He’s saying you can have a limit to your method. You see this really clearly in the sciences. The scientific method is built to explain natural causes. It cannot even in principle explain supernatural things. It’s not designed to do that. It is a net to catch natural causes and explain how one thing naturally rises and gives rise to another thing that should be uncontroversial. If you understand the way the scientific method works, it is not designed to prove miracles or anything like that. It can in some cases falsify a miracle. It can show, oh, this thing you thought was miraculous was actually perfectly explainable in natural ways, but it can’t prove a miracle. There’s no way you’re going to get to the end of a scientific conclusion and say, aha, this proves there was a miracle.
The best you can say is we can’t explain this scientifically. This is a thing too big for our nets. And the danger becomes because you can’t contain supernatural things in the nets of the scientific method that you then take the attitude therefore, they can’t exist because we can’t detect them. We can’t prove them using these methods that are designed only to catch things smaller that therefore they must not exist. But that’d be like taking a fishing net and being like, well, I guess there are no whales in this water because I didn’t catch any in my net. Well, your net’s too small to catch a whale. So if whales do exist, you’re obviously not going to be catching them in your net either way. Well, similarly, Benedict says there’s a way of approaching scripture that’s like this. Now, I think he has in view here with something that’s called the historical critical method.
There’s several different related methods that are looking at the sits and libin, the kind of time and place of the scriptures and that this can do good stuff at capturing the historical details around the scriptures. But it’s never going to catch the essence because it’s too big for the method that you’re using. It is in this way. The great mystery of Jesus, the sun made man is reduced to a historical Jesus, a tragic figure, a ghost, not a flesh and bone, a man who stays in the tomb, whose body is corrupt and who is truly dead. The method is able to catch certain fish. But the great mystery alludes it because the human being himself established the measure. In other words, as with the scientific method, if your method of exploring scripture is to presuppose, it’s not what it claims to be, then you’re going to be limited in what you can find.
So a couple of good examples here. You’ll find people who date the books of the Old Testament or the New Testament after the events they’re prophesying, and the reasoning goes something like this, oh, Jesus foretells the destruction of the temple in the year 70. Therefore that must have been written sometime after the year 70 and then put on the lips of our Lord. Now notice underlying that the net is so small that Jesus can’t make predictions about the future accurately. So he obviously can’t be God. He can’t be a true prophet. He can’t even be just a good prognosticator because even a person who wasn’t God, who wasn’t a prophet, might’ve just read the signs of the times well enough to say, you know what? You’re going to keep poking the Roman bear at some point it’s going to destroy you. And we know in the past that included destroying the temple when this has happened in Israel’s own history, you wouldn’t actually even need to be God to predict the future, but you can find people who say, aha.
Therefore it must have been written after that. And this happens all the time with Old Testament dating of books that this thing accurately foretold this event. Therefore it must have not really been a prophecy. It must’ve been a post diction. It must’ve been written after the event. That method is just assuming. Obviously this book isn’t inspired. Obviously it’s not prophetic. Obviously the person speaking isn’t led by the Holy Spirit. And if you start with those assumptions, then you’re going to get a lot of accurate information to a certain point, but you’re not going to get the heart of the thing because you’re assuming it’s something that tells you it’s not. And so you can’t know the truth about the book if you’re taking at the outset that this work which claims to be true is actually false, and then you refuse to even contemplate what if it’s true?
What if it really is for telling the future? That would complicate all the dating, all of the kind of historical scholarship on a lot of these areas. So you’ve got things that are like that, and even the rejection of miracles, you’ll often hear this goes against all the laws of nature, et cetera, which is another way of saying, well, for that to happen would have to be supernatural, which is like, yeah, that’s literally the point. And so if your method of understanding scripture is obviously you can’t have miraculous things, obviously you can’t have supernatural things because that would be supernatural. You are using this very tiny net and wondering why you’re not getting much in the way of fish.
But Benedict suggests that’s not the only way. You could don’t have to do this. You don’t have to use these tiny manmade nets to try to catch the whale. There is this other way of using reason of being wise, which is when a man recognizes who he is, he recognizes the proper measure and greatness of God, and he opens himself in humility to the newness of God’s action, that the truly wise thing to do is to recognize the limits of your own wisdom is in this way precisely by accepting his own smallness, making himself little as he really is, that he arrives at the truth. Thus, he says, reason two can express all its possibilities. It’s not extinguished, but rather grows and becomes greater. This is the great error. We have this idea that reason is going to be threatened by faith, and we either need to turn off reasons so we can have faith or turn off faith so we can have reason.
But you look at something like St. Thomas Aquinas and it’s clear, it’s like no, no, a reason which says, here’s what we already know about the world from our own devices, and here’s all this other stuff that God has revealed to us. Now, the treasury is so much greater, the storehouse is so much larger and you can see faith and reason interacting with one another. So where does that leave us? I want to leave you with his closing prayer to the theologians of the ITC and suggest that this might be a good thing for us to praise through as we approach Christmas. He says, let us now pray that the Lord will give us true humility. May he give us the grace of being little in order to be truly wise. May he illumine us, enable us to see his mystery in the joy of the Holy Spirit.
May he help us to be true theologians who can proclaim his mystery. We are touched in the depth of our hearts of our very existence. Amen. Alright, this coming Tuesday going to be a radical change of pace. I’m going to be sharing on great Aposty because I’ve got a debate coming up in a couple days here with Jacob Hanson on Mormonism that’s going to drop Monday night. Tuesday I’ll have a version of my opening statement. And so this is the last kind of advent themed one before we get to Christmas. So I wish you a blessed Advent and a Merry Christmas. For Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.