Ryan: Hey Friends, just a bit of an update here. This episode is coming to you a week late. We've had a member of the editorial staff take some time away. We're trying to keep to our schedule from here on out. But we'll see. Thanks for your patience if we have to switch things up a bit.
Also this conversation with Matthew Milliner of Wheaton College just went so well. We usually try to keep these conversations to about an hour. Matt and I ended up talking for over two hours. There's just so much that we've both been working on that have a lot in common. And so we decided to split it up into two episodes, even after cutting and rearranging some stuff. We’ve got two full episodes here. So this is the first part of my conversation with Matthew Milliner. The second part will follow in the next episode, two weeks from now. All right. Enjoy.
Ryan: My guest today is Matthew Milliner. He teaches Art History at his alma mater, Wheaton College near Chicago. Matt specializes in Byzantine Medieval Art, but we'll hear in this conversation how that explodes and amplifies to include the rest of the cosmos. He's a five-time appointee to the Curatorial Advisory Board of the United States Senate, and a winner of Redeemer University's Emerging Public Intellectual Award. He's written for publications ranging from The New York Times to First Things. He was awarded a Commonwealth Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies and Culture at the University of Virginia to complete his forthcoming book, Mother of the Lamb, coming out with Fortress Press soon.
I just saw the proofs on his desk and he's the author most recently of The Everlasting People: GK Chesterton and the First Nations with InterVarsity Press. Matt also tends to one of my favorite Instagram feeds, which teaches me to look at my surroundings with a kind of archeological vision. And so Matt, I've actually never been to Wheaton College.
Matt: I'm so sorry.
Ryan: Yeah, let's say you're taking me on a tour. Where does the tour start? And then tell me what we're looking at and then start digging down through the historical layers and tell me what you would see in one of your archeological Instagram posts.
Matt: I think it would start where yours should start. I'm sure it does, at the Meadowcroft Rock Shelter, right? Because you've got 15,000 years of Indigenous history right near you in Pittsburgh. We have an equivalent of that, which is Perry Mastodon. My wife jokes it should be called Katy Perry Mastodon because this beast is actually female. This is evidence of human habitation in this area that goes back about 11,000 years ago when the glaciers were receding and what we know as the Great Lakes, simply melt water. From the great curtain rising on the drama of human history, that we are all part of, who live in this Midwestern region.
Ryan: So is this a stuffed Mastodon?
Matt: No. It's a real skeleton of a Mastodon that was found. It has like some fake skin put on one side of it,a sculptural application of what it was once like. But the evidence, these are real bones. They're beautifully displayed.
Talk about a spear in the heart of a young earth creationism, which still sometimes rears its head around here. It just forces one to grapple, in a minority report, of course. And I would defend the freedom of people to hold that opinion, but I also am going to do my best to smoke it out of my students, as I have forced them to grapple with not only an 11,000 year old human hunting in this area, but actually 15,000.
The Clovis dates were eradicated, because of finds like Meadowcroft Rock Shelter. The Miller Point was discovered there. Another one of the main sites is just north of us in Milwaukee, where there were human markings found on a mammoth bone that clearly goes back 15,000 years. It's just so richly exciting. So that's where the tour would begin, I would say.
We're a Christian college and we're not ashamed of that. We don't hide that. We like it. We let our freak flag fly. You’ve got to ask yourself, what does this Christ who we profess here on this campus have to do with the people that were here? And if a student doesn't have an answer to that question, they better start thinking of one.
And I think the answer to that is you open up into this rich understanding of the one through whom all things were made, the cosmic Christ who has been present at all times to all people in all places. And, and you just open up into that and then you have a faith that can endure.
If the tour were to continue, we would drive over to the Winfield Mounds. I prefer to refer to them as D U 33, which is their archeological designation.
These are mountains that go back to the time of origin of Alexandria, Gregory of Nyssa. And there were humans in this area. Why are they called the Winfield Mounds?
That is kind of disappointing. Isn't it? That we slapped a name on those mounds of the man who both supervised the Blackhawk War and the Trail of Tears under Andrew Jackson’s command. We need to change that. Nevertheless, what about those people? What do those mounds testify to? Well, it's a pregnant earth that is testifying to the hope and the resurrection.
Am I projecting my Christian faith onto the people of old? No, I'm not. I'm intuiting what they're doing. I've done my research. I'm reading that this is a hope in a renewal of the earth. That's why the effigy mounds were created. That's why the Hopewell Mounds were created. If death is just natural, why not just throw a body into a ditch and say, good, let's move on?
No, there's mourning. There's sadness. There's expectation of renewal. Maybe Christianity should have been interacting with Africans from Egypt and Indigenous people from North America, instead of just the Platonists, in order to have conversation partners that were more amenable to the belief and the physical resurrection?
Ryan: We just recently read Gregory of Nyssa and Macrina’s dialogue about the Resurrection in the Beatrice Institute Undergraduate Seminar. And they really have a hard time admitting to the bodily resurrection.
Matt: It's hard for the Greeks, but it wasn't hard for most human cultures. In Acts 17, when Paul brings up the resurrection, Dionysus is the only one who sticks around. Everyone else laughs and says get out of here, we're not interested! And that's why Dionysius, the Areopagite, is such an important figure. At least he held on. He overcame his own Platonism by receiving the Gospel of Paul.
It should thrust us into conversation with non-European cultures. Egypt alone, with its pyramids, is proclaiming this need for resurrection. The Terracotta Army in China is also saying, we want more. This can’t be enough. Granted, it's a military. And it's certainly only for the elite, whereas Christianity would democratize it and say it's for everybody. What more natural partner could there be to Indigenous societies who take burial with such reverence, then a faith that presumes to believe in resurrection?
Ryan: Let me, let me ask you a question I asked Brad Gregory a few weeks ago. It's probable that humans have been around for a hundred thousand years and recent evidence might even take that back to 400,000 years. What does that long view of humanity do to our understanding of God choosing the people of Israel?
Matt: I think it only makes it more exciting. It only increases the drama of the narrative. It's like listening to a symphony and there was a whole other room of instruments you didn't know about that all of a sudden pick up with the same tune. And what is that tune you ask? The tune is Matthew 25, right? His deep cosmic identity with those who are the least of these. So Christ has always been, not with the paleolithic man conquering, but the secret is he has always been with the conquered. He enters the food chain on the lower end. He has not been with imperial conquest, whether it's Napoleon or the Neanderthals, conquering those who preceded them. He has always been mysteriously present as the lamb. Because last time I checked, he's the lamb slain from the foundation of the world.
So, I cannot overstate how little of a problem this is for understanding. It’s deeply enriching. To think every human is a Christological prophecy if they're born before Christ, or a Christological confirmation if they came after. What I simply mean by that, it's not some domineering, triumphalist Christianity, that's going to conquer everything, because that would be put to betray the message itself.
That's how good it is to be human. That untethered, infinite bliss and power would take on that form as well. And when he does take on that form, he is confirming the lesson that he had taught to the chosen people of Israel all along, that they were not chosen because they were the true conquerors. They were not chosen because they were the handsomest or the most beautiful or the most capable of wielding weapons of power. They were chosen because of their humility. Because their being chosen would most clearly indicate that it was not in their power. But it was by grace.
It is seamless with the great history that has come before. And you might say, but what about all the conquering that Israel does? They do that. But what immediately happens in the Hebrew Bible, shows what it's like to be conquered by the Assyrians and the Babylonians. And then, all of a sudden, that imprint is cast onto the thousands of years that came before. So again, I find it richly exciting.
One of my pet peeves are people who casually dismiss Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. I've read really good critiques of Pierre. You don't have to agree with him, but at the same time, he had already deposited the richness of this vision into new wineskins. And so, if other wineskins are falling apart, we’ve already moved into this richer understanding. Again, I don't agree with him in his entirety, but to absurdly declare that he is somehow less than cruciform, betrays an immediate exposure that you haven't read Henri de Lubac’s profound defense of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin against those who decried him as a heretic in his day.
And I love it. He just took it, right? He didn't wear it like a badge of honor as people so often do today. And that's why he emerges as such a trustworthy human being.
And so, what we've got is a big history. And one of the things that bores me, forgive me, about some, not all, but some of the literature that attends to this new evidence is its complete refusal to account for the embrace of Christianity by indigenous people.
I think that it's often people's whiteness, if I may throw around that thrown around term, that keeps them from addressing that because they prefer the exotic, the other. And to see Christianity amongst these people that they're trying to study… with a presumption that they must've been duped by the whites. No. Sorry. They get to pick that for themselves, thank you very much. That's not your choice. You let them speak on their own terms. And they're the ones often that are pointing to this profound, rich history. They see the confirmation of the crucified and risen one as something that confirms the rock art and the archeological discoveries that go back so many thousands of years on this continent, onTurtle Island.
Ryan: Yeah, I have a little example of that, that I prepared.
Matt: Oh please, please deliver.
Ryan: This is from The Dawn of Everything, the book that I keep flogging on this podcast. As you mentioned in another conversation, we could find similar material in Paulette Steve's… what's the name of that book?
Matt: The Indigenous Paleolithic and she cites both the Meadowcroft Rock Shelter and Perry Mastodon and Wheaton College in her early maps. It's so wonderful.
Ryan: They bring up a quote from brother Gabriel Sagard, a Recollect friar, who was in New France in the 1620s, among the Wyandot people, otherwise known as the Huron. And he started out really critical of Wyandot life. But then eventually he completely reverses his position and writes that,
“Among the Wyandot, they have no lawsuits and take little pains to acquire the goods of this life, for which we Christians torment ourselves so much. And for our excessive and insatiable greed in acquiring them, we are justly and with reason reproved by their quiet life and tranquil dispositions.”
Much like Biard’s Mi’kmaq, which a previous Jesuit missionary encountered, the Wyandot were particularly offended by the French lack of generosity to one another. He goes on,
“They reciprocate hospitality and give such assistance to one another that the necessities of all are provided for without there being any indigent beggar in their towns and villages. And they considered it a very bad thing when they heard it said that there were in France, a great many of these needy beggars and thought that this was for lack of charity in us and blamed us for it severely.”
What a description of an axe to society that is primed to receive a gospel that's not a revolutionary gospel for them, but one that I would imagine came very easily at least to those communities. So one of the things I wanted to ask you about is what was the evangelistic approach of the Moravians or people like David Brainerd, the successful early missionaries?
Matt: Well, I think what's interesting is we can start with the Wyandot, with the Huron, with the Mi'kmaq right in this area. And so, what's interesting about that quote is that the Recollects are often cast as the ones who have an animosity toward the Indigenous life in comparison to the Jesuits. And it's so interesting to hear a Recollect priest make that point.
But one of the Recollect priests that I mentioned in this book, who is working amongst the Mi’kmaq, he's really annoyed. I was astonished to discover this. Why is he annoyed? Because he's in the 17th century and he had given his life to bring Christianity to the Mi’kmaq and they were waiting for someone to come. They stated that they had two crosses and the priest brought the third. He clarified that he was bringing the gospel to them, but they showed him petroglyphs and rock carvings that indicated that they were awaiting this. And this really throws secular historicists for a loop. Clearly, that must be Christian retro injection into the Mi’kmaq records because, of course, you could never have a cross prophecy that is fulfilled in Christianity. It's just ruled out. And I'm like, well, why are you ruling that out? Maybe it's the case.
I first learned of this and then I confirmed it by discovering this Recollect’s frustration that he was not the first in a secular Canadian anthropology textbook. This is an assigned, standard university course where an anthropologist is doing her research. The anthropologist asks, “Well, tell me about your Catholic faith as a Mi’kmaq woman? And the woman replies, “Well, again, our culture has always preached the cross. And when Christianity came, we knew the final details.” And again, they used the petroglyphs and you can find the early rubbings of the rocks in Nova Scotia. You can go visit them. I've seen some of them myself. You can find that. You might say like, well, but that's just kind of an example of an anthropological quirk.
No, it's on the flag of the Mi'kmaq nation. But are they Christian today? I mean, how much time do you have? Like Terry Leblanc is a friend of mine. He's a Mi'kmaq Indigenous Christian. We've been having a conversation about Christian Indigenous culture for 400 years. It started at Port Royal Nova Scotia. So, glad you jumped in, but we don't really need your help. We need you to listen.
I would go further, it's not just 400 years old. It's maybe 400,000. I must say I did not know about the 400,000 number. I knew about the 100,000 from Paulette Steve's writing based upon the California discoveries, which seems pretty clear. You have some intelligent human arrangement of these mammoth bones in the San Diego area that may very well go that far back.
It's been explosively controversial. But again, it doesn't disturb me. But, you've got to expand your mind if you are a Christian. I mean, no one has to expand their minds. But, I'm saying if you want to be in conversation with this material, you have to have a cosmic sense of Christ. Which, of course, Gregory of Nyssa and Macrina naturally had.
A constricted brittle, modern, historicist understanding of Jesus, it's just not going to be able to handle this material. Some people get afraid and they ask if I am giving up on a literal understanding? Not in the least. I never have to make that choice between the literal, the allegorical and the topological, as you, of course, have written so beautifully about. And the anagogical eye, all of them can be in play at once.
Ryan: Well, and also if, if we feel like a 400,000 year human history belittles the history in which God has revealed himself through a chosen people, all we have to do is balance that out by adding another 398,000 years on the other end in the future.
Matt: There it is. I love it. Well said. You know, it's funny. Some of this was popularized in Richard Rohr's book, The Universal Christ. Rohr’s a gifted pastor, a truly, almost brilliant pastor and a sloppy theologian. And so some professional academics would criticize, saying it’s kind of sloppy and not well thought through. But there's a lot more sophisticated people that make the distinction between Jesus and Christ, not to separate them, but for intelligent, utilitarian purposes. Let's distinguish between Jesus and Christ, knowing that they'll immediately come back together again.
Raimon Panikkar, the great Spanish theologian, has such wonderful interactions between Catholicism and Hinduism, but really doubling down on his Christian faith as he does so. The Unknown Christ of Hinduism is a great book. His different lectures are really fantastic. And he's the one who makes the distinction between Christ and Jesus. Not to separate them, but to say the One who is present to the Indigenous people, when they mysteriously suffered, and who the flickering eyes of the man you were about to kill, who looked at you with forgiveness, that was Christ, right? Even if it happened in an anonymous glade. That was Christ. And then, of course, on Christmas, we learn his name is Jesus. There's a pure, perfect fusion, a Chalcedonian unity between those two entities. That's just good Christology. Right?
People listening to this podcast may not care less about heresy, but in my community it matters. And I think it should, but the heresy doubles back on the people who wouldn't make these moves, in my opinion. Oh, so you're saying he wasn't present to the 100,000 years of human history? Now that's kind of problematic, right? Shouldn't you be the one that's defending yourself, rather than saying that I'm too adventures of a thinker to say that Christ has always been present with these people?
I love the way that Stratford Caldicot puts it. This is a keeper of a quote. He has this great article on the differences between Christian and Hindu non-duality and he said, “The One who all religions know,” and that would include paleolithic religious observances, “reveals Himself in Christianity to have a triune interior life.”
Ryan: Right.
Matt: God wants to reveal this infinite bliss that he has always participated in, not as a lover, but as love itself. And so, that there were glimmers of that before Christmas is not surprising. And of course the chief glimmer, which is more than a glimmer, is the people of Israel.
Ryan: What did you learn from Peter Brown about looking at images or architecture?
Matt: Generosity. When my friend David Michaelson first came to Princeton, he was shopping for grad schools. He went to Peter's house and Peter had taken a Sotheby's catalog of Oriental carpets and had cut them all out and had created a model of the Great Mosque of Damascus in his home. Not to show to anyone. David sort of stumbled upon it accidentally. And that's how Peter did history.
And we all know that, his loving turn of phrase, all comes from that exceeding generosity to let the past be the past, and by letting the past be the past, it breaks into the present. So, there was the canopy that Peter erected under which so many people came, Christian, non-Christian, Muslim, non Muslim, secular. But, I think the distinguishing characteristic of the flock that was gathered together under that patronage was a generosity of spirit.
I'm not going to longingly look back and say, oh, the good old days. I don't know if it will continue. It may. I was back at Princeton, ever so briefly. Jack Tenusa is an incredible scholar who carries that spirit onward.
Ryan: How has the student experience at Wheaton College changed since you were in undergraduate?
Matt: Oh gosh, students are struggling, right? We know why, right? It's because of these machines we put in their pockets since they were, but babes. All the data seems to point in that direction. I get it from Twenge. Her scholarship is drawn upon in Lukianoff and Haidt in The Coddling of the American Mind, which is a really good book.
But what you see at Wheaton are those same struggles, that mental health crisis of sorts, that we did a pretty good job exacerbating through COVID. I'm not saying anyone's to blame, but it's been ugly. But what you see instead at Wheaton is that when the human soul is pinched in that way, or put in a corner, there's this immediate recourse to their Christian faith. And it becomes serious. We have the same crises that we have on other campuses. You've had students killed, horrible accidents, I won't go into it, but what you see when that same crisis happens is we have the valve of community lamentation, which can be public.
To give you a sense, when I went to Mount Athos, these monks kind of forced me to pillage the gift shop and take all these icons back with me, these replica icons. And so I was like, all right, I count that as permission. I can use these. And so, I got some more rigorous replications and have created essentially a sacred space in my art history lecture. Slowly, the icons have multiplied over time and now we get the incense going, we get the candle going, right. We've got the Sinai Christ there in the middle. We've got a black Christ and Indigenous Christ, as well. Not because we're being politically correct, because it's Christologically correct. Because of the university, the Totus Christus, right? So we just started hosting morning and evening prayer sessions.
And the Lenten Miracle is that it is completely voluntary. I'm not going to give you an uptick on your class grade. I emphasize that with great profundity. They have a required chapel. So, they know what mandatory prayer is like, but I have never been alone, never been alone.
And sometimes, I've wanted to be. I'm tired at the end of a long day. But I just set up these morning and evening half hour prayer sessions using Cranmer. Gorgeous services. And they just keep showing up. Right? So, we've prayed through Sandy Hook. We've prayed through the war (Ukrainian), we've prayed through all kinds of shootings.
We have this liturgy that we just appeal to. And I constantly say to students in our art history lecture, they don't have to come to the prayer. But, they'll come to class right afterwards and it'll smell like incense. And they like that. When I say this, I'm not saying you should have been there. I'm just saying, know that these icons were just used and that art history can account for that. Right? It breaks the glass of the discipline. It shatters. It's like we need art historians to come in and study us because we just stepped into the light. And we weren't looking at it standing alongside of it, to use Lewis's famous metaphor.
So, yeah, everything's the same in the sense of the challenges, the struggles, the democratic free-fall that we're all suffering from. But, at the same time, everything's completely different because we can be frank in those appeals.
Do we deal with the real issues there? Our conversations about race are heated. They are intense and wonderful and agonizing and they're full throated. But what makes the difference is that I can appeal to the lost Nubian frescos from Faras Cathedral, in what is now Sudan, that were submerged by the Aswan High Dam, and rescued, thankfully, by the Poles. Some are in Warsaw and some are in Khartoum.
And I can point to those, and say by the universal body of Christ, that's part of the story. I can appeal, not to the European foundation of Christian learning. I always first appealed to Alexandria. That's where the Christian liberal arts project began. Catherine of Alexandria is our patron saint, of sorts.
We have the race conversations, but I mean, at Wheaton, if you say we have boundaries, just like a good football game. It's got a boundary, right? Our boundary would be like, if someone says, oh Galatians is ridiculous. When it says there is neither slave nor Greek, nor male, nor female, that's just ridiculous.
It's like, well, you just stepped outside the boundary. I'm not going to punish the student, but it's like, they lose. That's a liberating insight because it's in the New Testament and that's our common text. And so it's so wonderful to be able to go to that.
Does it mean that there aren't great hermeneutical debates about the Bible? Of course not. But it's taken as a given, and therefore the multitude of peoples that the New Testament in this Pentecostal insight unfurls is our default for what diversity looks like. Not some new political headwinds that we're trying to accommodate ourselves to.
But Wheaton has a history. There were other headwinds that we unfortunately succumbed to in part of our history. But, for goodness sakes, we're an abolitionist school. And we all know that the University of Virginia would give half of its endowment for that. And it's not for sale. Because I've been to the Slavery Memorial at the University of Virginia and it's harrowing and they got to deal with that. Do we have stuff to deal with too? Yes, we do. Especially in regard to Indigenous history. We got stuff to deal with, but we've got abolitionism in our history and it's kind of wonderful. Gosh, I was at William and Mary and it's like a construction site. I feel for them, I'm glad they're doing the work. They were built by slaves. And you've got to reckon with that.
Ryan: What's the best recontextualization of an American monument that you've come across in these terms?
Matt: Ah, interesting question. I was told that in Charlottesville that the Jackson and Lee statues were going to be melted down and used to recreate beautiful statues. So that's one. But, the answer to the question is it's enrichment. Drive through Richmond. Jay Tolson told me about this while I was there. He's the editor at The Hedgehog. You see all these decapitated edifices, just huge plinths with nothing on them. And frankly it's ugly. And so, this is the beauty of the South, destroyed. You might say it wasn't beautiful because it was built to subjugate the African-American population. True. But, in some sense, it was beautiful. And now you keep driving and you find Kehinde Wiley's equestrian statue of an African-American man, proud, bestride. And that is beautiful and just. That's the best one I know of.
It was exhibited in Manhattan for a while, right in central park. And now it's found its permanent home as a response to the equestrian statues that have been removed. And it's a great statue. Kehinde Wiley’s an ironic spirit. And in the dedication to that monument, he's proclaims, I am not here to cancel your history. I am not here to shut you down. I am here to celebrate what has not been celebrated.
Beautiful, beautiful. So that's a successful contextualization. That's what I like to call the Douglas option from Frederick Douglas. That's what he argued for. He's like, don't tear the Lincoln statue down. Even if it's been problematic. Let's have a contextualizing beautiful statute nearby.
A quick story. It's not often that an art historian gets contacted by the police, but, I had a detective call me once and I was freaked out. I'm like, did a student die? What's going on? And I get the message on my phone. I called him. He was like, oh, you've been impersonated. Someone who claims to be you is going to come rip down the Doughboy Statue of Memorial to World War One in Wheaton with a bunch of angry students, because it represents imperialism. And the reason I contacted you is just to let you know. We were sure it wasn't you when they spelled your name wrong.
But times are so tense right now. This was summer 2020. Even to try to argue for that nuance, which I tried to in a podcast and someone listened to it and said, all right, this guy is some crazy statue -ripper-downer. So,it's a weird time. But anyway, Wiley is number one for me. That equestrian statue.
Ryan: Can you just tell the story of Gnadenhutten?
Matt: Ah, yeah.
Oh, so the Moravians amongst the little Lenape…I just found this new book called Zinzendorf An Ecumenical Theology of The Heart, like he's so ahead of the curve, he just realizes that this fractured Christendom is not working and therefore the heart piety is going to be the way forward. And that is sometimes marked in the history of evangelicalism as substandard or unintellectual. But really, I think it's the answer in many ways. That's the kind of mysticism that others kept alive in the midst of the divisive wars between Catholics and Protestants. So, the point is there's an entire history of ecumenical heart mysticism that one could easily write. In some sense, it has been written.
Zinzendorf emerges as a prophet of this kind and alongside William Penn, he was incredibly successful in his interactions. The Moravians, and these are the people, of course, that caused Wesley's heart to be warmed. So, it's at the heart of evangelicalism on this continent.
Moravians were successful amongst the Lenape because of their wound mysticism. I'm not kidding. Like Barbara Newman's wonderful work on the adventurous spirituality of the middle ages. She's a hero of mine. She is wonderful. And all of the medievalists that explore the heart wound piety, entering into the wound of Christ. Oh, the audacious middle ages. They were so wild.
But the Moravians were doing it too. In fact, it was a little crazier. Because they would like camp out on the wound of Jesus, and build their living room. I live in the wound! That's what it's like. But did they make pictures? Yes, they did. Many.
You can find them. They're pretty awesome. And so needless to say, this wound piety in this deep bloody heart mysticism appealed to the Lenape and they received the Gospel under these conditions. And it did nothing to alter the tide of settler colonialism, nothing at all. This is the tragedy of Brotherton Indians throughout the Northeast.
In Gnadenhutten, the Pennsylvania militia are deciding what to do with 200 or so Indians who are Christian, because they're not sure if they had secretly sided with the British. And so it's deemed expedient to kill them. There were women and children. It's primarily who they were.
And so it wasn't a heat of passion or in battle. No, it was premeditated. It was thought through. They said, okay, you can have the night for prayer. And so during the night for prayer, they sang hymns to Jesus.
And then in the morning they were hacked to death. Systematically. You can visit the place to this day. There's a little burial mound, and there's an obelisk that was erected on one of the anniversaries and it's relatively unknown. And this happened. And you might say, well, then they must have given up Christianity for good, right? Because they see how much of a sham it is.
No. One of them, and Rachel Wheeler has done her academic work in this area, extraordinary research, one of them who was not himself Lenape, but he was, I think, Stockbridge Indian, he was caught up with them. His name was Joseph. We know his name. He was not there at Gnadenhutten. He was away, but his family was killed. And does he surrender his Christian faith? No, but because of that, he is then blamed by his fellow Lenape for being insufficiently Lenape and they hack him to pieces. So he's a martyr. And they throw him onto the fire he's burned and he dies. But, he held onto his Christian faith to the end.
And so people flock to Rome saying I want to go see the sacred sites where the martyrs died for Christianity. It's like, wow, just go to Ohio, go to Indiana. Right. That's where Joseph died in the White River Valley. You know, walk outside your front door. Oh my gosh. It's just harrowing. And we could go on with that story. It just keeps going.
Ryan: Well, and I mean, it keeps going to the point that there are still Stockbridge, Muncy, Mohican Christians right? Living today.
Matt: Of course. They're in Wisconsin, they're in Ontario.
Ryan: And, and so are they the ones who kept the memory alive of this ancestor? Joseph, who was murdered by his own people.
Matt: These are not only Indigenous accounts. These are settler accounts, who are horrified that this happened. Christians are stunned by this. Now I'd have to comb Rachel Wheeler's sources and see where she got this. But it's astonishing that we know the name.
Ryan: I'm just going back to the Gnadenhutten massacre. Were there any Christian responses to that? Any genuine Christian responses to Christian slaughter of Christians?
Matt: There were. And that's why the obelisk is important. The Moravians are still vibrant in that area. And they actually have a play called Trumpet in the Land that happens in that area, which you can go to in the summer. And I went to it.
It commemorates the awfulness of this encounter and Zinzendorf amongst the Lenape. Now granted, the play is a little troubling because it's a little dated. You have these non-indigenous people dressed up as Indians. It won a big award, but it was made 50 years ago. It's not, au courant, right? It's a little cringy.
But it used to be performed by tribal members who were involved in that. Not my favorite way. It's commemorated, but it's a regional living memory and that's the thing. We academic people live in our little centers and if it hasn't come to me it's not real. And then you go visit the place. You're like, oh, this is living for them. They know where they live. Not all of them. Right?
You go to Newark, Ohio, and many of the people have just no clue that they live in the largest complex of earthworks in the world. The Hopewell people created these true fulfillments of having an earth unifying. Right? In touch with the stars… earth. These are calendars. And so it is sad, but in the case of Gnadenhutten, it seems in my experience, to be a living active memory.
Ryan: I did want to ask one other question, if you have time?
Matt: Please.
Ryan: And take this however you want. Why are you still an Anglican?
Matt: Oh, oh, the great question. It's in the book. Here's the thing. When someone asks, “Why did you convert to Catholicism?” It's fair to say, “Well, that's a long conversation.” And I think it's also fair to say, when someone asks, “Why are you not converting to Catholicism?” That's also a long conversation. And so, when I say, “It's in the book,” I mean that it's both in this and the sense of the tragedy of Christian disunity that I can't fix with my personal decision. I mean, what happened in Florida, that I mentioned here, that needs to be reckoned with.
I mean, that's the Aboriginal, you know, no pun intended, Gerardian murder that begins mission conquest in this land. So, I would love to try to rectify that with a personal decision, but it won't be rectified. But the longer answer to that question is embedded in the Mother of the Land, the Virgin I am so passionate about, because I really wrestle with some of the history.
And so I have a coherent beautiful, nourishing Christian community here at Wheaton that is Anglican. My wife and I think like, what would it be if we were not in that situation? I could completely conceive of a context in which I might find myself to be Orthodox or Catholic.
I do not consider it a faithless decision or some kind of cop-out necessarily, but it is where I am called right now. Everyone used to say that Protestants don't have mysticism. That has just been obliterated by Bernard McGinn. He is doing two volumes, one of which is completely on Protestants and mysticism. And so I think if one finds oneself needing to convert to Catholicism to access those depths, fine.
However, I have found that there are many Protestants that are doing all that work that are bringing that forward. The Moravians no less, with their sacred heart mystics...cannot that be accounted for, as well? I want to, from this side of the aisle, plumb the same resources, mine the same ore, that people would be mining on the other side.
And the thing that I'm really against, are these kind of slap dash declarations. Not that I'm a relativist, right? But I did this in my class until I hurt my hand. So, I had to stop doing it. But, I’d take a plate and I smash it on the ground. And then I’d pick up one large piece of the plate and I’d say, “The church isn't broken, this plate is not broken. Does it look cracked? No, it's not broken.” Well, tell that to the Indigenous people in Florida, who saw the murder of all the Calvinist missionaries who had come to that fort and that were killed as Lutherans in front of the Indigenous people, right?
And so, in some sense, plumbing these questions gets you out of these inter-European conversations. You know, another avenue of access to that is to really look at the movement of the Viterbo Reformers in Rome. Of course, they weren't in Rome. They had to go to Viterbo because they were pursued. You just realize, oh my gosh, we were one vote away from Reginald Pole becoming Pope. Right? And then Karratha took the reins and crushed it all. And you had clearly a message of coherent justification by faith in all these reform circles.
And then they started to be mercilessly persecuted. And so it's just like a part of it is wanting to lament that and not picking the right team so that I can find myself settled. Not that it's necessarily wrong to do that. And I'm not saying that someone who does convert is necessarily in a facile way, picking a team, it might be a genuine calling. And I have no doubt that it's a calling that some people have, but it is not mine right now. It's a really interesting place to be.
Ryan: That's a wonderful answer and it speaks…
Matt: I mean, we're, we're, we're just getting started. I think it, um, it would be a much longer conversation.
Ryan: I think, I mean, just, just the way that you speak to the woundedness of the whole church. I'm Roman Catholic, my wife and I raised our kids Roman Catholic. But one of their grandfathers is an Anglican priest. One of their uncles is an Anglican priest. Their other uncle attends his brother's Anglican church.That's the way we talk about it with them. This is a wound. It's a wound in the church. And even if the one true holy Catholic church is complete and is the plate, in some way, that it's a broken plate. And nobody is unaffected by that.
Matt: You just gave me the image, right? If you jump to one side of the wounded flesh and proclaim, “There's no wound!” That's a problem for a Protestant or a Catholic or an Orthodox Christian.
But that Moravian sense of entering the wound. I want to live there. It's the Moravian evangelical spirit that once blew amongst the Lenape, that blew through me in the land that activated my faith. And they're the ones who want to enter into the wound. And that's where I want to enter into lamentation. It's a wound. You're on one side of it. I'm on one side of it. We meet in that bloody center. And if that's gritty and medieval, so be it. The Moravians talk that way. I should let you go. Hey man, I really have enjoyed speaking with you.
Ryan: I have, too. This has been a real blessing.Thank you.
Matt: I'm glad you started a podcast. It's a lot of work. I know.
Ryan: Oh, and you should listen to the one with Barbara Newman, because we really get into the heart stuff. She takes the conversation even beyond what she says in The Permeable Self book.
Matt: Yeah. I saw that as I was preparing for this. It's already downloaded and queued up.
Ryan: Nice. She's wonderful. Yeah.
Matt: She's a gift.
Ryan: Okay. All right. Have a good afternoon.