Beeson Podcast, Episode #542 Dr. Christopher Seitz Date >>Announcer: Welcome to the Beeson podcast, coming to you from Beeson Divinity School on the campus of Samford University. Now your hosts, Doug Sweeney and Kristen Padilla. >>Doug Sweeney: Welcome to the Beeson Podcast. I’m your host, Doug Sweeney, here with my co-host, Kristen Padilla. It is good to have you with us. Before we get underway we’d like to wish every one of you a blessed Holy Week. This is a most important time in the life of the Church as we remember the passion of Jesus, his death on a cross, and his bodily resurrection from the grave. We pray that each of you will be reminded this week, in a special way, of the deep love of God for you in Christ. We are recording this episode on March 23rd, during another special week here at Beeson. This is the week of our storied biblical studies lectures. We are honored to be hosting Dr. Christopher Seitz this year, who joins us from Wycliffe College in Toronto. Kristen, would you tell us a little bit about who Dr. Seitz is and how our listeners can hear recordings of his lectures? >>Kristen Padilla: Yes. Hello, everyone. Today we have on the podcast Dr. Christopher Seitz. He is Senior Research Professor at Wycliffe College in Toronto, a position he has held since 2007. Before that he served at the University of St. Andrews and before that at Yale University. He also is a two time recipient of the Alexander von Humboldt Research award, which is a very prestigious award. He is the author of 14 books and most recently having published, “Convergences, Cannon, and Capitalicity,” and another book entitled, “The Elder Testament: Cannon, Theology, Trinity.” But he is most well known around our halls as being Dr. Mark Gignilliat’s PhD supervisor many years ago. And so we are glad to have him and his wife, Elizabeth, with us this week. We encourage you to go to our YouTube Channel, YouTube.com/BeesonDivinity, to listen to these lectures that he is delivering this week. So, welcome, Dr. Seitz, to the Beeson Podcast. >>Dr. Seitz: Nice to be here with you. >>Kristen Padilla: We always like to begin by getting to know you a little bit better. I’m interested to know more about you, Dr. Seitz. I wonder if you can tell us about yourself. Perhaps touching on your spiritual and academic journey. >>Dr. Seitz: Oh, the journey is now a long journey, isn’t it? I am in my mid-sixties and I have a research professorship, which means I’m entitled to work on book projects a bit more, I think, than most faculty. And, of course, during COVID the teaching has been re-arranged a bit. My career ... I took bible courses at Chapel Hill, North Carolina when I was an undergraduate. Now, a ways back in time, they were very constructive. That’s not often the experience I think people have. I had planned to go to law school, but the professor there had a big impact on me personally and professionally. And he died preaching in the pulpit in Charlotte on his 65th birthday. He was in his 65th year. I went to the funeral. I’d never been to a funeral at that point in my life. And his widow asked me to come get some books out of his library that she said, “He will have wanted to give you a gift.” And I got the three books and I said, “Well, I’m going to law school, so I’m not sure what I’m going to do with these.” But they were the text books we’d been using in the class. G E Wright, Bible Atlas, and John Bright, History of Israel. I left, and she said, “I would like to give you a book in addition to that.” And it was a Brown Driver Briggs Hebrew Lexicon. And my first thought was, “Well, I’m not sure what I’m going to do with this.” My second thought was, “That is a very big book to be lugging around at that age of your life where you’re concerned about that with your broken down car.” But it ended up being a kind of lantern under my feet, I suppose. As I went to seminary, interested in having a teaching ministry of some kind ... I have my father, my grandfather, a couple of brothers – all ordained parish clergy ... I felt like I knew that world well and I loved it and appreciated it. But I felt I really wanted to make a contribution to academic life. So, I got started on that. I went to seminary. I went to Germany to learn German, which was sort of obligatory at the time. I went to Yale and worked with Brevard Childs who had an influence on me, much like my undergrad professor, personally. He was a very devout honorable man, as well as a sort of towering scholar – I think would be fair to say. I worked alongside him and studied under him, and came back and taught at Yale. And the rest is, as they say, history. That’s more my professional life. I’ve done a lot of church work in my life. I like preaching. Those things are all hard to balance, as anybody on your faculty will know. It’s kind of hard to do all these things. But I have sought to do that. I’ve written a small book on preaching during the last word of Christ, on the passion. I gave those sermons in St. Andrews. So, I’ve had an interesting sort of balancing life. I had some leadership also in the Anglican Communion, which consumed a lot of time at a period where that looked like it was called for. At present, my wife and I are living in South Carolina though we have been in France for the last four years. I was a part time Chaplain at an Anglican Church in Fontainebleau. We’re now back in South Carolina. Of course, during COVID everything has been sort of thrown up in the air. So, Church on Sunday morning is a challenge for everybody now. But we have some fine parishes in the Bluffton/Buford area. We’re able to go to church. I don’t know what the situation is like in Alabama. But that’s a little bit to get things going. >>Doug Sweeney: Dr. Seitz, most listeners of this podcast are pastors and lay people in the greater Birmingham area. They know very well, many of them like to come to chapel when it’s possible but they know that right now it’s not possible to have visitors at our chapel services. Many of our listeners like to watch chapel services and special lectures on the web. But some of them will not have been able to see and hear what it is you have been saying to us this week. Could you give them just a little feel for the topic of this weeks’ lectures? And what it is you’ve been trying to do? >>Dr. Seitz: I’m looking at the Book of Ecclesiastes, which I have been teaching and I have been supervising dissertations on this from students at Wycliffe. It’s interesting that there’s a great deal of interest in the book. I was recalling that in Charles’ introduction to the Old Testament he speaks about the great influence Ecclesiastes had on the life of the Church. The monastic life, also through the Middle Ages, had a big influence on Martin Luther. And it always puzzled me because in the modern period I think Ecclesiastes is thought of as a rather pessimistic despairing voice. Clearly that was not what was being heard. I’m always alert to that, because I think we suffer from amnesias. I think if you live closer to death and disease and plague and so forth Ecclesiastes may be a book that you want to hear, a book that helps orient you away from the things of this life. It reminds you of the shortness of life and of the need to pay attention to the goodness of God’s creation and to try to live it on the terms he set for you. And Solomon is figure who I think I’ll try to talk about during the lectures. He becomes godlike to himself and loses track of things, which is a great temptation of power and money and influence. Those are things that in the West we are blessed to enjoy and also cursed to have, in a way. So, we have to learn how to live responsibly with a lot of richness really that makes us forgetful of God and other things. I’ve taken an interest in the book, and I’ve been teaching it. So, I thought I would try to do something along those lines here with the audience at Beeson. I’m going to talk a little bit about wisdom literature in the first lecture and then turn to Ecclesiastes in the second lecture. You all are pastors, so you sit at the beds of dying people. That’s not something a lot of people do or know much about. And it is a challenge. It also opens one up to a sense of the limit of life, the beauty of God in providing an eternal life for us, but these are rare experiences, particularly in our culture. We’re able to push these things out of sight. This morning, in my sermon, I talked about ... I about lost my wife to a very serious [inaudible 00:10:08] disease, it’s called. She was a patient at the NIH and we eventually went to France to work with a specialist there. She really only had a couple days to live. You have to plan a funeral and think about how to get a body across the ocean and things. These are realities that fortunately we don’t deal with, most of us, unless we’re caregivers. And so undoubtedly that also has influenced my attention to the book and to some of the themes that I think come across as harsh, but indeed are just strong cups of black coffee about the way things go. And also about lessons learned. I think the man, I’ll call Qohelet – he’s clearly modeled around Solomon, is someone who has had to detox himself and re-orient himself. I’ll describe that movement as a movement from anger and bitterness toward an acceptance of mystery. The ability to not know things altogether. And that that’s okay. Cast your bread upon the water. There’s a way in which I think Qohelet goes through an experience that is very rich and I think undoubtedly why the book was treasured so much through the ages. >>Kristen Padilla: Thank you, Dr. Seitz. Just as a reminder, you can hear these lectures on our YouTube Channel, and also on our website, www.BeesonDivinity.com/videos. Already we’ve heard an excellent sermon from you today. I’m looking forward to hearing your lectures tomorrow and Thursday, Dr. Seitz. Changing gears just a bit, I can remember many years ago as a student of Dr. Gignilliat in a biblical theology class learning about theological exegesis. I’ve learned from him that you had a shift in your approach to exegesis. I learned from him that you were formally trained in higher criticism, but then you shifted to a more theological exegesis approach. Can you tell us about the shift and explain to our listeners the difference between the two? >>Dr. Seitz: Yeah, it’s interesting what people see in you. That’s undoubtedly true. I’ll give Mark credit for that. I think that any observer might well think that there’s a kind of way in which I started out a certain way and then moved in another way. I don’t know that I think about it in exactly the same way myself. I was trained in historical critical methods. I think I always judge them to be servants and not good masters. I think they enabled you to answer the kinds of questions you are asking. Can we with any certainty know very much about Amos? Or, what would it be like to imagine Ezekiel’s audience? Something like this. These are sort of stock and trade questions. Then again I was blessed by a good teacher, Childs. When I teach students I always say, “Historical criticism is provisional, it is preliminary and it is possible.” That’s about all it can do. What is not provisional, preliminary, or possible is the text as we had it before us. And I think that certain ways of asking questions can be constrained and helpfully re-oriented when we come to terms with the book in the way it comes to us and the way it moves. This will come up in Ecclesiastes. I think there’s a design and movement to the book. Another example would be critical and conservative interpreters wrestle over something like the Solomonic authorship of the book. In a way I think both of those are narrow ways to think about what’s going on in the book. There’s clearly an evocation of Solomon, yet the word never appears in the book. And the ancient interpreters took that to be significant. They noted the absence. They noted the flirtation, the evocation, but they noted the absence. They thought that was important to note. In a way that’s what canonical reading does. It pays attention to what’s there and what’s not there. It tries to understand that. It doesn’t try to correct it, put it in a sequence, describe it as due to layers of this, that, and the other. It wants to know what the peculiarities of the presentation are and what they might mean. So, that’s partly something that I’ve always ... it maybe goes back to my own literary training at Chapel Hill. I was a literature major. The text as itself was a sort of theme. If you want to know about King Lear you read King Lear. You make note of the fact that King Lear emerges out of the second century BC and Shakespeare’s writing in the 16th century, but nothing prevents him from creating a work with meaning and structure and intention. That’s what inspired authors are doing. So, there has been, I suppose, a bit of a shift. Most of my publication has been on the sense, the coherence of the final form of books. Isaiah ... I did a commentary of Colossians. But I tried to read Colossians within the context of the letter collection as a whole. Where does it fall? Why is it there? What’s going on? What about the neighbors? Is there something about the prison correspondence that’s made these books lumped together? Those are the kinds of questions that I had been interested in. Also, I teach now mostly history of interpretation, that is so-called pre modern interpretation, Origen, Didymus, the early antiochian readers, Augustine, [Cassaeudoras 00:16:30], and then up to Calvin and Luther and so forth, Aquinas. I think when you look at the range of interpretation the things that they pay attention to, some of them pay attention to the sort of historical context of the book. The others immediately go to Jesus Christ. There’s probably a way in which one has to be sensitive to why both of those are both true at the same time. I think that’s sort of ... Ecclesiastes is himself but the father saw in him the great ecclesiast, namely, the one who gathered the nations from the ends of the earth. There’s a way in which he is who he is and there’s a way in which there’s more there that will land on another shore. I think coming to terms with that, that’s because I think there was a marvelous image ... I can’t remember who used it ... the bible is like drinking out of a fountain. You don’t drink it up, it keeps coming at you. You drink parts of it, but it keeps gushing and flowing and therefore it’s bigger than we are and we ought to be humbled before that. This isn’t an, “I’m in the breakers and I can’t find my way,” but we certainly shouldn’t try to tame the waters or put them in ... Now I know what the answer is to this question – Amos lived in the 7th century and these are the verses that belong to him and not the other ones and that kind of thing. >>Doug Sweeney: Kristen mentioned at the top of the show that one of your recent books is called, “The Elder Testament: Cannon, Theology, Trinity.” So, perhaps a related question while we’re talking about canonical exegesis. What is that book about and what’s the significance of the main title, “The Elder Testament?” >>Dr. Seitz: Well, you know, there has been ... and I suppose it’s more of an academic discussion about whether or not calling the Old Testament the Old Testament is a good idea. And this comes from various angles. You might have a university context in which you want to be careful that you have common ground with the Jewish audience, so you refer to the bible as the Hebrew Bible. The problem there is that Old and New are constituative of a covenantal relationship that’s therefore ... it’s hard to negotiate these terms without creating a different kind of problem in its wake. First Testament, Second Testament – that was tried by a certain Roman Catholic in a certain Roman Catholic context. But what’s the problem you’re trying to solve when you do that? Part of it is, I suppose, that you don’t want the Old Testament to simply have its voice sounded through the way the new hears it only. You would like it to retain its capacity to speak as Christian scripture. You’re trying to guard its integrity and you worry that “old” means outmoded, out dated. “My old car.” The old course is sexy because it’s old and you want to go play golf there, but usually connotates outmoded. I noticed that living in France for four years, the French I think relate differently to the past. They don’t tear down statues. They had a revolution and they did that once. They honor the past. They think about it as venerable. So, the word in French [foreign language 00:19:41] testament. It has a different evocation. It sounds like foundational, venerable. I was trying to get a handle on what kind of an English word would work for that. And I’m very clear in the book. I don’t want everyone running out and going, “Oh, let’s have a reading from the Elder Testament.” I’m not suggesting that we change Old Testament to Elder Testament. I tried to make a point “elder” on my ear, maybe that’s going to not work for people, suggests wisdom, tried and tested, sagacity, deference. I’m happy with deference. I think deference is a good idea when it’s the subject matter of holy scripture. So, I was trying to provoke some thought about the matter by using the word. I’ve written a couple of articles where I defend Old Testament against Hebrew Bible and First Testament and so forth. So, I’m on record as happy to live with the terms and try to figure out why they sound impoverished to us. There was a time ... I remember, Jim Kugel at Yale used to say, “The worst thing you could say in the Middle Ages was, ‘I have a new idea.’” And yet we live ... My iPhone is an 11 and yours is a 12. If you’re not careful you’re going to run into a place where you have lost the ability to think about the past as venerable. So, that was partly what was going on. That’s the first chapter of that book. I’m just tossing that out. I’m concerned with a number of things in the book. Ultimately, the last section of that book I try to look at some venerable interpretation. That is, the way a text like Proverbs 8 was functioned to do Trinitarian theology. Even though Proverbs 8 is never cited in the New Testament, it ends up being the go-to text for the Church Fathers about begetting, before time ... This ends up being a very rich text. I’m curious as to why that’s so. A lot of my teaching today is along those lines. We’re reading Psalm 1:10 next week in my seminar. The Lord said to my Lord ... and how it is that that text has functioned down through the ages. So, toward the end of my career I would be happiest, I suppose, teaching history of biblical interpretation. I find it disorienting in ways that I think are spiritually valuable, that make me think a little bit about what my presuppositions are. I’m also deeply ... I’m not a luddite, but I’m not a believer in progress, particularly. I think we’re suffering a bit with, “Let’s elect a President who can eliminate hurricanes,” or something. There’s a way in which I’d like to also maybe write a book on God is Great, God is Good. Something like that. Just try to get a sense of the majesty and mystery of God. Let’s go to the divine speeches in Job. Here’s an animal you know nothing about, you’ve never seen it. Tell me how the rock badger lays its eggs. Whatever. These are the notes I think need to be sounded increasingly. I think we’re getting eaten alive by scientism and distanced from our natural selves. I’ve been living in France in the countryside, but I grew up in rural North Carolina and I still think there are a lot more lessons to be learned from stubbing your toe than learning to manipulate your iPhone. >>Kristen Padilla: You’ve mentioned already a couple of times, Dr. Seitz, your teaching ministry and your love for the classroom. I wonder if you can tell us about your approach to teaching and what you think makes for a good educator today? >>Dr. Seitz: I saw that question on the sheet and I have to say ... That’s one of these trick questions in a way. Do I like to teach? I’m driven to teach. It’s a vocation I was given. I find it really hard work. I find it ... I want to be on top of things. I want my students to get a sense of the urgency and energy of the material. Those things are very important to me. I find them very hard work in terms of preparation. I used to have a 60/40 rule that when you lectured you needed to know 60 percent of what you’re going to talk about, and the other 40 needed to arise in the context of your giving a lecture. As you get older you may adjust that a bit. It could be 40/60. My hunch is that 60 percent of preparation is crucial because the other 40 is going to combust given what’s happening with the students. The look of mystification, the “I don’t get that,” or “Whoa! That’s exciting!” You gotta run with that when you get it because the job is to hopefully allow the Word of God to catch fire, but through the crucible of the person who is in front of you. These questions are really going to be rather different than your own, but I think it’s romantic to think that ... I’m a big believer in the teacher having a view of something, but also being patient enough to entertain alternatives. That’s what the 60 percent is about. It’s about having a firm set of convictions about what’s going on and bringing that to the classroom. But those are little things that I suppose resonate in the question. I think teaching is harder than people think it is. I think good teaching is very hard. I also think that it has changed over my lifetime. I remember when they handed out computers at Yale and they said we’re firing all the secretaries and here’s your computer. Well, this machine will eat you alive. And it’s got 5,000 things that you can tap into every second. Bear with me, but I remember ... Charles is a very close friend of mine, a colleague as well as my teacher, and he never went near the computer. He never went near it. I tried to get him to get on the computer so he could talk to his grandchildren. You can go down to the library and do email with them. He refused to do it. He had an Olivetti typewriter with a stuck key. He hand wrote his manuscripts. He made his own rubber bands. He then committed them to typewriter. He didn’t have an auto-correct on the typewriter. He had the White Out and all that kind of thing. There’s a lot going on in that. You’re not going to waste paper or time unless you’ve sort of formulated some things in your head. It’s not as though he would have been more productive with a computer, I think he understood that. He was more productive than I’ve been in my life. I tried to catch him, but ... it’s like a mechanical rabbit. There was something else going on. I think he, too, would have said that ... I used to say about writing, you need to go for long walks. You need time to process and you don’t do that in front of a screen and you don’t do it pounding your head on the desk. You’ve got to get out and walk the dog and be startled by something that’s coming to you just by virtue of really letting go a bit. That’s a Qohelet theme. An Ecclesiastes theme. Shut up for a while and see what comes, see what is stirred up. >>Doug Sweeney: Dr. Seitz, I feel that with you here on campus this week we ought to offer a shout out to our Anglican students and alumni and friends. Could you tell our audience what kind of Anglican are you? Maybe first of all. And then secondly what difference has your Anglicanism, your ordination in the Episcopal Church made in the way you do your work and interpret the Bible? >>Dr. Seitz: Well, I mentioned that I grew up, my dad was a pastor, a parish priest, and his father taught liturgics and parish administration at Bexley Hall, an Episcopal Seminary at Kenyan College. And so I’ve known the Episcopal Church inside and out. I never really knew much about any other church. Wycliffe is the only Anglican institution I’ve ever taught at, and half its students are garden variety evangelicals. All kinds: Mennonites, Christian Missionary Alliance, Korean Baptist, all under the sun. Most of my graduate students are not Anglican because Anglicans, sadly, in my view don’t work well with the Bible, they’re more interested in theology and liturgy and some other things. That’s unfair, in part, but fair in part. Maybe New Testament Greek, but Old Testament, I wouldn’t say has been a book that had a lot of life and energy. Now, when I was growing up in the Episcopal Church the lectionary, the means by which we heard scripture on Sunday morning, had virtually no Old Testament in it. You heard a little servant’s song on Good Friday and you heard ... Actually, they had a very rich Good Friday. We had church for three hours on Good Friday. We heard, “All ye who pass by, have you seen any sorrow like unto my sorrow?” So, we heard Lamentations, we heard 2 Isaiah, we heard all the stuff. So, I think probably the seed was planted in me that the Old Testament did have this rich what I would call typological or figural way of identifying Jesus Christ out of its own words. In a way, it’s always struck me, you don’t have any of the servant’s song material with the passion narratives. Why is that? Well, it’s because the confession is going on by those ... “We esteemed and smitten by God, stricken,” well most people aren’t there at the cross, they fled. But that language is now available to the church to use, even though it’s Old Testament. It might as well be New Testament. Because that’s the purpose for which whatever was going on in the bosom of Israel was preparing us for. But I learned those lessons outside of the Episcopal Church. I learned them through my academic career. Brilliant Lutherans. I taught with Lutherans when I first started teaching. Boy, that’s a tribe that really ... You’ve got to bring your A game to that. Other than the Episcopal Church I’ve watched it really kind of fall apart. I don’t want to sing the blues. I’ve worked hard for 15 years to ... as the President of the Anglican Communion Institute to try to identify the healthiest parts of the Anglican communion globally. This was before the forming of ACNA and some of the things that have happened in the wake of that. But also tried to establish ecumenical relationships with Wesleyans, Lutherans, Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox around the creed and commandments and the Lord’s Prayer. I spent a lot of time doing that. But I think the old line churches have really struggled. I mean, the gay issue and other issues, authority of scripture, have [inaudible 00:31:37] them. Other churches will have their own versions of fights and battles. These have been ours. I went to serve a parish in the Church of England in France and so I have motored around the community a bit. I was in the Scottish Episcopal Church when I was in Scotland. The state of affairs saddens me. I don’t tend to look at the modern Episcopal Church and see the Church in which I was raised. I suppose everybody feels that way about their own branch of this Body. There have been some good things. I think the lectionary introduces us to more scripture on Sunday morning. On the other hand it has introduced a challenge, because the linkages are often figural or typological and our training is not necessarily geared to sit down at that feast. We tend to just look at the Gospel reading for the day. So, I don’t want to ... It has been the place where I have lived. I would say there are always mysteries. A lot of Christianity is local. I mean, that’s just definitely true. We were living in rural France and my wife was struggling with these health issues. The local Catholic parish was outstanding. I preached on the 500th anniversary of Luther at the big Lutheran Church in Pennsylvania, one of my former students. And I said, you know, I go to that church, in the lap is a booklet that helpfully lays out the lessons and makes some meditative suggestions. The laity are running everything. They’re doing the catechesis, the pastoral care, they are providing the music, the clergy are in short supply and are working too hard. It’s their church, it’s not the priest’s church. If he doesn’t show up they’ll do something on Sunday morning. They’re there by conviction. Most of France is secular. So, the Bible [inaudible 00:33:41] preaching is about Jesus Christ. I thought, if Luther came back and said, “Ha ha, I won. These are the things I thought for.” But of course the Catholic Church is the Catholic Church, and it’s going to be different wherever you go. And moreover they were welcoming. That’s not necessarily anything that I would have experienced elsewhere. There again, I think that’s partly due to the fact that if you’re a Christian in France you are an oddity. You have made a decision that sets you apart from the culture. And if you want to go to the Catholic Church you’re going to be part of that odd group of people who claim to be Christians and they’re happy to have you. They’re also a little bit embarrassed by their mistreatment of protestants over the years. I’ve had a rich ... I’ve taught at a Lutheran seminary, Yale was multi-denominational, St. Edwards was notionally Presbyterian, most of my students are not Episcopalian. And I learn a lot from just trying to listen in on what the cultural realities ... Most of our students, half of our students, are Wycliffe International students: Chinese, Korean, Southeast Asian, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Indian. But they’ve come to us. They haven’t come to us and said, “Teach us about Indian Christianity.” They want to know what’s going on. That’s why they’ve come to us. There’s no point in sort of dumbing that down. They want to know what the Western Christian tradition is about. And most of them know that through their own missionary histories and so forth. So, Dean Sweeney, I didn’t really answer the question, except I’ve appreciation, I’ve had great affection ... It would be hard for me to leave the Episcopal Church. But I’ve also been blessed by God to not have to make that decision. Beeson has always been a great place, it seems to me, precisely to the degree I just said, we want to make sure this is a place where we’re respecting the judicatories of the people who come to us and we want as many of them as we can. And that’s a good thing. >>Kristen Padilla: Dr. Seitz, thank you for this conversation. We’re almost done and out of time. But before we leave, we always like to end the show by hearing what God is doing in your life. What he’s teaching you in your devotional time with him. I wonder if you can share something with our listeners that would really encourage them as to something that God is teaching you these days? >>Dr. Seitz: Well, he’s trying to teach me about this phase of life that I’m entering that’s called retirement. But isn’t somehow. There are going to be new rhythms in that, new occasions teaching new duties. So, I want to listen to see if I can get some clarity about that. Those are vocational questions. Personally, I’m probably in a bit of recovery from the loss of my parents recently, loss of a very gifted priest in France that was a very close and supportive man during my wife’s ordeal. And just the proximity of death and adjusting to that. Trying to make sense of it. My devotional life, I use a little thing called, “Let Us Pray in Church,” it’s in French. [foreign language 00:37:12] And it’s just a nice ... it’s like many of these things, a lesson from the Old Testament, a lesson from the New Testament, the Psalms. I can just sit and let that stuff do its thing, see what arises. So, I don’t think anybody gets any kind of clear sheet ahead of time about the phases of life. I’m in one where I’m going to need to begin letting go of things. And that’s (laughs) not something that comes naturally to men, I think, in particular, and women as well. So, I’ll be asking for all the help I can get. We’re living in a confusing time, church-wise, too. So, what to do, where to go? I wouldn’t mind going back to France and being of service ... I got a lot out of that. I loved teaching the Jesuits I was teaching in Paris. If the Lord says, “Come back,” I’d go back. >>Doug Sweeney: We hope this next season of your life is wonderful. Listeners, you have been listening to Dr. Christopher Seitz, Senior Research Professor at Wycliffe College in Toronto. He has been at Beeson Divinity School this week, delivering our biblical studies lectures. We are grateful for his gift of time today. Thank you very much, Dr. Seitz, for being with us. Thank you audience for tuning in. Goodbye for now. >>Kristen Padilla: You’ve been listening to the Beeson podcast. Our theme music is written and performed by Advent Birmingham of the Cathedral Church of the Advent in Birmingham, Alabama. Our engineer is Rob Willis. Our announcer is Mike Pasquarello. Our co-hosts are Doug Sweeney and, myself, Kristen Padilla. Please subscribe to the Beeson podcast at www.BeesonDivinity.com/podcast or on iTunes.