Beeson Podcast, Episode #575 Dr. Michael McClymond Nov. 16, 2021 >>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. We are recording this episode amid Beeson’s Reformation Heritage Week. We are honored to have this year’s Reformation Lecturer on the show with us today. By the time you hear this episode his sermon and his lectures will be posted online. I encourage you to hear them. They offer a rich feast of biblical and Reformational teaching. And you can find them on our YouTube Channel: Beeson Divinity. Thanksgiving is coming soon. We’re thankful here at Beeson for you, dear listener. It’s a real treat to share the work of God at Beeson with you regularly. And if the Lord prompts you to support us as you listen to our show we would love it if you would use the giving page on our website: www.BeesonDivinity.com/giving. Or, send an email to Dr. Gary Fentman in Beeson Advancement gdfentman@samford.edu. Just one more announcement before we get underway. On Tuesday, November 30, our James Earl Massey Student Preaching Award winner will preach for us in Beeson’s chapel. The award recipient this semester is Cole Griffith, one of our graduating MDiv students. Will you please pray for Cole as he prepares to preach in chapel. Make plans to come and hear this future pastor preach the Word from Revelation 21. All right, Kristen, I should probably stop announcing things for now. Will you please introduce today’s podcast guest? >>Kristen Padilla: Thank you, Doug. Hello, everyone. We have in the studio today our guest, Dr. Michael McClymond. Dr. McClymond is professor of Modern Christianity at St. Louis University. He was educated at Northwestern University, Yale University, and the University of Chicago. He has held teaching or research appointments at Wheaton College, Westmont College, the University of California San Diego, Emory University, Yale University, and the University of Birmingham in the UK. He is author and editor of 11 books; several of which have won awards. So, as you can tell, he is very accomplished. We are thrilled that you are here today with us at Beeson Divinity School. Welcome, Dr. McClymond to the show. >>Dr. McClymond: Thank you for hosting me on campus. >>Kristen Padilla: We have loved having you here. You’ve already given a sermon and a lecture. We look forward to your second lecture tomorrow. But for our listeners who don’t know you other than what I’ve just said, could you introduce yourself more fully to us? Tell us more about who you are, your spiritual journey, anything that you want to share about yourself? >>Dr. McClymond: Well, I was born in Washington D.C., grew up in Omaha, Nebraska. I lived in Chicago. I had about 10 years in California. So, I think of myself as a kind of Midwestern Californian before coming to St. Louis where I’ve been for over 20 years now. My father is a business executive. He lived a fascinating life. He’s still a big influence in my life. He’s in his late 80’s. I just talked to him recently. He was the vice president of a company that became ENRON and if you know anything about the ENRON debacle, what happened – my father was the competitor to become head of that corporation. And I think actually it was better that he ended up not with them over the long term. My mother is with the Lord now. She was a visual artist. As is my daughter, Sarah. So, some of that ... I didn’t get the visually artistic gene in my family. I began my career, actually, as a research chemist. My first job out of college I worked for one of the men who developed the atomic bomb. He was president when they created the first nuclear reaction in Chicago. His name was David Brestlow. He was brilliant, very challenging to work under him. So, I have about two years of laboratory experience as a research chemist before I followed the call to go to seminary and then grad school in religion. >>Doug Sweeney: Dr. McClymond, we want to let our listeners know about the sermon you preached in chapel yesterday and the lectures you’re giving us this week. Those of us who have listened to you thus far know that you are very interested in global Pentecostalism, charismatic movements around the world, the history of revivals and revivalism, and that these interests of yours have actually shaped the lecturing you’re doing for us this week on the doctrine of the atonement. Could we begin by telling our listeners a little bit about the experiences you’ve had with global Pentecostalism? The research you’re doing? Your interests in Pentecostal and charismatic movements? >>Dr. McClymond: Certainly. Like you, Dr. Sweeney, I started working on Jonathan Edwards, as a theologian, and that led ultimately into an interest in Edwards’ role in the revival in America. And then that kind of broadened into the Encyclopedia of Religious Revivals that I edited and that led into Pentecostalism. But at a later stage I was approached by another scholar named Candy Gunther Brown who has a fascinating back story. Her husband who is a neuroscientist was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor. She had never experienced any healing through prayer, but someone told her basically ... announced to her, an African Christian that she met, that God was going to heal her husband, Josh, and lo and behold he did receive healing and there was no sign of his tumor. Because he was a neuroscientist he was reading ... he could look at his own CAT scan and actually knew more about it than the technician operating the device. But so that launched Candy Gunther Brown on this project to study divine healing. She drew me into it. We received a Templeton grant, $150,000 grant, the three of us worked together. And we got to travel with a man named Randy Clark to Mozambique and Brazil and actually do before and after testing on-site in relation to vision ... people were praying for vision and hearing impairments. Not everyone received benefit, but we had a significant number of people who were profoundly deaf who were profoundly blind who were later seeing and hearing. And we also saw in the context of Africa as well as in Brazil how this was closely tied to the expansion of the Church. In one of the villages this woman named Heidi Baker who went with her husband to serve in Mozambique and now there’s something like 7,000 new churches in 20 years associated with this ministry. Much of it is connected with healing. But there was a boy who was 18 years old in this little village in Mozambique who had never spoken and she said, “Stick out your tongue.” And she grabbed his tongue and began praying. And he began making sounds. His mother was next to him and she started weeping because he had never made a sound in his entire life. She said, “Can you say, ‘Jesus?’” And so he started to say “Jesus” and everyone around him from the village were jumping up and down. They took him and they baptized him in the river right there. And now there’s a church in that spot. And so everyone in the village heard about this. And so it’s really something to see this right up front. Some of the scientific atheists got wind of our research and so they weren’t very happy about our claims of healing. But we actually had medical evidence to show that these vision/hearing healings were taking place. >>Kristen Padilla: You shared this story yesterday in your chapel sermon. It was very moving. Can you tell our listeners just a little bit more about your sermon yesterday on 2 Corinthians? Summarize for us your message and what were you hoping to communicate to your audience? >>Dr. McClymond: Well, in my more academic talks I’m talking about how Jesus is both the substitute and a representative. A substitute in the sense that he does, he acts in our place on his atoning work on the cross, and that he does for us that which none of us can do for ourselves. But at the same time in scripture we see that Jesus is lifted up as a representative and an example to be imitated. In Philippians 2 it says, “Have this mind in yourself which was in Christ,” and then in 1 Peter 2 it’s even more explicit that “Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example to follow in his steps.” And so in my sermon I went to the text in 2 Corinthians 4 where it’s really the book of Paul’s that goes deepest into his own experiences of suffering. But he speaks of how he was always carrying about in his body the dying of Jesus, that the life of Jesus could be manifested as well in him and through him. And what I suggest in the sermon is that we have today in certain circles, particularly Pentecostal circles a so-called prosperity theology that sometimes seems to present the whole Christian life as a series of uninterrupted blessings. And I think some Christians in reaction against that have gone the other extreme and it’s like, you know, we’re called to suffering and this is just how it is, and we kind of need to just put up with whatever we endure. And what I see in Paul’s teaching is this more creative dynamic interplay that as we die to sin, as we die to self will and our own desires, that God through His Spirit fills us and enables us to walk in a truly supernatural way. And so I think the Calvinists and the charismatic’s so to speak both are part of the larger truth involves holding these things together. And then I talked about some experiences in Mozambique with Heidi and Roland Baker who are, to me, living out the sort of apostolic life. Really kind of living on the edge of experiencing many, many conflicts and difficulties. They took out a contract on her life to assassinate her, the people who didn’t want her doing mission work. And she’s kind of like the Energizer Bunny. She just would not give up. Over time they just had this extraordinary fruitfulness of expanding the Church in that region. And also seeing God’s love and power, even on a physical level in the healing of the sick. >>Doug Sweeney: As you talked about with the students and the faculty on campus today, academic theologians have also paid quite a bit of attention to the doctrine of the atonement in recent years. It’s become a fairly controversial doctrine among academics. Can you tell our listeners a little bit about that? And about how your approach to atonement doctrine fits in relationship to the ways in which other scholars are dealing with this? >>Dr. McClymond: Certainly. I think Collin Gunton was on to something, and I quoted him earlier when he said that the modern period after the enlightenment is characterized by the idea of human autonomy. Human autonomy says essentially each of us, we’re the captain of our own ship. We shape our own lives, our own destiny, our direction. Really, one of the reasons the cross is a stumbling block, it’s offensive to modern people, is the message of Jesus as our substitute dying in our place is that he does for us what we cannot do for ourselves. That we are lost without his work. So, I don’t think there’s any getting around the offense that comes from this message that, “Guess what? You can’t save yourself. You can’t deliver yourself from the situation of sin.” So, there’s an underlying current in our culture that is pushing Christian preachers and pastors and theologians to ... if not to deny the work of Christ on the cross at least to begin to soften it in some ways, and minimize it. And so we end up with this split, I think, between those who are very strict and wanting to say to Jesus, “He is our substitute. He does for us what we can’t do for ourselves.” I call them the substitutionists. And then we have the exemplarists who are saying, “No, Jesus, his life and death are a model that we’re supposed to imitate.” To me, it’s a kind of unhelpful split. I think these belong together. On the one hand, we need to recognize that he does for us what we cannot do for ourselves – his atoning work. But then we’re called to have that mind of Christ and to live that life in which we are thinking of others. If I live out Philippians 2 it means I should be waking up in the morning and thinking every person I meet, how can I manifest the love of Christ to that person and that situation on an ongoing way? So, in my lectures I’m trying to heal what I think is an unfortunate rift that’s developed in the theological world. >>Kristen Padilla: Your second lecture is called “Reformation Era Diversity: The Cross in Lutheran, Calvinist, Anabaptist, Rationalist, and Mystical Perspectives.” Can you give us a teaser of that particular lecture? >>Dr. McClymond: Yes, the cross is simply too large a topic to be confined into any particular category. I see the different branches of the reformational movement, including even the rationalists I think have something to contribute, and I try to distill it down to a single point. I think the Lutheran idea of the cross as the famous Swedish theologian, Gustav Aulén, said was the notion of Christos Victor, that Christ triumphed over sin and judgment and Satan and death – all those things were defeated. What comes out of that is an attitude of confidence, to the extent that we understand that Satan has already been defeated from the time that Jesus died. We can really walk in confidence. It doesn’t mean that we won’t have struggle, we won’t have conflict. But the victory has already been won. The Calvinists cross is more on the sort of substitutionary atonement. I’ve touched on that already. There’s an attitude of gratitude. There is a sense of just how much we owe to him for what he has done for us, if we really understand that. The Anabaptist cross is one that focuses more on the imitation of Christ. Of course the Anabaptists are known for their commitment to nonviolence and to peace, and reading the sermon on the mount and trying really to live according to that. You see that the Anabaptists, also Dietrich Bonhoeffer in his famous book, “Cost of Discipleship,” that’s another way of approaching the cross that to me is quite important. I try to work in the rationalists as well. Some of the rationalists actually did not believe that Jesus atoned by his death but they saw Jesus as kind of like a Socrates type figure. One who died for his own convictions. And actually I think that there’s an element of that even in the New Testament. The conscience, Jesus, Paul said, made the good confession before Pontius Pilate. And that’s an important topic for our time when issues of conscience are rising up and the importance of following one’s conscience. And then finally the mystical perspective, and here I’m drawing on some of the Catholic thinkers like John of the Cross who said there is a dying to our own attachment to material things that we need to undergo. So, there’s an element of renunciation or asceticism, you might say, that is a part of living out the reality of the cross. So, there’s an awful lot to ... There’s almost a smorgasbord here of different ways of thinking about the cross. >>Doug Sweeney: Mike, I want our listeners to learn a little bit about some of the rest of our scholarship, too. Of course, you and I have been friends for a long time and I’ve been blessed by a lot of your books. Every one I’ve read. I’m not sure I’ve read all of them, but I’ve read most of them and have been blessed by them. I’ve even read a couple of them while you were writing them, parts of them. And that was a blessing to me. But I have to confess, your next book is one I don’t think I’ve read at all in any part. It’s called, “Martyrs, Monks, and Mystics: The Meaning and Message of Christian Spirituality.” Let’s talk about the rest of your scholarship, or some of the rest of your scholarship, starting with that one. The one that’s coming next. What’s that book about? What are you trying to do in it? >>Dr. McClymond: Well, I was recruited to write this book by a Catholic publisher, Paulist Press. I was, in fact, kind of surprised one of the acquisitions editors at Paulist Press had read some of my work elsewhere and wanted me to do it. I think she felt that I might give a more, let’s say, robust account of Christian spirituality. It’s intended to be a general textbook on Christian spirituality. Some of what’s being published now is kind of spiritually lite, it doesn’t really have a lot of depth. And this is a book in which I’m going to be talking about bearing the cross and imitating Christ as well as mediation on scripture, a little bit about monasticism, about martyrdom, and the spirituality of the martyrs, and so on. So, I’m learning actually a lot. I think the chapters, there are two chapters, one got expanded to two on mysticism, it may be the hardest topic that I’ve ever worked on, the Christian mysticism. Because I think there’s an awful lot to learn from the mystics and to affirm there, but there are also some problematic aspects of mysticism as well. I’m doing this in a very ecumenically Christian way so it synthesizes. We have Augustine and Thomas Aquinas and St. John of the Cross, but we have Jonathan Edwards and John Wesley and the German pietists and sort of interweaving of different themes. >>Doug Sweeney: Mike, most of our listeners would be Protestant, not all but most – it’s a Beeson sort of family audience. You think we have some things to learn from the mystics. Tell us. Tell our Protestant listeners what you think we have to learn from the mystics? >>Dr. McClymond: Well, I think one of the key things, and this comes out in my chapter on lectio divina, where the sort of biblical meditation, is I think Protestantism has a tendency toward intellectualizing the faith. And what we see in the Catholic tradition is a need to just start with scripture because that’s a good foundation for Catholic and Orthodox and Protestants and Pentecostals, but we start with scripture. We need for scripture not simply to, so to speak, float around in our mind. We need for it to become so deeply rooted in our heart that it affects the way that we experience the world and becomes the lens through which we see everything that’s happening around us. I found there was remarkable continuity between the desert fathers and the medieval Catholic mystics and some of the better Protestant authors about how to engage scripture and how to go deeper into contemplation. It’s a model in which we are feeding on scripture and scripture really becomes our spiritual sustenance in a way. Origen in the early church spoke of the flesh and blood and bones of scripture and how we appropriate that through reading and through meditation. I think the message about the need for a meditative and contemplative aspect, I think it’s as important today as it’s ever been because I think these wonderful devices that all carry around with us that are beeping or vibrating every few moments, every few minutes, are leading to such a level of distraction and such a focus on the momentary that we’re really losing sight of the deeper reality of who God is and who we’re to be in relation to him. And of course I go back to a very ancient source, which was Plato’s allegory of the cave in the Republic where you have the people that are chained to the wall and they’re seeing this shadow play on the wall and they think that is all there is to reality. And so the contemporary translation of that would be the people staring at the screen looking at their Twitter feed thinking it’s reality, right? (laughter) In Plato’s allegory one brave soul climbs up out of the cave and he sees the sunlight and it kind of blinds his eyes. And he comes back in and tells the others, “Oh, this isn’t reality, the shadows. There’s something up there.” And in Plato’s version of the story they kill him. They gang up on him, decide he’s a mad man for saying this. Well, I think there’s a lot of contemporary pertinence to our very distracted digital and media driven culture. I realize that this is being broadcast through media, but I’m talking about the media diet. We have to pay attention to how much time we devote to certain kinds of media and whether we’re feeding on the right things. >>Kristen Padilla: Another book that you’ve written recently is one of the award winning books that I mentioned at the beginning of the show and a book that I believe that Dr. Sweeney endorsed called, “The Devil’s Redemption,” which offers a historical survey and theological engagement with universalism. So, I’m curious, why did you write this book? And if you could explain to our listeners what is universalism? And how should Christians engage with this? What should we know about it? If you could just talk some about your book. >>Dr. McClymond: I’ll try to be very concise. The book is 543,000 words. (laughter) It was much more than I expected. In fact, I contracted with a publisher for only half that length and they were really in shock when they got the final manuscript. There was so much more to this debate. The debate has been going on for 1800 years. So, I profiled about 130 thinkers over 18 centuries in the book. This started with a book that ten years ago some may have heard of. A book called, “Love Wins” by Rob Bell. And during Holy Week, I think, it was 2011, the year his book came out, there was a cover story in Newsweek or Time Magazine, “What if There is No Hell?” And this was a very positive profile of Rob Bell’s book. I started checking around with people. I remember feeling kind of the inclination that I took to be from the Lord that I was supposed to write something in response. And I was resisting it. God had to sort of twist my arm on this because I didn’t really ... This was a highly controversial topic. I remember going into the local coffee and sandwich shop and there was a whole circle of women sitting there. They all had their Rob Bell book cracked open. I could overhear them talking, “Oh, this is so wonderful. We don’t have to ... There’s no judgment. No one is going to be judged.” And think about the implications of that for a Christian. You don’t have to have a difficult conversation with your non Christian friend, your agnostic friend, your Hindu friend. You don’t have to tell ... If they ask you point blank, “Could something terrible happen to me after I die, if I reject Christ?” Consciously, deliberately ... If you’re a universalist you believe in universal salvation, that’s what the word means. So, all will be saved. The title of the book is sort of playing with this idea that if God would never create an intelligent creature that would be lost, so that would mean that even Satan has to be redeemed. No, the book is not actually claiming that the devil is redeemed. There’s on Amazon comment that, “I think this book is terrible that he’s saying that the devil will be redeemed.” It’s like, obviously they didn’t get past the title. The title is to be thought provoking. Hmm, can the devil be redeemed? I wanted people to be thinking about that. So, I began to do research and to make a very long story short I was in the stacks at Yale University. I was on a research leave working there. And I had in a hand written set of names of Christian Universalists. Some of whom are not particularly well known, Vladimir [inaudible 00:24:04] and Jane [Led 00:24:05], and a bunch of others, [BALENTIN TOMBERG 00:24:07] – from different countries, from Germany and Russia and England. I was trying to figure out what connected them all with one another and I pulled a volume off of the reference shelf called, “The Dictionary of Gnosis,” which means Gnosticism and Esotericism. It wasn’t a theological book. It was really a book on the sort of strand of esoteric religion. And to my amazement there was an article on every one of those figures in that book. And that led me into a long journey into (laughs), “What’s a Jonathan Edwards scholar doing reading all of this Gnostic literature?” But I ended up going deep into Gnostic literature, Kabala, Jewish Mysticism, as well as certain strands of Christian mysticism. What I discovered is that there was this underlying driving theology of the Universalist movement that began with this idea that each of us, the soul in us, is a part of God that has fallen from the imperion realm above and become trapped in the physical body. What has come down must return. It’s kind of like having a helium balloon inside your chest and when you die the balloon returns and ascends once again. Now, if that’s the model for salvation then all of us would be saved just by virtue of what we are as human beings. And why would we need Jesus to come? Maybe he would only be coming and telling us, “Hey, guess what? You’re going to be saved.” This is a theology that kept reappearing in the history of Christianity and I trace that out in quite some depth. I find that that kind of Gnostic esoteric Kabulist idea is still with us. The book, when it came out, provoked some howls of protest from a number of leading academic theologians that did not like it at all. >>Doug Sweeney: What have you learned, Mike, as you’ve responded to the beating you’ve taken from some other academic theologians? Let me reiterate, I think your book is excellent and I agree with you. I am on your side. But clearly in our day and age, insofar as there isn’t orthodoxy anymore, inclusivism is at the heart of that new orthodoxy. Your approach to Universalism militates against that kind of orthodoxy. Give us some advice for minitry leaders, pastors ... our audience is full of people who probably agree with you more than with your opponents about the issues related to Universalism, but they’re trying to figure out – is there a good way to bear witness to this traditional Christian understanding of salvation through Christ alone that is winsome and that might well bear some good fruit in their ministries? Or do they just need to stand up for the truth and take a beating like you’ve taken a beating? >>Dr. McClymond: Well, one of the things that I did in the book is I tried to show how the question of final salvation, whether it is partial or universal is tied in with many, many other doctrines. And what I would say is that for obvious reasons Universalism has great curb appeal. You think of like a Universalist’s house, from the curb it looks wonderful, but I don’t recommend that people buy the house without stepping inside; checking the wiring so to speak; getting into the crawlspace. And what you find is that whenever Universalism has taken hold in a group of professing Christians, its ultimately undermined all the other elements of faith. The group, the denomination today we call the Unitarian Universalist, that was a merger of the Universalist movement with the Unitarian. Guess what? The Universalists, who started out as ... They said, “We’re evangelical Christians but who simply believe that everyone is saved.” And that’s kind of the starting point for Robin Perry and Rob Bell and some others. “We’re good evangelicals, but just as evangelicals can disagree over views of eschatology and the rapture and tribulation, we can disagree over this.” Well, that sounds wonderful but then you look at the historical record and you find that the Universalist Church ultimately what they said is that God didn’t, Jesus did not bear any judgment on the cross, and once you give up that element of judgment then Jesus is just a human being dying on ... They actually gave up the divinity of Jesus. And so you have the Universalist and Unitarians merging together. I did a review at the Gospel Coalition website of David Bentley Hart’s work. So, if people are interested in that, look under my name at the Gospel Coalition, and you can see the critique of that. So, that’s kind of a slippery slope argument, but I think it’s an important one. Another element is, again I can refer people to an online essay called, “The Opiate of the Theologians.” Of course, I’m playing with Marx’s expression about the opiate of the masses. But what I argue there essentially, and this is online at the First Things website, is that Universalism is a way that we would want the world to be. We would want everyone to respond. Who wouldn’t want everyone to be saved in the end? And I compare this to the gospel story frozen at the moment of the triumphal entry. Yay, Jesus! Everyone is clapping. They’re all applauding. Imagine just running that loop of film again and again and again. But wait a second, something else happens. As Karl Barth once said, “Perfect love appears in history and gets crucified.” And so an unsentimental look at the gospel story itself, you don’t even have to look at the world around us just the gospel story – we realize that again to cite John 3, scripture says, “The light as come into the world,” it says, “and men love the darkness rather than the light for their deeds were evil.” Then it talks about those who come to the light and those who flee from it. We can’t get away from this element of judgment. And as one biblical scholar said, he says, “It’s not the purpose of the light to cast shadows. But if the light is shining shadows will be cast.” And so there really isn’t a way to escape this element of the judgment that takes place, of course, as Jesus dies on the cross and also the element of freedom as well. I think many are familiar with CS Lewis’s statement that there are only two kinds of people – those who say to God, “Your will be done” and receive salvation. And those to whom God says, “Your will be done.” And “the doors of Hell are locked from the inside,” as Lewis said. So, that element of freedom, Pope Benedict XVI speaks of how has finally an expression of human freedom that it is the creature’s capacity to say “no” to God. And at some level we could rebel against the whole way that God has made the world. And some people will say, “Well, if I were God I would ...” What I want to say is, “Ooh, stop. Don’t finish the sentence. Don’t say ‘if I were God.’ You’re not God.” Right? And we are not really in a position to adjudicate like, “Well, God maybe should have made the world in a different way so that everyone would be saved.” But many academic theologians do want to say, “If I were God, I would have done things differently, and this is what God should have done. Therefore, ergo, this is what God did do.” It’s kind of what David Bentley Hart is doing. He says that if God allowed even one creature that he created to be lost then God is no longer God, no longer worthy of worship, and it’s better to be an atheist. So, it’s a startling claim that he’s making that ultimately involves rejection of the whole earlier tradition. >>Kristen Padilla: Thank you so much for being on the podcast today. We always like to end the show by asking our guests what the Lord has been teaching you these days that might be a word of encouragement to our listeners? >>Dr. McClymond: Well, I would say that I am learning more about the faith in a practical level. I do think, and this is something I learned from my charismatic friends especially, that there is a sense in which, you know, Jesus said, “Be it done to you according to your faith,” that we need to stretch ourselves to trust God for extraordinary breakthroughs, that needs of people are met. I put myself in a situation every week where I go out and I do prayer walking. I happen to live in the most violent, most murderous city in America, currently – St. Louis. I lead a group and we go to the murder sites, the homicide sites. That brings us into people on the street and people who need food and clothing. One guy that we found was on the verge of death. He was overdosing from fentanyl. He got a narcan safe shot. He moved into the home of one of the people I knew. Then he relapsed once again. So, this is ... it takes faith to trust God for this person, who will go nameless. We have to really believe that there’s hope for him. Fortunately he checked himself now into a new rehab program. But when we’re on the streets and we’re encountering drug dealers and drug abusers and street walkers, prostitutes, there, it’s a challenging environment because of the lifestyle issues that they’re facing. So, I’m learning about faith through being in that environment. What I would say to the listeners is put yourself where you need to trust in God. Heidi Baker said, “The way that we do ministry says, ‘if God doesn’t show up, we completely fail.’” And so if you’re not in a situation where you need God to show up in order not to fail, then maybe you need to be further out on that limb of faith, so to speak. >>Doug Sweeney: That’s a good word, Dr. McClymond. Thank you for your faithfulness. Listeners, you have been hearing Dr. Michael McClymond, an old friend of mine, learned and faithful theologian, a wonderful churchman, a fine Christian. It’s an honor for us to have him on campus with us this week, giving our Reformation Heritage lectures. Thank you, Mike, for being with us. And thank you dear listeners for tuning in. We love you. Please pray for us. We say goodbye to you 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.