Beeson Podcast, Episode #
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>>Announcer: 

Welcome to the Beeson podcast, coming to you from Beeson Divinity School on the campus of Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. Now your host, Timothy George. 


>>Timothy George:

My guest today on the Beeson Podcast is Dr. Ralph C. Wood. He is a university professor at Baylor University, professor of theology and literature. He's been a friend of mine for a long time, and I'm delighted to welcome you back to Beeson sDivinity School and to this podcast, Ralph.

>>Wood:
Glad to be here, Timothy. Thank you very much. 

>>George: 
I'm going to begin by just asking you to tell a little bit about your own personal story, your journey of faith. You've had a very interesting life, an influential one. Say a little bit about how you became who you are.

>>Wood:
As you know, Augustine says we live forward but think backward, and only in thinking backward can we discern the providential hand of God upon us when our lives look like so many chicken tracks as we are going forward with them. And I can look back and see how deeply gifted I was to have been brought up in a very modest circumstance, that is to say, a small East Texas town called Linden, a county seat town, member of First Baptist Church there, and pastored by a man during my formative years named Joe Gilmore. He was a Baylor grad, and a man who gave great care to the preparation of his sermons, for example. He wasn't a manuscript preacher, but he didn't give versions of the plan of salvation every Sunday over and again. He really thought about his sermons, delivered them with great dignity and great passion. 
And I saw from him this was a calling that I myself might be summoned to, and indeed felt God's call into my life, on my life. As a senior I therefore offered myself for ministry and undertook then to spend the rest of my life doing some kind of ministry or another. 
At that time, I very much wanted to go to Baylor. This was 1959 when I finished high school. But in those days, Baylor cost $2,000 a year, room, board, books, and tuition. And my parents were high school, public school teachers, making $300 a month. And so this was very clearly going to work a hardship on them financially. And they had survived the Depression without going into debt, which is no small thing. And so I didn't go to Baylor. You can see the great serendipity of where we're going. 
I've wound up at the place where I wanted to begin. I went instead to a small school called East Texas State, about 60 miles east of Dallas, a little town called Commerce. It's now part of the Texas A&M system. It's called Texas A&M at Commerce. And there I took two degrees, a BA and MA, majoring in English and minoring in history. But the major in English was really what turned me around because the most distinguished member not only of the English faculty, but of the whole faculty and the humanities, was a man named Paul Wells Barris. He was an Iowan who spoke foreign languages fluently, who read Latin without a dictionary, and who was, to my surprise and at first a bit to my chagrin, a very devout Roman Catholic. And in my part of East Texas, there was not, in my home county, there was not a single Catholic church. I had never met a Catholic until I got to college, and so I had all the typical, as you can imagine, bigotries about Catholics. And for the most scholarly, learned, and faithful member of the whole faculty to be a Roman Catholic threw me for a bit of a loop. 
But I began to see that he was not there to try to make us into Catholics. He was there to talk about literary texts as they bore upon large theological, moral, spiritual questions. And so I took every course he offered, a total of six. But the high moment came in 1962 when he brought Flannery O'Connor to the campus at this little small college in East Texas, her only Texas visit, so we have that to our credit. And I saw that I struck gold when I read her for the first time in my life at age 20, because I saw that she was uproariously funny. I saw that she was deeply southern, but not in the Faulknerian sense of the aristocratic South, but of the redneck South. 
Both sides of my family were sharecroppers. And she was writing about people such as produced me and writing about them with immense insight. And that, of course, pleased me that she could make world-class art out of small circumstances, whereas Faulkner made it out of large circumstances. But what was most, of course, riveting of all is that in her devout Catholicism, she made her Christian faith cohere with her literary imagination. These were not separate spheres that simply stood alongside each other independently. She brought them into a magnificent unity that was funny, southern, and deeply Christian.
And I began to see that if I could spend my life reading figures such as O'Connor and teaching them to undergraduates, I had a calling that might be God summons to me instead of traditional pastoral ministry. I did actually a good deal of student preaching, as you know, in the South. They let us go pretty young at this time. I had no business, believe me, doing it. But I began to see this might be my real calling, and it turned out to be.
I stayed and did a master's degree with him, working on O'Connor, was lucky enough to win a scholarship to the University of Chicago, and of course carried on there my whole endeavor at bringing together the world of confessional Christian faith. And literature that's not only Christian, however, but that's also skeptical, also sometimes sub-Christian or minimally Christian, but always seeking to integrate the two, seeing how they really impinge upon each other, how the skeptics raise questions about the faith that we Christians must not dodge, but also how we Christians ask hard questions of those who do not share our belief. 
Then out of Chicago, I had the very great good fortune of finding my first job at Wake Forest in Winston-Salem, staying on there for two and a half decades. Then to my delight, coming here to Samford for the interim year. What I didn't mean to be an interim year, we had bought a house up here in Vestavia, happily joined the Vestavia Hills Baptist Church. And you may not remember this, Timothy, but at the end of that, what I thought would be first of many years, you offered me the opportunity for doing a seminar on Karl Barth. In what would have been the autumn of 1998.

>>George:
Yes. That's right. And you left before that could be scheduled.

>>Wood:
Exactly. And so I had the opportunity then to go be a part of a renaissance that Robert Sloan was undertaking at Baylor and have been there 12 years, very happy. 

>>George:
Well, I first met you when you were at Wake Forest. I was at the Baptist Seminary in Louisville at the time. I knew a very young faculty member, having come directly from Harvard to that post, and we began to get students from Wake Forest who were very bright, very engaging, who had read deeply and thought widely, and they had one thing in common: they were students of Ralph Wood. And so “I’ve got to meet this Ralph Wood.” And we did get a chance to meet, I think, at Rice University not long after that, and we've been friends across these years. 
Now I want to come back to your literature concern, because I think that's how you have made such an impact across many disciplines. But I want to talk to you for a minute about theology, because when we first met those 30-something years ago, you were just coming off, I think at that time, being enamored with Paul Tillich. And you were beginning to think a little bit more about Karl Barth in a positive way. Talk to us why that change, why that transformation, which I think has been influential and important for you in the years since then.

>>Wood:
No doubt about it. No doubt. At the University of Chicago in the mid-1960s, when I was there, Tillich was the orthodoxy of the day. I took a three-course sequence in the systematic theology of Paul Tillich, and taught by very good, very persuasive teachers, Schubert Ogden, for example, and David Tracy, for example, found in Tillich a kind of natural way of bringing together these two worlds. But when I got into the classroom, I discovered that it was, as it were, too natural. There was too easy a fit between the world of culture and the world of faith.
You know, Tillich's motto, that “faith is the substance of culture and culture is the form of religion” was just too simple. It didn't acknowledge the clash ... as Updike would call it, the right angle clash that very often the gospel brings to culture. And so I began to cast about for some better way of negotiating that relationship. And so actually I turned to Kierkegaard first and read Kierkegaard for ... some of my friends probably tease me about my progressive theological leaps as if there were no core or center. I hope that's not the case. But I began to see that Kierkegaard was right. He said, “I must be taken as a corrective and not as a solution.” I simply bring things back toward what has been lost, but I do not offer anything in the way of a final option. 
And that proved to be true. And of course, having read Kierkegaard, I began to know that one of the chief appropriators of Kierkegaard in his early work was Karl Barth. And so I simply without ever having had any tutelage in Barth educated myself, if that's possible, in reading the church dogmatics, the ancillary works of Barth, the secondary criticism, and blinded myself almost reading that fine, fine print of Barth, and was transformed by it, because that is what turned my teaching around. 
Because what I discovered in students is that students do not want a kind of Christianity that simply echoes the culture, because ours is a pretty rotten culture. And therefore, if there's not a faith that can offer a drastic alternative to it, why should they pay attention to it? And so I began to actually do a kind of about-face. So rather than teaching secular writers, I taught my first year, for example, Camus, Sartre, Faulkner, Kafka, Hemingway, all the great secular saints of the modern world, trying to show that there were theological implications, which there are, of course, but there are no theological answers. 
I did an about-face, and I began teaching J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, Gerard Manley Hopkins, W.H. Auden, and on the list goes. And the students were taken, and I was taken. And I saw that I had now undergone the kind of reversal that Barth not only made possible, but that made my teaching now really possible in a new way. 

>>George:
In one of your writings, you write about the idea, I think that was shared by both C.S. Lewis and Tolkien, that Christianity is the one true myth. What do they mean by that? What do we mean by that?

>>Wood:
Yes, that's a crucial term that must not be misunderstood. By myth, they do not mean something humanly concocted, something merely thought up by human imagination, and least of all, some way of escaping the hard realities of the world by fleeing off into the world of imaginative constructions. They mean by that what Lewis called good dreams, a very important term for Lewis, in which they both began to see that there are certain patterns in the literatures of the world that have pointers beyond themselves, that have, Lewis especially liked the term he adopted from Augustine, that have what Lewis called anima naturaliter Christiania, that have souls who are in a strange way naturally Christian, who are given to a kind of sacrificial life of suffering for the sake of something beyond the world. 
And that those pointers, those hints, those good dreams that lead people and entire cultures outside themselves to a radical self-transcendence are therefore anticipations of the gospel. They're a kind of preparation for the gospel. So that the Christian faith, as Lewis famously says, is myth become history. So that what was in many cases human imagination has entered time, entered space, in, of course, God's entire self-disclosure, which means of course Israel, which means Christ, which means the church. And so in that sense, Christianity is the true myth.

>>George:
Barth has a wonderful line where he says, “that which the world calls history, we call myth, and that which the world calls myth, we recognize as history.” I think that was in his Aussein-Andersen with Bultmann, where they were talking about some of those issues of historicity and faith. Now a lot of the writers, Flannery O'Connor being one, that you've been drawn to and have helped to explicate are Catholic. Why is that?

>>Wood:
Very good question. That's a question I get from my students all the time. Several reasons for it. I've co-authored a piece with Stanley Hauerwas where we tried to answer that question about why this nation, which Chesterton famously called “the nation with the soul of a church,” has not produced any
major Christian writers prior to the middle of the 20th century. And only then in Flannery O'Connor and to a lesser extent Walker Percy. And what we argued there, and what I think to be the case, is twofold. 
First of all, so very often the liturgical life, the worship life, the imaginative life, the artistic life of Protestant Christianity in this country has been so thin, so barren, so wan and weak that it doesn't grab the imagination of thoughtful, imaginative people. When you look at a room that's empty of anything but four walls with a pulpit, your imagination is not brought alive very fully. Now, of course, Flannery O'Connor is very drawn to the South because she says the Bible is what really brings the imagination alive, but the point still holds that often Protestant worship is liturgically barren, that one doesn't do anything there that's radically different from what the world does, and so it doesn't really grab the imagination. 
And secondly, and far more drastically, actually, that a great deal of American Protestantism has been a virtual echo of, again, what was best in the culture, not what was worse. So it's a very high and a huge accomplishment for the American republic to have had so close a relation with Protestant Christianity. But in the 20th century, that really has worn out, because that marriage is now more and more, as you know, a divorce. 

>>George:
And Protestant Christianity itself has become so attenuated. 

>>Wood:
Exactly. 

>>George:
In terms of its own roots and its own dynamic.

>>Wood:
So Flannery O'Connor said, these people won't have much to do with me, but these Bible Belt preachers, these folks shouting, “Jesus saves,” these road signs reading “get right with God,” -- I believe them all. In fact she was once asked, “What, if you were not a Roman Catholic, would you be?” And of course her interlocutor, a sophisticate, assumed high church Anglican, maybe Lutheranism of a certain kind. And she said, “No, if I wasn’t a Roman Catholic, I'd be a Pentecostal Holiness.”

(laughter)
In other words, her Christianity has to be sweated. It has to be on fire. It cannot be something cool, detached, rationalistic, and therefore simply echoing what's going on around it. It has to be in a drastic tension.

>>George:
My favorite Flannery O'Connor story is Wise Blood, which deals with some of these very same issues you're talking about and presents in some ways the depth and the tragedy of human life in the face of God's grace, overriding grace, but never squinting on the tragic element. It's there.

>>Wood:
Yeah, and for that reason, then, you've got so many Catholics getting it right on these issues that, in fact, I'll use this analog in my sermon tomorrow, she says, “God's grace heals only after it first wounds.” And an unwillingness to be wounded of course shuts us off from the healing, the true healing of God's grace. And she says God's grace burns us clean. And so when you get that kind of Christianity in a number of Catholic writers, then what I do is try to bring my Protestant and overwhelmingly Evangelical students at Baylor to see the way in which their own lives will be tremendously enriched by discerning what the church, catholic in the small case, but also the upper case, brings to them, but also what we bring to the Catholic church in the upper case as well.

>>George:
That leads me to ask you a question I myself am often asked. You know, with all the affinity that you feel to the Catholic tradition, the dogma, the tradition, the great beauty of its art and architecture and literature and all the rest of the liturgy, why don't you become a Catholic? I mean, you are still a Baptist, Ralph, right?

>>Wood:
Oh, yeah.

>>George:
Why are you still a Baptist?

>>Wood:
I might as well go ahead and cut off this microphone. (laughter) Well, I get asked that all the time. In fact, I invented a term that Steve Harmon and others have picked up called Bapto-Catholic, which is how I define myself. 
Well, basically because I have not been called to be. I've not been summoned by God to be. And what I mean by that is not something pious, but that I feel I have a tremendous ministry to try to help my people come to this larger understanding of the gospel, which the Church catholic offers. Just as I feel I have a ministry to Catholics to help bring them to that which they don't have, for example, the gathered church in which not a few are to be assigned the evangelical councils but the whole body of Christ is to be intentionally Christian - that's a huge, huge difference, of course.
And so I remain not in tension between the two, but I hope bringing the two together and I may say in a church, a Baptist church in Waco, that very deliberately tries to adopt as much as it can from the church ecumenical as possible, and not therefore being bound by small denominational considerations. For example, riding in from the airport, the young student here, Robin Krauss, asked me with what Baptist group our church identifies, and I said, none. I mean, we're not independent Baptists, I don't mean to say that, but we just think those are such small...

>>George:
You're not a partisan Baptist.

>>Wood:
Right. They're such small categories in what Mark Nolan and dozens of others are calling a post-denominational age. I took a poll of my 35 students, and of course I have this semester on the Oxford Christians about their own denominational or religious identity. Of those 35, five of them, and five only, had sure, solid identities. “I am a Lutheran.” “I am a Methodist.” “I am a Baptist.” “I'm a Catholic.” All the rest were seekers. 
They're saying, I'm not satisfied with my religious identity as it was given to me here, there, and elsewhere. I'm trying to find a solid identity within the church in our time. 

>>George:
You know, Beeson Divinity School is an intentionally evangelical and interdenominational school. And you're here visiting our campus because you're preaching tomorrow in what will be the closing service of our series this year on the Nicene Creed. And each week we've taken a different segment of the creed and we've made that the focus of our worship. We've recited it. We'll do that tomorrow in our worship service. And this has been a kind of gathering experience for our students who come from all different kinds of traditions and denominations, to find there is a common core Christian commitment, a creed, an affirmation that we can make as unto the Lord, not just as an intellectual statement of propositional truth, which it is, but also as an expression of joy in our hearts and praise to the living God. And I think I see that happening more and more among evangelicals today, and that's a good thing.

>>Wood:
Oh, absolutely. Our Baptist church recites the Apostle's Creed at every baptism, and then throughout the year on other occasions, and then we celebrate Trinity Sunday openly by reciting the Nicene Creed. So yeah, when sometimes I'm charged with being a creedalist, I say, would the God that it were possible.

>>George:
Yes, yes. Well, we're almost out of time, but I want to ask you to go back a little bit in history and talk about another Catholic writer I know you have interest in, Gerard Manley Hopkins, one of the great poets, I think, of the English language. And a person who also struggled with faith in significant ways. Tell us your take on Hopkins.

>>Wood:
Well, I never get weary of teaching Hopkins, though Hopkins is a very difficult poet, and students have to learn to like Hopkins. They can read George Herbert and immediately sense identity with him. His language is simpler, his concepts are not as complex. Hopkins is a tougher nut to crack, but once you do so, you can see several things going on. One is a revolutionary use of the English language, whereby he's trying to recover its Anglo-Saxon roots, its old English roots, by the rhythms that were not iambic, brought over from the Italian by Chaucer via Petrarch, but are very much from the world of Beowulf and from the great medieval works, and early medieval works. And so they learn what it's like to think and to hear the Anglo-Saxon rhythms. 
Secondly, he's a deeply sacramental writer. And I try to help my students to see that sacrament is a good word, that neither Luther nor Calvin was nervous at all about that good word. A sacrament performs what it declares. It makes something happen. And Hopkins makes it happen in his work. 
And then thirdly, Hopkins is wanting to write a poetry that can take on the Darwinian world without qualms, where he sees that nature does have a kind of surging power that is often destructive. But he wants to see the deeper power beneath the destructive surfaces of the natural order to penetrate the divine order at its root.

>>George:
Would you read us one of Gerard Manley Hopkins' poems?

>>Wood:
I'd be delighted and one of my favorites is entitled, As Kingfisher's Catch Fire, Dragonflies Draw Flame. 
As Kingfisher's catch fire, dragonflies draw flame. As tumbled over rim and roundy well stones ring, like each tuck string tells, each hung bell's bow swung, Finds tongue, the fling out broad its name. Each mortal thing does one thing and the same, Deals out, that being indoors, each one dwells, Selves, goes itself, myself it speaks and spells, crying, What I do is me, for that I came. I say more, the just man justices, keeps grace, that keeps all his goings graces, acts in God's eye, what in God's eye he is, Christ. For Christ plays in ten thousand places, lovely in limbs and lovely in eyes, not his, to the Father through the features of men's faces. 

George:
My guest today has been Dr. Ralph Wood. He is university professor of theology and literature at Baylor University. Thank you for coming.

>>Wood:
My delight, Timothy

>>Announcer:
You’ve been listening to the Beeson Podcast with host, Timothy George. You can subscribe to the Beeson podcast at our website Beesondivinity.com. Beeson Divinity School is an interdenominational evangelical divinity school training men and women in the service of Jesus Christ. We pray that this podcast will aid and encourage your work and we hope you will listen to each this podcast will aid and encourage your work and we hope you will listen to each upcoming edition of the Beeson podcast.