Vices, Vanities, and iMAGEiNATION

Ep 205: Dr Koontz and Rev Fisk talk about collapse and how talk about it with your family, the history and significance of mirrors, and the vice lists in the Bible and why we have them. The revs also discuss how the Eight Commandment presses Lutherans into niceness while ignoring a broader range of virtues.

Resources mentioned: The Modern Survival Manual: Surviving the Economic Collapse” by Fernando "Ferfal" Aguirre

El Salvador President Nayib Nbukele answer to BBC reporter about his tactic for dealing with gangs

Many thanks to our sponsors, Blessed Sacrament Lutheran Church in Hayden, ID and Luther Classical College.

Dr Koontz –  Trinity Lutheran Church
Rev Fisk – St Paul Rockford and Hebron Collegium

Visit A Brief History’s own website for more

Music thanks to Verny

Transcript:

BHoP 205 Vices Vanities and iMAGEiNATION
[Speaker 1] (0:06 - 1:50)
Dr. Koontz, how do you talk to your kids about Tiawake? You know, I don't. Not out of
some, you know, reticence about exposing them to sad or weird things.
I mean, they learned the Bible, so they should have some acquaintance with the idea
that things go away or that things fall apart. But I guess I try to do it by giving them a
sense of where we came from and that there was a time when essentially we had
nothing and basically everything was Indian country. And I don't just mean in the sense of possession by assorted tribes. I mean, dangerous, wild, difficult, hostile to us, and that we can therefore survive through practically anything because our family did before. So we have to do the things that they did, and not in the sense of, you know, bushcraft or farming or something. Not just those kinds of things, but that we have to rely on God and stick together. So I don't need to create in them. They have plenty of time as adults to speculate about what could go wrong or how it would go wrong if it did. But I try to prepare them for hardship or difficulty in that way by telling them what we did before and that it did work, that if we rely on God and stick together, we will be okay.

[Speaker 2] (1:51 - 5:15)
I like that. I wish I had the luxury in a sense. You know, I had exposed my kids to media influences pretty heavily through most of our lives. And it's only been the last three years that I've believed in my own capacity as a father to enact a, what do you call it, a storyline in the home in which the machines are not our
friends. That's kind of a key part of the new storyline. We can use them, they're tools, but they're not our friends. And so my family's got a lot more of the whole story flowing through before I even get to say anything, even with the attempts I've made to clarify. And I've certainly also been, I don't know, with our kids' education at least, I always want to give them the full scope. So I don't, if they ask, I don't hide it from them or something like that. And so anyhow, and one of the things that then our family, I did have to address, and we still continue to walk this learning curve together, was something out of the Aguirre book, which probably the thing that stunned me most out of that entire book was when he said, you know, when it all goes down, it's all going to turn left. It's all going to go sideways. People are going to be hungry. People are going to be fighting and blah, blah, blah. Your family's going to argue until you die. He just kind of said that to you as a reader.
And I went, huh, we're going to sit there and debate who's in charge. We're going to
quibble over things that might matter on a sunny day, right? But when it is pushed to
shove and we need a leader to follow, you know, you reader, he said, you're not one.
And I, you know, I took that with not too much salt, right? I took that with some
seriousness and have been then trying to work with my family, who we don't have roots like you do at all. I can't build on that. Trying to convince them though, that through the mutual understanding of the gospel, the kingdom of Jesus Christ, a shared trust in his capacity to guide, lead, reform, save us in the present, that with attention to his Holy Spirit's work, we are prepared for whatever comes our way. That said, then again, I'd like to have those stories around our dinner
table be a little less about Ukraine. Not Ukraine too often, but you know, voter fraud and inoculations are hard to keep out of their eyes.
And more and more health crises that involve toxic food supplies, the people who they run into that are in, you know, for us it's the jujitsu community, but you know, whatever other communities you run into whose worldviews are a radical, just radical and having to prepare them for like, well, how do you not like make faces at that person who's making faces at you, you know, and that kind of thing. So I know you're doing that too. And so I don't mean to say that your answer doesn't, but I'm envious of your answer and the kind of capacity to lay a long story that you have.
[Speaker 1] (5:15 - 9:56)
Yeah, I think it also has to do with the fact that in a crisis, a lot of things that are matters
of choice fall away. And so metaphorical things fall away, metaphorical family,
metaphorical steadfastness, a lot of the things that, that decorate rhetoric, like you said,
on, on sunny days. So third order or second order things that are matters of great
consternation and, and frustration and obsession in first order crises of how are we going
to, how are we going to stay alive?
Or I think, I think maybe more along a gear a lines, like how are we going to thrive in a,
in a situation of, of gradual decline of a variety of things, right? Because part of the point
of that gear, a book that we've talked about before, and the listeners can look that up if
they're new to the podcast, or if they're not doing the back catalog, listen for which we,
we should hand out some kind of prize. That's hundreds of hours.
So if you want to write into the show and say, you know, and maybe provide a
screenshot of, you know, it's actually been played or something, or we'll just trust you
that you've listened to the whole back catalog having started last year or something, you
know, but the book about surviving hard times is really about the gradual decline of

Argentina. And that in a situation like that, I think it's important to realize that you, you
are given in what are called the orders of creation, but particularly in the three estates,
family, church, and let's say government, generally various levels, you're getting, you're
given first order realities. And you do see this worked out throughout history, particularly
with the estate of government, because you can see how, if you know geography and
you know who had military power, you can generally explain what happened.
But if you don't know military history, if you just know something you were taught in
undergrad about, you know, whatever women's lives in 15th century Florence, you don't
really understand what occurred and, uh, and why. So when you go down to these first
order things, I guess what I'm trying to get at with my kids is that there are a lot of
things that are matters of choice and they might be interesting to you and they might be
fun and they might be stimulating or they might be obsessively depressing the way the
news often is for people. But there's a sense in which finally it doesn't matter.
It just doesn't matter. And there are situations like collapse, like emergency, but also like
death, which I think is the best way to, to think about these things that show you in a
ready, clear way, what are first order things and therefore what, what are, what's in the
first rank of my priorities in life and what am I going to center my life around? And
almost everything else falls away pretty, pretty rapidly.
There's a, there's a, there's a very rapid, clean, intense process of exfoliation that occurs
when you examine your life and in terms of death. And that enables you to make
choices, I think much more readily than if you try to sift, which is a lot of times what
readers, personal questions or readers, listeners, personal questions are about. How do I
sift or how do you sift?
And, and the, the answer is in a, in a simple way, the answer is I don't because part of
the reason that I studied the past more than I read the news is because by the time I
read the news when I do, and I, it's not like I live in a cave, but by the time I read the
news, it's, it's not nearly so unclear or interesting in its flow as when, you know, you just,
you just read the news where it's like, well, what else do I need to know?
What am I missing? If I read about a country that is, you know, pretending that military
strength doesn't matter. Okay.
Well then I'm reading about a country that's controlled by another country. That's really
pretty clear, right? That's extremely clear historically.
So history is just one version or it's a long-term collective version of thinking about your
own death.
[Speaker 2] (9:58 - 11:09)
Yeah. Yeah. Coming to terms with a planet in which we all die and that that factor is sort

of the driving power behind almost all daily decisions, whether we acknowledge it or not.
And we don't acknowledge it and we live in kind of hiding from it. So I asked you to do a
little digging for me on a historical tidbit that is probably a bit weird, but, but then again,
I don't know. I I'll see if I can tie it all together, but I'm, I'm the question I asked you to
find out for me was on the history of the, the mirror as a American middle-class
commoner phenomenon.
And particularly with reference to the old language of it being a vanity. So my question,
Dr. Coons is really like, when did America decide that being vain was, you know, the
most necessary thing in our cultural existence? I don't mean that we made a decision.
I mean, we see that the mirror simply became what we assume we do. Yeah. I think
that's a big change in our history and I'd love to know what you found.
[Speaker 1] (11:09 - 16:57)
So those are, there are two different streams to figuring that out. And one is the fact that
until you are able to manufacture glass, that is sufficiently clear and reproducible, right?
So you, that you have production capacity to get high quality glass out there, the
production of mirrors as we think of them is going to be pretty low until the 19th century.
And one way to see this actually is to just, just look in the Bible to see where there are
mirrors. And there are in fact very few, right? Your two clearest ways to think about this
in biblical terms are when Paul talks about seeing, he says, see in a glass.
And that's just a, that's just an old way to talk about a mirror because most people's
acquaintance with glass, besides drinking vessels is going to be, is going to be small
mirrors. We see in a glass darkly. That's because the glass is fairly impure.
It's highly impure compared to modern glass. We see in a glass darkly. So we don't really
see a whole lot.
We see some vague resemblance to ourselves. And James is going to talk about the man
who sees his face and then goes away and forgets what he has seen. And that is
because he has rare access to such things, right?
So part of the reason he can forget, I mean, James is trying to tell you when you see
yourself in light of God's word, when you're doing it infrequently, you don't, you're not
really grasping who you are. You don't, you don't actually know what you've seen in this,
in the same way that a lot of people have more insight about the imperfections of other
people's noses than they do about their own. The reason they can have insight about
their own is when they have access to the site of that, but to see that frequently, unless
you are pretty wealthy is very rare before the industrial revolution.

So this is a case of technology making something possible that was never possible
before. So that's the other stream is the idea of mass produced vanities. So if, if before
the common way in human history to see yourself is to find a still pool of water, that's
the story of Narcissus, right?
He he's looking into a pond when he sees himself and becomes obsessed and says that,
you know, he says, I love you right to himself. And then, and then poor echo who's hiding
over there in the willows. All she can say is I love you.
And he doesn't care. That story is based on how most people are going to see
themselves, which is in water. If by the time of the 19th century, you can see yourself in
a vanity, the insight there is still that what's happening is really that you're, you're
satiating something that in, in a, in a way is pointless.
And this has to do with human beauty. So a lot of people will talk about beauty today in,
in a lot of fields, partly because we just don't, we don't have a lot of it. People present
themselves kind of in an ugly dress down casual, but that is to say, I don't, I don't care
what I look like to you way.
And that goes for both men and women. In addition to the buildings we live in the
environment around us, which is occupied by strip malls and, and cracked concrete. So
people are obsessed with beauty.
I think partly because we have relatively little of it. That doesn't mean that we're, we're
finding it necessarily, or that we are displaying it. But the idea of the vanity is it's kind of
a great title for the area where the woman gets herself ready because there is a need
both inside of her and in those looking at her to be beautiful.
So there's something necessary about a vanity. There's also a recognition that there's
something futile about it. And futile, F-U-T-I-L-E is important along with its synonym,
vain, V-A-I-N, because that, that word vain means at the same time, it's kind of silly or it
makes you prideful, but it also means that it's kind of pointless in the end because the
woman who is looking into the vanity, the very thing that she's looking for is itself, and
the word that we use is very telling here, it's fading like the colors in a painting that's
been exposed to sunlight too long. So there's something going on here that I think
captures, and this is, the vanity is really particular to, to women's lives, but it captures
something that's true about human beings generally, which is we can, we can use
something, we can make something relatively new, certainly new in its clarity in the
mirrors that we're able to produce, but that's not going to arrest the processes that
themselves prove in the end to be vain because eventually there's going to be, you
know, there's, there's going to be death and then nobody looks pretty, right?
[Speaker 2] (16:58 - 17:10)

Yeah, yeah. It's, it's, it's very like us to take a new power and to use it in the most self-
destructive way. Yeah.
That's just unto our nature.
[Speaker 1] (17:10 - 17:10)
Right.
[Speaker 2] (17:11 - 17:31)
So yeah, I mean, that's, that's really helpful. I, I have been mulling on this for quite a
while, and so let me see if I can get a little crazier. Sure.
Take, take it through a few steps backwards. Yeah. What got me most was the day that I
realized I was watching a talking image and listening to it.
[Speaker 1] (17:31 - 17:31)
Yeah.
[Speaker 2] (17:31 - 18:09)
Without ever realizing like, oh, talking image, Bible, bad. Like, and, and I'm not at the
point where I, I, I want to tell everyone that every picture that talks is there for the
antichrist and you're going to hell. Like that, that's going a little too far, I think, but to
realize that, you know, for anybody who is outside of the faith of Jesus Christ, for them to
watch a talking image is for them to worship it and that this is going on all around us.
So I started pondering, you know, the, the infiltration of the talking image as a normative
factor of Western civilization that nobody questions. We just do what it says.
[Speaker 1] (18:09 - 18:10)
Yeah.
[Speaker 2] (18:10 - 18:53)
In 1984, George Orwell and all that. Sure. Fine.
I'm still thinking book of revelation, even though I don't really believe there's a little
season that's separate from the millennium, which is the eternal reign of Christ. That's
already initiated. You know, a little season is going to be right now to the end of the
world and then the rest of the kingdom.
So, so I'm not really looking for like the, the, you know, the hat tip on, oh, we're at the
end times now, but I can't ignore the talking image that everybody's worshiping. And as I

was pondering that and it's overlap with things like twisted light, like that's how it works.
Uh, it all came to congeal again and seen in the mirror, my face that was talking to me
about these very things.
And I realized I had another talking image that I was listening to.
[Speaker 1] (18:53 - 18:53)
Yeah.
[Speaker 2] (18:54 - 20:09)
And I thought, well, golly, if I ain't just going to be snuckled by this thing, I would like to
not be an idolater by intention. James or James John's final words of his letter, you know,
little children, keep yourselves from these things. I, I am not an iconoclast.
I don't intend to become one, but there's something about the twisted light, the
refractive or the, the reflective nature that isn't true. And the futility of our pursuits that,
that we want to use. If I can, if I can summarize my learning, why do we take pictures?
And it's because we want to hold onto what God's taken away. And that factor from
Shinto to Alan Jones, you know, Alex Jones, you know, it, it doesn't seem to matter to me
if we're not waking up from the, the domineering spirit that causes us to listen to so
many things that are not the scriptures, then we're going to continue being railroaded
into if nothing else, our own vanity. Right.
I mean, if nothing else, uh, it's, it's just a practical question, but I think it's more than just
a practical question too.
[Speaker 1] (20:09 - 20:57)
Okay. So I think this, this has to do with a question of, of images generally, and then
maybe we can move through time to talk about moving images, to talk about the
shrinking of the moving image from a giant screen that you, you sit in a generally a
nicely appointed room to watch with other people originally with live music. And even
with a live narrator, just a cool little fact about film history is that Japan held on to the
live music and the live narrator longer than anyone else that even after talkies came out
in the, at the very end of the twenties, beginning of the thirties, Japan held on to a live
narrator longer than anywhere else.
[Speaker 2] (20:58 - 21:00)
They have always had a sense for the arts, I think.
[Speaker 1] (21:00 - 24:42)
q
Yeah. Yeah. Well, they, yeah, they certainly have like a highly cultivated aesthetic sense
and holding onto the live narrator keeps some semblance of life about what it is that
you're looking at.
You move from that into TV. So now it's completely privatized. And from there you move
to completely individualized streaming on your phone so that you can now be in the
same room and be watching, you know, three different things, the three people in that
room.
If you go all the way back to the question of images, I am always struck by the relative
bareness of Northern European architecture. And it's an impulse that you see in these
populations when they have different religious convictions. So Lutheran churches and
Methodist churches and not Mormon temples, but, um, Mormon stakes, right?
Local churches are all Baptist churches can, even when they don't have a religious
conviction against images, strictly speaking, they tend to be fairly bare and fairly
abstract. And I'm speaking even before modern architecture that they are relatively
unadorned by images. When they do have images, it'll be a matter of focus up front.
If you contrast that with say Slavic church architecture, Roman Catholic, you know,
Byzantine, right? Eastern Orthodox, even also Slavic Lutherans, it's going to be much
more adorned. Even, even the decoration and the architecture of Slavic reformed
people, like there's a large reformed church always has been a large reformed church in
Hungary is more ornate in its decoration where there's a religious conviction against
images per se, there's still more decoration than among the Scottish.
So what's interesting to me is that images have a power that some people are more
willing to, to concede to than others. Here's the thing. I think everyone's heart is full of
images, right?
That's why the warning against idolatry strikes at the heart. I think everyone, regardless
of his culture, his background, whatever, his heart is full of images. What different
cultures choose to do about that.
So let's, let's be fairly iconoclastic. I mean, you, you mentioned Shinto and Shinto is in
some ways, one of the most, to my mind, iconoclastic of pagan religions. Usually inside
the temple, there, there isn't an image of, you know, there's a profusion of images in a
Buddhist temple.
There is almost a complete abstraction in a Shinto temple. What you do with that and,
and with the heart full of images and ready to manufacture more, I think that's really the
question. For a Christian, part of the potential of images is because Christ is alive.
And so therefore those who are in him are also alive. So an image of Abraham or Isaac or
Jacob in a church or in my home is a reminder of, of life. It's not a pointless seeking after

death, which in a milder form is nostalgia.
So if you think about the difference between having an icon of Abraham, for example, or
for personal reasons, I like icons of Adam. They're, they're not very common.
[Speaker 2] (24:42 - 24:44)
Find a Jonathan one for me.
[Speaker 1] (24:45 - 27:35)
Yeah, those are probably even rarer. But that, that is something different than if I have a
picture of life in the town where my grandparents met in the decade that they met,
right? Only in New York in the 1930s is never coming back.
It's gone. It's still there, but that's gone. So there's a difference here between images
that are reminders of life and images that are reminders of death.
One of the things about a vanity or what those images do to my heart is whether they
create greater affirmation of life, greater trust in God, or whether they create death. And
that does actually depend on my heart because some images have no effect on me, but
they might have a strong effect on you and vice versa. I think that one of the, one of the
things about the power of the moving image, how, whatever size the screen is, is that
because it gives such a, such a good facsimile of reality to any human being, the power
that it has is that it, it doesn't really have to ask to pull the heart.
It just can in the same way that eye contact has much greater power in speaking than
not making eye contact. So when you're thinking about images and what, what pulls the
heart, because the heart is just going to be there and it's going to have and want images
and it will be pulled. Those are just properties of mankind.
Then you want to ask yourself, okay, well, what kind of images am I, am I being pulled by
because their power will be greater than, than words, than smells, than other things that
affect your senses. Those, those image, because one way to see this is if you have like a
sort of, you know, Marcel Proust type event where you are moved by a certain smell or
taste. So you take other senses.
When that occurs for Proust, it was this Madeline dipped in the, you know, we would call
it herbal tea. When that happens, notice that what your heart does is that it brings up
certain images that certain smells that remind you of childhood, they bring up images.
Whereas the image doesn't, doesn't need a, a smell or a sound or a taste to supplement
it, but that those other things will, will supplement themselves with images if at all
possible.
[Speaker 2] (27:37 - 29:33)

And the tendency to rely on sight as our dominance truth finder is pretty, pretty there.
And, you know, notwithstanding stories of those who've lost sight and discovered the
power of the other senses. So the, there was so much good there again, and especially
in, in diagnosing, lest anyone think otherwise, you know, the iconoclastic confusion error
to see how the incarnation death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ has made his
image, the crucified man, the mark of his kingdom, the sign of his triumph.
And from there flows all beauty restored. But, but in the same vein, then same kind of
ponderings over the last couple of years, you know, a, for a Christian in faith, getting
ready for your day in front of the mirror, you're fine, probably, you know, guard your
heart for the non-Christian. It's an idol has to be, there's no other option dogmatically.
It just can't be, they have to worship it. They must. And so with that kind of awareness in
mind, that that is that pagans, unbelievers, they don't have faith to attach to Christ.
And so all their good works are filthy rags. So also the realm of art is effectively the
realm of magic is the realm of image crafting for the sake of casting forward a spirit,
really a feeling of belief, whatever they want to call it. And so just again, to see that what
the issue isn't that Christians can't, the issues is Christians need to realize we do it
different and then start doing it different and stop doing it just like everybody else
because following their trains are getting us to their destinations.
[Speaker 1] (29:34 - 33:11)
I think that particularly with Christians on this, this is, this is not my absolute despisal of
modern architecture. I think blanket despising of any given time, any given time, I'm not
saying any given trend or any given artist or architect is, is silly because it does not
recognize God's providence. However, the trend towards abstraction is always a trend
for a Christian in a direction of immense profusion that is privatized.
So rather than have something definite to look at or definite to understand, so there's a
sense in which a steeple of almost any kind is fairly abstract, but we understand that a
steeple could be highly abstract or, you know, fairly straightforward in what it's
presenting. And we don't expect there to be tons of ornament on a steeple, but you'll
notice that generally human beings have more ornament decoration definition, the
closer to human life and human eyes and our line of sight that it gets. So down where we
are, right, we don't expect mementos of our family life to be on the roofs of our homes,
but it would be a little weird.
And it's always telling when you go into somebody's house and they have no family
pictures of anyone from ever, right? If that's the case, then you're kind of like, okay,
why? You know, what, what causes you to avoid that?
They might have their reasons. Usually those reasons are pretty deep and usually have

to do with pain. So when you're thinking about what kinds of images are going to be
there when there's abstraction or there's nothing, particularly in a human line of sight,
that actually is an image of anything or anyone, what you want to think about is, okay,
well, what's going to happen to the hearts that live here?
And I think what occurs at that point is that you get immense variety, not necessarily
good, but definitely variety because there's nothing in front of everyone's eyes. If you've
ever been in a Unitarian church, this is fairly easy to understand because they're going
to be generally extremely abstract, not necessarily an architectural style because they
might have inherited the building from the 18th or 19th century, but inside the
decoration will be very abstract. And when it's not, it will be something probably old and
protected by some kind of, you know, the antiquities act of some kind that they, they
just can't get rid of that bust of John Adams or something, but otherwise there will be
abstraction.
And so notice that generally with high abstraction goes immense diversity of hearts. And
I mean that in terms of beliefs, but also in terms of attitudes and perceived purposes and
things like that, when you have a uniting image, so here are images of our family or here
are images of our God, or then you are also providing a focus in the way that Hollywood
does for the heart to fix itself on.
[Speaker 2] (33:12 - 34:32)
Yeah. And to see the inherent nature of man in this, that there, you can't really avoid yet
there, there must be an image that you look to and that that is what father and mother
are created to be. If I get Luther right in the large catechism, that, that, that we are the
images of God to the children.
It is in the world that things are falling apart that we erect these counter images,
nostalgic narratives built on some shared pain. I think you just said, and it's, it's very
insightful to hold us together. And it's, again, I'm not saying this as like some blanket
condemnation.
I'm not saying you can try to avoid this. I'm saying Christians should not be ignorant of
this broken part of our nature and of how readily it gets out of control without, without
some convictions about what we're doing with these images and how it is very easy for a
human in America to collect boxes and boxes and boxes and boxes of images while
failing to, to mend relationships with the people in those very pictures that are living
right there.
Right.
[Speaker 1] (34:32 - 38:34)
Yeah. Right. And I mean, the, the decline of photo albums, like albums of all kinds,

because albums are something that you use, excuse me, that you use to collect
generally either images or signatures or mementos of other people.
That's what they were for. And albums predate, uh, mirrors in any kind of widespread
use. There were albums.
This is sometimes, especially where you get old drawings that you might be familiar
with. If you are interested in whatever Jane Austen's England or something, uh, you're
getting those drawings or watercolors from someone's album and they would take them
around and have people sign them, but also draw mementos of what they've seen the
capacity also to draw as a matter of common educational training that you can sketch a
bird that you saw or sketch a, a home that you stayed in when you were traveling. All of
that has to do with the capacity, not only to receive images, but also to produce images.
And this was even to the extent there's a, my doctoral advisor wrote a whole book about
this particular thing.
That's why I am personally interested in it. But what, what she wrote about is something
that in rhetoric has its own fancy word we can use if we want to, but it's basically the
capacity in the preacher. So she was writing about the church fathers.
That's what she does. The capacity in the preacher to put an image in front of people's
minds. Yeah.
It's called in Greek. And what that means is that you are accepting the fact that they
need to receive the word of God through hearing. How will they hear without someone
preaching?
That's the way that God has chosen to reveal himself to mankind primarily, right? Not
solely there's also the sacraments, right? But primarily through preaching and even the
sacraments are accompanied by God's word.
But that what you are doing is you are, you are accepting the fact that human beings
live through images. So you are trying to create in front of their mind's eye, an image.
And that's, I mean, it's telling that we have the phrase mind's eye, but not ear's eye or
nose's eye or, you know, the other, the other senses.
So even when we're trying to express that something really is right there in front of us
and we're really grasping it and, you know, and, and, and Paul says this, the Galatians, I
placarded Christ in front of you as crucified. So you're just accepting that they're going
to think even in their thinking as if they were seeing. And you want to make sure that
right in front of their eyes is a very clear image of the sacrifice of Isaac or of Paul's labors
for the church's night and day or whatever it is that you're trying to do, because that,
that will be the image in their heart, right?
And the heart, the heart is, doesn't actually itself physically see it understands biblically

speaking, but it, but it wants to, it believes in what it sees as it were. And so the heart's
perception is then governed by the images that have been given to it. And if those
images are predominantly of, of God, of his life, of these kinds of things, then the heart
will simply be attached very, very differently than if primarily, and this is where, you
know, education comes up as so desperately important.
Then if primarily the images are privatized are governed by algorithms are governed by
profit are governed by dissent or appeal to the worst that is in you, then of course your
heart is going to be warped. I mean, what else could possibly happen?
[Speaker 2] (38:36 - 41:06)
Yeah. So, so where I'd like to go a little bit with this now is, you know, speaking of
images and caricatures, there was a series I read years ago. I shouldn't say I read it.
I watched it. It had been turned into an anime from the graphic novel that it originally
was, but you know, it's amazing where you find good story and to dismiss either film or,
or the theater or various groups of fiction, genres of fiction, as if no, you know, insightful
author could be there. I found that to be a mistake.
And in this case, the storyline of the full metal alchemist, for those who want to check it
out, it's got some real genius to it. And largely in this, that the, the spin of the baddies,
the bad guys who build their way all to the great epic end is a play up on the seven
deadly sins by name. And it, it does such a great job of picturing these people, greed,
wrath, lust, pride.
It's such a good way of describing them, making them be who they are that I almost
can't think of the seven deadly sins now without those images being who I then reckon
I've got to deal with. What's been more valuable recently is believing that dealing with
the seven deadly sins is worth my time. That is that as a framework for combating my
own cantankerousness per se, or, you know, tendency to fall apart myself, that it is, it is
a seven deadly sins that give me a nice place for the fruit of the spirit to go to war with,
you know, things that I can, I can see my greed and I can hate my greed.
And that's good thing. Yeah. Right.
Yeah. And so, so from there, I, this to me is not disconnected from the whole concept of
the vanity, the tendency of us to follow images that promise us we'll be who we think we
ought to be. And the, the real slippery slope that most of us are amassing around us
simply by having a, a greed for images themselves, a desire just to have them keep
them for their own sake without, you know, again, the, the bigger kingdom per se in
view.
[Speaker 1] (41:06 - 45:31)

Okay. I mean, I think the reason the seven deadly sins are helpful is simply because it is
a list and catechisms like preaching have to recognize that human beings need
organization. For example, they can't just listen to, you know, blather for 40 minutes or
blather endlessly.
You need to be organized and clear and the seven deadly sins organized in a clear way.
Something that appears all over the Bible and is so frequent that it has its own name for
by people who study the Bible called vice lists. So rather than, you know, memorizing
every vice list and trying to cross check it as you have to do when you use different
writers in the Bible, because they'll use more or fewer words depending on their
reference.
James is extremely compressed and some people go on and on and on. I love James, but
what, what the seven deadly sins do is that they, they sum things up. This goes pretty
far back.
I believe the first list in church history, there are vice lists outside of, and before the
church, but the first list in church history is Tertullian. So that's a very early North African
church father. You also get in the fourth century, Evagrius Ponticus, who's, I don't know if
you can tell from his name is, is Greek proto Byzantine, you might say.
And he's got, he's got nine and he pulls them into eight things. Among those are, are
seven deadly sins, but, but some are kind of, you'll notice that when people's lists are
different, it's because they're, they're usually expanding something that they think is
more important. So in the biblical vice lists, you'll notice that things that are either
completely internal or sexual usually have more words for them indicating you kind of
need a finer tooth comb on things that are internal or sexual problems than you do for
raising up hands and anger.
Like Paul says, don't do that. Raise your hands up in prayer instead in first Timothy, but
you know, raising your hands in anger, this kind of only one outcome to that. Whereas
things that are internal and or sexual sins or, or vices are going to be both more frequent
and in need more words to describe them so that you know what you're dealing with in
the same way that, you know, people who spend a lot of time outside know way more
words for soil conditions and weather and, you know, Eskimo words for snow because
you deal with this all the time and you need to know what you're handling. When you
think about these things as not just sins, but vices, I like that word that, that, that these
are vicious because what they do is not just that you commit them and that's wrong.
And, uh, you know, I've railed against this before and I'll do it again. I, we need to stop
using speed limit signs as an illustration for God's law. It's just not a good idea because
we all know it's quasi or entirely arbitrary.
So there are people who remember when you had to go 55 on interstates and it was

stupid, right? It was dumb. It's quasi it's, it's at least quasi, if not entirely arbitrary, but it
also doesn't express like, you know, because guess what, if I go 55 and a 30 and nobody
catches me, it doesn't do anything to me.
Whereas what happens with sins and especially when we think of sins as a vices is that it
destroys me by and by so that these things, they are vicious to me. My pride or my
vanity or my gluttony is vicious to me. It could be vicious to other people.
It's definitely vicious to me, the offender. So when you think about the seven deadly sins
or the seven vices contrasted with seven virtues, which we can talk about if you want,
but the seven vices, that's just a summary of things that destroy me or a summary of
ways in which I destroy myself.
[Speaker 2] (45:31 - 46:31)
Yeah, right, right, right. They are descriptions of the way my spirit goes wrong. Right.
And what I like about that is, as opposed to, and I, I am going to teach the small
catechism, but like the 10 commandments as my only vector for how to lead a righteous
life leaves me either with the external alone, which is too easy, most agree, or with, at
this point, sort of the Lutheran, you just never can, you just never gonna. And, you know,
try hard, but your heart's against you. Okay, good.
But, but I still want to fight here. Right. And so the framework of the seven deadlies, I
just find less of the, the shame and guilt baggage that for whatever reason, my, my
experience of Lutheran training has left me with 10 commandments is I don't, they don't
give me teeth to fight with.
[Speaker 1] (46:31 - 46:38)
Okay. That makes sense. Yeah.
So I, that's the reason that in instruction, I like to combine the 10 commandments with
the table of duties.
[Speaker 2] (46:39 - 46:39)
Amen.
[Speaker 1] (46:39 - 46:55)
In addition to, you can just run off the table of duties and supply viceless and virtuous
from the Bible. And the reason I like to do that is because, for example, let's just take,
let's just take the chief commandment in the Lutheran church, Missouri Synod, which is
the eighth commandment, not the first, but the eighth, right?

[Speaker 2] (46:55 - 46:57)
Well, it's only the explanation that's right.
[Speaker 1] (46:57 - 51:02)
And the way that that actually works is that the eighth commandment is used. So
obviously I'm not impugning God's commandments. I'm impugning our stupidity and
applying them.
The eighth commandment is used to keep people from saying things that are not nice.
And the problem there is that niceness is only a third or a second order virtue. It's not a
primary virtue.
It's not prudence. It's not temperance. It's not chastity.
It's not faith. It's not hope. Niceness is definitely not love because you can be nice and
hate the person at the same time.
So what we're looking at when we look at the eighth commandment is for example,
instead of thinking about commandments in terms of, did I behave relative to other
people? Because the way that we interpret the eighth commandment as like, don't say
anything about anyone ever. Okay.
And I feel very free and happy to say what I'm saying right now because people impugn
me, Pastor Fisk, Pastor Grylls, all the time. Here's why it doesn't bother me in short is
because when you think about vices and virtues, you have to realize that other people's
sins are not actually your primary problem in life. Certainly not stupid things other
people say about you.
They are primarily his problem. And when you start to think about sins as a way of
diagnosing one's own problems, you know, tellingly this chief or theological or
accusatory use of the law is called in Lutheran shorthand, the mirror, right? Is that you
need to realize that the biggest problem here is you, not the other guy, you know,
including his, you know, dumb thoughts, opinions, characterizations, right?
That doesn't mean that defamation is okay. It means that when you think about
defamation or the way that we usually talk about it as slander, because we're usually
doing it in a, in a private forum as gossip rather than a public forum, which is what
defamation or libel might be considered that, you know, it's not like that's okay, but you
need to understand that the primary problem here isn't that he did it in public. It's that
what has come forth from his heart is such uncleanness proceeding from maybe pride,
maybe wrath, maybe his own sloth, which is therefore offended by another's action,
whatever it might be.

But it's the reason I find the virtues and vice is very helpful for thinking about these
things is because they diagnose not just what has been done externally, but also what is
occurring internally. That's much more helpful for understanding oneself as well as other
people than simply to think about what has happened externally because what thinking
only about externals does is it makes the breach of external possibly very superficial
piece, the greatest defense. And that's why the eighth commandment has taken on the
proportions in our midst that it has, or that in other forms with traditions, with other
numberings of the commandments, being winsome takes on the same importance or
being gospel centered, which means winsome, which means nice has taken on
importance.
I mean, there are different words for this phenomenon in different groups, but the reason
that does, or the reason that externals and external peace and external niceness take on
such importance is because we don't really have much of a sense of what is happening
internally when sin is committed, that it's vicious, that it's destructive, that it proceeds
from the heart and so forth.
[Speaker 2] (51:04 - 53:43)
Where there is no unity, the appearance of unity is all the more necessary. Yes, that is
correct. Yeah.
Yeah. All right. So for my part, I'll just, I'll go on record and say that greed and the other
image in my life that, that tends to give me trouble.
I realized the image of exchange. I don't care for Washington. I like Benjamin a lot more.
He's my favorite image of exchange. That factor out of the book of Revelation also
remains at play. You know, while the radicals want to always pin the tail on the mark of
the beast, somewhere underneath this all, it's been the coinage of images and our
hoarding of them for ourselves to the detribution of the poor.
There's been the problem all along. It's why the civilizations rise and fall. It's why
Jerusalem is rejected again and again.
When Jesus is in the temple, says, throw me the coin, you know, whose image is this? It's
all kind of been there. As I wake up again in February of 2024 and chart a course toward,
I don't know what economic scenario, quote unquote, the world has ahead of me along
with my own need for vanity and submission to the, whatever stories, the talking image
in my mirror had given me for so many years and dropping that at the cross of Christ
and right beside it.
And that's why I'm saying it publicly here. The manner in which I let the story of the US
dollar tell me how to feel day in and day out. I mean, dear Jesus, let me repent and teach
me a better way.

It's just so sad. These little tiny pictures on pieces of paper. And the more that I put it in
that category, you know, as I think about the bills that'll be due and I guess I go, hold on.
Okay. How many little idols do I have to wrap up here and send somewhere digitally to
make sure they all get happy? They got their household gods for the week, right?
That to me has been a tremendous freedom. It doesn't mean that all the problems are
gone, but this framework of the seven deathlies is where I'm getting it. And then, and
recognition that the human capacity for image worship is unparalleled.
We are redeemed. So let us walk at liberty as those who are wise and do what our flesh
is about, right? And again, let the word of the kingdom be the thing that drives us to and
for and with each other.
[Speaker 1] (53:45 - 59:30)
The connection between images and vanity in any given, any given vice is an interesting
one because it links what we've been talking about with the sense of vanity, I think as
futility that we haven't talked as much about, but is certainly there whenever either
Solomon is considering life under the sun, not above the sun, but under the sun. Or when
Paul is talking about why are you enslaving yourselves again? If you could be saved
through the law, then Christ has died in vain.
And that sense of futility to one's life is the one that I think is probably haunting most
people. So they might have, they have various images filling their hearts. They're
pursuing this, they're pursuing that.
Those are probably going to be second order or third order things. I mean, it's not that I
think it's impossible that family is an idol for many people. I don't particularly think it's
helpful when people don't really know how to organize their family time or discipline
their children to just denounce family as an idol in the sermon and move on, as if you've
done your job, because probably their family life, which is worthwhile sacrificing for, is
highly disordered, poorly managed, because second and third order things are
overtaking everything, particularly the family's time and life together. So this is
something, especially for preachers, like, please understand what is actually occurring in
people's lives so that you have some insight into what is actually wrong, rather than just
denouncing things that, you know, maybe in 1950 people were taken care of as a matter
of course, but they're not today.
But what's going to happen is that even, let's say your family is an idol, the problem
here, and Solomon knows, he's got plenty of family and plenty of accomplishments and
ecclesiastes, is that it turns out that the things that you're striving for are, they prove to
be vain. And when Paul talks about striving, therefore, he talks about having put other
things aside. And when you put other things aside, this is where, you know, you're not

going to be a human being who has no passions, who has no desires.
What you need is for those things to be reordered. That's the purpose of the virtues as
opposed to the vices, is that a virtue is not a human being who who now behaves like
some kind of theological robot. I have met theological robots in the flesh.
They do exist in the Lutheran Church, but that's not what I mean. But that you turn into
somebody whose passions or whose desires or whose sight or intellect or whatever,
whose powers are turned to good ends. That's what the virtues are, right?
It's the turning of man to good ends. I guess we've been denouncing that. We've been
saying that Christianity is a flight from virtue.
I think that made some sense at some time. I don't think it makes a lot of sense now.
Christianity is instead the renovation of man, which involves a change from vice to
virtue.
That's a message of long-standing, and that's what happens in the resurrection. It's not
like in the resurrection we are absent all virtue, but that we are completed in virtue in a
way that we obviously are not before then. But the idea that there just is no virtue or
virtue is not worth pursuing is really the idea that finally love, which is the summary of
the commandments, is itself vain, and that is not something the Bible says.
So even Solomon can say that so much of life is vain. The stuff you thought mattered,
your career ladder, your sense of this is my job title, whatever it is, that was vain, yes.
But to fear God, that is also to love and trust in him, is not vain.
So love is not some kind of vanity. The talents you've been given to work with are not
vain. The one who lives in vain is the guy who buries his talent.
So I think the idea that virtue is somehow the enemy and vice is not, that was a mistake.
That was a mistake when we started talking that way. Because what it meant is that we
begin to talk as if the things occurring in people's lives are not actually occurring in a
way that for centuries and centuries and centuries, not only by those evil Roman
Catholics or something, but for centuries and centuries, we were trying to figure out
what is the matter with people?
And we said, they have these vices. Here are some lists. It's not everything, but it's a lot.
It's a lot of what's going wrong with them.
[Speaker 2] (59:31 - 1:01:16)
Well, we're kind of almost out of time here, but it's not a bad place to have one piece of
news from the week, which is a little video that sufficed or arose with Naib Bukele in it.
He is the president or was president of El Salvador. He was under, they were voting to

have him be reelected.
I'm not sure how that news did turn out, but he is answering a question to a BBC reporter
about the supermax 70,000 K security prison, where 70,000 murderers from El Salvador
have been rounded up and put there by the government to bring peace to the nation. It
would seem, and it's a beautiful illustration in me, Adam, of what you're just talking
about, where the reporter is so caught up on a narrative, attempting to expose the flaw
in punishing the person accidentally that he misses that this man he's asking the
question of is trying to take care of a nation of families with kids and grandmas and all
this other stuff who are just tired of 70,000 gang members running the country. He goes
off, the president goes off. It's beautiful.
He's like, we don't get mad at you. You have a king. We let you have a king, but you
want to come in.
Your ideas have failed us, though. That's the main thing. We've tried your ideas.
We've tried your ideas. We've tried your ideas. It's the very same thing.
We're going to solve this problem of violent gangs with niceness and kind of a subtle,
soft touch, just in case a mom gets upset somewhere. So your thoughts on that.
[Speaker 1] (1:01:16 - 1:04:15)
Yeah. Well, I mean, this is a truism in theology as a narrow subset of things humans
think about, but it's true in all realms of life because you're dealing with divine realities,
which is the person who is against the law set opposite to the law, the antinomian, is
always also a legalist. That is someone obsessed with the law.
So both those people who are really the same person, they're always looking for
perfection where it can't be found. Now, it's different how they express that. And it could
be the same person expressing completely opposite opinions, totally contradictory stuff
at one time or another.
So with Bukele, if he brings order to a country completely governed by criminals for
decades, then they will be legalists and demand absolute perfection in the way that he's
doing that in a realm that is not possible. And so if you bring relative order to your life,
you know, the legalist will demand more, which is impossible before the resurrection.
Okay.
So they will demand the impossible in a legalistic way. They will then with the criminal or
with the person whose vices are destroying himself, be far too soft. It doesn't matter.
You can still be a Christian and do that or think that it's fine. Okay. Because you're
baptized or whatever your excuses, you can be a gang member.

It's fine. It's totally fine to have this secret society of violent men. That's cool.
You know, I'm going to make sure that you don't serve too long in jail, right? The
antinomian and the legalist are the same person. Okay.
And that's why they will say completely opposite things in various realms, because
fundamentally, they're looking for perfection through the law. And when they don't find
that they will react either by acting like you're supposed to have it legalism, or they will
act like, because you can't have it all search for order, all search for law in the in the
government, or in one's family life or something is futile and stupid. And that person is
really the greatest danger in any of these realms, government, church, family, whatever,
because that person is trying to seek a life that has no order.
And that's not the life God gives. He doesn't give life without giving order. The body, the
bones of the body have an order, let alone the soul.
The virtues and the vices provide you some order, some scaffolding, some some bones
to articulate right in the way that the bones structure, the skeleton structures, the
human body. And that's a good thing. And that clarifies your thinking.
And that that also sorts through the images of the heart to give you greater
understanding and wisdom.
[Speaker 2] (1:04:17 - 1:04:27)
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[Speaker 1] (1:04:27 - 1:06:03)
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