Paul Sutton is a Church of England curate (trainee vicar) at St. Leonards, Exeter.
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Psalm 8, Book of Common Prayer, translated by Myles Coverdale.
O Lord, our Governor, how excellent is thy name in all the world!
Thou that hast set thy glory above the heavens!
Out of the mouth of very babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength, because of thine enemies, that thou mightest still the enemy and the avenger.
For I will consider thy heavens, even the works of thy fingers, the moon and the stars which thou hast ordained.
What is man that thou art mindful of him, and the Son of Man that thou visitest him?
Thou madest him lower than the angels, to crown him with glory and worship.
Thou makest him to have dominion of the work of thy hands.
Thou hast put all things in subjection under his feet.
All sheep and oxen, yea, and the beasts of the fields, the fowls of the air and the fishes of the sea, and whatsoever walketh through the paths of the seas, O Lord our Governor, how excellent is thy name in all the world!
Welcome to the Psalms with me, James Delingpole, and I'm really looking forward to talking about Psalm 8 with Paul Sutton.
Welcome to the Psalms, Paul.
Thank you very much.
Paul, I've done very little research, as is my wont.
Tell me about yourself.
Well, I think even if you had research, you wouldn't be able to find that much.
I'm just a humble Church of England curate, at least for a little while longer, and so that means I'm kind of at the last stage of my training to be a Church of England vicar, working down in Exeter, at St.
Leonard's, Exeter, and before that lived in London for about 10 years.
Right, OK.
I imagine that it must be quite difficult being a curate and would-be vicar in the Church of England at the moment.
Well, I mean, these rules apply to all churches, by the way.
I mean, you know, I'm sure that Roman Catholic priests have a similar problem.
But if you're one of those old-fashioned Christians who believes in God and the Bible, isn't that a bit of a barrier to entry?
Well, let's hope not.
I mean, I don't think it is.
I think...
On the one hand, you're right.
The Church of England has fumbled all kinds of things over quite a long time, and it's looking like fumbling more and more.
Those who are optimistic about the C of E want to say, well, actually, it's still got a totally solid biblical basis.
You know, it does believe in God, and at least in theory, everyone has to sign up to that, and much more.
But I think you're right.
If you're a bit more pessimistic about it, which I certainly am, then, yeah, you do look around and think, Okay, there's so much good that is going on in this, and I imagine far more good than either you or I will ever actually see, because it just happens in the background where you don't spot it.
But yeah, it does feel like there's some serious crumbling at the foundations.
I'll tell you what the Church of England has got, and you can't take that away from it.
It's got the liturgy.
It's got the Book of Common Prayer.
And we're going to be talking about... Call me old-fashioned, call me biased, but I think my favourite versions of most of the Psalms are the Coverdale translation, which is used in the Book of Common Prayer.
I'm interested you'd say that because obviously in previous Psalms episodes you've gone with the KJV and I've always thought, oh James you know you're somewhat traditionalist but what about Coverdale?
So I'm pleased to hear that you're a Coverdale fan as well.
I'll tell you the story behind that Paul.
I've been, with Christianity as with everything else, I've been on this massive journey in the last Three years.
And I'm learning stuff all the time.
So I originally thought, well, the King James Version is the thing because it's King James and it's the Bible that one reads if one is an Anglican.
And then I realised that No.
There is an older... I mean, Miles Coverdale's translation predates the King James Version by what, about 60 years?
Yeah, I guess so.
I mean, certainly, from what I know, a lot of the psalms picked up in the King James Version were, they were kind of just redrafts of what Coverdale had done.
In the same way that, to be honest, most of the King James Version of the Bible was just subtle redrafts.
It went through various edits before it sort of reached its final 1611 form.
But yeah, Coverdale's there.
Absolutely great at the beginning.
So we've got this, we're going to do the Coverdale version which which begins um oh lord our governor how excellent is thy name in all the world the kjv goes for oh lord our lord i think which is quite tricky isn't it does it how i take it it's got the capital letters for the first lord and then the uh just regular upper you know uppercase then lowercase for the second lord because they're different words in the original and you know that you must know whenever it's a capital l
you know the whole thing in all capitals that's Signifying God's personal name, whatever Jehovah as it used to be called, It's exactly that!
way as sometimes people call it now so it's distinguished between those two two things in the second one oh lord our lord as you say is something more like governor or ruler i wondered if you go for it though because i was it always makes me chuckle when it says oh lord our governor it's kind of you know you don't hear the word governor apart from in a sort of del boy scenario it's exactly that it's what it's it's i i it makes me think of minder yeah yeah Governor!
Exactly, O Lord Our Governor.
It's like cab drivers call you Governor.
Occasionally.
Old-fashioned cab drivers.
Yeah, yeah.
Cheers, Gov.
Exactly.
So you've gone for that one, then, have you?
I'm just going to desperately check whether they haven't mistranslated any of it.
O Lord Our Governor, how excellent.
Just a name in all the world.
I'm glad you volunteered to do this psalm, Paul, because this has been sitting in my in-tray, waiting for somebody to do Psalm 8 with me.
And it's one of my favourites, because in Terralia, it's the psalm that justifies my fox hunting.
You said this!
Because it's clear to me, and correct me if I'm wrong, Reading the Bible, and reading the Psalms particularly, which I've been doing now fairly solidly for a year or so, and I realised that the Biblical version of the world, the things that the Bible enjoins us to do,
Often clash greatly with the way we've been trained to think about the world now.
Everything from feminism to animal rights to gay marriage.
These are things that are really inimical to what the Bible tells us.
People don't like that.
Like you said at the start, you know, It is difficult being a kind of just basic, just basic classic Christian in the Church of England today because you think these things are just sort of obvious if you're a Bible reader.
Okay, they're still challenging and there's not, I'm not saying it's easy to grapple with it and there are hard questions about it all, but yeah, I think that's the point where you feel things are increasingly out of step with what Christians have always believed, not just what the Bible says, but you know, there are still many people who haven't bowed the knee to Baal Yeah, well luckily!
Exactly.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, exactly.
So take me through the psalm, because you're obviously as fond of it as I am.
Well, it's a psalm about hierarchy, when you just trace through the whole thing.
The whole thing is about who's in charge of what, and who's where in the pecking order, for want of a better word of it.
So it starts off by speaking of the Lord, our Governor, our Lord.
And I think it's not just incidental that it says our Lord, it's saying Governor, it's saying Ruler, to underline the fact that The Lord really is, in fact, in charge of everything.
How majestic is your name in all the earth?
Sorry, I haven't got Coverdale, but I've only got the King James one.
You have set your glory above the heavens, so that's the kind of anchor point for the whole thing, that the Lord, who, as we'll find out later in the psalm, made the heavens and the earth and everything in them, is so gloriously, majestically in authority over all those things that his glory is above the heavens.
He's very much not out of the picture of The hierarchy of the world.
But he's right at the top of it, unimpeachably, unquestionably at the top of the tree, as it should be.
He made it all.
He sustains it all every moment.
And so it starts off by professing how majestic the Lord's name is, anchoring the kind of structure, pecking order of the world in that.
And then it bizarrely kind of flicks all the way to what we feel is kind of the It's not necessarily the bottom of the pile because we know that babies are not actually the bottom of the pile, they're the bottom of our pile in a way.
But it immediately flicks to talking about babies and infants out of whose mouth God has established strength.
Now we'll come back to that verse at the end because I think that's the verse which It's sort of most puzzling in a way, but it makes sense.
I'm glad you said that, Paul, because it puzzles me.
Out of the mouths of very babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength.
I mean, I sort of get it, but I'm glad you're going to talk about it later.
Well, sort of get it is always good enough.
I mean, the more I read the Bible, at least, the more I just think, on a good day, I sort of get it.
And there's a kind of infinite pool to play in.
But it's important that we can get it to some extent.
And I'll make a proposal, at least, for why I think that verse is there.
Then it goes on in the third verse to talk about kind of the real nub of why the psalmist is writing this psalm, which is that when you look around you in the world, In the universe, it does feel like we're not at the top of the tree.
It feels like we're in something of a subordinate position.
And that's true looking at the physical heavens, the skies, which are described as the works of thy fingers.
Lovely little detail that it speaks later on about the works of God's hands.
The heavens are described as the works of his fingers, as if he's sort of, you know, just casually flicked them into place.
Speaks about the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained.
By the way, when it talks in the Genesis chapter 1 creation account about the stars, the stars are truly a throwaway.
So it speaks about the other things that God created.
And then it just says, and also the stars.
It's just literally in one word in Hebrew, and the stars.
And obviously, the more we discover astronomically about the universe and the stars, the more we're like, hang on, that's not a small part of what God made.
If anything, we're a small part of what God made.
And I think it's precisely that sense of the greatness The expanse, the above us-ness of the stars, which is what the Samas is meditating on.
Because that's where he gets to in the fourth verse, what is man that thou art mindful of him, and the son of man that thou visitest him.
Now I think, I just think this is a familiar feeling to all of us and it's part of the reason why people, I think this is true of very religious people and it's also true of people who are trying to run away from their religiousness I think.
People love going out into nature and they climb up to the top of some Tor and Dartmoor and they wild camp in the wilderness of Patagonia somewhere so that they can see the stars.
Why do people want to do that?
Because it puts us into a context which we find I don't know.
Both comforting and unsettling.
And people will truly live for that.
You'll often come across people who will talk about how hiking is my religion and the wilderness is my religion.
And in a sense they're right to because coming across the might of the universe and nature is something of a transcendent experience.
Or at least it puts us in touch with something that is greater and bigger than ourselves.
Yes, I'm thinking there actually of the Romantics, of the Romantic movement.
Yeah, absolutely.
And you think of, well, Thoreau and the German Romantics and you think of the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich and you think of our own Romantics and it's all about this search for the sublime.
Yeah, that's exactly what I was gonna say, which is the sort of the terror and magnificence of nature Except they sort of made Nick.
I mean, I think this was the beginning or Part of the process towards this sort of new paganism that we've got today.
I'm not I'm not convinced that the romantics were We're much interested in God.
They sort of deify nature, don't you think?
Oh, definitely.
And I think that's why what the psalmist is doing is a much richer reflection on nature than just that desire for a kind of generic encounter with the sublime, because ultimately, you know, if that's the best you've got, some sort of neurons firing that makes you feel like you're small or important or a strange combination of both.
And that's kind of the best you've got.
What the psalmist is doing is way more radical than that.
Or just way more insightful than that, because it's not even talking about us in contrast with the signs of nature.
It's not even talking about us in contrast with God.
It's specifically talking about us in contrast with the angels.
So that's what it says in verse 4 and 5.
What is man that thou art mindful of him, the son of man that thou visitest him?
Thou madest him lower than the angels to crown him with glory and worship.
And it's not just that bit there that's talking about angels, because when it says about the stars in verse 3, within the biblical picture of the sort of symbol world of the Bible, the angels and the stars are pretty closely linked, for kind of obvious reasons, that there's a host of them for a start, an innumerable host, they're above us, they're in heaven.
You know, the things that are in the physical heavens, i.e.
the sky, the space, God has designed them to be symbolic of the things that are in The heaven that he created is the dwelling place of the angels and all that stuff.
That's why when the scriptures talk about God's throne room, it has a blue floor, which we think, that's just bizarre.
Why does it talk about having a sapphire floor?
All of the little details that are seen in those visions of God's dwelling place, they're kind of sky-related details.
The stars that populate the physical sky and the angels that populate God's heaven are meant to be symbolically drawn together.
In other words, the psalmist looks on a night sky, presumably without any light pollution in those days, and sees this innumerable host, which you really couldn't count, and obviously they could only see a tiny fraction of the stars that actually exist.
It looks on that innumerable host and is rightly reminded of the angelic host.
And obviously, people have had various beliefs about angels throughout all of history, but the Psalmist is writing about angels and the stars, connecting them together, because he feels the same thing about both, which is What are we compared to those things?
What are we compared to the innumerable lofty stars?
You know, the ancients weren't stupid.
They realised that the stars were massive because they realised they were impossibly far away.
They possibly didn't know quite how far away or how massive they are, but they realised that the stars were both massive and innumerable and, to all intents and purposes, changeless because they're just the same from generation to generation.
They look at the stars and think, we are nothing compared to that.
And knowing as they did that angels exist, They kind of felt the same thing about them, and then they connected them together and felt... It's almost a kind of moment of... The psalm is almost reflecting on the sort of angst.
That's an anachronistic word, but the angst of feeling that we're very small.
Where do we fit into this hierarchy?
If God's at the top, it looks like we're certainly not in place number two.
What do you think?
I think in the KJV it says a little lower than the angels rather than lower than the angels.
But thou madest him lower than the angels to crown him with glory and worship.
So it's saying that God made man to be inferior to angels.
And nevertheless, is that the missing word which we have to understand?
Nevertheless, to crown him with glory and worship?
Well, we'll come to that because I think it's exactly that question which the writer of the book of Hebrews exploits.
So the writer of the book of Hebrews throughout the whole book is reflecting on various themes or passages from the Old Testament.
And generally, the way in which he's doing that, I mean, it says in the KJV that Hebrews are written by Timothy.
Traditionally, people believed it was written by the Apostle Paul.
I think most people today say, we don't really know who it was written by.
But whoever it was, was reflecting on the Old Testament and saying, hang on, this doesn't quite make sense.
What's actually going on here?
And realizing that basically, if you plug the answer, Jesus, into these things, then it gives you some answers.
But we'll come back to that in a minute, because I guess we have to kind of I've got to grapple with the fact that this is randomly talking about angels.
I mean, do you think most people... Do you think your listenership is generally on board with angels?
Yes, totally.
Two of my listeners have seen angels, to my knowledge.
Right.
Yeah, yeah.
One of them was made of sort of bright yellow light.
In fact, they were listening to one of my podcasts with Dick, and she turned to her... We were talking about Christianity.
And she turned to her husband and said, sort of, where are you on this?
And he said some sort of husband-like answer.
And she looked in the corner of the room and there was this... an angel standing there, bright yellow light.
And she was at pains to assure me that she was neither drunk nor stoned at the time.
It was just... it was there, the angel.
Another one saw... an angel, but it was grey.
It was like...
Well, maybe one day.
on a roof and it was protecting her from something.
So yeah, I think people are on board.
I mean, I'd love to see an angel.
I totally believe that they do exist. - Well, maybe one day.
And I guess the thing about angels is, you know, actually a lot of people who don't yet believe in God, do believe in angels?
So when they do the surveys and look into, you know, people's beliefs and stuff, about a third of people in Britain claim to believe in angels, which I'm actually surprised at how low that is.
I would have thought all people would, but there you go.
But that's often higher than the people in the same surveys who will say they believe in God.
Even more disturbingly, people will say, you know, more people will say that they believe in the devil than they believe in God.
And it's interesting, I can't remember, it was a long time ago someone was on your podcast A number of people, actually, I think, who've basically felt like, over the last few years, they've become so convinced of the existence of a malevolent spiritual power, they've kind of thought, well, hang on a second, if there is a malevolent spiritual power, there must be one that's a good one that is greater, and, you know, have come to some belief in God as a result of that.
I think that's a kind of reasonable route to believing God.
Yeah, I think it's a logical assumption.
I think angels are a kind of logical system.
Some of the kind of Christian tradition has sort of reasoned towards angels existing by saying, we know that there are things that are alive and material, you know, us and cats and blades of grass and stuff.
And we know that there are things that are material but aren't alive.
Well, doesn't that imply that there must be something which is alive but not material?
And, I mean, that's just one of the various different angles people have come to to say that angels exist.
And to be honest, the most convincing one is just the sheer weight of testimony about it.
You know, you've just said you've spoken to two people, like I can think of loads of people I've spoken to who have, obviously sometimes implausibly and sometimes presumably just wishful thinking or falsely, but there's so much reporting of it that you think, You know, how many people are you going to disbelieve in order to maintain an anti-supernaturalism?
The answer is often a lot.
Isn't it kind of key to being a Christian?
I mean, look, if you're going to be a Christian, surely you should take the Bible seriously.
It's not just a collection of stories.
This stuff is real.
And if you're going to believe in this Super powerful deity, creator of all things.
But you can't see him but he's everywhere and he can just flick his fingers and the stars can be created and things like that.
It's not exactly a stretch to think that he created a few angels in the process and also you've got... I mean isn't that the nature of...
of our existence that we've got this earthly existence and then we've got going on simultaneously this war between the fallen angels and the heavenly hosts, the ones who are still up there.
I mean that's not stuff that's been invented since the Bible, that's in the Bible isn't it?
Oh yeah, yeah.
I love that this stuff is so obvious to you because I think lots of people would just think, hang on a second, but I think you're absolutely right.
And there is a kind of, right at the beginning of the very first verse of the Bible where it says, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
I think there's a good case to be made for what it then goes on to say, and the earth was formless and void.
I think it's a good case to be made to say that, you know, it's almost like that, the whole story of the heavens, which we know starts there in, in verse one of Genesis chapter one, it begins there and then
It sort of dips into our story at various points but we really by no means know the whole story of what's going on in the kind of heavenly part of God's history and some bits we have to sort of deduce about it I suppose and some people don't like that they kind of want to say well I'm willing to go with the bits that are here in black and white but I don't want to make the deductions
And so, for example, people don't, yeah, they'll say, well, it never says really clearly in the Bible why the demons fell.
So the demons are the evil angels.
And it's clear that they are angels who in some way fell away from their sort of original dwelling, as it says in Jude, verse six.
So people don't like to do the deductions, but we kind of have to, because the Bible is talking about our story, the world of the story of the earth.
The history of humanity and insofar as that intersects with the history of the angelic spiritual world, we've got little glimpses of it, but we only have glimpses.
And I find it really interesting to think that it's quite plausible that the angels only have glimpses of our world as well, because it says in, I think it's in 1 Peter, maybe it's 2 Peter, About how the angels long to look into these things, these things being about Jesus.
As if, in some ways, they don't have all the information about it.
We kind of long sometimes to look into the angel thing.
You said you'd love to see an angel.
And they kind of look into our world with almost the same intrigue, that they've got little bits and pieces of the story, but not the whole thing.
Now I don't think it's quite symmetrical in that, because In some ways, well, this is kind of what Psalm 8 is ultimately about, that the story of what is going on with humanity is actually a more important story than what's going on with the angels.
And, well, some of the angels, I take it, don't like that, and they're the angels that became demons.
That's a good, that's a really interesting point.
Because it does rather explain, I mean, if you believe as, um, It tells us in 2 Corinthians that the devil is the god of this world and the devil is essentially one of the fallen angels, isn't he?
I mean, that's kind of the deal.
If that is the deal, then it does explain why, for example, the ruling elites do terrible things like torture and murder children.
Because they want to affront God, because they want to get at God for creating man in his image, and they resent it.
And so the best way to get at us is to engineer these horrible, horrible acts which must hurt God greatly.
Well, absolutely.
The fallen angels are almost defined by their hatred for humanity, obviously as an expression of their hatred for God.
There's a really interesting section of all sources, the Quran about this, where the Quran is telling the story about Satan's rebellion.
And it talks about how, this is in the voice of God, we created mankind, then fashioned you, then told the angels, fall prostrate before Adam, and they fell prostrate, all save Iblis, which is their name for Satan, who is not one of those who make prostration.
Allah said, what hindered thee that thou didst not fall prostrate when I bade thee?
Iblis said, I am better than him.
Thou createst me of fire, while him thou didst create of mud.
To be clear, I don't think what's said there is precisely true.
In fact, I think it's explicitly false, because it posits that God told all of the angels to fall prostrate before Adam.
Whereas we read in Psalm 8 that humanity was made a little lower than the angels, or for a little while lower, however you want to take it, that in humanity's original state, we were lower than the angels.
That's precisely why the Samus has this angst or puzzle mood, really, about war.
If we're lower than the angels, then in what sense have you crowned us with glory and honor?
And in what sense are all things under our feet?
And, you know, as much as I think what the Quran's saying there is explicitly false, it's nevertheless talking about a pretty plausible theory of why the angels fell, which is it was revealed to them by God that they were going to worship one of these, like, dust mite creatures that they'd just seen made.
To whom, you know, for the The angels, from what we can see of them in the scriptures, are enormously different from us.
Enormously powerful.
Their intellect is greater than any human being.
You know, they obviously can move instantaneously.
They can do loads of stuff that we just think of as, well, literally god-like, because obviously many people have worshipped angels as gods.
They seem to have loads of wings as well.
I mean, loads of wings.
Confusing numbers of wings.
Yeah, like the seraphim that are revealed in various places, but in Isaiah chapter 6 in particular, it talks about how they have wings that cover their faces.
They have six wings in total, two of them to keep them afloat, so to speak, and four of them to cover various body parts.
Yeah, within the Bible there are various different categories of angel that are revealed.
And there's been disagreement throughout the history of the church about that, but certainly the cherubim, the seraphim, the thrones, angels and archangels, and then a few in between, the sort of dispute about where they fall in the hierarchy and stuff.
But yeah, even the angels themselves are created hierarchically among themselves.
Yeah.
Actually, as a digression, and this is going to... I don't like upsetting Catholics, but where are you on the St Michael Prayer, for example?
You know, the St Michael Prayer, which was written by one of the popes in the 19th century, I think, because he recognised how bad things were getting, and he felt that he needed to enlist the support of The Archangel Michael.
We tend not to do that in the... Protestants don't pray to Michael, that's definitely right.
Yeah, I was also reading about the St Michael prayer recently.
I think it recognises something accurate about the world, which is that there is a spiritual clash going on in the background of everything.
We know from the Bible that Michael is somebody who disputed with the devil and so presumably is a powerful one among the angels because the devil, Satan, is a particularly powerful leader of the fallen angels.
So he must be powerful and presumably hasn't gone into retirement, presumably still involved in the spiritual battle in some way.
He's the general.
I mean, he's in command of the heavenly host.
I mean, obviously, subordinate to God.
But God, I suppose, is what?
The supreme commander.
And he would be...
Something under that.
I mean it's hard to say because within the angelic hierarchy as traditionally conceived, the highest of the angels are the ones that are basically just purely devoted to God.
They're just like in his presence, they've got all the wings to kind of cover them so that they're, you know, decent before him.
But they're kind of not really interested in the things of the world or its battles.
So that's the cherubim and the seraphim in the thrones.
In some ways they're higher and they're regarded as higher because surely like the closer to God you are, the higher in the pecking order you must be, kind of thing.
But yeah, certainly among those angels who are directly involved in the world's affairs, which traditionally understood would be The Principalities, the Archangels and the Angels.
Yeah, Michael seems to be, well, he's one of the only two angels whose name we know from the Bible, alongside Gabriel.
Obviously Catholics have Raphael from there because they have extra books in their Bible.
But yeah, where am I on the St Michael prayer?
Like I was saying, I think it recognises something which is often overlooked about the world, which is that there is a spiritual battle going on in it, that the angels are actually the helpers of God's people.
Like it says in Psalm 34, I think, that the angels of the Lord encamps around the saints.
And that is actually literally true.
So there's an absolutely bizarre passage in 2 Kings where The Syrians are attacking the people of Israel, and Elisha is the great prophet at that time.
It says, When the servant of the man of God rose early in the morning and went out, behold, an army with horses and chariots was all around the city.
And the servant said, Alas, my master, what shall we do?
He said, Do not be afraid, for those who are with us are more than those who are with them.
Then Elisha prayed and said, O Lord, please open his eyes that he may see.
So the Lord opened the eyes of the young man and he saw, and behold, the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire all around Elisha.
And when the Syrians came down against him, Elisha prayed to the Lord and said, please strike these people with blindness.
So he struck them with blindness in accordance with the prayer of Elisha.
It's just like one of those crazy moments where it just sort of, I mean, in this case, literally opens the guy's eyes and he sees what's actually going on in the world, which is that You know, presumably you could have just walked through those hills and had no idea of what was going on, but it turned out that, you know, not just in a metaphorical sense, but in some actual real sense, angels were encamped in order to protect and defend God's people.
So yeah, so far as the St Michael Prayer, like, kind of recognizes that, like, good idea.
Obviously, as a Protestant, I don't really see the need to pray either to saints or to angels.
Um, because we have this extraordinary access to God through Jesus Christ and, you know, I think it's quite right.
I was praying the other day for, that God would protect, well, in this case my church and my family and stuff, by means of his angels, because that feels like an appropriate thing to pray and maybe that's what is meant by the St.
Michael Prayer.
I guess I'm kind of like, maybe it comes to a point where you're sort of splitting hairs and saying, look, we're praying the angels will protect us.
That's a good idea.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think that you're bang on about that scene.
Elisha, you said, was the... Elisha in Two Kings Six, yeah.
Yeah, I'm convinced that that is how it is.
I'm not sure whether you need to take DMT or some sort of other psychotropic to be able to see this other world, but I think there's no question that there's the seen and the unseen.
Angels are all around us and they sometimes take visible form and that sometimes they take human form.
I think sometimes we meet people who are actually angels in disguise, and they're... Yeah, and this is like... I mean, it's in the Bible, it's a very strong kind of thread in Jewish tradition, which is a motivation for hospitality, which is, you know, you really don't know whether this stranger that you show hospitality to is in fact an angel.
And, um, yeah, like, I don't think that's just a kind of whimsical thing.
Obviously it's based on the fact that Abraham actually did show hospitality and it turned out he was angels.
But, um, you know... That's right.
That's a real thing.
Crazy.
Crazy to think it.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
No, exactly, yeah.
So, um, what's that, what's that, um, Wim Wenders film, the, um, in Berlin, with the angels?
I'm like a film illiterate.
I've honestly no idea.
It's really good.
It's got lots of angels in it.
You sold it to me already.
I'll look it up.
Hang on.
Keep going.
Tell me more stuff and I'll look it up.
Tell you more stuff about the angels.
Oh, it's called Wings of Desire.
Wings of Desire, and this is about angels in Berlin.
With Bruno Gantz, who's, yeah, he's great, he's a good angel.
And it's, do you know what, it's unlike, unlike so many, at the risk of digressing here, which I love doing anyway.
I was hoping you'd digress, it's good.
I was watching, over Christmas, with my boys, we were watching A film I'd never seen before called Scent of a Woman.
You know, it won Oscars for Al Pacino.
OK.
And I was put off by the title.
I just thought, oh, it's so kind of icky, the whole idea of a film called Scent of a Woman.
But it's about a kind of maverick lieutenant colonel who's in the US Army, who for various complicated reasons has gone blind.
And he's a difficult character.
It does its thing, and he teams up with this boy from this ritzy private school.
And they go on this jaunt over Thanksgiving to New York in which they learn from each other and stuff.
And the boy at the Ritzy private school has got problems which are resolved in the final scene with the help of this blind, fiery, but essentially decent, decent military man.
And it's got some good bits in it, but I just... I'm at the stage in my understanding of the world now where I think that Hollywood is manipulative, schmaltzy, dishonest, and that film being the Oscar-winning character is definitely schmaltzy and ultimately dishonest in what it tells you, the set-up at the end.
The resolution of the film is based on a premise that is unimaginable because it wouldn't happen in the private system.
It's just made-up crap to tug at the heartstrings and to get a satisfying resolution.
I'd say that that Wim Wenders film is not like that.
Increasingly I find myself drawn to art movies because art movies do not manipulate you quite so shamelessly as mainstream Hollywood films do.
Well, film is such an incredibly effective medium.
I mean, like I say, I'm basically a film illiterate.
I very rarely watch films.
But when I do, I'm always like, this has got the power to shape your whole desires and thinking of world, which is, I mean, like why it's such an amazingly influential and effective art form, but also therefore a battleground.
You know, the stories that are going to be told in Hollywood in whatever other, you know, output of movies, they're not going to be stories which tell this deep, rich truth about the world.
They're not.
They're not.
You know, that kind of stuff.
I have to play on those themes because otherwise it would be boring.
Like only the real world where God actually rules and heroes actually suffer and die and then win, rise again like Harry Potter. - You know, only those stories are actually good stories because they're the story that God has actually woven into the world.
Oh, Harry Potter is satanic then.
You must realise that.
You know, I'm starting to be, it's one of those things which I just desperately don't want to have to recognise because on the one hand, you know, it is a fundamentally Christian story in terms of the final outcome is the defeat of Evil by good, particularly through the hero losing his life, essentially.
And yet at the same time, it mainstreams things where if your child was actually going to a school of witchcraft and wizardry, that would be a fundamentally bad thing.
Of course, like fiction, it's fine to have magic in fiction.
One can't be too puritanical about it.
I'm inclined to be puritanical.
I don't know, Paul.
You're going to go all in on Harry Potter?
I find myself increasingly Of the view of all those much-mocked Americans in the Midwest who believe that rock music is evil and that Hollywood is satanic and you keep the kids away from this stuff.
I'm not saying that it would be possible to do so, but I think they do have a point.
The entertainment industry is controlled by the Enemy, and that's the Enemy with a capital E as well.
All of it.
All of it.
Yeah, and I think that's what I was trying to say about film as a medium, which is it has such an enormous power to tell people true stories.
It has to tell true-ish stories because they're the only good stories because they're true.
And yet, yeah, it's fundamentally not leading people into the actual finally true story, the kind of eucatastrophe, as Tolkien called it, which underlies all the rest of it, which is the story of God making the world, saving sinners by saving his son, all the rest of that stuff.
By the way, let's change the subject totally.
Where are you on the cosmology of the Bible as against the one we're taught by scientists?
I mean, you can tell where I'm coming from on this one, but for example, That the Bible talks about, sort of, waters above us as well.
I mean, I'm not sure that... I'm not sure that the heavens are as described to us by astronomers.
I think that... I suspect that the Bible's closer to it.
You want to go back to those medieval heavens?
Oh, right!
Well, biblical heavens is what I'm after.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I think...
I mean obviously there is water above us, that's what the clouds are, and when there's a lot of clouds above us there's a lot of water above us.
What's more interesting to me is that in Genesis it talks about the springs of the great deep as well as if there's a lot of water below us and somehow that water is involved in the flood and all that, you know, the things you read about in the scriptures and you're like oh goodness I really don't know how this matches with any of what mainstream, and when I say mainstream I mean Unbelieving science says about this.
I'm not quite sure how to grapple with all those things and put them together I mean, I do think I believe in You know that space is this vast Expanse, you know with billions of light-years and the closest star is several light-years away and you know that there are However many hundreds of billions of stars out there and some of them we can't see.
I do.
I don't think like the medievals thought that the sky really was like a series of transparent domes on on which various planets and stuff moved.
What they said was not false in that it was phenomenologically an accurate largely accurate description of you know what they could see above them.
But I don't think you have to choose between them.
I don't think you have to say well either either you've got a biblical heavens, the expanse of the heavens and the vault of the heavens, or you've got outer space with millions of light years and supernovas and stuff.
It's just like, no, no, no, they can totally fit together.
Maybe there's a bit that I'm missing which you can...
I think all the supernova stuff and all that black holes, I think it's just all made up stuff.
No black holes.
Yeah, it's designed to sort of reify space as a thing.
I'm not sure I believe in all that.
But anyway, as you say, it's totally not essential.
So maybe we should get back to the psalm.
Get back to psalm 8.
This has been off the sidelines.
Made us love the angels to crown him with glory and worship.
So that's the nub of the kind of puzzle of this psalm, really.
If it said that we're lower than the angels, then why does it immediately follow by saying to crown him with glory and worship or glory and honor? - Yeah.
It then goes to explain about the position of humanity in relation to everything else.
Thou makest him to have dominion over the work of thy hands.
Thou put all things in subjection under his feet.
You think, hang on a second.
We've just seen in a couple of verses previously talking about the moon and the stars as the work of thy fingers.
Now it says thou makest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands.
Presumably it's not making a hard distinction between the fingers and the hands.
It's saying humanity was made to have dominion over the work of God's hands.
And then even more explicitly, thou hast put all things in subjection under his feet.
And obviously it's going to expand upon that and say, all sheep and oxen, yea, and the beasts of the field, foxes and the like, fowls of the air, fishes of the sea.
The fowls of the air and the fishes of the sea, and whatsoever walketh through the paths of the seas.
I love that phrase, the fishes of the sea.
Fishes rather than fish, that's what he said to Coverdale.
When I was at prep school we sang these psalms.
You're very reluctant to sing these psalms when you're eight or nine because they're just like dirges.
But now it's there in my head forever, the fowls of the air and the fishes of the sea.
Yeah, like I remember singing that one about bringing his sheaves with him.
I was like, what does that even mean?
But at the end of some psalm, it stuck with me all those years later.
Oh, and don't get me started on that.
That George Herbert song that one sang.
The one about something, something through thy laws makes that in the action.
Fine, and you think, what?
What is this crazy stuff?
But I think about that poem like...
Most days.
Now that it's stuck in my head.
Because it's saying, you know, who sweeps the rumours for thy laws makes that in the action fine.
It's just such a lovely and just affirming poem of ordinary work.
What does it mean though?
Who sweeps the rumours for thy laws makes that in the action fine?
Right, what's it called?
We're going to look it up.
It's called The Elixir by George Herbert.
yeah so we're now well off the office we're now 90 off piste which is the way i like it um so it's a it's a poem about the fact that there is a tincture so it's using a lot of um kind of alchemical terms um There's a tincture which actually can turn everything to gold.
Teach me, my God and King, all things thee to see, and what I do in anything to do it as for thee.
Not rudely as a beast to run into in action, but still to make thee prepossessed and give it his perfection.
This is where it becomes a bit more obvious, I think.
A man that looks on glass, on it may stay his eye, or if he pleaseth, through it pass, and then the heaven a spy.
So that's saying, you can just look at a piece of glass, you can focus on that, but it's designed to be a window to higher and greater things.
All may of thee partake, nothing can be so mean, which with his tincture, and here is the tincture, here's the thing which changes it, for thy sake will not grow bright and clean.
So it's saying there that that's the kind of magic medicine that can turn everything into something that's clean and worthwhile.
And then he begins to apply that into just ordinary life.
So a servant with this clause makes drudgery divine.
Who sweeps a room as for thy laws makes that and the action fine.
So it's just saying, this is, you know, often it's an encouragement to me when I'm doing drudgery things, encouragement to my wife when she's, you know, changing it, another nappy and all that kind of thing, which is that actually God has made it so that doing things for him, in obedience to him, whether they are of value, whether in obedience to him, whether they are of value, whether they contribute to the GDP, whether they feel particularly satisfying to us or not, are of massive value before him.
They're pleasing to him.
And that's why the final verse, this is the famous stone that turneth all to gold, for that which God doth touch and own cannot be less for less be told.
So it's just saying what it says in various places in the New Testament, Colossians 3 and stuff, which is that even the work of a slave, a Christian slave, doing what they're told by their master, however tedious and degrading it might be, Um...
They are storing up treasure in heaven by doing those things.
And Herbert, in his great genius, has realized that the alchemy thing works quite well to sort of pick out the way that actually those things are profoundly valuable to God.
Before we go back to Psalm 8, I would recommend a book to you, and actually I would commend it to all viewers and listeners.
It's a book called Music at Midnight, and it's a critical biography of George Herbert, who is arguably, certainly one of the greatest poets in the English language, and particularly if you're a Christian, I mean, he's our greatest Christian poet.
I mean, he wrote for God, and he wrote He wrote poems worthy of his love.
And this book is a critical biography, so it takes you through the poems and really explains them, including the elixir.
I'd really recommend it.
My only problem with that book is that even though the author is a former dean of Christchurch, a man of the cloth, he actually buys into Evolutionary theory, I think.
He keeps making these slightly dismissive comments about George Herbert's worldview, his 17th century worldview, which of course we've grown out of all that now and we don't quite believe in.
And I'm thinking, this is what's gone wrong with the Church.
You've got men of the cloth in the Church of England who don't actually believe that God created the world.
Right and it is just like the most basic creed or thing that you know the very beginning of the creed says I believe in God the father almighty creator of heaven and earth of all things visible and invisible if you don't believe in God made the world you don't believe that in angels and stuff well that's like basic creed or Christianity and okay I you know exactly how that played out at what time in history
I don't think that's at the very core of any kind of creed questions within Christianity, but I don't know.
Yes, I also find it hard to be patient with that.
I mean, do you think technically, given that the creed is a sort of affirmation of the tenets of the faith, do you think technically you can even be a Christian if you don't believe that God created the world?
Well, immediately you start thinking of special cases and like people with very profound learning difficulties who God has somehow reached out to them and they basically know the name Jesus.
People who are mentally impaired.
I'm talking about vicars and bishops.
Those people shouldn't become bishops.
I'm absolutely with you on that.
I bet they're the ones most likely to become bishops.
I bet it's almost a barrier to entry if you actually believe in it.
It certainly is a barrier to entry in the higher echelons of the Church of England.
The more you really seriously believe in the stuff that is kind of obviously there in the creed and in the Bible.
I mean like technically in the Church of England, although they've watered this down over the decades, clergy do have to sign up that they believe in the Christian faith and as it's expressed in the Bible, in the creeds, in the historic formularies, bear witness to it and stuff.
So there is a kind of There's meant to be a basis to it, but it used to be that you had to say, "I believe in everything in the 13 known articles, right down to the death penalty and all that kind of stuff." Whereas now, I don't think we're...
And what's the death penalty for?
Well, just in the 13 known articles, which is the kind of confessional basis of the Church of England.
Whenever someone says, "I believe in the 13 known articles," I always say, "Do you believe in the death penalty?" Because Article 36 or something specifies that that's why the magistrate has the sword, so that it can put to death wrongdoers and stuff.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
Don't tell me you're not a good Anglican, James.
Clearly I'm not.
Do the 39 articles stipulate what merits capital punishment?
I don't think so, no.
That's odd, though.
I thought, isn't the deal thou shalt not kill?
Isn't the deal that God takes care of that?
Well, you or I definitely shouldn't kill people.
And I think what it's affirming is the belief in the Bible, in the Christian tradition, that some people have been given the right to take life where it's warranted.
Does the Bible say that?
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, it speaks about how, you know, people who shed blood, or by man their blood should be shed, obviously in the Old Testament, Many things are assigned a capital penalty.
Even in the New Testament it speaks about how the magistrate bears the sword, and I assume it says sword rather than, you know, keys to prison for a reason.
I mean, it's not so that they can kind of give them a slap with it.
Like, it is saying that there's a legitimacy, God has given a legitimacy to execute his judgment on people to certain government figures and magistrates and stuff.
Now again, like, obviously the classic objection to that is Well, what if people get executed wrongly?
To which the answer is, well, God sees that too.
He knows it all.
He puts it all right.
He's the only final just judge.
Look, don't hear me making a strong plea for the Church of England to return to its confessional roots and have more capital punishment.
We've got to be realistic about where we are and the arguments about the abuse of capital punishment and stuff.
I'm sort of wise to that.
The point I'm making is more just, people who sign up to the 39 Articles, do they even realise that's what they're signing up to?
Yes, I was thinking, he will not leave them in his hand, nor condemn him when he is judged.
That's the bit in Psalm 37 when the ungodly are constantly trying to slay the righteous.
We're getting now to my, we've got now actually to my favourite bit, which is the one that explicitly says that we are in charge of the animals.
And I remember having an argument about this with some typical Church of England vicar at a lunch who was saying, yes, we have rather modified our language since man was given dominion over the animals.
We now say, we now prefer the word stewardship And I say, oh, this is exactly what is wrong with the Church of England.
This wet notion that somehow, somehow, oh, we got the translation wrong.
And actually, Psalm 8 wasn't telling us the hierarchy.
It wasn't being as explicit as we think it is.
And actually, our understanding of the Bible should be tempered by modern environmentalism, whatever.
Well, I do believe that mankind has been given dominion over all of creation.
And when I say all, I really do mean all, including the angels.
Make sure we don't miss that because that's kind of the nub of the whole thing.
But yeah, it speaks here openly about all the things which in Genesis 1 and 2 are entrusted to the man to rule and to have dominion over and to subdue, which includes
Sheep and oxen, well obviously sheep and oxen by definition are subdued, they're domesticated, you know, animals that have been appropriated to human use, but it's also true that we have dominion over the beasts of the field, things that seem untamable whatsoever walketh through the paths of the sea, all of them are assigned to be under humanity's dominion.
That humanity, that dominion does involve care, but it doesn't involve a kind of sentimental care.
I'm always struck by, there's a proverb, In the book of Proverbs it says, the righteous cares for the needs of his animals, but the kindest acts of the wicked are cruel.
And obviously we know from the rest of the Bible that righteous people who care for the needs of their animals also kill their animals, because killing to eat animals is a totally legitimate thing to do.
That's part of what they've been given to us for.
And nowhere, at least nowhere after Noah in the Bible, is there really a case to be made that it's wrong to eat meat.
But it is definitely wrong to be wantonly cruel to animals.
And, um, well, we all know that intuitively.
Whenever you read the kind of early life backstory of serial killers and stuff, um, they tend to start off with acts of gratuitous cruelty to animals.
And, um, I, you know, on the one hand, you've got those deliberately torturing animals for the sake of sheer pleasure.
On the other hand, you've got righteous people, you know, thankfully slaughtering The lamb that they've cared for, for the needs of their family, using every bit of it with a grateful heart, turning it into a sheepskin rug, as well as eating the meat and boiling the bones for broth and stuff.
Those are the two poles of right treatment of our animals.
And then there are things that fall in the middle of that.
And I think one of the best Testimonies really to the kind of people, you'd have a better personal experience of this, the kind of people who go fox hunting are people who are generally care for the needs of their animals.
They're not actually human people.
Not only love, they love their horses, obviously.
They love the hounds, but this is what so many people don't get.
They love the fox as well.
They respect the fox.
The fox is, yes, he's the quarry and the adversary to a degree, but he's also the thing that makes everything possible.
We call him Charlie, you know, because we want to personify him, because he's a...
He's as much a part of this ritual as the rest of us.
And I think the other thing that people don't get about fox hunting, they really should.
I mean, anyone who is squeamish about foxes being killed...
Should be appalled at the things that would happen if fox hunting didn't happen, which is essentially they get shot.
And the problem with shooting foxes is A, it's indiscriminate.
You kill healthy foxes and young foxes and old foxes alike without discrimination.
But also it doesn't discriminate...
With fox hunting, the fox almost always gets away.
I mean, if it's healthy, it will get away, because foxes are more cunning than a pack of hounds.
They'll run you round the houses, or round the fields, but they won't... They'll get away.
It's only when they are sick or old, when they are actually much more of a menace, because then they tend to predate on lambs and things, on chickens, on things that are easier to kill if you're old or sick.
So, there's a sort of... I see animal sentiment... I mean, like feminism, and like gay rights, and like transgenderism now, all these movements are actually...
Whatever they say on the surface, they're really about undermining the Bible, undermining biblical values.
So the feminist movement tries to teach you that men and women are the same, which they're clearly not.
We have delineated roles in the Bible, it's very clear about that.
And the fact that we've lost so many elements of these roles, I think, is why our society is so sick.
And in the same way, That the whole kind of animal rights and vegetarian movements, and worse, the vegan movements, have completely muddied the waters.
And what I like about those lines in Psalm 8 is, you're right, they don't enjoin man to, yeah, you can mistreat animals because you're the boss.
They just set out the deal, clearly.
Yeah, and it's not...
Yeah, I think if you're seriously concerned about cruel treatment of animals, then the very few, as you said, weakened foxes that...
May or may not get tracked down by dogs is really the least of your concerns.
I mean, all you have to do is watch one video about battery farming and you kind of think, hang on a second, what's the real big problem with treatment of animals in the Western world?
I don't think it's a few guys... Non-competitive child trafficking?
Yeah, yeah, precisely.
The things that matter, that are actually sacred in a way that clearly, you know, it's legitimate to take the life of of animals for basically quite a lot of different reasons.
Like, you know, if you're hungry, you can take the life of an animal.
But it's never legitimate, outside of certain very narrowly justified circumstances, to take the life of another human being.
You know, whether they're a child or an unborn child or any adults.
So, you know, it definitely seems like there's a kind of inversion.
Maybe this is what you're trying to get at, that you end up valuing animals more than human beings and trying to put them on a level together.
And Salme is trying to say, there is actually an order, a pecking order to creation, which is a good thing.
God, the creator, outside of it all, at the top.
The animals underneath humanity, and then in the middle... Well, let's come back to this thing about humans and angels, because I think this is the nub of the song.
In the middle, you've got this question of where is our place in it?
We know it's above the animals.
Well, some people, as you said, don't know that.
But in reality, unless you're going to live a very odd life, as a matter of fact, you do recognize that we are over the animals and are able to use them for our benefit and stuff.
The question is, If angels seem so much greater than us and so much more powerful and literally above us and they can do things we can't do, then why does it say what it says in the middle of the psalm about, Thou madest him lower than the angels to crown him with glory and worship.
Thou makest him to have dominion over the work of thy hands.
Thou hast put all things in subjection under his feet.
And let me just come to what the writer to Hebrews says about that passage because When I first saw this, it blew my mind.
It says, for unto the angels, I'm giving you KJV because I know you like that.
Unto the angels hath he not put in subjection the world to come, wherever we speak.
But one in a certain place testified, saying, what is man that thou art mindful of him, or the son of man that thou visitest him?
Thou madest him a little lower than the angels.
Thou crownest him with glory and honor, and did set him over the works of thy hands.
And here's the comment on it.
Sorry, here, one more bit.
Thou hast put all things in subjection under his feet.
Here's the comment.
For in that he put all In subjection under him.
He left nothing that is not put under him.
So it's making the same observation we've just been making, which is, hang on a second, there seems to be a tension between this little lower than the angels and the fact that it's saying everything is under the authority of humanity.
Then it says, but now we see not yet all things put under him.
But we see Jesus, who was made a little lower than the angels for the suffering of death.
"crowned with glory and honor, that by the grace of God, "he should taste death for every man." And I think that the thing which just, I'd never quite seen before until I was meditating on this psalm is that the psalm actually makes sense when you realize that, okay, not in totality, but in its sort of prototype of Jesus Christ who has actually but in its sort of prototype of Jesus Christ who has actually been exalted above
Humanity has now found its proper and intended place higher in the hierarchy than the angels.
That's why I think the Quran, although the way that it expresses it is wrong, is onto something when it's talking about why it was that the angels fell.
Because God was saying, perhaps as I speculate, that God was revealing to the angels This little dust creature, you are going to worship one of these.
And that seems absurd.
And yet, it was precisely what Jesus Christ was and is and did.
When God became a man, he became the object of the angels' worship.
But he was a baby, and he was a man, crucified on a cross.
And now, he has been crowned with glory and honour.
Having been raised from the dead and ascended into heaven.
Like, yeah, right, he really does have glory and honor now.
And we see that.
We see now that already he is exalted above the angels.
But the psalmist is still musing on that way back a thousand BC or whenever this was written.
We're kind of not musing on that, but we're able to see with the greater clarity, yeah, it's correct to say that everything in creation, including the angels, is
Subordinate to humanity or at least at this point to one man and you know it's it's only in and connected to that one man that the rest of us are kind of above the angels because you know they're infinitely more powerful or the rest of it than we are but they worship a man and that's why I said at the start that you know we've got this story of the heavens and the story of the earth and they're not symmetrical because The story of man is a more important story than the story of angels, because God became a man.
I mean, it says it again in that same section in Hebrews, it says that surely it's not angels that he helps, but he helps the offspring of Abraham.
He didn't become an angel.
He became a human being.
And that is, the more you meditate on that, the more you think, whoa, okay, God's story is, you wouldn't make it up.
It's absolutely wild.
And yet, that's how it is.
It is wild, isn't it?
Yeah.
And I like your phrase, that's how it is.
Because I think a lot of people, even people who consider themselves Christians, don't really grasp how clear some of the things that the Bible tells us are.
They sort of almost dare not believe this stuff.
Or rather, I think it's maybe worse than that.
They've been so corrupted by our culture, by the lies of our culture, that we're taught to undermine the truth of Christianity.
That they can't sort of fully subscribe to the Christian vision.
But subscribing to it in some measure is the essence of being a Christian.
And I think, you know, that's...
The kind of phrase that's attributed to the devil, I don't think this is actually in Milton, but it's picked up in Milton's famous phrase about Satan, better to reign in hell than serve in heaven.
The demon's kind of motto is non serviam, I will not serve.
And in some ways that is the motto of everyone who Hears of Jesus Christ and just says, I'm not serving him.
Not a crucified God.
That's ridiculous.
That's contemptible.
That's foolishness.
It's a stumbling block.
Come on, I'm not serving that.
I'm afraid.
I'm not afraid.
Not afraid, that's the wrong way to put it.
I'm afraid that's how it is.
Actually, God really has exalted that one who was crucified.
He's exalted him to the highest place.
You know, that's not just a kind of, to own the angels because, you know, they rebelled against God, so let's get back at them.
Why did God become a man?
He didn't do it just so that he could score points against the angels.
He became a man in order to redeem fallen humanity.
And that's just a glorious thing.
Which is remarkable because, and it is expressed in that psalm, that line we said, you know, what is man that thou art mindful of, or the son of man that thou visitest him?
And it's like us, Really?
We are God's favourites?
Yeah, yeah.
We have to commit to some kind of human exceptionalism, and this psalm totally underwrites that.
It's not an exceptionalism that's like, okay, we're the top dogs of everything, because the whole thing is framed, literally framed in the psalm, top and bottom, by how majestic is your name, thy name, in all the earth.
God is above all these things, but within the created order, humanity, although for a little while it was lower than the angels, its final destiny is to be higher than the angels.
In Philippians chapter 2, it's talking about, I just never quite noticed before, why it is, the reason that is given for why Jesus was exalted to the highest place.
It talks about how He was humbled and became obedient to death, even death on a cross.
So that's what he did.
And then it says, therefore God has exalted him to the highest place and given him the name that is above every other name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.
And that's, when it says every tongue, it means every tongue in heaven and on earth and under the earth.
So we're back to this idea of the angels and the demons.
Every one of them is going to confess that Jesus is Lord.
That is to say that he's God, that he's been exalted.
But why has he been exalted?
He's been exalted because he was obedient to death, even death on a cross.
I just think, how is that not good news?
Why would God do all this stuff?
He only did it because he loved people who were unlovable.
Obviously it's easy for us to say this as Christians.
We ought to be thinking, why would anybody not accept this?
Like, this is the answer to every question and every puzzle, or at least it promises a final answer to every question and puzzle.
Well, that's kind of part of our mission, isn't it, Paul?
It certainly is!
I mean, it's obvious to us, but there's lots of people out there to whom it ain't obvious, and I'm kind of... I've got this policy, the Don't Frighten the Horses policy.
I don't want to come on too strong, but I just want people to know I mean, maybe just having a chat about Psalms is a sort of way of introducing some of these concepts without ramming them down people's throat, because there's nothing worse, is there, than somebody coming on to you too strong with their particular message.
I mean, it used to freak me out.
Christians used to freak me out.
Well, yeah, I know, and... Yeah, it's a sort of occupational hazard, I guess.
It is.
I just wanted to... I think this is really germane to this discussion, and I'm not going to...
I can't see my finding another song where it really works, but I think this is a really important point I want to make.
Because what I said about feminism, and what I said about transgenderism, what I said about all these movements...
As I said, they're not really what they say they're about.
Underneath, they're about something fundamentally satanic, I believe.
They're all rather, I mean, okay, maybe satanic is just a wrong word, but anti-biblical, anti-God ultimately, anti-Gods, anti-the hierarchy that is so explicitly described in Psalm 8.
This is really interesting.
So you probably know, I read a book a few years ago called Watermelons about the environmental movement.
I discovered...
On the way.
Somebody called Julian Simon who was known, he was an economist, he was known as the Doom Slayer because he was constantly disproving all those predictions of doom that the Malthusians were coming up with about scarcity of resources and how we were running out of time and blah blah blah.
Good.
But he noticed a shift in the way that books about
Um, animals, um, changed from a kind of a biblical, hierarchical one, like the one outlined in Psalm 8, uh, to a sort of new environmentalistic, sort of stroke ecologist view of the world, where man was just one creature among any, among many, and we were really no better than a virus or a bacteria or whatever.
And I just wanted to Yes, here we are.
I would say at the top of my head, but it's better if I read it.
According to Simon, it was that the environmental movement had taken on the qualities of a secular religion to which any form of dissent, however grounded in fact, was viewed as an abominable heresy.
Conventionally, in religious tradition, nature had been seen as something that God had created for man.
In the new green religion, said Simon, man was no longer at the centre of things.
And this is a quote from Simon.
Ecology teaches us that humankind is not the centre of life on the planet.
Ecology has taught us that the whole Earth is part of our body and that we must learn to respect it as we respect life, the whales, the seals, the forests, the seas.
So many people have imbibed this stuff, unaware that what they are accepting is an explicitly anti-Christian view of the world.
Simon traced this dramatic shift in attitude by comparing old and new scientific textbooks.
In the past, he noted, the descriptions of many birds included evaluations of their effects on humanity in general and on farmers in particular.
A bird that helped agriculture was more highly valued than a bird which harmed it.
By contrast, the current textbooks Often evaluate humankind for its effect upon the birds, rather than vice versa.
In the old religion, the human species was enjoined to be fruitful and multiply.
Under the terms of the new one, it was little more than a cancer for nature.
But the old one, Simon argued, had it right.
And that is, you know, I 100% agree with that, and that is the story that is told with such power by all of those Attenborough documentaries.
You know, as much as I love watching the clips of those, you know, fish eating a bird or whatever it is with my kids, The message of the documentary is that humanity is a scourge, and if we stopped interfering and stopped doing whatever we do wrong in various habitats, then we wouldn't be destroying these precious animals' habitats.
On the one hand, it's not a totally irredeemable idea, for some of the reasons we've already talked about, to do with cruelty, and also to do with the fact that There is a Christian insight or impulse underlying it, which is that animals, they go about doing their stuff, killing each other, eating each other, wiping each other out.
And we don't talk about a genocide of the termites or whatever, because that's just what they do.
Whereas we actually could be morally culpable for the way that we treat the environment or animals or something like that.
I'm not saying that we are, but we at least in theory could be.
Often there are undoubtedly practices which are culpable.
But you can't actually hold that difference between humanity and the animals and say that human genocides are actually really bad, which for the record they are.
You can't actually say that unless you're positing some kind of human exceptionalism and some kind of accountability above humanity.
You can only do those things if you are at the very least some kind of theist, and the only kind of true theist that there is, given that the only true God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, is Christianity.
Deeply, it is only Christian theistic impulses which underwrite a true... Even our most twisted instincts about the environment are underwritten by Christian assumptions.
I'm thinking particularly now of my audience, which is Sort of people who would define as awake or have gone down the rabbit hole.
Yeah, heretics, heretics.
Who are red-pilled.
And I think that some of them at least would have problems with the very notion of hierarchy.
Because they would say, well of course it's kings and queens and potentates who are Running the world on lines which are not in our interests and they don't care about us and why should we submit to their authority?
And I sort of sympathise with that.
In the same way there's a scene in Paradise Lost where Satan is describing the set-up in heaven and he talks disparagingly about warbled hymns.
You know, that's what they do in heaven.
It's just, yeah, bleurgh.
What am I saying here?
I'm saying that there is within us, those of us who've seen what damage is being done to us by the ruling elites and how little they care for us and how thoroughly immersed in evil they are.
It's hard for people to then go, yeah, but God is quite clear that he wants hierarchies.
So how would you sort of answer that?
Well, a lot of the ruling elites and the people who pull the strings are not legitimate hierarchs.
You know, they're people who have usurped a position within that hierarchy, as I understand it, at least.
And even those people who are actually, you know, in government, they've been assigned to be kings or queens or prime ministers or something, even those people That can only be done in its proper place where it's recognised that above them is a higher and totally perfect power.
And again, hats off to the Church of England that in its prayers for the Sovereign, both in the modern prayer books but also much more potently in the traditional one, it's totally recognised that that's You know, recognizing whose servant he is.
That's what it says about the king.
And yes, I have much sympathy with people who feel like hierarchy is the source of all kinds of suffering and pain in the world.
And I think that's true.
When Jesus so wisely said, the poor you will always have with you.
I think he was recognizing in a deeply realistic way that oppression you will always have with you.
You'll always have wicked rulers and you'll always have People who abuse or usurp their position.
But I don't think that... I think saying as a response to that, well we'd be better off with no hierarchy at all.
One is folly, because you can't have that.
Even within the world, let alone outside, obviously.
You cannot escape the actual rule of God.
But two, whatever alternative you get, Reduces to the same thing you can be as frustrated as you want with power and oppression and ultimately hierarchy You just can't avoid it.
You're gonna you're gonna get it one way or another and I Am in great sympathy with you.
You know, I am I am among that listenership who feels hard done by you know when I see the various ways in which extraordinarily powerful people are screwing up the world in the financial system and All kinds of things.
I can't conclude as a result, therefore hierarchy is bad.
I think hierarchy is inevitable.
The thing that we ought to be praying and longing for is for good rulers and authorities, which is precisely why the Apostle Paul And joins Christians to pray that they be able to live peaceful and quiet lives.
I think it's saying basically, you know, that you, that you wouldn't be oppressed as something that's a right, a right and necessary thing to pray for, because yeah, hierarchy in a broken world doesn't work out so well all the time, but you don't have another choice.
And, um, there is, there is a top of the tree and that top of the tree is, uh, Lord, the Lord, our governor.
And he doesn't miss a trick of any of those things.
I think that's the best I've got.
Yeah.
Well, I'm cool with that part of it, anyway.
He definitely has got our back.
Ultimately.
And he wins.
That's why I do feel sorry for the... I keep saying this, I do feel sorry for the Satanists and the Fallen Angels.
The team that... The people who've chosen to back them.
It's like backing...
I don't know, I don't know much about football, but backing a team that's not very good against a team that is... Yeah, yeah, it's like, you decide to start supporting football and you immediately pick somebody who's already going to be relegated and, yeah, it is like that.
Yeah.
I mean, I think, um... What's Toby Young's football team called?
That would be like supporting them.
QPR, isn't it?
QPR, yeah.
The, um... Yeah, one of the striking things about the role of the demons in God's salvation is Their involvement of it is a complete own goal.
It's truly self-defeating.
So various people are described in the Gospels as responsible for Jesus' death, right?
Obviously the soldiers who actually crucified him, the people who handed him over to be crucified, Pontius Pilate in a way, he was crucified under Pontius Pilate.
But also Satan himself is regarded as involved in it.
It talks about how Satan entered into Judas to do the deed which handed Jesus over to be crucified.
I've always thought about that.
It's like, did he have any idea what was going to happen?
Can you read anything?
Did he really think it was a good idea to kill God's son and that there wasn't some kind of what C.S.
Lewis calls deeper magic that was going to complete, not only undo that work, but make it the cause of his own destruction?
And there's a certain just remarkable, almost laughable hubris to it that's saying, yeah, I'm going to pursue this line of trying to destroy God's son and I'm sure it's going to work out.
And actually, when you start tracing back... What could possibly go wrong?
What could possibly... Exactly, it turns out it was... Everything could go wrong from there.
Do you think, going back to that line that we haven't quite finished discussing... Out of the mouth of very babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength, that thou mightest steal the enemy and the avenger.
Do you think that's another example of the Psalms being prophetic?
Do you think that is a reference to the Christ Child?
Yes, I think it can't just be a reference to Jesus because it speaks about multiple, plural, babes and sucklings.
But I think it is primarily a reference to him.
I think it only really makes sense once we see what God is doing in sending his son as a tiny baby before that as a single cell.
It's saying that
Oh Lord our Governor you are so much greater than the things in this world that you've actually set things up so that the very weakest are the means by which you overthrow what appears to be the mightiest and I think that's how that once you start to see that and plug that into the rest of the psalm because let's face it the rest of the psalm doesn't talk about enemies and avengers and stuff but here it does talk about it you realize that
That same kind of topsy-turvy, first shall be last, the older shall serve the younger, motif which you get throughout the scriptures, is also one that applies on the cosmic scale.
So the angels, if we understand Genesis 1 correctly, were the first things to be created, or at least before the things of the earth.
And man, humankind, was the last thing to be created.
And the weakest of the humankind is a babe in a suckling.
And again, it's through those very things, the weakest things, that God has seen fit to overthrow what appears to be the mightiest things.
And that is actually what's going on in verse 5, when it says, Thou madest him lower than the angels to crown him with glory and worship.
It's actually saying, yeah, humanity has been set How low can you go?
You can go as low as being a tiny baby, and then you can go as low as being crucified.
And yet it's by means of that very thing, that very weakness, in the case of that first two, the infancy of Christ, it's by means of those things that God has in fact turned things over, kind of flipped it all around.
So I think it is talking about exactly what you were Yeah, what you were mentioning there.
It's saying, it's a Christmas verse actually, and there aren't many Christmas verses around as jobbing pastors and preachers realize, but it is a Christmas verse because it's saying that ultimately the means by which the powerful are overthrown is a baby.
Have you ever come across the poem by Robert Southwell, which is, it's only half of the poem actually, but it's called This Little Babe.
No.
So it's a great... I mean Robert Southwell was a Jesuit priest in the 16th century and those guys, much as I am a Protestant, but those guys were like proper boy zone heroes going around hiding in people's houses and they were being hunted down by mad sadistic witch hunters and stuff.
But Robert Southwell, although he spent almost all of his life in like a Jesuit training house in France, You know, English was a language he probably didn't actually know that well.
He wrote some amazingly punchy, very, very Anglo-Saxon poetry.
And I'm not going to read it all because it would be too much, but there's a Christmas poem of his that has this idea of the baby as a combatant, really.
This little babe, so few days old, has come to rifle Satan's fold.
All hell doth at his presence quake, though he himself for cold doth shake.
For in this weak, unarmèd wise, the gates of hell he will surprise.
And I think it is that idea of surprise, coming back to what I was saying about why did the devil try and kill the Son of God?
Was that a really good idea?
You know, it does seem that In the blindness of the enemies of God, he said, no, I will not serve God.
I will not bear the knee to what he says I must bear the knee to.
Yeah, it was actually a surprise.
You know, they thought God's going to fight fire with fire and power with power.
But God actually fights power with weakness and, um, you know, kind of judo style flips them.
Yeah.
That's totally it.
I think that it's, it's Something that people underestimate about Christianity.
What's the guy, the mixed martial arts fighter who's converted to Islam, you know, what's his name?
Andrew Tate.
Andrew Tate, exactly.
And you know, he said, his sort of rationale for choosing Islam over Christianity is that Christianity is just not hard enough, you know, it's not defending itself properly.
And I'm thinking there is actually nothing harder than the serial martyrdom that takes place throughout the history of Christianity, starting with Christ himself.
You've got to have bigger balls than anyone to be able to prepare to do that on the basis of an afterlife.
On a kind of an act of faith.
People don't get that.
At all.
And it's because they don't see that God just likes turning things upside down.
He casts down the mighty from their thrones.
He just does it.
You read the Bible, he just does it again and again and exalts the humble and weak.
Put down the mighty from their seat.
Well, Paul, I think we've covered off Psalm 8 pretty well there.
I've enjoyed it.
I think we've gone deep, yeah.
It's been nice to talk about it.
Well, it's good.
No, do you know what?
I always enjoy these chats because even though I recite these psalms in my head every day, when I have these chats, they always illuminate the psalms for me.
I learn new things about them.
Well, good, I'm glad.
I mean, there's a practically limitless amount to learn about it.
Every time I reflect on it, I see something slightly different.
That's just remarkable, that a text could be that rich.
It's also really good.
It's like a form of therapy for me.
It's like when I sit down with somebody who is literate and one can have a good chat about classic literature or whatever.
In the same way, there aren't that many opportunities to really grapple with the details of Scripture, except when I get a tame vicar on, or similar.
Tame?
Tame vicar.
That's the best thing I've been called all day.
Well, I wish you good luck in your quest to find a parish which is worthy of you.
Well, I think I'm about to come to the end of my time as a curate, and I'm 99% sure that I will not be carrying on as a minister in the Church of England.
Which is, I fully intend to carry on as a minister, so perhaps watch this space.
What are the options, out of interest?
If you can't find a place in the CV, where can you go?
Well, I think the hard thing is, among the evangelical churches in England, Most of them are Baptist churches, or churches that are Baptistic in that they only baptise infants, adults rather than infants as well.
And I think, you know...
I definitely think that it's right and necessary and good to baptize babies of people who are Christians.
It's part of God's covenant and his plan, so that's something I'm pretty set on.
So yeah, your options are pretty limited.
There are various sort of breakaway Anglican churches, Presbyterian churches.
There are plenty of things out there which, in a way, are the Church of England, but better.
Because, although the Church of England has a huge depth of... It is the deep church in England, for sure.
Yeah, there are other Anglican options, or Presbyterian options even better, out there, which are... But yeah, there are loads of them, so it's a big thing.
I feel very, kind of, in two minds about it, because I was writing for our parish magazine the other day, and observing that there had been a church here, They're on this very site of St.
Leonard's for like 800 years or something.
And if there's another 800 years left in the world, there probably still will be, it will go through its crazy ups and downs and, you know, various different buildings.
And it's hard to imagine what the world in 800 years would be like if there is another 800 years.
Um, but yeah, there'll probably be people worshiping Jesus here then.
And it feels like that's, that feels like a significant thing to leave behind.
And yet, You know, I can leave it behind.
I'm just one small guy in a small part of the world.
Just get on with what I've been called to do in my life and let God sort out the rest of it.
Well, I was going to say, God has got your back.
He'll... Yeah.
Well, thank you.
Yeah, He does.
Well, you know He has.
That's the deal.
Anyway, it's been great talking to you.
Thank you so much.
And you've been a delightful guest and guide through Psalm 8.
Do you have a website?
Do I have anything to promote?
Not really.
I mean, if people are struck by anything I say, or they're in Exeter and they want to know what church they could go to because they hate the C of E or something, well, I can point you in the right direction.
So just email me paul.sutton at stleonards.church.
And if you really, I mean, if you want to find out more about, you know, if you go on YouTube and search for Paul Sutton St Leonard's, I'm sure you can find various things on there, but really nobody's going to want that.
So I give that as a vague possibility.
Okay.
Well, and viewers and listeners, I hope you've enjoyed listening to this podcast.
If you want to support me, please, Substack is my favourite place at the moment.
I think that's attracting more and more.
It's just more user-friendly than the other channels.
You can buy me a coffee.
But maybe even more important than either of those is Spread the Word.
I'd love it if you'd share with Christians and non-Christians alike.
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