Interview with Dorothy Greco, Author of Making Marriage Beautiful

Making Marriage Beautiful stands apart from the many marriage books that flood today’s publishing markets. In its pages, Dorothy Greco draws on her twenty-five plus years of marriage and her wealth of experience in writing and ministry to highlight essential components of a healthy marriage and exhort readers to aspire toward inculcating such a vision in their own relationships. Greco’s book and the principles she offers are motivated and undergirded by her Christian convictions, and reading the book is pure joy. With its lived wisdom and gracious tone, Making Marriage Beautiful is a unique and important resource. And, as our interview below demonstrates, there is plenty of overlap between our concerns here at MoralApologetics.com and the issues Dorothy considers in this volume, most especially questions of the value of persons and God’s provisions for meeting the moral standard. Marybeth Baggett: Based on what I’ve heard from you and on the book itself, it seems that writing Making Marriage Beautiful is something you felt called to do. On a Christian picture, this idea of calling is connected to the notion of human dignity, that God has created each one of us for a purpose, a specific way in which we image him. Can you talk a little about that in regards to your writing of this book? How do you feel that God prepared you to do this work? I’m especially interested in how he made this charge clear to you.

Dorothy Greco: Much like the story of Joseph, it can often seem that the place of our greatest pain or wounding intersects with our calling. I can see this clearly in my own life.

I believe that every follower of Christ must yield to the call to love their neighbors. Some of us are called to love specific people for a life-time. Neither of these invitations has come easily for me. Due to a challenging childhood, my highly sensitive nature, and some deep relational hurts, by the time I graduated from college, I had the emotional EKG of a cadaver. I mistrusted others and chose independence, rather than healthy interdependence.

I know it’s unusual, but I did not grow up inserting myself into romantic Disneyesque plots or dreaming of being swept off my feet by a knight in shining armor. About seven years after choosing to follow Jesus, I began to detect something stirring in my soul for my now husband. Because I was both guarded and insecure, we had an incredibly tumultuous dating relationship and engagement round one. He eventually broke up with me, and we did not speak to each other for nearly two years. When we finally reconnected, it was obvious that we had both changed.

In round two of our relationship, there’s been no shadow of turning, but we have also had to be intentional and work hard in order to have a solid, fulfilling marriage. We are both strong-willed, stubborn people who seem to have opinions about everything from the bathroom wall color to where the Christmas tree should go. Additionally, life has thrown us some long-term vocational and health challenges. As a result, sparks fly on a regular basis, and we have had to learn how to have productive conflict.

Throughout our 26 years together, we have both felt impressed and emboldened by the Lord to believe that Scripture is true and to step out in that truth. Practically speaking, that means though we’ve had a great deal of conflict, many disappointments, and significant loss, we continue to trust that because God called us to commit our lives to each other, He will empower us to love well.

When I approached my agent about writing a marriage book, she warned me that they are one of the most difficult genres to break into, especially if one does not have a substantial platform. My platform is modest, I am not married to a famous athlete or movie star, and I had no intention of doing anything scandalous in order to sell books. Despite her dire predictions, I strongly believed that God was nudging me to go for it. I felt a divine compulsion to write this book (maybe because I needed it)! After following Jesus for nearly 40 years, I’ve learned to trust the impulses and believe in his provision.

Baggett: Morality may involve rules and law, but as we know, guidelines and prescripts do not exhaust what living a moral life requires. As scripture teaches, love is the animating force behind the law (Matthew 22:40) and its fulfillment (Romans 13:8-10). In writing a book on marriage, did you find it challenging to balance offering particular advice, rules for readers to follow, with exhortations toward love, more holistically understood? If so, how did you address this tension? How do you understand the relationship between following rules and the law of love?

Greco: I really chaff at books with titles such as Forty Days to Transform Your Husband or Ten Steps to a Perfect Marriage. Though we might want it to be, life is not formulaic. We should not assume our relationship with God will be formulaic either. I certainly rely on both the specifics and the abiding principles which undergird certain rules (e.g. the Ten Commandments), but I have not found a rule-based approach to relationships at all helpful. It was not really a struggle for me to approach writing this book in a more nuanced and organic fashion.

I am, first and foremost, a sinner saved by grace. As such, I am always aware of my sinful tendencies whether it’s to curse someone who cuts me off in Boston traffic, or to withhold love as a passive-aggressive retaliation for a minor infraction committed by my husband.

In the case of marriage, it’s quite clear from both the Old and New Testaments that God is about monogamy. The clarity of Jesus’ words on marriage (e.g., Matthew 5:27-32) awaken me to God’s high standards, which exist for my own good, and then simultaneously reorient me toward Him. So if I’m being mature and living in a posture of humility, God’s rules strengthen and empower me to love more like Jesus.

Baggett: A point you made in some of the marketing material you sent along before this interview struck a nerve with me—you said that one of the hardest things you faced writing the book was ensuring that you had the integrity to do so, if any marital struggles you went through somehow undermined your credibility. This resonated with us at Moral Apologetics, since we’re writing about morality and ethics, and some might think that, in doing so, we’re claiming we’ve arrived. Of course we know we have not—as you know that sanctification is an ongoing process. Can you talk a little bit about how you dealt with this doubt while writing your book? Did this self-reflection reveal anything new to you about that process of sanctification? For purposes of this interview, I’m wondering especially how you think God uses marriage in that process.

Greco: It would have been super easy to write a book on having an awesome marriage while mine was less than awesome. (Who would know other than my husband?) The idea for this book actually emerged when we were going through one of the most painful seasons in our lives together. The crisis was not marital, but of course it deeply affected us as individuals and as a couple.

Because we had already been married for 20+ years and had been doing pastoral care for almost that whole time, I could have gone through the motions of being married and simply relied on my experiences to pull this book together. That felt rather disingenuous to say the least. As followers of Christ and leaders, my husband and I have always felt that our offering will be tainted and perhaps even poisonous if we lack integrity. We’ve each benched ourselves from doing ministry at various times along the way, knowing that we were not in a good place and needed to take a break.

I can assure you, I expediently confessed and repented of my sins when I was writing Making Marriage Beautiful. I have enough fear of the Lord and enough knowledge of Scripture to know that how we live matters a great deal to Him.

As I was polling friends about possible titles for this book, one response really struck me. This woman, who is in mid-life and has been married for more than thirty years, wrote, “I have been married a long time and don’t feel the need to learn more. I’m good.” I literally gasped and then started to cry. I immediately prayed, “God, don’t ever let me become complacent. May I always be willing to keep learning and keep growing.”

One of the most significant lesson I learned when writing this book (other than that writing books is so much more difficult than I ever imagined!) is that I have not arrived: I am not a marriage expert and never will be. I’m simply a middle-aged woman who endeavors to love her husband with a fierceness and consistency that allows him to flourish. Though we have experienced glimpses of God’s sublime love breaking into our marriage, learning how to love my spouse is a life-long process.

Baggett: Lately I’ve been meditating on scripture passages that explain fear and love as opposing forces (I John 4:18, for example), and so (in reading your marketing materials) I was especially interested in your description of newly married self as fearful. Can you talk a little about how you opened yourself up to your husband’s love? What risks did that involve, and how did you gain the courage to take that risk? Have you found that love itself, as you grow deeper in it, has given you more moral courage?

Greco: By the time I turned 21, I assumed that people were generally not trustworthy and if I made mistakes, I would be abandoned. That’s a lot of fear—and a lot of pressure to make no mistakes. Early on in our marriage, I attempted to be perfect in an effort to quiet my anxieties. Of course, anyone who goes down that road knows that not only is it impossible, but the pressure to be perfect causes more anxiety.

One of the ways I learned to trust was by incorporating confession as a regular discipline into our marriage. By committing to confess my sins, no matter how small, my facades fell. My husband saw me as the broken, weak woman that I truly am. Miraculously, he kept loving me. One of his greatest gifts to me has been a constant reassurance that he’s not looking for or expecting perfection. He has always been quick and gracious to extend forgiveness to me. Over time, we have accumulated a great deal of relational equity which we draw upon as needed.

And yes, feeling secure in his love and in the Father’s love has definitely allowed me to be more courageous in all aspects of my life. The deeper my identity in Christ and the more confident I am of my husband’s love, the more risks I can take—like writing a vulnerable marriage book! Truth be told, this level of freedom is exhilarating.

Making Marriage Beautiful can be purchased at Amazon.com. There is currently a special running for the Kindle version, selling for $2.99.

Interview with John C. Peckham: Author of The Love of God: A Canonical Model

It’s a real treat and privilege to introduce a new regular contributor to MoralApologetics.com: John C. Peckham (PhD, Andrews University). He is associate professor of theology and Christian philosophy at the Theological Seminary of Andrews University in Berrien Springs, Michigan. He is the author of The Love of God: A Canonical Model (Downers Grove, Ill.: IVP Academic, 2015) and The Concept of Divine Love in the Context of the God-World Relationship (New York: Peter Lang, 2014) and has published articles on issues of systematic theology and canon in journals such as Trinity Journal, Philosophia Christi, Andrews University Seminary Studies and Themelios. This interview is about his most recent book: The Love of God: A Canonical Model (Downers Grove, Ill.: IVP Academic, 2015).

1. The topic of divine love is a perennial issue. Why did you write this particular book, The Love of God: A Canonical Model?

God is love. Those three words are at the center of everything I believe about God. Yet, just what does that mean? How does God love us? The term “love” is a rather elastic one, defined in so many ways by different people. Popular conceptions and myths about God’s love abound. Over the course of a number of years of studying the theology of divine love, I came to realize that the beautiful and complex conception of divine love exhibited in Scripture is often muted, or even silenced, by the presuppositions of traditional and non-traditional theological systems. The love of God as depicted in Scripture turned out to be far better and greater than I could have imagined and I’ve had many of my own presuppositions challenged and overturned in the process.

1. Your book engages a number of conflicting conceptions of divine love. Can you introduce our readers to the theological landscape relative to this issue?

While there is a broad spectrum of views regarding God’s love, the main issues of the contemporary theological debate are illumined by two prominent models of divine love that are near the opposite ends of the spectrum. The transcendent-voluntarist model views divine love as unilaterally bestowed beneficence. Conversely, in the immanent-experientialist model, God is universally sympathetic. God necessarily and immediately feels the feelings of all others. Both of these conceptions flow from competing conceptions of the divine nature, the former building on a more traditionalist ontology and the latter rooted in process panentheism. The conflict between these mutually exclusive models of divine love points to the crucial questions at issue in the wider discussion of the nature of God’s love and the God-world relationship, including whether God’s love for the world is volitional or essential, disinterested or evaluative, impassible or primarily passive, unconditional or conditional, and unilateral or reciprocal.

1. With so many competing conceptions of divine love, how did you go about attempting to advance the discussion on this issue?

I employed a canonical methodology to investigate the meaning of divine love in light of the contemporary debate, seeking to exposit the canonical perspective on divine love without assuming the accuracy or inaccuracy of existing models (with regard to love specifically or the nature of God more broadly). I undertook this by first identifying the issues and questions in the current debate, then conducting an inductive reading of the entire biblical canon and isolating any and all texts and/or passages that touched on these questions, even slightly. I then analyzed and organized the extracted data, narrowing and expanding it when themes emerged as more or less significant than originally thought. Finally, I systematized the data into a systematic model and compared and contrasted it with other existing conceptions of divine love.

1. You mentioned previously that God’s love has often been misunderstood. Perhaps some readers will be surprised by your treatment of so-called agape love. Is God’s love agape-love as is so often taught?

Many of us have been taught that the term agape describes a uniquely superior kind of divine love, which involves (among other things) giving but never receiving (i.e. gift rather than need love). However, in the biblical canon, the agape root by itself is not a qualitatively superior term of divine love and should not be elevated above other biblical terms for love. Analysis of the usage of agape in the LXX [ed. note: Septuagint] and New Testament demonstrates that it may convey a broad range of meaning, from the most virtuous love of affection and generosity to a “love” that is more akin to lust and fades quickly after its rapacious selfishness is satisfied. When used of God, agape does convey the best kind of love but this is so not because the agape root inherently conveys only the best kind of love but because God’s love is itself perfect. Moreover, God’s love is also conveyed by many other terms, including the phileo root, which overlaps with the agape root in nearly every respect in NT usage. Further, the kind of divine love depicted via these and many other terms is not restricted to the popular conception of divine love as unilaterally giving but never receiving.

1. You posit in your book a foreconditional-reciprocal model of divine love with five aspects. Can you briefly introduce those five aspects?

John Peckham 

The five complementary aspects of divine love in the foreconditional-reciprocal model are: volitional, evaluative, emotional, foreconditional, and ideally reciprocal. First God’s love in relationship to the world is volitional but not merely volitional. God’s love for the world is neither essential nor necessary to God’s being yet also not arbitrary. Whereas God, as Trinity, is essentially loving, God did not need to create any world but created this world voluntarily. In this way, God’s love in relation to the world is freely bestowed and yet he loves the world in accordance with his essentially loving character. Second, divine love is evaluative such that God takes evaluative delight and pleasure in his creatures (via divine mediation). Third, God’s love is profoundly emotional and passible though not to the exclusion of volitional and evaluative aspects. Fourth, divine love is foreconditional, not altogether unconditional. That is, God’s love is prior to, but not exclusive of, conditions. Finally, divine love is ideally reciprocal. God universally seeks a relationship of reciprocal love but enjoys particular, intimate relationship only with those who accept God’s love.

1. One of the oft-debated issues that holds significance for moral apologetics is the ongoing debate regarding free will. How does the volitional aspect of divine love shed light on this?

In my investigation of divine love, I discovered a great deal of biblical information that indicates a libertarian conception of divine and human free will. Indeed, the biblical data regarding divine love suggest that God is not only significantly free but also grants significant freedom to humans to accept or reject a love relationship with God (bilateral significant freedom). Although God wants everyone to enjoy a love relationship with him for eternity, humans have the freedom to reject God’s love. As such, God’s desires often go unfulfilled.

1. Many conceive of God as wholly altruistic and believe that “pure love” must be entirely self-sacrificial. How does your model of divine love relate to this?

While many believe that “pure love” should be wholly altruistic, to the exclusion of any self-interest, the Bible recognizes proper, wholly unselfish self-love, and God’s love itself includes unselfish self-interest. To say otherwise overlooks God’s rightful command to worship and exalt him and the joy that he takes in love relationships with creatures. However, God’s self-interest is not selfish but includes the best interests of all others. That is, he has voluntarily bound his own joy to the true happiness of his creatures (what I call other-inclusive self-interest). Although humans have no value to bring to God in and of themselves, God enables humans to respond to his prior and enabling action and mediates their meager offerings through Christ. In this way, God can appreciate and enjoy the gifts that humans offer even though they are faulty and imperfect, much in the same way that a father appreciates an intrinsically worthless father’s day gift because it came from his beloved child.

1. Can you unpack a bit more what it means for God’s love to be “foreconditional” as you describe it? If God’s love is not wholly unconditional does that mean humans can merit God’s love?

By foreconditional, I mean that God’s love is prior to all other love and conditions, but not exclusive of conditions. Yet, while divine love is conditional in many ways, it is never merited. We love because God first loved us (1 John 4:19). Nevertheless, we may choose to forfeit a love relationship with God. As such, contrary to popular suppositions, divine love is not unconditional in every respect. Yet, there are aspects of divine love that are unconditional. For example, divine love is unconditional with respect to God’s volition (he always desires to remain in a love relationship with each human) but conditional with respect to evaluation and ongoing relationship (thus humans can finally reject a love relationship with God). Because divine love is inherently relational, although God continues to “subjectively” love even those who reject relationship with him, the “objective” aspects of divine love are contingent upon relationship. God does everything he can to remain in a love relationship with each person short of overriding the freedom that is essential to love. As such, his longsuffering and compassionate love far exceeds all reasonable expectations.

1. What do you think readers of moral apologetics would be most interested in regarding your book?

I hope there are a number of elements that would be of interest to your readers, not only regarding the many intricacies of divine love for us but also relative to the wider conception of the God-world relationship. Understanding God’s love, in my view, goes hand-in-hand with understanding God’s goodness. In particular, I think there are significant implications of the foreconditional-reciprocal model of divine love for the problem of evil. The volitional aspect of divine love, for example, entails bilateral significant freedom and such freedom holds implications for the way God relates to the world. Specifically, this model suggests that, although God is omnipotent, he voluntarily and temporarily limits the use of his power to allow the significant freedom of creatures. Further, by engaging in love relationship with creatures, God is deeply affected by the world.

1. What project(s) do you plan to work on next? 

I have recently completed a draft of a manuscript on canonical theological method and I plan to begin working in earnest on a follow-up to this book that unpacks the implications of this conception of divine love for the problem of evil and addresses central issues of God’s providence.

Thanks, John! You’re doing great work, and we hope this interview helps inspire more interest in this really important scholarship. Readers of the site, please read John’s book The Love of God: A Canonical Model!

Interview of Dr. Tom Morris

In this interview, I asked Dr. Tom Morris several questions about his life and ministry, his teaching and writing and speaking. Dr. Morris is a very dear soul, a brilliant philosopher, great long-time professor, dynamic speaker, and eminently gifted and prolific writer. Along with Elton Higgs, Good God was dedicated to him; he was Jerry Walls’ teacher and dissertation advisor at Notre Dame, and I have had the privilege to get to know him personally through the years. He is something of my intellectual grandfather, you could say! He’s also a dear friend. He’s been a wonderful encourager and mentor to me for many, many years, and my respect for him is boundless. Two of my prized possessions are books he sent to me some years ago, books he didn’t just sign. He drew little cartoons on the inside of each of them, personalized just for me. It was one of a plethora of gestures of kindness he’s shown me through the years. He’s likewise been a source of encouragement, inspiration, and wisdom for thousands and thousands of others. It’s my distinct honor to share this interview with Tom Morris, a great scholar and even better man. Please visit his website at TomVMorris.com, and be sure to read his daily blogs and his regular column at the Huffington Post.

-Dave Baggett

Photo by Matt Lamers on Unsplash

1. I’d love to know about the experience you mentioned in God and the Philosophers, when you were an undergraduate at North Carolina, and you experienced something of an epiphany in front of the math building. It pertained to your sense of calling. Can you describe that influence in more detail, and its impact on you then and since?

I remember the day vividly. I wish I had written down the date and time. But when it happened, I had no idea how lasting the memory or the effect would be. It was like many of the most important events of my life – I didn’t see it coming. There was no preparation that I was aware of. It just happened like a bolt from the blue. I was struck with a thought that seemed to come to me from beyond, an assurance that there’s a reason I’m here, in this life, on this earth – that I have a mission, a job to do, something important to accomplish. I had no idea what that might be, at the time, but that didn’t matter. It wasn’t like I was having a premonition of my work, or career, just a powerful assurance that there’s an importance in my being alive, a specific value in my adventure. It made me feel good, and strongly confident, and somehow grounded in a sense of meaning and purpose, even though, again, I didn’t know any specifics, at that point.

And what’s odd here is that I believe we’re all alive for a purpose. That was just my moment of assurance that I had nothing to fear or worry about concerning my future. First, there would be one. And second, it would be something that I could feel good about. I would be able to serve people in some way. I did sense that deeply and powerfully, but again, without specifics. The phenomenal, keen psychological feel of the experience was unlike anything I had ever had happen to me. It was almost like a voice speaking to me, yet not with a tone or timber, heard by the ear. It was just a thought, a message with propositional content and emotional resonance that came to me suddenly and seemed to touch my spirit in the deepest way. From that moment on the sidewalk in Chapel Hill, I had a sense of meaning that went beyond anything I could explain.

1. When you were still in college, you began your first book—on Francis Schaeffer and apologetic methodology. This site, as you know, is about moral apologetics, various moral arguments for God’s existence. Do you think some of the distinctive features of morality—its authority, prescriptivity, etc.—are better explained by a religious worldview than by naturalism?

I really don’t see how naturalism can accommodate any degree of ultimate objectivity about moral principles and demands, or even about such things as rights. And the naturalist, like any of us, typically has strong moral intuitions about such things that impinge on our conduct. We may disagree about the details, but naturalists can be as morally offended, or inspired, as any of us. And they’ll have real trouble making metaphysical sense of the power they feel, the power that truly moves them, and us.

George Mavrodes, I think, once wrote a nice essay about the oddness of morality in a materalistic universe that says it all very well – or at least, it struck me that way as a young philosopher, when I first read him. [ed--“Religion and the Queerness of Morality”]

Theism roots so much so deeply in the metaphysical weave of reality in ways that naturalism just can’t do. You have to give up a lot to be a naturalist, and I don’t think most naturalists, even very intelligent naturalists, fully understand this and all its implications. They still keep a foot in the warm water that their own view can’t provide.

1. When you were a student at Yale, you bucked the system and enrolled in a number of classes in both analytic and Continental philosophy, and earned doctorates in both philosophy and religious studies. What led you to do that, and how did that breadth of study shape your work?

I was determined to leave no ultimate stone unturned. I didn’t care about the divisions in the department philosophy or in the university, or about the animosities that accompanied these divisions. I was intensely curious and wanted to be able to follow my nose wherever it might lead me. So imagine my surprise when I was once in a Kant seminar on the “other side” of the department with dancers and artists and actors and had to read books with titles like “The Mass Psychology of Fascism” and “Love and Lust” and “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” and “The Female Orgasm,” to help in my understanding of the categorical imperative and The Critique of Pure Reason. Of course, my worries about the connections were a bit assuaged when, like a ritual, we had to retreat to the professor’s office every day after class for sherry and even more cheese.

I think my work was shaped by an intellectual breadth of early acquaintance with a wide variety of modes of thought that was relatively rare in my time. I came to discover that, most typically, philosophers knew almost nothing of theology; theologians knew little philosophy; continental thinkers weren’t trained in logical precision, and analytic practitioners seemed to hardly ever sip sherry.

1. At Notre Dame your teaching was legendary. I know several folks who served as a TA for you, and to a person they confirm what a remarkable privilege it was to do so. You brought the marching band into the classroom before a final exam, and all sorts of things to make learning fun and enjoyable and memorable, without sacrificing the rigor. You won the Indiana Professor of the Year award at one point. What are the top two or three pieces of advice you’d give to teachers, guiding principles that you followed yourself?

You have to love your students first and then love what you’re teaching. Love is the moving force. That leads to connection and enjoyment and success.

I often told my TAs that philosophy is serious but that doesn’t mean it’s somber. We always had fun. I wanted the students to think of philosophy as a fun and fascinating and important way of confronting the world. Ultimately, I wanted to bring them back to the ancient view of philosophy as a way of living. And that includes laughing and loving.

I always tried imaginative gimmicks to make philosophical points vividly and memorably. And I’ve had people come up to me in convention centers all over America and say, after a talk to a financial services company, or an industry association meeting, “Professor Morris, I was in your class in 1983 when the lights all went out suddenly.” I’d reply, “Why did that happen?” And then I’d get an answer like “You were giving us a Near Death Experience and it was really vivid and so funny I remember it all these years later.”

A robot might tell corny electricity jokes in a class about artificial intelligence, or Dominoes might deliver pizzas to the class early in the morning when they weren’t even open, to illustrate something in a lecture on miracles, or I might provide a little electric guitar performance to illustrate something in the philosophy of science. My general rule was “Four minutes of craziness to gain their attention for the next forty six minutes.” We had a theme song that would play when I entered the auditorium. Snickers bars often flew through the air for good answers, or just to start the class. When people avoided sitting in the front, Burger King might cater cheeseburgers to only the first two rows. A month into the semester, we did Early Course Evaluations asking for suggestions. The next class I’d go over, the often hilarious, suggestions that my very clever undergraduates would make, and I’d actually implement some of them. They never know what would happen next.

At the end of each semester, on official final course evaluations, students would always say: “I could NEVER sleep late and miss class, because I knew that if I did, it would probably be the class everybody would talk about for the next ten years.” That’s why I never had an attendance policy. If I couldn’t make it so good they didn’t ever want to miss it, I was not doing my job, as I understood it.

1. Your work in philosophical theology greatly influenced many philosophers, including me. I remember reading your analysis of a modal version of the Euthyphro Dilemma that, at the time, opened my eyes to a whole new approach to solving the Dilemma. Much of your work focused on a particular conception of God—understood in the Anselmian sense. What are some of the reasons for the philosophical power of this notion of God?

Thanks for your kind compliment. Now, about that conception of God: Well, for one thing, it’s the most extreme idea imaginable, isn’t it? And whatever else is true of me, I’m a person of extremes. I’ve been known to find a new restaurant and love the meal so much that I would go back and eat there every night for two weeks. When I decided to start working out hard at the gym, I committed to two hours a day, every day, for the first year. I do extremes. It’s my great strength and weakness. Extremes intrigue me.

The idea of the greatest possible being, a maximally perfect individual – you can’t get any more extreme than that. It’s a sort of absolute ideal for a philosopher. And any attempt to understand and apply it has got to lead to discoveries all over the place. I found it very attractive and intriguing. I wanted to give it a new level of rigorous and creative attention, as a unifying idea of great importance for philosophical theology and then perhaps for other specialties as well. I felt like, if we understood the core idea of perfect being theology deeply enough, and logically enough, we’d get answers to problems that would otherwise be unavailable. And I think I was right.

1. What led to your leaving Notre Dame after 15 years, situated as you were as one of the brightest among a set of premier philosophers making up what was one of the best philosophy departments in the world? What do you miss most, and least, about academia?

When I was approached out of the blue by Disney to make TV commercials for Winnie the Pooh, as a philosopher, I was so surprised, and I was delighted to be reaching out beyond the classroom, especially to promote a most philosophical bear. The two network commercials I got to costar in, with the Pooh characters, brought a surprising amount of attention my way. Various area business and civic groups had been asking me to come and speak on ethics and success, and other topics for a couple of years. And I would always say yes, to build bridges between the university and the community. Then word started to spread. NBC Sports had me speak to their sponsors at every Notre Dame home football game. The Young Presidents Organization began to ask me to give talks to presidents of companies all over the world. Then, when the Pooh hit the fan, when the commercials started showing five or six times a day on all the networks, everybody got interested in this strange guy, part philosopher, and part TV pitchman.

Quickly, I published a first trade book, True Success: A New Philosophy of Excellence, and I was soon getting invitations to speak everywhere. My wife would pick me up from the airport for my morning freshman Philosophy 101 class. I’d teach, have lunch, then do a senior afternoon class, and head back to the airport for another trip and another talk somewhere in America, or beyond. As this grew in momentum, and I saw people in every business get excited about the wisdom of the ages, I began to feel a sense of calling, almost Abrahamic in nature, to leave the known for an unknown promised land where I was meant to grow and prosper intellectually in new ways. I had started all this with no clue that people actually PAID speakers. Then it became a real business. It was hard to teach full time and also serve the world in this new way. I felt I had to make a choice. I loved my students and my academic work, but felt so strongly that this was the next adventure, that I left the full professorship, the tenure, and all its guarantees for this big new challenge and joy.

Norman Kretzmann, Sage Professor of Philosophy at Cornell, who had been a sort of informal mentor and great encourager to me, wrote me a nice letter at the time urging me not to leave the world of philosophical theology just to go and popularize philosophy for the masses. I wrote back and told him that the new challenges were just as tough, even without requiring modal logic. If people had already figured out happiness, struggle, change, and success, there wouldn’t be a steady stream of new books on these issues. And I was going to be the first philosopher ever to bring the best rigors of analytic training to bear on such matters. I felt I had a shot at making a big difference to people’s everyday lives, not something that was even on the radar screen when penning a piece for The Philosophical Review, or The American Philosophical Quarterly. I had experienced and enjoyed serving the 126 people in the world who could read my technical work, and the 4 who actually understood it well enough to be persuaded. Of course, I’m kidding. It was more like 3. In any case, I was ready for the new assignment that I was being given.

When I resigned from Notre Dame, I wrote a long letter to the campus newspaper telling all my students that I was leaving not because I had found something more important than they were to me, but because they had prepared me for a new mission that I was being called to launch out on, and I would always appreciate and treasure the time I had with them for those many years in South Bend.

What I miss most about academia is the time I had to see my students grow in wisdom and understanding throughout a semester and beyond. What I miss least is excessively long faculty meetings, unspoken professional resentments, and the manifest irritation of certain formerly affable colleagues who had decided that, as an exuberant public philosopher, I was no longer to be greeted in the hallway, or spoken to in any way, unless absolutely necessary. They must have thought that Pooh-losophy could be dangerously contagious.

1. You describe yourself as shy. I’m sure that would come as quite a surprise to anyone who has seen you give a public lecture. How would you explain the discrepancy?

When someone moves in next door to me, it may take me six weeks or months to get the courage up to go say hello. And yet, I’ll talk freely to anyone sitting next to me on an airplane. I’m a walking paradox (one in philosophy, one in religious studies). Part of me would be happy sitting alone in my room reading and writing most of the day, and just taking breaks to talk to my wife, pat the dogs, and throw a ball to the cat to chase or disdain, depending on his mood. And then another part of me wants to be with those 5,000 people in Las Vegas, or those 10,000 in Orlando, or the 20 top executives in Silicon Valley. When this started happening, I began to realize more deeply that I really liked being around people who enjoyed and appreciated the ideas I was bringing them. And I had to get over the shyness to do the job. Of course, as a professor, I already learned a lot about how to do that. Like many performers, actors, singers, comics, and jugglers, I learned, for the sake of my audience and my effectiveness, to overcome any tendencies that would keep me from having a sort of exuberant effectiveness. And it’s always a joy.

But the two parts of me serve a purpose. The shy side encourages the scholarship and thought required to create new frameworks of ideas. The sociable showman side helps me get those ideas out into the world. Ultimately, great presentations happen where personal neediness meets the love of others amidst the joy of service.

1. Explain your vision of public philosophy. Is this a tradition that, after the likes of Emerson and perhaps James, has been neglected?

Public philosophy is just a version of public health. What would we think if all the physicians just stayed in their labs, discovering things, and talking about them among each other, but never brought those discoveries out into the world, or – worse yet – just worked on things that they happened to be interested in, whether those ideas would ever have any practical implications or not? We need basic research in science, all the sciences, without regard for payoff or practicality, but we also need applied science that aims at positive impact. I think of theoretical philosophy as immensely important, but it’s not the only sort of philosophy that deserves attention. The practical side of philosophy has been neglected for a very long time in our culture. And I think we’ve all suffered as a result. I came to realize that I was being put into a position to do something about that.

But I had few role models in our time. What Emerson and James accomplished in their time gave me a sense that it can be done, and to great effect. And of course, there were other philosophers who had reached out to a broader audience, like Mortimer Adler, who was actually more of a historian than a philosopher, and Bertrand Russell, who maybe shouldn’t have reached out at all. Sartre and Camus had made their splash, as it was, but a lot more was needed, and in a different direction, adumbrating a different sort of worldview. Pascal had inspired me, as had Kierkegaard. But rather than jokingly jabbing Jesuits or hilariously harpooning Hegel, I decided to focus on another set of issues. Give me another 200 years to work in practical philosophy, and I think I’ll get it right. But even now, it’s the most satisfaction I’ve ever felt on any intellectual pursuit, although figuring out the incarnation and tracing the implications of perfect being theology were pretty much fun, too.

1. Tell us about your eight-part novel series—how it happened, what it’s about. Is this something you planned to do, or did it catch you by surprise?

This is definitely the wildest, most unexpected story of my life. In February 2011, I woke up, had toast, jam, and coffee for breakfast, and, before I could get out of my chair to go work on a book about how to deal with change, one of the greatest changes and adventures of my life suddenly began. I started to see, as if in my mind's eye, a vivid movie. It was something like the most amazing daydream of my life.

In an instant, I was watching and listening to an old man and a young boy, who were sitting under a palm tree in the desert and talking about life. Their conversation was really great, so I ran up the stairs to my study and began to type as fast as I could, to catch up and keep up. I then put a short essay on The Huffington Post with the first rough version of that initial conversation. People reacted quickly and with great enthusiasm. "What is this?" "Is this the beginning of a book?" I honestly didn't know what it was.

The movie then continued to play, most days, on and off, for almost four years. The result is, so far, eight completed books that have not yet been shown to publishers. A former student of mine who is now a famous thriller novelist saw the first two books when they were freshly written, and said right away, "This is The Alchemist Meets Harry Potter Meets Indiana Jones!" I hope so.

Watching this inner movie and writing it all down has has been the pinnacle of my experience as a philosopher. The things I've seen and heard and learned by viewing this mysterious movie go beyond anything I've ever read or discovered in more normal, ordinary ways.

Three weeks after the movie began to play, and well before I realized that I was in the process of writing a book, and, of course, long before I knew it would be the first of many books, I woke up one day and had an almost equally unusual mental vision, where I saw something new, again, almost like in a dream.

It was clearly a book called The Oasis Within. Noticing a banner across the top of the front cover in this surprising morning vision, I realized right away that it said, "Over Three Million Copies In Print." So, I responded to that by saying, "Ok, then. I'll write this book." And the big adventure began.

The series is set in Egypt in 1934 and 1935, a place and time about which I knew almost nothing when all this started. But after 2 or 4 or 6 hours of writing, I’d google stuff that I saw – a certain kind of snake, a specific men’s wristwatch, a car of a particular make, and was amazed to discover, time after time, that these things were in fact in Egypt in 1934 or 1935. I heard characters call out each others’ names – Arabic names I didn’t know – and those I checked out turned out not only to be legitimate names, but most often perfect for the characters. It’s fiction, but all the research that novelists do before writing, I didn’t have to do at all. I just wrote what I saw and heard. I never made up a plot point, or a conscious decision about what should happen. I watched. I listened. I wrote.

In the end, it’s a series about life, death, meaning, friendship, the secrets behind everyday events, and the extraordinary power of a well-focused mind. It’s about love and commitment and redemption. It’s about good and evil and folly and wisdom. It’s about what moves people to chart their way in one direction rather than another. It’s about inner peace, inner power, and the role of this world in a much bigger scheme of things. It’s about dreams and difficulties, and triumph and ultimate reality. How could that not be fun to write!

The publication of this first book, which is something like a conversational prologue to the series of action and adventure stories that go on to reveal a deep and ancient philosophical worldview that's uniquely powerful for the twenty-first century, will be announced at my website, www.TomVMorris.com when it's available. I don’t even have a fiction agent for it yet. So wish me luck!

1. What would you say is the integrating theme—or themes—of your entire career, spanning your time in academia, your work as a public philosopher, as an essayist and novelist, and your future goals?

My overall theme is helping people think through the most important ideas there are, with conceptual precision and concrete imagination.

My future goals are to keep doing it, and discover more new things that I can share with excitement and great satisfaction.

Photo: "Happiness" by C. Roengigk. CC License. 

Interview with Jerry Walls

Photo by Bryan Minear on Unsplash

In this interview for MoralApologetics.com, David Baggett interviews his dear friend, former teacher, and collaborator, the one-of-a-kind, iconoclastic Dr. Jerry Walls, a leading and prolific Christian philosopher and professor of philosophy of religion at Houston Baptist University. Questions canvass Dr. Walls’ education, early interest in philosophy, his graduate work at Princeton, Yale, and Notre Dame, his interest in eschatology, and other book projects in which Walls is engaged.

1. When were you first drawn to philosophy?

The first time I can recall becoming really fascinated by philosophy was one summer in high school when I was bored and looking for something to read, and picked up a book my dad had bought at a second hand book store by Francis Schaeffer entitled Pollution and the Death of Man.  It was a book about ecology, which, frankly, did not interest me much.  But I was fascinated by how he analyzed the issues in the ecology debate in terms of basic presuppositions and worldview.   During the next several years, I read all of Schaeffer’s books as they came out, and that is how I was first introduced to things like epistemology and came to see that Christianity makes big truth claims about ultimate reality, and is among other things, a philosophy that provides answers to all the big questions.

1. When did you become interested in issues of the afterlife, especially hell?

Well, I was raised in Knockemstiff, Ohio, and “hellfire and damnation” was often preached about in my little country church, especially during revivals.  Listening to the sermons at Bethel Chapel, there was no doubt that issues of life and death were at stake in how one responded to the gospel.  I was converted at age 11 in response to a sermon on the text, “there is but one step between death and thee.”   Several years later, I went to Princeton seminary, and many students as well as faculty were dubious about the idea of hell, and some rejected the afterlife altogether.   The clash between my religious formation and my formal theological training was existentially riveting for me, and provoked me to think seriously about heaven and hell and whether there really are good reasons to believe in them or not.  After graduating from Princeton, I went to Yale Divinity school, where I wrote a master’s thesis on hell, and I have been thinking and writing about these issues ever since!

1. Is it true you were a teenage preacher?

Yes, I preached my first sermon when I was thirteen, and had preached well over a hundred sermons by the time I graduated from high school.

1. Tell us about your education at Princeton and Yale and Notre Dame. Who most influenced you among your teachers, and how?

Well, as I said above, Princeton was rather diverse in its theological commitments, and posed a number of challenges to my evangelical background.  We had a student group made up of evangelical students at Princeton called the Theological Forum, and I was President of the group.  Some of my best learning came from this group.  We had a number of notable speakers, including John Stott and Cornelius Van Til (who had not, I believe, been back at Princeton until we invited him) and others.  (One of the students who was in our group by the way, was Bart Ehrman, who was still an evangelical at the time.)  But the most memorable speaker was Alvin Plantinga, who we were able to get because his brother Neal was doing his PhD at the seminary at the time.  It was the first time I had met Plantinga and he gave a lecture in which he dismantled the theology of Gordon Kaufman, the Harvard theologian who labored under Kantian strictures concerning what we can say about God.  It was both a gutsy and a galvanizing talk, and an enormously encouraging breath of fresh air and it elevated the enormous respect I already had for Plantinga.  As for my teachers at Princeton, I learned a lot from Diogenes Allen, though he was a difficult personality and I did not have much of a relationship with him.

At Yale, where I did a one year STM, I worked almost exclusively with Paul Holmer, whose main interests were Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein, though he also wrote a little book on C. S. Lewis. Holmer was a delight to work with and he encouraged my interest in the doctrine of hell. Holmer was very dubious of what he called the “bright chatty” sort of students, and I remember when I first met him and told him I wanted study with him, he was reserved until he asked me what I was interested in.  When I told him I wanted to write about hell, he immediately got excited and encouraged me to come to Yale.

Notre Dame was simply an ongoing intellectual feast and was by far the greatest educational experience of my life.  I had the privilege of taking courses with the very best people who did philosophy of religion, starting with Plantinga, and including Fred Freddoso, Tom Flint, and Phil Quinn.  I did a reading course with Quinn, by the way, on divine command ethics, a foreshadow of our work together.  Quinn, of course, wrote an important book on divine command ethics.  Plantinga’s courses were extremely stimulating and mentally challenging and you always left feeling like your brain had just had a strenuous workout that pushed you beyond your limits.  But my most influential teacher at Notre Dame was my mentor Tom Morris, who was something of a force of nature with all the interesting stuff he was producing at the time.  I learned a lot from him not only about how to do philosophy, but also how to teach, and that still influences everything I write.

1. How did you end up writing not just about hell, but also about heaven and even purgatory?

Well, after writing about hell, I came to see that heaven poses its own distinctive issues that deserved addressing.  Moreover, heaven was almost entirely ignored by philosophers at the time so I wrote a book entitled Heaven: The Logic of Eternal Joy.  I wrote a chapter on purgatory for the heaven book, having become convinced that a version of the doctrine makes theological sense for Protestants as well as Catholics.  I had no thought of writing more about purgatory at the time, but again, further reflection led me to see that it too poses distinctive issues that deserve discussion.  I was fortunate to receive a Research Fellowship in the Notre Dame Center for Philosophy of Religion for the 2009-2010 academic year and I wrote the book that year.

1. How big an influence has C. S. Lewis been on you?

In short, it has been incalculable.  I vividly recall the first time I read The Great Divorce, a book that has had a profound influence on all of my thinking about the afterlife.  I was at Yale working on my STM thesis on hell, and struggling to make sense of how eternal hell can be compatible with the perfect love and goodness of God.  I remember reading that book into the early morning, and finishing it before I went to bed.  What was stunning to me was the way Lewis made moral and psychological sense of how human beings can prefer evil, how they can choose to remain in hell, even if given every opportunity to repent and embrace the love of God.  That recast how I thought about hell, and it would eventually help me to think more clearly about heaven and purgatory as well.

1. You’ve published with Oxford University Press, but you can also write very accessible books. Should more philosophers try to write books for wider audiences than just fellow philosophers? Why isn’t it done more?

Well, the best and most interesting philosophy deals with big issues that matter to every thoughtful person.  Even if the immediate issues we are writing about are highly technical, if they really matter, it is because of their connection to bigger questions and concerns.   I wish more academically accomplished philosophers would keep these big issues in mind and attempt to write books that address them for a wider audience.   Such books, of course, are not a substitute for academically rigorous books, and should not be mistaken for them but they play an absolutely vital role in communicating the central ideas of philosophy to the broader culture.  Not everybody can do this, but those who can should, in my view.  The failure to do this has the effect of marginalizing philosophy and even trivializing it in contemporary culture.  The vacuum of course, has often been filled by popular books that are superficial and often poorly informed.  And many philosophers accordingly shy away from writing popular books because they do not want to be identified with such superficial books.  Moreover, such books gain little recognition in the academy, and may even hurt your reputation.   But the solution, I think, is for more philosophers to try to do both, to write serious books but also write books that communicate the central ideas in an accessible but responsible fashion.  If we fail to do that, we should hardly be surprised if philosophy is seen as increasingly irrelevant to the overwhelming majority who lack our specialized training.

1. Tell us about your most recent book on heaven, hell, and purgatory.

Well, in short, it is my attempt to distill the central ideas of my academic trilogy into a more popular form for a broader audience. The book explores heaven, hell and purgatory in light of the big philosophical issues like the problem of evil, the nature of personal identity, the ground of morality, and the really big one: the very meaning of life.  I attempted to write it in such a way that any thoughtful reader who would like to understand these issues better could read it with appreciation.  I will be interested to see if I have succeeded.

1. What other book projects are you involved in?

Lot of things.  I just wrote a long essay on purgatory for a new Four Views of Hell book that is forthcoming.  My son Jonny and I have a book of essays coming out shortly entitled Tarantino and Theology.   Another book I am excited about is Two Dozen or So Theistic Arguments, which I am co-editing with Trent Dougherty.  It is based on Alvin Plantinga’s famous paper of that title, and will explore each of his arguments, several of which are new ones that have yet to be developed.  A colleague here at HBU and I are working on editing a collection of essays on issues in sexual ethics.  Another book I am co-authoring is Why I am not A Roman Catholic.  I am co-authoring this one with Ken Collins, a church historian.  Not to mention a history of the moral argument I am co-authoring with Bag.   So it looks like I’ll be busy for a while.

1. Why do you think the book you and I are wrapping up, the sequel to Good God, is important?

Well, it deals with huge issues of urgent practical concern, just for a start!  Contemporary culture is morally confused to put it mildly, and seems increasingly bereft of moral foundations.    Christian theism provides not only a rationally powerful, but also an existentially appealing account of moral truth that beautifully answers to our deepest yearnings for ultimate meaning.   We advance in this book an abductive moral argument that brings together an array of powerful considerations that have not, so far as we know, been advanced in this fashion.  These considerations, taken together, provide a powerful case that God makes sense of the crucial features of morality far more convincingly than secular alternatives.

Photo: "Conversation" by John St John. CC License.