The Dr. Jeff Show Ep. 18 – Scott Hahn

Episode 18: Summary & Transcript

Disclaimer: Please note that this is an automatically generated transcript. Although the transcription is largely accurate, it may be incomplete or inaccurate in some cases due to inaudible passages or transcription errors.

Episode Summary

Dr. Jeff interviews Dr. Scott Hahn about the importance of a biblical worldview, focusing on the concept of covenant, biblical literacy, and the Christian understanding of death and resurrection. Dr. Hahn explains how his unique educational background in theology, philosophy, and economics shaped his integrated worldview. He emphasizes that covenant is the central theme of scripture, defining God’s relationship with humanity as a family bond rather than a contract.

The conversation explores the necessity of understanding the Old Testament to fully grasp the New, the centrality of worship in the Christian life, and how a proper view of the body and soul, as united by God, provides hope in the face of death. The discussion culminates with themes from Dr. Hahn’s book, Hope to Die, which addresses the cultural fear of death and offers the resurrection as the ultimate source of Christian hope.

Episode Transcript

Dr. Jeff Myers (00:02):
Hey everybody. It’s Dr. Jeff. Thank you for tuning into the Dr. Jeff Show. On this show, I interview major thought leaders from many different fields of influence showing how worldview changes everything.

So my guests speak on a wide variety of topics, but today I wanted to dig in with Dr. Scott Hahn to talk about why it is so important for us to understand scripture, to be biblically literate, to understand the bodies that we have been given and the future hope of resurrection because it changes the way we live every day. You won’t want to miss today’s show. Dr. Scott Hahn, welcome to the Dr. Jeff Show.

Dr. Scott Hahn (00:45):
It’s great to be with you, Dr. Jeff.

Dr. Jeff Myers (00:47):
This is going to be a wide ranging conversation and there’s going to be a lot of serious element to it because we’re going to be talking about, among other things, your recent book, Hope to Die, where you’re just coming straight out and dealing with death, but giving us hope at the same time.

And 2020 was a year of death, and it really was. 10% more people died in the United States of America. I don’t know other countries’ experiences, but I assumed that it was similar. And I went through a cancer battle, so I was thinking about death all of, not obsessively, but thinking about it all of the time. But you say that we can have hope because of the resurrection. And I cannot wait until we get into that part of the discussion because hope is really what we need right now more than anything, right?

Dr. Scott Hahn (01:49):
It sure is.

Dr. Jeff Myers (01:52):
Let’s get to know you a little bit though, Dr. Scott. Should I call you Dr. Scott? Dr. Scott on the Dr. Jeff Show? Scott. Okay. Scott, let’s get to know you a little bit because one thing I noticed when I was getting to know your bio and watching a couple of videos, you attended Grove City College, which is one of my favorite schools. And you triple majored. Okay. So you’re an overachiever at times two, but you triple majored in theology, philosophy, and economics.

Now, when I saw that, I just knew a lot of the people who were listening to this and watching this are going to be asking, okay, theology that has to do with Jerusalem, philosophy that has to do with Athens. Economics, what? Wall Street? How did Jerusalem and Athens and Wall Street fit together?

Dr. Scott Hahn (02:49):
Yeah, good question. Okay. So I had a conversion experience in 10th grade and there was a spiritual awakening when I found Christ, but also the gift of the Holy Spirit just made scripture come alive before I couldn’t pay attention. I couldn’t stay awake. And then after, the scriptures just seemed to catch fire. And the deeper I went, the more it became clear to me that a biblical worldview was what I was hungering for.

And so by the time I was finishing up 12th grade, I was on my third round trip through the Bible and I knew where I wanted to go to study. And that was Grove City. I wanted to study theology because they had good scripture professors there, as well as philosophy. But since my father was paying tuition, he added, you can choose business administration, accounting, or economics. And so I chose economics.

(03:41):
And my first semester, I discovered that I was glad. I was very grateful to my father, not just for the practicality of it, but because at Grove City, there was an Austrian approach to economics.

Dr. Jeff Myers (03:53):
Yes, that’s right.

Dr. Scott Hahn (03:54):
And so it’s Jerusalem Athens, in this case, Vienna, because it was all about Meses and Hayek and Menger and Bombark and others. And so that became my first major. And in fact, my first publication was an article on the outcome of income tax in the Freeman in 1980, an economics journal that is Austrian and its perspective. And so I still embrace much of the truth of that overall approach, but I’m not a Cantian like Meses. I’m not an anarchist like Rothbard, but I learned to think in big picture terms.

And studying theology was always my first love. I realized in philosophy, I also found a kindred spirit in the last person I expected to love. And that was St. Thomas Aquinas. And so I became the evangelical Thomas, the Calvinist Thomast for my four years there. I was still, at that point, relatively anti-Catholic, not relatively vehemently, but that’s a story for another day.

(04:59):
In any case, what happened to me my freshman year at college was I talked to Dr. Sennoltz about a book that I had signed out in the library, Introduction to Christian Economics by Dr. Gary North. And I said, He mentioned you a dozen times in that book. I found it in the index and he said, oh, I know him and I also know Rush Dune. And so he pointed me to the Institute of Biblical Law.

And so one year later, I had finished this thousand page tome on the Institutes of Biblical Law as well as North. And I began to realize that sacred scripture as the word of God really opens up a map to the whole world and unites all of these different disciplines so that instead of just triple majoring, I had an opportunity to develop a biblical worldview, especially around the idea of covenant.

(05:49):
I always thought in reading scripture, it’s obvious to me, even if it’s not to others, that covenant is the master key that unlocks the word of God. Old covenant, new covenant, the new, concealed and the old, the old revealed and fulfilled in the news.

Dr. Jeff Myers (06:03):
Talk a little bit more about that, Scott, because I want to get into that.

Dr. Scott Hahn (06:08):
Yeah, sure.

Dr. Jeff Myers (06:08):
The term covenant’s not all that familiar, I think, to a lot of people who might be watching or listening. So just play that out a little bit.

Dr. Scott Hahn (06:16):
Right. Okay. So like a lot of people back then, I assumed that the meaning of covenant was religious jargon for one thing, but essentially synonymous with contract, only a sacred contract. But the deeper I went into the Old Testament, the more I realized that, no, it’s very different. In establishing a contract, you exchange promises. I give you my word, you give me your word, and our words are our names, and the names are our signatures. And then once we exchange property, we can go our merry way.

But in a covenant, you have to begin with promises, but then you have to invoke the name of God. And instead of just my name or your name being the glue that binds the contract, it’s the holy name of God that means an oath, that means a covenant. It means not just the glue for a temporary exchange.

(07:06):
It’s the cement that makes the two one. The primordial form of the covenant is marriage in Genesis two. It’s the way in which we image God as male and female. And the two become one, and you’ll remember that the two become one flesh. And the one flesh, as I discovered 39 years ago, is so real that you’ve got to come up with a name nine months later after that conception.

And suddenly you begin to realize that to be human, to bear the image and likeness of God is this capacity to enter into something more than a commercial exchange through contract. It is to enter into an interpersonal communion through covenant that always involves God, but it also reveals God because it opens up this mystery that from all eternity, God is not just a solitary being. He’s not reducible to being our creator, our Lord, our governor, but in fact, is a communion of persons in a way that goes beyond the Hahn family.

(08:05):
And so for me, covenant was gradually this discovery of a worldview that did more than integrate philosophy, theology and economics. And for that matter, politics and sociology and psychology. It really integrated my own life of study as an undergraduate, my own life of prayer, and my own life in ministry, in Young Life. Young Life had been the instrument that God had used back in 9th and 10th grade to bring me out of crime, juvenile delinquency, will leave it in generic terms.

And so I returned the favor when I got to college and spent three and a half years devoted to about 15 to 25 hours a week doing Young Life, reaching the un-evangelized kids in the high school, which for me back then also included the Catholics. But in that process, I just found an integration of a unity of life, body, soul, mind, and spirit, but also individual and interpersonal.

(09:06):
And by the time I finished college, I was ready to put theory into practice. And so I got engaged my senior year to the most godly and beautiful woman on campus. And we got married shortly after we both graduated in ‘79.

Dr. Jeff Myers (09:20):
Wow, that’s a great story. And I remember hearing a lecture when I was really young from Hansenholtz. He flew from Grove City up to New York. Foundation for Economic Education was hosting an event. And I attended that. So that was a lot of fun. I think I was really shaped by that study of economics because I saw how it kind of backfilled everything else and my understanding of how a biblical worldview applies to life.

So the idea of covenant, this is why we talk about a marriage covenant instead of a marriage contract because it is those two people coming together in one flesh. And in the Old Testament, you see a covenant with God and with Abraham, where Abraham takes the animals, divides them in half, and God walks through the middle, sealing that covenant.

Dr. Scott Hahn (10:15):
A covenant oath, and that term in Latin, covenant oath is as Turtalian taught us in Augustine too, sacramentum. And so a sacrament is so much more than a ritual that is really how you ratify and renew this covenant bond of communion that is never merely horizontal or human. It always involves that vertical component of God’s presence, of God’s assistance.

And you recognize that in no other religion in the ancient near East do you ever have a covenant with the supreme deity. You invoke his name and he will judge your covenant relations, but only in ancient Israel does God allow himself to not only enter into a covenant, but he is the one who initiates that. And even when we break it, he finds a merciful and just way to renew it.

And so this has been my passion for 45 years. We’ve been married for 41 years, but it was when I was a freshman at college and all of my classmates were going off to a Pentecostal church, getting rebaptized because they thought baptism as a baby means nothing.

(11:23):
And I’m thinking that might be right. But my professor said, no, dive into this before you make a rash decision and to discover that the sacrament of baptism in my relationship with Christ is significant, just like I don’t have any remembrance of when I was born to my parents, but the fact is that was where I got life in the natural order. That’s when I discovered my parents. And so take that up a notch.

And in the supernatural realm, it really does point to how it is. We are made to become children of God and not just Fred and Molly Lou Hahn in my case. And so covenant, the old covenant, the natural human family, begins with a marriage. And then I see how God renews it with Noah aboard the ark where there are four married couples that are united as one covenant household. And as you mentioned, Abraham is described by his contemporaries as a chieftain.

(12:16):
So Sarah’s barrenness is not just a private issue, it really is the family of God facing the end of the line until Isaac is born. And then suddenly you realize that in Genesis 14, there are 318 trained servants of Abram who he’s ready to take in the battle. He didn’t have just one wife. He had a whole tribe. And so the tribal family of God is renewed through Isaac and Jacob.

And then Jacob’s 12 sons become 12 tribes and suddenly at Sinai, you can see what God is doing as a father. He’s renewing the covenant only now. Israel’s a national family. And by the time you get to the new covenant, it’s an international, a universal family. And so you just begin to see how God is not just lording it over subjects. He’s fathering a family from a marriage to a household, to a tribe, to a nation of 12 tribes until finally you truly have a universal international Catholic church.

(13:16):
And this is the newness of the new covenant. And to see this through the eyes of a father, our divine father, at the same time, I was becoming a father roughly 39 years ago. Nothing changes a man as much as becoming a dad, but to combine that with discovering God’s fatherhood is much more perfect than mine will ever be. It’s like nitro and glycerin. It’s powerful.

Dr. Jeff Myers (13:42):
Yeah. And this opens up the Old Testament of the scriptures for people. So those who are watching or listening right now, when you go back and reread scripture, taking in mind what Scott has said about covenant, you’re going to understand and appreciate God’s work in your life in a whole new way. And this leads into my next question, Scott, because you converted to Catholicism.

And then now as part of your job as a professor, you run the St. Paul Center. And I wanted to read the mission statement as best I can because it relates directly to everything that we’ve talked about so far. Your mission is to train a generation of priests who are fluent in scripture and to help Catholics become biblically literate. Have I got that about right?

Dr. Scott Hahn (14:36):
That’s exactly right. Yes.

Dr. Jeff Myers (14:38):
So first of all, why is biblical literacy so important? I mean, people will read a little devotional here and there, but why is that such a big deal?

Dr. Scott Hahn (14:50):
Yeah. So for us, biblical literacy for lay people especially, but then also biblical fluency for clergy, for preachers and teachers. That’s the twofold mission. And on the one hand, it’s simply because of the power of the word of God. On the other hand, especially for Catholic Christians, the mass is obligatory. So you have to go to worship on Sunday, and you also have to hear the word of God. You might hear other resources that are read, but the only thing that has to be read every Sunday in every worship service we call the mass, is the word of God.

And invariably, there are three readings or four, and they’re always taken from the Old Testament and the new. And so often they’re isolated, but in fact, they’re cumulative. And so to recognize how to connect the dots between the old and the new in the worship, in the liturgy of our Sunday service is to me, life changing.

(15:46):
And so to see how the new is concealed in the old and to discover how the old is revealed and fulfilled in the new, not just back in the first century, but in the 21st century through the power of the Holy Spirit. My favorite story in the Bible will come as no surprise. It’s the road to Emmaus where Jesus decides what to do with his first day back from the dead. He must have had lots of options.

I like to think, if I were Jesus, I think I would have dropped in on Pilate to see how clean his hands still were and maybe go comfort my mother or drop in on Caiaphas and the Sanhedrin and whisper, “I’m back,” while hovering over them all. But instead, what’s so startling, although it doesn’t really shock us as much as it should, is that He chooses to spend most of the day going incognito on this long road, seven miles from Jerusalem to Emmaus with two men who have been following him for months, if not years.

(16:41):
They don’t think of themselves as anything but as followers, but they’re so forlorn, are you the only one who doesn’t know these things that have happened in Jerusalem? They asked the stranger, which is so ironic because he just so happens to be the only one in all of Jerusalem who knows exactly what happened and why, what difference it’s going to make for the redemption of the world, but he plays along with them.

And then he shows that it was necessary for the Christ to suffer these things before entering into his glory and beginning with Moses and the law and then the prophets, he spends hours on Easter Sunday, his first day back from the dead, leading probably the greatest scripture study in all of history and not once do they recognize him until they have what we liken to the Eucharist. And that is taking, blessing, breaking, giving that bread.

(17:32):
In Luke 24, just as he does in the upper room in Luke 22, when he takes, he blesses, he breaks and he gives. And finally, their eyes are open in the breaking of the bread. But that moment, he disappears because once we recognize the resurrected Lord in his body, blood, soul, and divinity is here in our midst through our worship, he is not playing hard to get. Now you see me. He brought them precisely to the point where he wanted them to be.

And the eureka grace is such that they say, “Did not our hearts burn within us as he opened the scriptures.” And then they go all the way back and report to Peter and the apostles what had just happened. And I can almost picture Peter saying, “Wait a second, you want us to believe that the risen savior his first day back from the dead spent hours leading a Bible study with, what’s your name again?” Cleopas and your friend.

(18:23):
We were here the whole time. I think Cleopas might have said, “Well, if you hadn’t denied him three times, maybe he would’ve showed up with you instead.” But it wasn’t a time to hurl accusations, it was a time to bear witness to this amazing grace-filled moment of the resurrection. And who should suddenly appear our Lord in the upper room and then Easter Sunday afternoon and evening, he leads the second lengthy scripture study.

I mean, it’s exhibit A and B proof positive that Jesus prioritizes the importance of studying scripture and understanding the promises of the old and how they’re fulfilled by him in the new, but especially through his passion, his death, but above all his resurrection and his ascension into heaven. I mean, if that is how the Lord of Lords is going to choose to spend his first day back from the dead, I think we ought to be reassessing our priorities forthwith.

Dr. Jeff Myers (19:21):
Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. And for him to give the flow of all of scripture, because I have heard people say, well, the Old Testament is called the Old Testament because it’s the old and we don’t need that anymore. We have the New Testament. We have the better, the improved versions. So we’ll stick with that. But Jesus spent his time tying it all together to show that it was all this revelation that had come from God.

Dr. Scott Hahn (19:49):
That’s right. And just if I can insert a footnote here, nowhere do the New Testament writers ever refer to what we call the Old Testament as the Old Testament. The term is always graphe, scripture, or the oracles of God. The one time in two Corinthians three where Paul speaks of the Old Covenant, he’s referring to the letter that kills.

So if you read the Old Testament with the Holy Spirit and with the eyes of faith, the veil is pulled back so that as Augustan puts it, even the Old Testament is the New Testament for those who have the eyes of faith to see how Christ is there on every page. Whereas if you’re reading the New Testament apart from faith without the Holy Spirit, that becomes the letter that kills, as St. Thomas Aquinas explains. And so the need that is so great for us is to have the gift of the Holy Spirit to enliven our own sense of faith, to find our Lord in all of scripture.

(20:42):
And so we can designate old and new and understand BC, AD, or everything up to Malachi and then from Matthew to the apocalypse. But there really is a sense in which the New Testament is still new, even though it’s 2,000 years old, because it’s opening up a covenant that ends up pointing us into the inner life of what the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit share. And the first person isn’t like a Father, like I’m a real Father, God is a Father like I could never be.

And so the Trinity is more than just a dogma. It is the framework for a truly Catholic biblical worldview. And I can say Catholic small C because when we affirm the apostles’ creed, one holy Catholic and Apostolic church, even if you don’t happen to be Roman Catholic like I am, and I’m convinced that Roman is still right.

(21:32):
But on the other hand, man, I think it’s time for us as Christians to discover that we share so much more common ground in Christ through the scriptures understood in terms of the covenant and when we affirm the Trinity, it’s not just some abstract doctrine.

It’s what transforms our worldview into a kind of family vision that we are not just creatures, we’re not just acquitted criminals, we’re not just patients who’ve been healed. We are sons and daughters of God and that’s who we’ll be in a trillion years and that will be the first minute of eternity. We have got to adjust our compass and our clock. This biblical worldview is almost too good to be true, except it’s the truth.

Dr. Jeff Myers (22:13):
This is so rich and I’m always trying to think from the perspective of somebody who’s hearing this who might be a little bit skeptical.

Dr. Scott Hahn (22:23):
It’s like a fire hydrant.

Dr. Jeff Myers (22:25):
I know it is. There’s so much to it. So I always recommend to people, if you’re not sure what to do, just read three chapters a day.That’s what I do. Read through all of scripture every single year, just reading three chapters a day. If I miss, then I try to catch up, but I can always start with Genesis and get to Revelation. So a lot of people.

Dr. Scott Hahn (22:44):
And always include one chapter in the gospels because I do think that entering into a deep friendship, a profound sense of covenant communion with Jesus is the thing that makes Exodus and Leviticus much more endurable.

Dr. Jeff Myers (23:00):
I was just going to go to Exodus and Leviticus because I think that’s where people say, “Look, Genesis was great. The first half of Exodus was great.” That’s good. But two weeks into the year, I am in the deep weeds. I’m reading about if a man digs a pit and then his neighbor’s ox or donkey falls into the pit and what am I supposed to do with all this? And then I start reading about the tabernacle and what the walls are supposed to look like and all these different things.

And I think there are a lot of people who say, “Oh, well, if you have a biblical worldview, you have to somehow incorporate all of that into your life.” How do you help people understand the Old Testament law in relation to how they’re living their lives now?

Dr. Scott Hahn (23:49):
Great question. Well, I can share from my own personal experience when I was a newly ordained Presbyterian pastor at Trinity Presbyterian, our congregation in Northern Virginia had the likes of North and Rushdoony and Bonson and Chilton and Jim Jordan. I mean, so we had this sense of biblical worldview, the unity of the old and the new.

But when I was preaching and teaching through the penitent, through the law of Moses, what I discovered was so, in some ways it was hiding in plain view. It was so obvious that I should have known it all along, but we were preoccupied in the early 80s with a biblical worldview that applies to politics, to economics, to the social order, to legislation, which is fitting. But when you look at the Mosaic law, you realize that there are elements that apply definitely, even if they’re not strictly binding the way the 10 Commandments are.

(24:46):
But what I noticed, especially in Exodus, even more in Leviticus, is that 70, 75, 80, 80, 85, almost 90% of the Mosaic legislation has to do with the worship, the tabernacle, the furniture, the vestments, the sacrifices, the ordination of the priest. And likewise, all of the feasts that we have as pilgrims to go to throughout the liturgical calendar. And so I would say what it did for me was to make worship front and center.

The source and the summit of my life individually, but also as a member of the family of God has to be defined primarily and overarchingly in terms of liturgy, in terms of worship, in terms of sacrifice, praise and thanksgiving. It’s so easy for me given my personality to find the weeds, to always look at the problems that are deserving of criticism or not. But the fact is, when you lift up your hearts and you see the Lord God and you recognize his holiness is not primarily meant to instill terror, but a kind of godly fear that will recognize that he wants more for me and for my loved ones that I would want for myself or what I’d settle for.

(26:01):
And even more, he knows me and my loved ones better than we know ourselves. And when we worship him, we don’t add anything to him. He’s infinite. He’s eternal. So why have this command performance of regular worship? It’s because that’s how God opens us up and gives more of himself to us so that we can really be filled to overflowing with his truth, with his goodness, with his power, with his love, and especially these days with hope and joy.

You think of the disciples on the road to Emmaus, how forlorn. I mean, the darkest day, good Friday. How do you recover from that Easter Sunday? But it’s not just like, “Hey, you’re back. It’s good to see you.” You have to recognize that what looks like a colossal divine failure is actually the most unbelievable fulfillment of God’s fatherly love and wisdom that he planned from the beginning. This is not plan B. This is what God, the Father intended. The darkest night is before the dawn. But I mean, explode those wineskins because what God has for us exceeds our wildest dreams.

Dr. Jeff Myers (27:07):
That is so great. And so that’s why in its services, in the Catholic services and the Anglican services, you have the Old Testament reading, the New Testament reading, and then the gospel reading, because that ties all of those pieces together.

Dr. Scott Hahn (27:23):
And it points to the Eucharist too. And the fact that Jesus only uses the phrase the New Testament one time in Luke 22:20, and it says, “This is the cup of my blood, the blood of the new covenant, the blood of the New Testament.” That discovery for me was colossal that the New Testament was a sacrament before it becomes a document, according to the document, doesn’t cheapen or devalue the document, but it subordinates the liturgy of the word where you’re reading the scriptures to the liturgy of the Eucharist where you’re encountering the risen savior whose real presence is here in a way that goes beyond my five senses.

Dr. Jeff Myers (27:59):
Yeah. And I think you’ve mentioned the sense of worship that is the focus of this Mosaic law, loving and worshiping God. There’s also a strong focus, and we don’t have to talk about it today, this is probably a whole other show, but there’s a strong focus on loving your neighbor.

The verse I gave earlier, I didn’t mean to just make light of it. If you dig a pit and your neighbor’s ox falls into the pit, you must make restitution. That’s loving your neighbor put into law that you need to be watching out for your neighbor’s interests. And somebody who goes to law school takes torts as their class, which deals with negligence law. They’re learning how that principle of loving your neighbor, which originates with the Mosaic law, applies to our own society today.

Dr. Scott Hahn (28:53):
Right. When you think of how the rabbis counted all of the laws in the Torah, they came up with 613, and so it’s hard to order them all. But when they ask our Lord in the gospels, what is the most important law? He nails it. And the rabbi agrees. It is to love the Lord your God with all of your heart, mind, soul, and strength.

So he goes straight to Deuteronomy 6:5, but then the second is like undo it, love your neighbor as yourself. And that is nailing Leviticus 19. And so not all laws are created equal, but all 613 are correlated. They’re integrated. They’re united precisely by love in a way that might be surprising to us because we don’t think of love as something that can be commanded. I mean, if I told my students, love me, or if our governor told all of the citizens in the state of Ohio, “You must love me, ” I think we’d cringe and run out of the room like a burning building.

(29:48):
But when God creates us out of nothing and commands worship, not for his sake, but for ours, then love is the only inner logic that ties all of those laws together. You step back and say again, this is almost too good to be true. It exceeds our highest hopes. If God loves us more than we love ourselves and he requires us to love him, and that’s the thing that makes sense out of all the legislation, then worship is not front and center because God is a cosmic egomaniac, but because God is a cosmic lover. He wants what is best for us in a way that exceeds our own capacity to understand.

Dr. Jeff Myers (30:29):
Now, for those who are watching and listening right now who are thinking, these guys are wandering all over the place and where is this? I assure you, we have been focusing on laying the groundwork for what we get to talk about next, which is what we started the show with. I kind of teased it out there and then just dropped it, but it’s front and center here.

And that’s what you’ve written about your book, Hope to Die. And the subtitle of the book is The Christian Meaning of Death and the Resurrection of the Body because much of what the apostles were doing was responding to a heresy that was prominent at the time, gnosticism, which said that the world was created by an evil demagogue and the real God doesn’t have anything to do with our bodies or what’s happening in the physical world. It’s all spiritual.

(31:27):
And today, Scott, it seems that people have taken that on. Even people who have no belief in God at all are now saying, “Well, my identity, for example, my sexual identity is who I am as a person. So if I feel that I am a woman trapped in a man’s body, then that is who I am and you have to accept that.” It’s almost as if people have stopped seeing any relationship between who they are and their body, which can actually lead away from hope and lead to a fear of death, which is what you address in the book. And so I don’t know exactly how to unravel that and prepare for how to talk about your book, but maybe among other things, we need to tie back that relationship between our souls and our bodies.

Dr. Scott Hahn (32:17):
Yeah. I mean, when God has joined together, let not man put us under, and that’s not just male and female, that’s body and soul. And I think that in our culture today, our worldview, even though we don’t think we have one, but de facto, I think most people think good materialists. They think that the body is all there is, and yet I’m something other than my body. And that’s sort of incoherent or inexplicable. I think what we have to recognize though is that our culture is giving us confusing signals. It’s a kind of love-hate relationship.

You almost love your body too much and then indulge it, and then you begin to despise it because of the addictions or the weaknesses and the disease that comes our way. And it’s, I suppose, similar to other forms of addiction where you like drugs too much and then you despise yourself and then the needs you have or sexual addiction or alcoholism and so on.

(33:10):
But I think what we have to recognize is that the body is more than just a compartment. It’s more than a carton. It’s more than a wrapper that we find ourselves in for now. It really is a sign, but more than a sign, a symbol, even more than a symbol, there’s a sense in which my body is a sacrament of my soul, of who I am as a person made in the image and likeness of God. Angels are pure spirits. Dogs and trees and rocks are mostly material, but as Aquinas describes us, we’re a composite.

Humans are unique. We’re made up of contrary elements, the spiritual substance of the soul that gives me my own sense of personhood, and yet the physical component structure, my material body, which is why I’m gesturing with my hands and articulating words with my lips and using my body to communicate the things that are on my heart so that we can share them with others.

(34:07):
And when you see, we distinguish not to separate and oppose, but the purpose of distinguishing in Christian thought, in biblical worldview, we distinguish to unite. We distinguish the human nature of Jesus and the divine nature to show how they’re united in his person. We distinguish the material element of the body from the spiritual substance of the soul to show how they’re united in me as a person and in you as well. Got it. Then suddenly death is not just finally shedding this skin. We’re molting it like snakes to be freed. No. The idea that a body is sort of a prison was a platonic concept that gets it wrong.

On the other hand, to think that we’re nothing more than bodies is also reductionist and demeaning. And so you have this spastic way of thinking that was characteristic of gnosticism because these gnostic groups were either so libertine that they didn’t care what you did with the body, immorality, drunkenness, or on the other hand, so aesthetical that you denied yourself the bodily needs, you saw sexuality as something inherently evil and it’s like, well, which is it?

(35:14):
It can’t be both. And yet that kind of spastic thought pattern I think is prevalent today, which is why it is not wrongheaded to say we’ve backed ourselves into a kind of gnostic worldview where we love our bodies too much and yet we also, we have a contempt for them at the same time. And it’s only when we recognize that God, the Father has made us in his image and likeness so that the soul can know what is true and love what is good, but the body that is male or female can express that knowing and loving physically, not just spiritually.

So that when Adam knows Eve in Genesis four, she’s going to conceive and bear a child who also bears the image and likeness of God. I’m convinced that theology as the queen of the sciences has got to be given back her throne, but only when we’re really ready to integrate scripture and theology, which is why we call it the St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology. It’s not just Bible study and it’s not just studying doctrine. There really is a marriage that I think we need to rediscover. Very fruitful one too.

Dr. Jeff Myers (36:20):
Scott, tie that in because I know anybody who’s with us at this point in the conversation has had horribly painful experiences with the death of loved ones in this last year. And there seems to be this tremendous fear of death that almost ends up, it just grips the whole country. It affects everything, how we see one another, the laws that we make, the lockdowns, all of these different things. Help us understand that fear of death that people have that comes from that spastic weird relationship between body and soul.

Dr. Scott Hahn (37:13):
Yeah, good. Okay. So you can see how we have life that is physical in our bodies. It’s natural. We breathe and all of that. But we also have a life that is spiritual, that is a kind of higher life. They’re not opposed, and yet they are properly ordered in a hierarchical way that the life of the soul is to govern the life of the body.

And you can see this all the way back in the beginning when God breathed that Adam’s nostrils the breath of life, that’s how he becomes a living being, a nephesh in Hebrews 2:7, in Genesis 2:7. That Hebrew term is significant though, because it shows that man’s first breath is not just air or oxygen. It is the breath of God. It is the spirit of God. So that his body is animated by his soul, but his soul is animated by the Holy Spirit.

(38:01):
There’s life and then there is life. And so 10 verses later when God says about the forbidden fruit, the day you eat of it, you’ll surely die. He could have said you’ll deserve to die. You will be sentenced to die. You will begin to die. But he says quite clearly on the day you eat of it, you’ll surely die, which raises the question, what happens next?

Because when you turn the page and they eat, they don’t die. They don’t die physically, but you can recognize what philo, the first century Jewish philosopher in San Augustine also saw that there’s death that is physical, but there’s also a death that is spiritual. And when 1 John 5:17 speaks about not all sin is mortal, but there is mortal sin, it’s the same Greek word that you find in the Septuagint. Fanitos, the day they ate, they died.

(38:48):
Spiritual suicide. They snuffed out the life of God and their soul by preferring something finite to the infinite gift of God. That’s the essential meaning of idolatry. And so when we look at death, we’ve got to recognize, well, if there are two kinds of life, physical, natural, and spiritual, supernatural, then there are also two kinds of death, the physical as well as the spiritual.

In Hebrews 2:14 and 15, we’d have to spend more time looking at this later perhaps, but the devil had the power of death, the ancient serpent. And in Hebrews 2, we read that our first parents had the fear of death. It’s natural. It’s healthy. Jesus exhibits that in the Garden of Gethsemane. He’s not looking forward to physical death, but ultimately to violate the will of God is more fatal and mortal ultimately than to just simply avoid. It’s more mortal than cancer.

(39:47):
It’s more. And yet we have it exactly bassackwards, as my mom would say. We fear the loss of a life that is finite, meaningful, good, natural, but we don’t fear the loss of a life that is divine and eternal. And it’s proper to have the sacred view of life. We’re pro-life, the natural, the human, the divine as well. But I think what we have to recognize is that this human life of ours is, the mortality rate is 100%. None of us are going to get out here alive.

But as Jesus shows us through his life, death, and resurrection, plan A always involved something whereby God would take the grain of wheat that falls into the earth and dies in order to produce even greater fruit. Jesus’ resurrection is not just a resuscitated corpse like Lazarus. It’s not just his legal vindication of innocence.

(40:45):
It’s not just the fulfillment of the prophecies about being raised on the third day. It’s nothing less than the divinization of his human nature. And it doesn’t add anything to the eternal son of God, but it’s how he adds everything to sons and daughters of men so that we can enter into what he had from all eternity.

Again, we’ve been made partakers of the divine nature through a death that wasn’t the loss of life, but the gift of life. He wasn’t the victim of Roman violence there at Calvary as much as he was the victim of divine love. And this, again, gets us to the portal, the very core, the nucleus of a Christian biblical worldview. And so it would take hours to unpack this adequately for people to feel as though I’m doing anything more than just aiming a fire hose at them. But I mean, this is why we’re on the planet.

(41:41):
This is why we’re mortal. God isn’t up there saying, Yikes, they’re all going to die. What are we going to do? Well, we’re going to resuscitate their course at the end of time. This is all proceeding according to a plan like Paul would say, who has known the mind of God? I mean, I would say, who would’ve thunk it? Trust God more than we trust ourselves and we’ll realize that the best is yet to come. And again, it’s not plan B.

Dr. Jeff Myers (42:06):
This is so good. Scott, I work with young adults, as you know, and you’ve shared a story with me about how your son read through the book, Understanding the Times, and that really made a big difference for him and his life. I love that story. And when I work with young people, I always want to kind of ask as sort of the last question in the show, what is your word to the young adults today who need hope, who live with that fear of death? What is your word to the rising generation?

Dr. Scott Hahn (42:44):
Well, I shared with you before we began, Jeff, about how my oldest son, who’s now a PhD, Dr. Hahn, professor of scripture and theology at Mount St. Mary’s Seminary Emmitsburg, I am so proud of him. He’s so brilliant. He intimidates me and I enjoy very few things more than that. But when he was 13 or 14, he did something really wrong and I had to figure out a punishment.

And so I just thought, well, let’s write straight with crooked lines. Let’s do what God the Father does with me as a sinner. I gave him this big thick book by David Noble on the team called Understand at the Times that said, “Read through it, take notes and develop a biblical worldview.” He did. I was Catholic and so was he at the time. So there were slight differences, but like 85, 90% of our beliefs are held in common.

(43:30):
And that book, especially when you study Marx, Freud, Darwin and so on, it changed his life much more than I realized, more than he realized. And so years later, he told me, “Dad, that was the best punishment you could have doled out.” And I’m so grateful that I had a chance to share that with you before we began the recording, but I was hoping that I could share it with your listeners as well, our viewers. But then you said to me, your experience when you first met David Noble in Summit Ministries was, “I’ve got a lot of questions.” And his response was something like, “We’re not afraid of questions.” Is that what he said?

Dr. Jeff Myers (44:04):
That’s right.

Dr. Scott Hahn (44:05):
Yeah. And to me, that’s the message I would say to young people. Don’t be afraid to ask questions, hard questions, but then don’t be afraid to search out answers, especially in the word of God. We’re not claiming to have all the answers, but what we are saying is we’re not afraid of the questions. We welcome them.

And I think true believers should recognize the fact that 30,000 questions don’t add up to a single doubt to quote John Henry Newman. It’s one thing to ask questions about your faith, but that is not the same thing as doubting or denying that it’s true. You’re just recognizing, “I believe, help thou my unbelief. Increase our faith, Lord,” because he wants to do that more than we want him to.

Dr. Jeff Myers (44:51):
I’m taking so much away from this conversation, Scott. Some of the things I will never forget are that we’re not living God’s plan B, we’re living his plan A, that all of scripture reveals this plan to us and it culminates in Jesus Christ, death, and resurrection, not just as a reinvigorated corpse, but as the living God who secures our hope in life and in death. What a great investment tonight.

Dr. Scott Hahn (45:21):
Glory to God in the highest.

Dr. Jeff Myers (45:25):
Dr. Scott Hahn, thank you so much for being on the Dr. Jeff Show today.

Dr. Scott Hahn (45:29):
Oh, you’re welcome, Jeff. But I mean, thank you. 10,000 thanks. What a joy, what an honor, what a privilege.

Dr. Jeff Myers (45:33):
Oh, now that was an intense discussion. I’m really glad that you joined us today on the Dr. Jeff Show. You can learn more about Scott Hahn at scotthahn.com. Han is spelled H-A-H-N. Also, you can visit the St. Paul Center that Dr. Hahn talked about at stpaulcenter.com. And you can find out more information about Scott’s book, Hope to Die: The Christian Meaning of Death and the Resurrection of the Body that is available wherever books are sold.

Worldview changes everything. That was true in today’s show. It’s going to be true in future shows. Please tell your friends. We want everybody to subscribe to this so we can get the truth out as widely as possible, and we’ll see you next time.

Ryan Dobson (46:20):
Hi, everyone. This is Ryan Dobson from Rebel Parenting. When my parents, Jim and Shirley Dobson chose Summit Ministries Worldview Conference for me when I was 17, who knew how completely transformed my life would be in two short weeks? It changed me so much, I’ve returned every summer for 34 years.

Summit Worldview Conferences challenge students ages 16 to 25 to think deeper about their faith and convictions by engaging with today’s top worldview thinkers and apologists. This summer, your student can attend an in-person conference, that’s right, in person or summit’s amazing virtual experience. They will be equipped to vigorously articulate biblical truth, meaningfully impact culture, and curb the influence of false worldviews. Join Summit this summer and change the trajectory of your students’ life forever. Click the link in the show notes to learn more.