Biola University
On today’s episode, Stephen Lloyd-Moffett, professor of Religious Studies at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, CA, speaks with Tim and Rick about the deeply human tendency to search for meaning in religious experience. Stephen shares a story from his younger years that would set him off on a vocational path of religious scholarship. The three then spend time discussing whether God can be found and whether we can know God — important questions that invite points of agreement and respectful disagreement. Through the discussion we also see a common value of wanting to acquire a conception of God that can profoundly shape how to live a life.
Transcript
Rick Langer: Welcome to the Winsome Conviction Podcast. My name's Rick Langer. I'm a professor emeritus at Biola University and also the co-director of the Winsome Conviction Project with my good friend Tim Muehlhoff.
Tim Muehlhoff: Rick, great to be back with you. One of the really fun things about doing this podcast is we get to have on people that normally we just wouldn't rub shoulders with. But I recently got a chance to do a Veritas Forum, which is this amazing program where they bring people from different perspectives on different college campuses, and they have a moderator, and that moderator will guide a discussion. And I recently was on with Elizabeth Barrett. She's the host of this really interesting podcast, Rick, called The Reluctant Therapist, and she's great. She's been doing it forever, and we absolutely had a blast doing this Veritas Forum. She actually invited me onto her radio program after the Veritas Forum, and we continued our conversation.
But one thing that made the conversation so productive was the moderator. I just found him absolutely fascinating and immediately thought, "We need to have him on our podcast." So let me introduce our listeners to Dr. Stephen Lloyd-Moffett. He is a professor of religious studies at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo. He holds a master of arts and a PhD in religious studies from the University of California Santa Barbara, as well as a master's of theology from St. Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary. So what a fascinating background. And Rick, I think you're absolutely going to love him. I found Dr. Moffett to be gracious, funny, engaging. So Stephen, with that kind of introduction, don't blow it.
Stephen Lloyd-Moffett: Yeah, thanks so much for having me on, Tim and Rick. It's good to be with you today.
Tim Muehlhoff: I want to read a quote, and this will serve as an introduction. It's from a Catholic philosopher named Peter Kraft, and he says this. "The idea of God has guided or diluted more lives, changed more history, inspired more music and poetry and philosophy, than anything else real or imagined. It has made more of a difference to human life on this planet, both individually and collectively, than anything else ever has." And I think what brings us together, Stephen, is that we care about the religious impulse that seems to be part of humanity, and we care deeply about God. Even though we may have different takes on this, we've spent a lot of our time and professional career studying this idea of God. So what brought you to religious studies?
Stephen Lloyd-Moffett: Yeah, well, it is a long story, but I'll give a shortened version of it, because as an undergraduate I was a economics and film studies major, and I had thought about either going into film or going into business. And I studied abroad in Greece, which was, I told people because I was interested in philosophy, but it was really, I grew up in Seattle and I did not want to go anywhere that was cloudy. And while I was in Greece, there was an extra credit opportunity, which as a econ major, I knew the best value of an extra credit opportunity provided by the school was the farthest away. And this one happened to be at a monastic community called Mount Athos, which is in northern Greece. It's a peninsula that has been home to monks for 1500 years, and it's a center of Orthodox spirituality. But I knew nothing about it except for it was a free trip paid for by the school.
I had never stepped foot in an Orthodox church. I had grown up in a fairly typical suburban Presbyterian church, so I knew nothing about Orthodoxy or monasticism. I don't think I'd even ever met a monk at that point. And I went in with a friend, and we were greeted by a monk, and he just said, "Welcome. I'm glad you're here." And what's hard to capture is, it wasn't so much what he said, but he had this joy that sort of exuded out of every pore of his body. It was just warmth of love and support that came out. And it wasn't even what he said, but it's who he was.
And I was blown away. I told to my friend at that moment, I go, "What is that? That is..." And I look back now and I think I had seen my first truly happy person, and it was like I had a sort of a scale for what was possible for humans, and he just sort of blew that scale out of the water. I saw somebody truly living. And he said, he eventually said, "You should take a nap. We have church tonight." And I was like, "I've been to church many, many times, why would I need a nap?" Well, that service started at 8:00 PM and went until 10:00 AM the next day, a 14-hour service. And I was just blown away.
And I came back and I ended up struggling to understand monasticism, and I wrote a term paper, study abroad, which is not often a center of one's academic journey, this study abroad. But it was the only time I pulled an all-nighter in my entire college career trying to understand, where did these monks come from. And to make a long story short, 10 years later, that was my dissertation topic.
And so that was the beginning of a journey to try to understand what I saw in those monks. And I eventually ended up spending a year living in monasteries, mostly Greek Orthodox monasteries, but also Russian and Egyptian, and then in the middle of it ended up in India for some months. And so that was really the beginning of a journey of studying monks that I'm still on.
Rick Langer: Wow, what a great story. That's just really... When Tim was reading your bio, my first question was, "How in the world did you end up in an Orthodox seminary as part of your educational process?" I guess you answered that question now.
Stephen Lloyd-Moffett: Yeah, it was interesting. At a personal level, I had to separate what was an academic interest versus a personal interest. When I came back from the monasteries, I had a job lined up as a management consultant for a very prominent firm. And I kind of had this dream of, well, I was going to live monastically in the world. So I was at the beginning getting up at 3:30 and saying my prayers and going through that whole process, as one does as a monk. And within a month it was 4:30 and in a month it was 5:30 and then slowly dissipated, as one does without the support. So I was kind of in a wilderness there trying to reconcile this monastic life that I loved and was drawn towards in some ways, but also all my other interests. And it was really a sort of struggle to try to make sense of it.
What I realized is that, after a few years of being a management consultant and a year driving down to South America, I kind of realized that while I had experienced all these things and met all these people and had so many tremendous moments of spiritual joy and insight, I wasn't qualified really to understand it. I didn't know the languages, I didn't know the context. My biblical knowledge was probably better than most Christians, but really I hadn't studied the Bible with any depth. And so I decided I needed, if I was going to be serious about answering that question, I'd need to go back to school. Santa Barbara was one of the great religious studies programs, but they didn't have the support in the patristics and the early Greek fathers. St. Vladimir's in New York was sort of the leading center for studying Orthodox patristics. And so I spent the first three years of graduate school part-time in Santa Barbara and part-time in New York.
Tim Muehlhoff: And how long have you been teaching at San Luis Obispo? Cal Poly?
Stephen Lloyd-Moffett: Yeah, so this will be my 20th year starting up in the fall.
Tim Muehlhoff: Oh, congratulations. [inaudible 00:08:52].
Stephen Lloyd-Moffett: Been there, yeah, pretty much my entire career. I did one year at Cal State Bakersfield, but other than that, I came and was one of the founders of the religious studies program at Cal Poly. It had been approved as a minor the year before I got there, but then my predecessor had a brain hemorrhage in class and had to move on. And so I took the program over and have been developing it throughout its whole time at Cal Poly.
It's interesting because I don't know how much you know about Cal Poly, but we are the most religious school west of the Mississippi outside the denominational schools. That is more, a higher percentage of our students are engaged with their religious beliefs than any other public institution. So it's a very unique environment in which to teach religious studies.
Tim Muehlhoff: And you've made some interesting observations. I was listening to one of, I think it was a sermon, not a lecture, and you said a couple things that I just wanted to get your thoughts on. You said, "Most of my students are uncomfortable with a traditional notion of God," and you said that 70% of millennials and Gen Z have significant doubts about the traditional conceptions of God, so that you've been on this journey to have a conception of God that you think you could live with as well as your students would find more inviting. So we would love to hear your understanding of God, and I know that you often appeal to the New Testament, particularly John chapter four, verse seven, "Beloved, let us love one and another, for love is from God and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God." So could you just unpack for us your working idea of who God is?
Stephen Lloyd-Moffett: Yeah, I mean it's definitely an evolution that has evolved over time and through many vicissitudes. But I think the starting off point is really, when my students say, "I don't like God," or, "I can't believe in God." And I've come to ask them, "So who is God to you?" And more often than not, their answer is something that I can't agree to either, like God is a God who judges people and sends people to hell for just being who they are. And I'm like, "Okay, well, if that's God, I don't buy that either." Or, "God is one who doesn't mind war and bad things happening, and doesn't want to do anything about it." And I say, "Okay, if that's God, I don't believe that either." And so instead of just being like, "Oh, okay, you're a non-believer and I know what that means," normally I like to start off by saying, "Okay, well who is God to you?"
And I find that as a technique is useful in other things. When people say, "Oh, I have an issue with Islam," it's like, "Okay, what is Islam to you?" And then more often than not, I say, "Boy, if that was Islam, I'd have a problem with it too. But fortunately there's more to it." So I have evolved into thinking then, as I talk with students, who God is.
I have had struggles, I think in the past with trying to reconcile the God that's often been presented in America, which is God is the one who wants my football team to win, and the other one to lose. God is the one who really wants me to have this car or pass this exam. And when I sort of reconcile that with the God that I encountered in the monasteries, it just seemed so vast and so great and so wondrous. I really found myself drawn more towards the Eastern Orthodox conceptions of God ultimately being a mystery, that God is beyond our human conceptions as a creator of logic, as the creator of all the conceptions and frameworks of the world. God is beyond all of those.
And so while the things of this earth will point to God, and the New Testament can point to God, and Jesus can be the living embodiment of God on earth, ultimately God will stand beyond any human conceptions that we have. And in the East there's always been this sort of accent on the mysteriousness of God. And I've tried not to violate that or to have the sort of hubris to think that I get God.
I hope that I am gaining a clearer and clearer picture over time. But I realize that at each journey, at each stage in that journey, my conception of God only grows bigger and greater and more mysterious. The minute I think I understand God, a new vista sort of awakens. And so my conception of God is one that ultimately I'll never be able to put human terms around, that'll always at some point stand out.
But then I think, Tim, you're referring to a sermon I gave about that maybe one human or one sort of framework for understanding God that I've grown skeptical of is sort of God acting very much like a grand human. So when we say, "God thinks this," or, "God wants this," that I was like, "Well, maybe we should stop thinking of God solely in terms of a noun who acts more or less like us, but rather God is the act of love." God is the bond that comes to earth. And so when we say that Jesus is fully divine, Jesus embodies that love so perfectly and inspires that love and others so well, that is what we mean by God incarnate. That maybe a new approach to seeing God can see God as the act of loving, and that when we have God in us, that love is the sign of divinity within us.
So maybe that's a start to thinking about it.
Rick Langer: So I listened to that sermon as well, that I think that Tim referred to. And talking about the idea of God as a noun, God as a verb. And there's a part of me that responds to it... I mean you see Christian statements of God is love. So you get in one sense that kind of an equation straight out of scripture. But on the other hand, I don't think what scripture is saying when it says God is love is that God is a verb or God simply is the act of love exchanged between two human persons, or I'm not sure how you might define love because that kind of demands its own definition, right. But there's a part of me that somehow I can't quite put that one together. I guess maybe I want to just ask, so is God a person or is God a verb? Because I have a hard time thinking of a verb as a person, if you know what I mean.
Stephen Lloyd-Moffett: Yeah, I would say... So my dissertation, I did a lot on Saint Basil of Caesarea, fourth century bishop who's just absolutely foundational to Orthodox theology. And he has a longstanding debate with a guy named Eunomius. And what Eunomius argued back in the fourth century is that when we say God is Father, that father is not symbolic, that he is father. And Basil replied, "No, God is not a father like you and I are a father." Well, he's not a father, he was a bishop, but other humans that are fathers. The father is a rich symbol that helps us limited humans conceptualize this vast mystery that's behind everything and impelling everything forward. And so when we say God is a person, I think one thing that often falls short is that very naturally leads people to the Sistine chapel, right? God is just an older, greater version of a human being.
And I've come quite skeptical of that. It's a framework that's helpful in some ways, but ultimately it's just a framework. And so yes, I mean, we can talk Trinitarian theology and the personhood, and three persons in one essence, and that's a useful series of frameworks for us to solve it. But when those frameworks get in the way of encountering the mystery behind everything, then I think maybe we need to look for other frameworks, because in the end, our human logic and conceptions to me are just frameworks that point to a reality that is true and deep and real and behind everything, but is not confined by the frameworks we give in.
Tim Muehlhoff: And Stephen, I love that concept you said when you said, "Then the other religions become," I think you said, "almost spiritual [inaudible 00:19:19] or source material for us to find this mysterious transcendent being. I'm very much impressed by your knowledge of other religions. You very easily move in and out of different religious traditions. Does that help your conception of God, is that you come to these vast different traditions and when you put them all together, you get a better concept of God than rather than just going with one particular tradition?
Stephen Lloyd-Moffett:Yeah, I mean the sort of struggle between doing religious studies and doing Christian theology has been present in so much of my life. And one thing that I've found is that... That beginning experience for me was with an Orthodox monk on Mount Athos. And I've richly spent time with a ton of Orthodox monks that I find incredibly inspiring and deep. I've of course been with many monks who aren't, but as I've sort of traversed through life, I've also met people of other traditions who share a lot of that same depth that when I look at them, I see that love in them, I see that understanding. I see that sort of same spark that is coming through their actions.
And so I can say that maybe they're from a tradition that doesn't resonate with me, that Christianity might resonate best with me, but I'm willing to entertain the notion that whatever is behind this experience of love that I first discovered through Christianity, and then most saliently through orthodoxy, I'm willing to entertain that that same God can work through other traditions and through other people. I can say for me that Jesus might be the highest expression of that love, the embodiment of that love, or at least the Jesus that I want to know or that I choose to know. But I can also see in others that love refracted in who they are and what they do. And so I've found at times the conceptions of other traditions very helpful for me to expand the frameworks that I take to encounter that mystery behind things.
Rick Langer: I was very moved by the story you told about this encounter with the Orthodox monk on Mount Athos, and just this feeling like he broke the boundaries of... My needle, my joy measuring needle broke when I tried to assess him. And it made me wonder, so was the impulse you felt with that an impulse to pursue? I don't know how to say that, so perhaps lurking behind this is also my tension with, is God a person? Is Jesus a person? But I'll put it this way, let you correct. Did it make you want to pursue being like that monk, pursue joy perhaps? Or did it make you want to pursue the God of that monk, so to speak? And it may be that that's the wrong way to ask the question, but hey, that's what's in my head. I'll let you adjust that.
Stephen Lloyd-Moffett: Yeah, no, I think it's a fair question because I have actually ended up studying a lot of the psychological literature on happiness and done a lot of comparative happiness stuff. But one of the things I find from that is actually true to that experience, is most happy and joyful people don't set happiness and joy as the north star of what they're aspiring to. They're aspiring to something else, and the joy and happiness is the byproduct of that.
So for me, it was very much that I saw in Father Ineos someone who in my mind was one of the first people who is truly living. When Jesus says, "I came to bring you life and life abundant," what is that? I mean, what is he talking about? Because he doesn't come to bring me breathing. Or maybe he does, but in some mundane level, right? When he says, "I come to bring life," well, that's what was embodied by that first monk I saw. He was someone truly living.
And I came back in a very 19-year-old American way saying, "Ah, America lied to me. America said to truly live, I need to find a spouse, get a good job, save up money and buy a house on the coast." Most of those people who were doing that didn't seem to be fully alive. And yet here was somebody who had rejected marriage, rejected a career, was assistant guest keeper at a monastery, and he seemed to find what everybody in America wanted.
And so when you looked at that source, he was not saying, "I wanted to be happy, I wanted to be joy." He said, "I encountered God and this was the only response that I could give, which is to dedicate my life to explore that God that inspired me." So I mean, to answer your question, Rick, it was very much a trying to understand what was his path, to understand that God who had been given to me for my youth, because he clearly had a different conception than I had encountered in America.
Tim Muehlhoff: Stephen, to listen, there's a tension, I think we probably feel as Biola faculty here, because we're the Bible Institute of Los Angeles. So we kind of put all of our cards on the table right away. So when you talk about that the spirit of love will be a test of our actions, there's just so much of that that we resonate with. And even learning from other religions. We have, one of our philosophers here at Biola wrote an amazing book called Confucius for Christians, and how we should be open to some of those impulses that Confucius had.
But maybe the tension we feel a little bit, as much as we resonate is, but then can God be found? I understand the mystery of it, and I love your concept of spiritual nomads picking and helping, moving in and out of different religious traditions. But at the end of the day, I think we would say as evangelicals that we have found God in the person of Jesus Christ. But in your perspective, can God be found, or is it an ever deepening, evolving search that certainly produces happiness, joy, contentment in the search, but does one ever arrive where we feel like we found the objective God?
Stephen Lloyd-Moffett: Yeah. Let me parse that in a couple of ways. First is no, I don't think you ever end up encapsulating or encircling God. So my experience both as an individual and reading the church fathers is that the moment you think you get God, a new vista awakens, right? So Gregory of Nessa talks about going from glory to glory, that is you are on this unending sort of move towards a greater and greater view of God. And I wouldn't say that you found God from his perspective or didn't find God. You are finding God all the time, and that movement towards that God is the Christian life. That is heaven, that is that continual reorientation of yourself every day towards a clearer and clearer picture, knowing that you won't ever arrive. You won't ever have that beatific vision that Augustine thought you had, for example. At least in the East, you don't have that. You don't ever arrive and just have pure clarity. You are on ongoing journey.
As to whether other traditions can find it, all I know is that for reasons small and big, Christianity has become an obstacle to many people. The God of Christianity is a source of pain or a source of disgust for some people. And so I just don't think that that has to be the only way. If there are other ways that God can reach out to people, I don't limit God to being, this is the only path, and certainly not the only path being my individual denomination or my own individual tradition. On Mount Athos at Vatopedi Monastery where I met Father Aeneas, outside the church there's an image of Socrates and Aristotle. And it's caused great controversy even in Orthodoxy on this, like, "Why are they at a monastery?" And the monk said, "Yes, they pointed to Christ," like they had some part of truth that led to Christ. Christ will be the highest embodiment, but it's not like they were in undifferentiated darkness. They could point, and I guess the God that I believe in is big enough to use a myriad of tools to help people see who he is.
Rick Langer: If I could just run with that a little bit. So this is intriguing to me, and I feel a certain measure of tension that I'm trying to figure out what it is that's kind of niggling at the back of my mind here going, "Why does this not work better for me?" So let me try this. When you were talking about this, about the idea of encapsulating God or getting him all figured out, that's the thing. I don't think many Christians think that you... I mean, well, I should be careful. I am always amazed at what some people think, but I certainly don't have some notion I'm going to get God all right, all correct, all in my box. But I do think finding God as if that is a particular person, to go back to that issue, can make sense without it having to entail some kind of complete encapsulation.
And the idea that comes to my mind, I guess, is I think about my wife. So Sherry and I've been married for 43 years. I better be careful. I don't want to get this wrong and have her listen to the podcast. But anyhow, we've been married for a good long time now, and I would absolutely say I know my wife, I know Sherry. But I would never say I know her exhaustively or that I'm never surprised by what I find in my wife of four decades plus.
And I think it's actually almost a proper property of a genuine person, is that you do know them truly, but you don't know them fully. You do know who they are. There's an accuracy about how you know them, but not a comprehensiveness. Because it'd be a terrible thing if I couldn't tell my wife Sherry from Tim's wife, Noreen. I like Noreen too, but she's not my wife. And so maybe I'm just [inaudible 00:32:01] but some way you kind of got to get it right, and anybody can't plug or play with that. Does that make sense or am I going down the wrong path with this?
Stephen Lloyd-Moffett: Yeah, no, I mean, so Basil, St. Basil started this sort of distinction in God between God's essence and God's energies. And so God's essence will always remain beyond us. We'll never get to the core, but we can see God's energies. And energies are really sort of the way God shows up in the world. And so when we talk about God working through King David, we want to see God working through St. Paul or whatever. I mean, that is a concrete example of God's energies in the world. But also when we see a miracle or we see a severed relationship come together through Christ, that's God's energies in the world too. And so we can know things about God, it's not that God is completely a mystery that we'll never fully get. We can know things. The question is, as Orthodoxy will say, in the end, I'm going to accent that there's so much more to God that stays beyond the little bit that I can capture in my head.
I can spend a lifetime experiencing God and studying God and clarifying who God is, but in the end, the accent's got to be on the mysteriousness that lays beyond. God is so much bigger, greater and more complex than my little brain will ever get its head wrapped around. And so it's really a version of where you sort of put yourself down. Yes, I do know some. I've spent my life studying God, I've had incredible experiences with God, but I still will say that compared to even people I've met, I know just 1% of who God is, because God is so much bigger, so much greater, so much more mysterious than my little brain can conceptualize.
Tim Muehlhoff: And Stephen, I think we would agree with that. I think we would also, the inscrutableness of God, I think where as evangelicals we probably place a lot of the stock in Jesus. I'm thinking of Colossians, that when you were talking, I was thinking of Colossians 2:9, that the fullness of the Godhead dwells bodily in Christ. So I think some of that mystery of God, inscrutableness, is when Jesus comes in human form and lives and dwells among us and is fully human, fully God. And so there's this way of relating now to the mysteriousness of God as you interact with a human being.
So for us, we place a lot of stock that Jesus is the one who makes God understandable. Can you help us just for a second, understand your understanding of Jesus? Would you say that Jesus was God? Would you buy the resurrection that we put a lot of stock in, to say that Jesus died and was resurrected by God? Can you just flesh out a little bit? Is Jesus one among many or is there a uniqueness in your understanding of Jesus?
Stephen Lloyd-Moffett: Yeah, so there's several questions there that, let me set aside. I mean, I would say for me, Jesus is that divine energy in human form. Yes. So absolutely Jesus is. And I would say too, that the knowledge of Jesus is also inexhaustible. The reason why the New Testament can be such an enduring text is because you can study it and study it and find new insights every day of the year for 75 years of your life and never exhaust the wisdom and beauty that is found in it.
I love, I've had students in the past be like, "Oh, I totally understand Romans." I had a student at 20 write a self-published book on Romans, and I was like, "I've read Romans in Greek. I've read every commentary. There are whole passages, I have no idea what Paul was talking about. Don't get it. Trust me, you don't get it." And that's good you don't get it. That's fine. It just means there's so much more to it. And so, yes, I think Jesus is, in my view, the highest example and a unique example of that.
Now, that being said, I also know that Jesus won't resonate with everybody. And I've seen people see that divine source refracted in others and find the kinds of inspiration that seem consistent in my view, with the God who works through Jesus. So I'm not going to say that there is no way that there's any other vehicle of God than Jesus. I won't stand on that mark.
I can say things like, for me, Jesus has been the greatest lens through which to see God on earth. And that can go from my own experience. But I have more qualms about saying that is a universal statement for everybody. So yeah, I guess work with that as you will.
Rick Langer: Well, Stephen, thanks so much for joining us. It's a fun conversation to have, and one of the things we like to do with the Winston Conviction Podcast is just say there's value in conversations even when they don't end in conversion or agreement or any of those things. We learn things. We learn things about people, we learn things about ourselves, and we often end up learning things about our own beliefs that refine and enhance them. So it's fun to just take some time and have one of those kinds of conversations. So thank you very much, Stephen, for taking the time to do this with us. It was a delight, and we really appreciate your taking the time to spend this with us.
Stephen Lloyd-Moffett: Yeah. Well, thanks for having me on. I always enjoy talking with thoughtful people.
Rick Langer: Speaking of thoughtful people, I'd like to thank all of our listeners at the Winston Conviction Podcast. We'd love to have you become a regular listener, subscribe on the Spotify or Apple Podcasts or wherever you like to get your podcasts. And we'd also encourage you to check out the winstonconviction.com website. We have resources there, articles, information on cultivating convictions, holding them deeply, conversing with others in ways that honor our differences, but avoid dividing communities. And that's really what we're all about.
So thanks for joining us. We'd love to have you subscribe. The other thing you can do is sign up for the quarterly newsletter, and you can find that sign up on the winstonconviction.com website as well. Thanks so much for being with us.
