Steven Garber (00:02)
As I watch the world, really all over the world, Asia and Africa and Europe and Latin America and North America, I think that the church as church stumbles over the mere meaning of vocation pretty badly. And we stumble over it because we are disposed to dualism in the church, wherever the church is. We just can’t imagine how it is and why it is and why would it matter to God, why should it matter to us? That we ought to see the world more coherently.
And so for all kinds of theological and historical and ecclesial reasons, suppose, we can’t imagine any other world than what we have to conceive of, construct as a more dualist universe. in the long history of the Catholic Church, vocation is reserved for priests and nuns.
if you have a vocation and you’re intending to be somebody more religious is the language which is used, of course. ⁓ The Orthodox have their own ways of stumbling. The Protestant world, of course, the last few centuries. I there was early on in Luther and Calvin in particular a great recovery of a deeper biblically born understanding of the calling of God upon ordinary people in the world. ⁓
But because of our disposition to dualism, it didn’t take very long before us to begin to say, are you sure Martin Luther that a cobbler could be? I can’t see how quite that would be, like that could have really been. if you imagined an early life in Geneva, Switzerland, caring about the public sewers, because those things matter to God and his people in the world, it isn’t very long before, of course, we just began to stumble over, stumble over.
Dru Johnson (01:26)
Hmm.
Steven Garber (01:42)
I do think there are some theological visions and histories which are better on this than others, but I do think that wherever I go, I find that just to be a finger to the wind, when you think about things we pray about as the church gathers, we assume in some ways what we pray about ought to matter most to God and to us. But I think how rare it is, how rare it is for the church ever to pray about people in ordinary life having ordinary work in the world.
vocation is very rarely brought up or remembered in the worship of God. I would say just to finish this that my own long held credo has been that vocation is integral, not incidental to the mission of God, to the Missio Dei.
Dru Johnson (02:27)
Yeah, and by dualism, I assume that you mean this kind of heightening of spirituality, that the greatest things are in the heavenly realms and ⁓ kind of the old school caricature of Platonic spiritualism. And everything kind of have to do with the muck and yuck of daily life is just what we have to do to get by. But as my Brazilian church parishioners, when I was in a Brazilian church in Newark, New Jersey for 13 years, ⁓ when they found out I was a pastor, they’re like,
Why are you doing this professor thing? why are you, you should be a pastor. Like, you’re ordained as a pastor, you should be working as pastor. That’s the high calling, right? This professor thing is kind of a joke, right?
Steven Garber (03:04)
Yes.
That’s exactly, in a thousand ways, Dru that face is seen all over the world.
Dru Johnson (03:14)
⁓ It strikes me that ⁓ one of the most, you know, I come from the biblical scholarship world, but if you’re reading the Old Testament, if you’re thinking about the festival cycles, if you’re thinking about the kind of life of the agrarian subsistence farmer in the Iron Age and how they celebrate and worship God, it seems, I don’t know, maybe I’m naive, it seems impossible that you wouldn’t see
that working the field is a labor of, it’s actually where you meditate on God’s Torah. It’s where you do this work, right, is in the field day and night. So I wonder if this is also a Bible, I tie everything to Bible literacy or Bible illiteracy, but I wonder if there’s a little bit of Bible literacy problem going on here.
Steven Garber (03:59)
Yeah. Now I’m sure you’re right about that. You know, if you are representing the Center for Hebraic Thought, I was just thinking about what that would mean for this conversation, Dru, and thinking, you one of the most glorious and instructive of all the Psalms, the Psalm number eight, which places human beings in very middle of God’s work in the world, in middle of the cosmos. We are agents, we are stewards, we are meant to be a little lower than the angels, of course, you know, to do what? To take up God’s work in his world.
Dru Johnson (04:28)
Mm-hmm.
Steven Garber (04:28)
And
so I do think that there’s a biblical literacy problem. And I would say that, again, you are the Center for for Hebraic thought person, but you know the church is stumbling over the medium of sexuality in the Song of Songs. We just can’t quite imagine that this could be anything other than a metaphor for the smile of Jesus. You think it looks like a bottom to me. ⁓
Dru Johnson (04:50)
Right.
Right.
Steven Garber (04:56)
The Church just has not been able to figure out how to actually take the goodness of God’s creation and understand our place in relationship to it. We just don’t do that very well.
Dru Johnson (05:07)
I always love to point out that there’s a strong rabbinic tradition that says it’s obvious what the Song of Songs is about. It’s about mathematics. ⁓ It’s a medieval tradition, so you can imagine why they might say that. Yeah, and I think, I wonder, two things that I would like to…
Steven Garber (05:14)
Ha
Dru Johnson (05:25)
put in conversation with vocation here is one, where does the Protestant work ethic fit in here? And then later, I would like to return to the idea of career and careerism, because I think that’s the only vocabulary we have today that we can employ successfully or unsuccessfully as the case might be.
Steven Garber (05:42)
Right.
Well, you know this is true, but almost every good thing that happens in this world has the possibility of being stewarded well and rightly and then being stewarded poorly and we miss the point. We distort or we skew along the way. ⁓ I often think about my wife Meg, who I’ve been married to for most of 50 years. Her kisses are a good gift to me, but you know that kisses can be distorted and misused and you can hurt somebody for the rest of life by the wrong kiss at the right time, by the wrong…
So it isn’t that somehow a kiss itself is ⁓ to be held in suspicion, but the question in Augustinian terms is where does it find its place in the orbit of your loves?
Dru Johnson (06:20)
you
Steven Garber (06:28)
So I would say, on the question of what the Protestant Reformation brought about, when you get a few hundred years away, it’s hard always to know, did that person really say this or not? And since you were a Center for Hebraic thought, you’ve walked the streets of Jerusalem and the cities of Israel, and you know that tradition says, it’s pretty easily said, whichever turn you make on the little street. Well, the tradition says that, and I don’t mind that, it’s harder to get history other than those kind of
Dru Johnson (06:51)
Right.
Steven Garber (06:58)
⁓ reflections because we don’t really know, we weren’t there. But I would say someone like Luther, did he really say that when the nurse, the woman milking the teats of the cow, that her hands or fingers were as holy as the priest who offers the holy sacrament? I think that theologically I believe that’s true. ⁓ Did Luther say that? I’m not sure exactly, but he believed that, something quite pretty close to that.
So would say that there was something that God did in history through these fathers, mostly in the Reformation thought as we look back on it now, centuries later, to say, well, they understood something about the coherence of the cosmos.
They understood something about the nature of God and the nature of human beings in God’s world. And so they were, in some ways, pushing back on centuries upon centuries of abuse within the churches that had unfolded over time. And we all know some of those stories. And not only was it in terms of buying your salvation, things which are egregious errors for the church to wrestle with, but as it worked out sociologically and historically, I’m sure people like Luther were saying, really, it is like that? And the priest is this.
like this and he does this and the rest of us have no relationship to and you know and whether Luther actually said you know why should the devil have all the good music I don’t know but he he thought things like that you know in some ways really to listen to the taverns and the pubs of his own day and think well that’s a pretty good tune ⁓ you know and couldn’t we sing a song by that one you know we gathered together on Sunday this next week so I would say that you know that ⁓ in my mind it was a
It was a wonderful, important reformation of the Church’s thinking about the nature of what it means to be a human in the world. First of all, what does it mean to be in relation to the God of heaven and earth? What does it mean to be the image bearer of God in the world? What does it mean to live by the laws and the ways of God in the world? What’s the meaning of that for ordinary life in the world for ordinary people? And I think that was the heart of Reformation, gift to centuries and to the Church and to the world.
But over time, you can begin to take this and move that and misuse this and misunderstand that. it’s not hard for me, looking back in history, as I understand it at least, to see that in more Protestant-formed societies in Europe.
There was something about a political economy that seemed looking back on something that was more healthy than what had happened under more Catholic-dominated societies in Europe. They couldn’t quite figure out, you know, somehow even to break free from the clerical dominance of not only the Church, but also the world. ⁓
They didn’t bring into being the more industrial, entrepreneurial economies that more product countries did. So there’s something, I think, that’s worth pondering over that. The Protestant work ethic, clearly it was at a pejorative reading in the last generations, more than constructive. Well, it meant this, and it came from this, and it made this happen. And I think, well, OK, I see all that too. But ⁓ I do think that.
Dru Johnson (09:53)
Hmm.
Steven Garber (10:18)
in that magnificent study of American life in the 1980s, Habits to the Heart by the University of professors, Robert Bellin and company, you know, looking towards like what are we going to do to recover a more hopeful future for America? One of the most important paragraphs in the book is we need to have a recovery of a sense of calling and vocation ⁓ if we’re going to actually begin to understand what work means and what work means for the wider good, for the wider common good.
and they rooted it actually in the biblical vision of calling. ⁓ I think it’s true. I just think it’s true because you can’t get there apart from a deeper reading of what vocation means for the church in the world.
Dru Johnson (10:51)
Hmm.
Yeah, that’s very helpful. I mean, it calls me back to Genesis. Before anything went wrong in the creation account, you have work and marriage and rest, which rest makes sense because you have work. Obviously, toil is injected into the work formula. ⁓ I teach a lot of freshmen, 18-year-olds. I have young adult children. ⁓ And I always show a cartoon, and I won’t.
get it right, but it’s, know, a comic, ⁓ like a New Yorker cartoon, that, you know, guy loading a dishwasher saying, you know, is that that moment that Bob realized that not every single moment of his life was going to be filled with meaning and joy or something like that.
Steven Garber (11:42)
Thanks.
Dru Johnson (11:47)
But I think it’s very difficult, or I’ve noticed ⁓ the story around career, careerism, passion, ⁓ calling, vocation that kind of gets sold. As you said, there’s various versions of that story. ⁓ Almost equates in some people’s minds that, well, if you’re not doing what you love, you shouldn’t do it anymore. Or that kind of like, if you’re doing what you love, it’s not work. You’re getting paid to do it. I wonder where…
The actual grind, of course, maybe this is my seven years in the military speaking, but just the grind of having to get things done and not enjoying it. there’s there’s something not only pedagogical that it teaches you, but there’s also a certain type of joy that can be had, a pleasure that can be have from digging a ditch that is not fun ⁓ and does not end quickly. And you keep looking and you still have more to go. I compare it to grading. I actually have a…
Steven Garber (12:44)
worth of you to stand now.
Dru Johnson (12:45)
academic ditch digging right here.
yeah, so I wonder if you could speak about that kind of the toil and the grind, but also the redemptive side of that.
Steven Garber (12:56)
So how much time do we have,
Dru Johnson (12:59)
Take your time.
Steven Garber (13:03)
Well, because I’m deeply born of this grand biblical metanarrative from creation to consummation, I think about all of life in that light. And not only does the scripture teach this story, but of course the great teacher of the church, Augustine, first formulated this in his own way 400 years after the life of Christ. ⁓ It offers us, you know,
Posse Pacare, Posse Non Pacare, all the way from beginning to end of the story. We are instructed, if we pay attention to the biblical vision of what we now have come to call a now but a not yet world.
where Christ is coming to make everything be new, all things ever made new, and yet, and yet, even the creation groans, and we do too. So I’m not, I live in any other world than that world, so I’m not romantic about it, but I also am biblically moored too, to understanding the goodness of God’s world, you the goodness of my wife’s kisses, the goodness of good work, you know.
like to plant, you know, so this is the springtime in Virginia and I finished the day yesterday with my, you know, hands dirty and you know washing my mouth again and you know my jeans dirty and you know and having put my hands in the soil throughout the day, you know, and I do that and I love that and I love that and I love that, you know, even as I grown over the weeds that come up too at the very same time. And so on the one hand, I mean I’m not a romantic about anything.
though I am somebody who tries to be tethered quite consciously to this meta-narrative from creation to consummation, which understands both the goodness of work, but also the grievousness and the sorrow and the weariness of work in the world too. So just because you are the center for Hebraic thought, maybe it would be worth just noting that ⁓ in the Prophet Zechariah, ⁓ which is a long book of
and it’s full of woe and lament and complexity and historical and political grief and it goes on and on.
The very last words of the whole prophecy are ones which I have chosen to stop and ponder and actually to think, yes, that’s the world I believe to be true. So the very last words of the prophecy are these. Someday, someday, even the cooking pots will be called holy to the Lord.
Dru Johnson (15:26)
Hmm.
Steven Garber (15:28)
And it’s intriguing to me because probably like you, I’ve traveled different places and I’ve sat for suppers in little Kenyan villages which the cooking pots are made from the clay of the soil around. I’ve also, you know, sometimes been drawn into fancy pants, know, condominiums or houses in the cities of the world and you think, did you spend $800 on this fire engine red cooking pot? Maybe you did, I don’t know. You you realize that every house in the whole world…
Dru Johnson (15:38)
Mm-hmm.
Steven Garber (15:56)
far away, big fancy pants ones in the cities of the world. Everybody has a cooking pot. It’s the most ordinary utensil in the kitchen. Everybody has a cooking pot. And somehow, the wonders and the mysteries and the providences of God as he told the story of scripture, the image that it was to be of eschatological hope was that the cooking pot, somebody even the cooking pot.
maybe the symbol of drudgery, washing dishes again tonight, even the cooking pot will be called holy to the Lord. So for me, I think we have to hold intention, both the reality of drudgery and weariness, I get tired, I’m tired at end of the day, but also somehow even the middle of the most ordinary things of life. ⁓
Dru Johnson (16:24)
Mm-hmm.
Steven Garber (16:43)
that there is some symbol of hope actually, some symbol of eschatological reality. This too has meaning ⁓ and someday it too will be called holy to the Lord. So I think about it like that.
Dru Johnson (16:59)
⁓ How do you deal with the or disentangle the confusion for I think of the American mind? man, this has gotten really bad for younger people as well is that money and the actual vocation and the money you make for the vocation are somehow entangled. ⁓
you know, if you think about a parent that stays home with the children and one that goes off to work, the one that goes off to work has the career, the one who stays home with the children is just the minder or, and that largely is because we, well, my guess would be is that we value, we show our value of things by paying for them or giving them some economic value and we don’t give economic value to what’s done in the home really. And of course, up until, excuse me, up until fairly recently,
Most all the work was done in the home or the homestead, right? So this is a new concoction of work. But do you think there’s a utility in tethering money and ⁓ salary to the value of work?
Steven Garber (18:10)
Oh, like again everything else we talked about in this little conversation, Dru, there is a utility. Is it one and the same? It can’t be that. Clearly there is some meaning to doing that. But you only have to pay attention to a little bit of the world or a lot of history to realize it cannot be done that way, to be honest and true to the world that really is there.
You can look into any window you want, pop culturally or sociologically or historically, realizing that there’s not any relationship at all between those whose income has anything to do with the happiness of their lives. It just doesn’t work that way. It does not work out that way. Why would it be, again, you are the biblical scholar, but why would it be that in both the Old Testament and then the New Testament,
there’s any sort of pop cultural poetic reflection on the nature of life in the world it is why not then eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow you die. Both the Old Testament prophets remember that, heard that the other day as do the New Testament writers.
So it’s interesting to think about that. live in Albemarle County now, which is in Charlottesville, Virginia. The poet laureate of Albemarle County is Dave Matthews. And he owns more land than anybody else in the whole county. Why? Because of his songs like Trippin Billy’s, which he says, what? Why not then eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow you die?
Dru Johnson (19:25)
Ha!
Steven Garber (19:37)
And I would just say that history seems to be pretty clear about it if you pay attention, if you’re listening very carefully. That there isn’t any particular relationship, inherently at least, between the income you have and the happiness that you have. Now I think that, again, part of the problem here is, as I listen, ⁓
is that church doesn’t do very well with this. don’t teach very well about this. We don’t sing songs that reflect this. Our hymns don’t reflect this theology. Our prayers typically don’t. How often have you been in a church? True, I don’t know that at all about your life, but I’m just guessing that you’re probably like most people I know. How often has it been that Susan, who stays at home watching over a four-year-old or seven-year-old, we pray for her this morning. You’re praying for the Bible translator in New Guinea and for the missionary in Kenya. We just don’t see ordinary
things like that as being worthy to pray about or to sing songs about or to preach as if somehow this has meaning for your life in the world. So this church is deeply, deeply plagued by the dualism liturgically in a way which is think tragic actually because it diminishes a sense of meaning to one’s life because why should I think it matters if God doesn’t? Because God doesn’t because of course the church sure doesn’t.
And I think in some ways it would be its own sort 21st century reformation if we could even just say, could we this next week begin to pray for, you know, so and so who’s a mother at home with her children, so and so who’s a kindergarten teacher, so and so who’s an attorney, and so and so who’s a journalist, and so and so who’s a farmer. ⁓ And ⁓ we don’t have a theology like that in the church at large. We don’t preach that way, we don’t pray that way, and we don’t sing that way.
Dru Johnson (21:20)
Yeah, now that me and my wife are in our 50s, think my wife is, maybe this is something you do when you’re in your 50s. You kind of look back and say, did anything I do matter at all? I don’t know if that’s just, yeah, maybe that’s my insecurities on display here. ⁓ But you know, my wife has, when she’s talking to younger parents, ⁓ the common thread has been, it’s just hard.
Steven Garber (21:33)
It just works.
Dru Johnson (21:48)
There’s, mean, we had four kids under five years old, ⁓ two adopted, two biological. And there’s just years where it was just really hard. And there was not, as you said, there was not a lot of acknowledgement of that in the church. And ⁓ I didn’t abandon her to that task, but I always think like, wow, I could have probably done a lot more work than I did. ⁓ Because I was working in the church and I saw that as like my career, this is what I’m called to do and I have to be doing this.
I have actually, and you can correct me on this, but I’ve taken to telling young men and women who are looking at their careers, they say, well, if somebody stays at home, it’s too bad because they’re losing out on all these opportunities career wise. And I say, well, whoever stays at home, whoever goes off to work needs to also cut back on hours and needs to miss promotions and needs to miss opportunities as well for the sake of their, for the sake of their investing in their family at that time. Cause it seems like such a precious time.
I guess I’m saying all of this to say there is this kind of general trajectory for single and married people that you kind of have this sweet spot where everything falls into place. And then after that, you’re lost. So it’s almost like a moonshot ⁓ for them. And that seems to be how they conceptualize it. And I always say, look, I didn’t even do my PhD until I was 35 with four kids moved over to the UK. That was my third career. ⁓ But that doesn’t really land with them.
I wonder how you think about that ⁓ wasted time in career seeking or career training.
Steven Garber (23:19)
Hmm.
Well again, you and I are talking in the year 2026, And if we were talking in year 1826, it’d be a different conversation, wouldn’t it? Because we wouldn’t be talking about career like that. Most of us wouldn’t be all. We couldn’t have imagined even a world like that, where we were talking like I’m making choices about what I be with my life. Some did, but most couldn’t even have imagined what you’re saying to me.
Dru Johnson (23:36)
Mm-hmm.
Steven Garber (23:50)
It isn’t that it was all fated or all karma. That wasn’t what I’m saying.
But in some ways, the sociological, historical context of life in the 1800s wasn’t like that. So we are, in some ways, I don’t think this is a bad word, but it sometimes can be seen pejoratively. I think we are graced or we’re privileged to be even having this conversation. But like most everything else in life, what can be gifts to us and blessings to us can be curses to us too. So choice and over choice and too much choice, clearly for many people, especially younger people, I think can be a plague upon them.
And I have good friends who think about these questions all the time, and I do in my own way. I spend most every day of my life through talking to somebody somewhere about what should I do with my life. And either it’s me speaking about that or writing about that or speaking somewhere, somebody wants to talk about it. It’s a pretty dominant question for most people, what should I do with my life? And it’s not unhealthy question, it isn’t a bad question. ⁓
But maybe just to say one more thing about it, I think if there’s a confusion, I hear almost always it’s between the ideas vocation and that of occupation. I think that vocation is the deeper, truer, longer word. Occupation isn’t that word. It’s related, but it isn’t the same word.
Dru Johnson (25:06)
Hmm.
Steven Garber (25:17)
Because vocation is what makes Dru Johnson different than his dad. know, different than his best friend, different than his wife. You it’s what makes you be you in the history of the whole world, uniquely you in all of history, Personality, gifts, size, interests, thoughtfulness, know, personality. I everything about you that is written into what we should honestly call the vocation of Dru Johnson. ⁓ Occupation isn’t that word.
it’s related to it, but I would say that it has to do something more like, you know, for as you said before I was 35, I had done this and I’d done this and I was going to do this now. And you you weren’t changing. You weren’t changing. You were entering into different contexts for you to be deepened and developed and expressed. know, so for me, occupation has more to do with and what responsibilities and relationships am I now occupying?
as I spend the next years of my life at this. And the hope, of course, the deep longing that for every one of us, sons of Adam, daughters of Eve, that we are.
the deep longing is there should be a graceful coherence between my vocation and my occupation. But again, in the now but not yet of history of your life and mine, none of us have complete coherence. None of us do, and it’s only a fiction to think that she does or clearly he does. He has it all together. But of course, as you know, because you’ve been a pastor along the way, you just scratch a little bit on the forearm of the.
of people and they too struggle, they too have longings, they too feel dissonance between what they have to do day by day and what in a sense they really wish they could do day by day.
Dru Johnson (27:00)
Yeah, and it was in the Brazilian church we were in, it was mostly people who had immigrated to the New York City area, some legally, some not, ⁓ and they had taken multiple jobs, know, painting the subways or driving taxis or cleaning houses. ⁓ It was interesting to me how they all had a very similar vocational pattern, which was I was responsible to do good work.
and I was responsible to share the good news with the people I worked with. ⁓ And that was a constant thread in no matter what people did kind of in the grind side of work where there weren’t a lot of choices and they weren’t weighing career options. They were actually doing all this so that their children could weigh career options and their children went to good universities. ⁓ So I think I can hear what you’re saying, scales to all kinds of different jobs with different degrees of freedom and different
of toil to them as well. ⁓ Can I back up a little bit to how you were formed and shaped? ⁓ And if I have heard correctly about you, you went to L’Abri at some point. ⁓ And I wonder, how do you tell people, how do you explain Libri to people? And then how do you think it shaped you?
Steven Garber (28:24)
We moved to Charlottesville last summer where we have two kids and eight grandkids. We bought a house across the street from our oldest daughter. ⁓
When she was 20, she was studying in Geneva, Switzerland for a semester in international health and development. And on her own initiative, without asking for permission, because why did she need to at age 20, she decided that she would go up into the mountains of Switzerland to visit this little village called Wemo and this place called L’Abri where I had gone when I was a 20-year-old college dropout. ⁓
And after she got back, she said how much she loved it and was surprised by how hospitable it was. thought maybe she would like to drop out of school when she finished that semester and go back and spend another year there. She ended up spending about 10 years there, actually, kind of moving through the position of a student, then a helper, then a worker. And I would say that she would still see that L’Abri world as being her second home. In fact, last summer, she’s
45 years old, now 46 years old now, and she has three kids, a husband, and last summer they spent about two months living in Waymo as a family. So it’s been a very deeply formative part of her life, and it was for me too, Dru. I wasn’t…
I family who’d ever been there. I had many friends who’d ever been there. heard about it, and the word on the street was, if you had an honest question, you could get an honest answer at this place called L’Abri And there was no internet, there were no brochures. It was simply the word on the street, literally. And I had some questions. I had dropped out of college a year before that and was living in the Bay Area in a commune and working on a counter-cultural magazine and hitchhiked in across America the next year.
ended up at L’Abri I’ve always said this about it, Dru, that I met people and ideas there that shaped me for the rest of my life. And I’ve always been grateful for its influence in my life in that way. We have five kids. I think four of them have spent some time at Le L’Abri in their own 20-something moments along the way. The one, of course, having more of a deeper, formative experience, the one who’s our neighbor now.
You know, think that, you know, is, I was asked a few years ago, kind of a wonderful surprise moment in my life by the publisher for Schaeffer, the IVP had, was doing a 50th anniversary edition of some of their major books along the way. And they wanted to do one for Schaeffer’s The God Who Was There. And they would have asked, you know, tens and tens of people to do this. I got asked to write the foreword for it, to introduce it to a new ⁓ generation. ⁓ I mostly, you know, chose to write about the… ⁓
apologetic of hospitality that marked L’Abri more than Schaefer argued for this and he took up this and he argued against this and he made this argument about that. I all those things were interesting in their own different way but I was arguing in fact it was the embodied apologetic of come and live among us and come and think with us and come wash dishes with us and come work in the gardens with us and come think with us come read what you want to read what you need to read to answer your own honest
Dru Johnson (31:15)
Hmm.
Steven Garber (31:43)
question as you wrestled for your own honest answer here in this context of a community which lived to be an exhibit of the reality that God is there in the world. I think that was a great gift to me. It’s still a good gift for people and ⁓ I’m a believer in the good work of L’Abri
Dru Johnson (32:05)
⁓ I often tell parents whose kids are looking at college, say, hey, college is great. Maybe take a year or two off and go work a job. Don’t go backpack Europe, but go work a job. Learn the value of a dollar and of the Protestant work ethic. Because I have found those students, when they come back into the university system, are some of my best ⁓ students. mean, sometimes you get naturally gifted people who are natural work ethic. ⁓
And I wonder if L’Abri, in some ways, serves a little bit of that. You said you were college dropout. I assume you went back to college at some point and got higher education, got higher training. ⁓ But ⁓ the problem is our system is set up for 18-year-olds who, even more so, I mean, think about the 1980s, 18-year-olds were probably vastly more mature, at least in terms of the kinds of responsibilities they had, their sense of the world.
⁓ than they are today, just ⁓ physiologically I feel like ⁓ even I’m dealing with ⁓ adolescents who are in their late 20s now, but they still have kind of adolescent approaches to the world, right? ⁓ And so I think often is that the right advice? And the only thing going against it is…
Well, they need what they would say is a vocation. They need a job. They need a career. They need an occupation that will pay their bills, which I agree. do, you know, people do need to contribute. But that seems to be the only thing that an American mind, even an American evangelical mind can comprehend is that at the end of the day, this kid needs to get a job, a high paying job that will give them maximum amount of leisure time that hopefully they’ll spend with me, their parent. And that’s it.
⁓ And so the idea of asking them to step back from college in their mind seems to be to just interrupt every single idea they’ve ever had about themselves and their own personal progress. So how do you coach people in those moments? And I would assume you at least lean towards my position. I don’t know. Maybe you disagree. I’d like to hear.
Steven Garber (34:21)
I agree deeply with you. It’s hard to say unless the family rule is you cannot go to college until, know, some families probably are that way. I would say, you know, our five kids, you know, we had several that either before college or early on stepped back, stepped away.
Dru Johnson (34:31)
Right.
Steven Garber (34:41)
Yeah, so I would, I mean, this is kind of a throwaway remark, but it’s true mostly. I think that college is too valuable to waste on an 18-year-old. The possibilities of learning as an undergraduate, there’s too much possibility and goodness to waste on an 18-year-old who just doesn’t know enough yet to know what he or she really needs to know.
And I don’t think it’s a moral issue in a particular way. I just think that in terms of it’s a maturing reality that you just don’t know enough about yourself and the world around you to know what you ought to be doing when you’re a freshman in college. ⁓ I would say about L’Abri and my own experience, I mean, wasn’t that I was flunking college. just, I had a sense that there were better reasons, more important reasons than passing the next test.
that ought to be part of my experience as an 18, 19, 20 year old. And I couldn’t see what should be motivating me than simply to get the next paper done, to pass the next test, to get the next grade. And I wanted more, Dru. I just wanted more. That’s why I dropped out, really. And I say when I was at L’Abri, I think the great, great gift to me was that I learned to learn.
In some ways, maybe it was that I was a few years older than a 17, 18 year old, but I learned to learn. And I think I began to see principally that the learning was going to be primarily on me.
Dru Johnson (36:12)
Hmm.
Steven Garber (36:12)
And even though I was an eager student, I was an eager listener to wise people who were older than me, and I’m still that way in a surprising way, but I would say I was that kind of 18, 19, 20-year-old who sought teachers out because I wanted to learn from them. But I even could see then that I needed more. And I realized that when I was away, to learn what mattered.
was going to be on me, Steve Carver. And it wasn’t that I was, you know…
Dru Johnson (36:44)
Mm.
Steven Garber (36:49)
I was the sole agent in the learning process, but that it had to be more to do with the questions that mattered to me. that if I had a sense, even in a small kind of 19, 20, 21 year old way, a deepening vocation in my own life, these things are me, these things matter to me, then if I had a sense that those were the things that were giving coherence to my studies, I could find a way of asking questions in literally
every class that would allow me to deepen insight into what I wanted to learn. And I think that was a great, great gift to me of the Labriec, you know, pedagogy.
Dru Johnson (37:30)
Yeah, I had a similar experience, but mine was from coming out of the military. ⁓ I had questions and I needed answers and I was patient enough to say like, okay, I need to understand a little bit about history. I need to understand about psychology. ⁓ And I was not a great, was not a wonderful student, but I was highly motivated. Even today, I tell my students,
I’m here to facilitate learning, hopefully to prod you to learn, the work is on you and they do not like that at all. They come and especially if I’m sure you’ve taught in other continents and countries, there can often be this, you’re the expert, you contain all the fire hydrant material, we’re here to just catch whatever flies past us.
And that’s very depressing to some people when they realize like, no, this is going to require a lot more than just taking notes. ⁓
Steven Garber (38:23)
And you can
see that, again, it’s more the question of telos, I suppose, because it’s more if you see undergraduate learning as a way to learn to learn for the rest of your life, or ⁓ that this is the end point. When I’m done being a student, I’m done being a student, and I go on into my life. ⁓
So I think that if you have more the former idea about what undergraduate years could mean and should mean, then you realize that you’re learning to learn about the world. And you’re learning to read, you’re learning to think, you’re learning to analyze, you’re learning to make sense of. And that’s not the same thing as that I am a receptacle to take in and write notes about and give back to you all that you’ve said to me, and that’s what learning is about. ⁓
Dru Johnson (38:50)
Mm-hmm.
Steven Garber (39:12)
In some ways, Dru, think, again, I’m just sort of playing on the Hebraic thought part of who you are, but it’s this perennial response as anyone we have in the history of the human race, because it’s its own version of, it’s that woman you gave me. ⁓ It’s that profession you gave me. that, you know, she’s the one, he’s the one who’s responsible for what I learn here.
And if I don’t learn what my parents want me to learn, the job market expects me to learn, well, with my professor, of course. And I think for me, the maturing of dispositions and heart and mind away from school years was to realize, well, you want good teachers, don’t you? You need to have a good teacher. But what you learn and how you learn, how important the learning is, is more for you,
Dru Johnson (40:04)
⁓ I’m curious about when you went to L’Abri, and I won’t pester you about L’Abri but I’m just interested in those old days of L’Abri. ⁓ What were your questions? What were the big nuts you wanted to crack?
Steven Garber (40:16)
It’s interesting to ask that because I still think about that as being in some way surprisingly central to who I am, Dru, years later.
I lived, as I said, a commune in the Bay Area the first year. ⁓ And it was kind of between the worlds of…
Berkeley and Stanford, Palo Alto and Berkeley. And I was living in Palo Alto, but I was hitchhiking between the two communities week after week, just listening to the gurus of all kinds of ideas for week after week. And I began to see somehow, and I wasn’t able to say it out loud so much, but I just began to pick up in that course of that year that every debate I listened into, every idea I heard being argued on some level in some way came back to
what does this person believe about human beings? To put it in the language of Psalm 8, what is man? What does it mean to be human? In Jerram Barrs’s question from years ago.
Dru Johnson (41:07)
Hmm.
Steven Garber (41:19)
Whether it was politics, it was economics, the arts, sexuality, ⁓ everything I was hearing in the debates of the universities and the university, some cultures that those cities represented, everything somehow came back to an argument about what does it mean to be human? And that these implications, economically or politically or sexually or artistically or whatever.
And I realized, because I had been raised by people who loved God and wanted me to love God, I had some rudimentary theological framework to think with. I realized that Christians taught that we made the image of God. But I remember literally thinking, that’s a very short sentence, isn’t it? not sure what I should say after I said those words. So when I went to L’Abri, the question I thought I had in my own heart was, I want to understand what does it mean to be made the image of God? What does it mean to be human?
Dru Johnson (41:56)
Hmm.
Steven Garber (42:09)
I would say in some ways Dru in a surprising window into my own sense of vocation over years now. That’s still what I’m working on. It is still what I’m working on. My undergraduate thesis, my master’s, my PhD, all were one more in C.S. Lewis’s best image of further up and further in to that question. That’s just been what I’ve been thinking about ever since then. I’ve taken that question all over the world, literally.
I think about, know, conversations this past week in Portland and Indianapolis, you know, I’m going to Denver tomorrow, ⁓ you know, and I know that somehow in some way I will again say out loud, well, you see my great teacher, Walker Percy put it like this, the great novelist essayist, that bad books lie, they lie most of all about the human condition. And you can see that window into that question.
Dru Johnson (43:02)
Hmm. Okay.
Steven Garber (43:08)
I’ve taken that insight of Percy’s everywhere for years and years now, whether it’s the Beijing Film Academy in China making the argument, bad films lie, don’t they? They lie most of all about the human condition. ⁓ So anyway, would be, that L’Abri question has become the question of my life.
Dru Johnson (43:26)
The idea that books lie, films lie, stories lie. Again, I’m just throwing all my rants past you to see if you can critique them for me. ⁓ I’m an anti-romantic in the sense that I’ve seen a lot of the destructive power of people holding other people hostage to their unrealistic ideas of the world. ⁓ And so I take it when you say lie, I…
Steven Garber (43:34)
That’s fine. That’s fine, completely.
Dru Johnson (43:54)
I take you to mean something like they are polishing a turd in some way, as we like to say, or they’re selling you a story that is completely inhuman and inhumane. ⁓ What do you mean by the lie? How do you unpack that?
Steven Garber (44:00)
Thank
I taught politics for a long time, Dru, at Capitol Hill. So in some ways, my sensibilities about many things were forged in those years of wrestling with undergraduates about the nature of our political life as people. ⁓ it’s as true of political visions as it is of novels or films. Bad political visions lie. They lie most of all about the human condition. Bad economic paradigms lie most of all about the human condition.
Dru Johnson (44:36)
Yes.
Steven Garber (44:39)
when I was a twenty-year-old and thinking the universe through, I read pretty, in listening to the counter-cultural debates of the Bay Area, like in the early 1970s, I was attentive to the debates about the nature of society and how it got worked out in history and I know for a time I was intrigued by the argument from the counter-cultural left. ⁓
drawn in by the Marxist critique, you know, because it seemed deep, systemic, powerful, far-reaching, you know, which was important to me in my 20-year-old life. I wanted something that was more than just me. I wanted it to be for a wider world. And I know that one of the gifts of library to me actually was listening to Dr. Rookmacher, Hans Rookmacher, you know, lecture about Reformation versus Revolution.
Dru Johnson (45:29)
Hmm.
Steven Garber (45:30)
still remember the impact of his insight about that, because I was sort of drawn to it. I a dropout after all. I was living in communes after all. And I was open to different ways to think and to live and to be in the world.
His argument was that revolution doesn’t get you there. And he kind of went into this historical analysis of its movements and its arguments and its positions and its promises. And I began to think, you know, that is true, isn’t it? mean, what I have wanted a reforming of life.
a renewal of society, which was the driver for me. That didn’t happen, and it wasn’t going to happen, in the revolutionary motif ⁓ of the world. ⁓ so I think that I know that I began to… ⁓
realized that I wanted something deeper and truer. ⁓
Dru Johnson (46:29)
It’s also very hard to get people to revolt against the system on the basis of a picture of a modestly better government than we currently have. You almost have to construct a lie and that’s not just the Marxist side.
Steven Garber (46:45)
I think that that is, I again, I don’t know you at all, Dru. You don’t have to record this if you don’t want to. And I don’t know, I was looking on Snopes this morning to see, did this really happen? Did this really, was this really said? But I saw some poll from the Fox News viewers saying that most of them believed that the assassination attempt was staged.
Dru Johnson (47:06)
yeah, yeah, that’s
common now, yeah.
Steven Garber (47:08)
And I don’t know that really
happened or not. I mean, know that there are a lot of ideas being thrown out the last couple of days about what happened. you know, I mean, when in my reading of listening to what’s going on politically right now, we have to listen to lies every day, well, what would you think? I mean, how would how could it be otherwise? You know, and.
So I just think it ⁓ doesn’t work. And in some ways, it’s another version of the emperor has no clothes. Somebody, somebody, somebody, sometimes has to be willing to say out loud, a speaker of the House, a leading member of the Senate, the emperor has no clothes. It’s a lie. He’s a system, we all believe the lie, and it’s a lie.
Because we don’t flourish that way, trying to, we cannot and we will not and we never will.
Dru Johnson (48:01)
⁓ Yeah, at some point in history somebody is going to say this probably pretty soon. So why not just say it now? Okay, the… ⁓
Steven Garber (48:12)
I want to say one thing before you say you’re done. I want to make sure we’ve talked about one thing. So just to tell you that.
Dru Johnson (48:14)
Yeah.
Yeah, go ahead. I was going to ask you one last question about your books.
Steven Garber (48:23)
I guess
we just, because we don’t know each other very well, but seeing your, in your title position, center for hebraic thought, you probably don’t know, Dru, and why would you, that for years and years I have identified myself as somebody who thinks and lives out of the Hebrew and Christian world and worldview. So that’s consciously who I am, and you don’t know that because we don’t really know each other, but I have pretty sincerely, seriously and consciously identified myself that way for a long time.
Dru Johnson (48:40)
Hmm.
I was probably injected with a similar virus from Jerram two guys, Jerram Bars and Jack Collins at Covenant Seminary. So ⁓ that’s good to hear that. mean, when I listen to you, when I read you, I see somebody who gets what we’re doing and like at the core of your being. ⁓ So that’s why I was so excited to talk to you. Speaking of your books, ⁓ somebody who’s written many books, I always like to ask them, ⁓
what order would you suggest reading and then how nerdy is each book? So if somebody wants a light read or just to dip in, what should they read versus a deep dive?
Steven Garber (49:28)
Yeah.
Well, none that I’ve ever written or anywhere close to being nerdy Dru How could they possibly be? ⁓
Dru Johnson (49:41)
You
Steven Garber (49:44)
I would say if what I said to you a few minutes ago about the question about the human condition has been one that’s threaded its way through my whole life, I would say that the writing I’ve done has had a thread that I am aware of at least. I think people who know me pretty well would say, yes, I see that about you. But I got interested a long time ago in this question of sustaining vocation. How do you keep a vocation alive over the course of a life?
know, it’s one thing to be passionate about something or believe deeply about something when you’re 21, 22. You know, it’s harder when you get to be 28 and harder when you get to be 35, you know. But I began to see that even though in some ways in the parable the soil’s imagery, that most don’t continue on.
Most don’t understand in the language of the gospel, which the fourth soil, first person understands, but most don’t. But some do. Some do keep on keeping on. And intrigued me to think, why is it that some do even though most don’t?
the first book I wrote was about that. ⁓ We’re looking at the conditions of what we could call modern postmodern consciousness. Why this business of putting together a connected life, a coherent life, why it was important, but also why it was so hard to do that. So that was really the first book. ⁓
I think I, you know 10 years later when I wrote another one, ⁓ it was really in many ways a response to listen to people all over America and the world who had taken the first book seriously and they were in their 40s and they hadn’t given up. They hadn’t walked away. And that didn’t, but more than that even true. They were people who.
had decided to keep going and they still believed in what they had committed themselves to years and years earlier. They just cynical about it, weren’t just worn down by it, but they still believed it to be true. And it intrigued me that they did because every person I talked to in a more serious way, by the time they got to be 45, they had suffered in some way. They had been disappointed in some way. They had grieved over something in some way.
and intrigue me to think that here you have grieved, here you’ve been disappointed, and you still believe this to be true? Why would that be, why and how is that true of you? So the next book, even though it’s titled Visions of Vocation, even though it is titled that, ⁓ Common Grace for the Common Good, the question of the book is, is it possible to know the world and still love the world?
So there’s a whole chapter there, true director of the Center for Hebraic Thought, about Hebraic thought and about its understanding of what it means to know this idea of Yadah, which is so powerful, the Hebrew language. So it’s really a whole chapter looking at the meaning of Hebrew thought for this question of vocation, but reading it in epistemology. So your friend and mine, Esther Meek, we have together thought a little bit, but not often together about, she calls it covenant epistemology.
covenantal epistemology. But it clearly grows out of a belief that there’s something about the epistemological vision, more of Hebraic thought, namely in particular, the idea of covenant, of covenantal reality that actually gives shape and substance to how we understand what it means to know. And for me, the idea to know and to love the world is the dynamic reality at the heart of what vocation means.
The other, know, if someone wants just an easier way in, the fourth book is a book of essays with photos and about 40 essays. It’s called The Seamless Life, a tapestry of love and learning, worship and work. And you can see something again of the more, you know, he break all of life vision, even in the titling of the book. ⁓ But.
But it’s essays, shorter essays and photos with the essays. ⁓ And ⁓ again, looking at how do you understand the whole of your life, all of your life, in light of what you believe to be true about the world. This most recent book, you know.
I don’t, you know, how could I think it’s nerdy, Dru? I couldn’t think it’s nerdy. ⁓ I would say, fact, know, in my own self-perception of it, I really wrote it for the whole world, because I’ve seen that what I’ve written before has been picked up in the whole world in different ways, published in Indonesia, and Slovakia, and other parts of the world, China, ⁓ and ⁓ I very intentionally wrote it for people all over the world.
So I not only every chapter drew in on stories of people in Africa or in Latin America or Europe, films that are from Europe or films from China or novels from…
Africa or whatever, but I also when I was putting together the book finally with the publisher and getting the endorsements I purposely worked hard to make sure that people who I knew all over the world from Singapore and from Rio de Janeiro and you know and from London and Oslo and you know Timbuktu were included in those endorsing the book because I wanted to be seen as a book that if you were from his part of the world this too was a book for you. So I write that way I want to think that way.
Dru Johnson (55:28)
Excellent. Well, Steve Garber, thank you so much for your wisdom and your writing over the years. And ⁓ I hope people look forward to diving into more.
Steven Garber (55:38)
Thank you, Dru. It’s such a gift to meet you finally.
