Church Authority & Councils: How Serious Should We Take Them? A Messianic Scholar’s Perspective

To your point about, well, that wasn’t the church. That was the Catholic church. We were just talking a moment ago about Martin Luther whose incredibly toxic words about the Jewish people were just used straight up by Hitler. So
We’re going to bag on the Catholic church. This has to be equal opportunity criticism of the reformers. Sometimes when I teach this stuff in my classes about Martin Luther, my Lutheran students are scandalized because nobody talks about Martin Luther’s antisemitism in these circles where Luther is kind of the hero. And I think in a lot of ways, Luther was a hero. Luther was picking up on widespread corruption in the Catholic church in his day, and I think he made some really valid points. Again, I don’t think he was sola scripture in the way that certain kind of evangelicals are today because he also valued church councils. Okay, so we need to say that about Luther. But Luther also had, I think, really extreme blind spots, and I think it causes us to wrestle with this Alexander Titin idea that the line between good and evil runs through the heart of every human being.

Welcome everybody to another episode of the Covenant and Conflict podcast with us by popular demand. Jen Rosner, welcome.

Thanks. It’s so great to be back.

I’m so excited to have you back. Thank you for putting us back on your calendar. I said last time, you are my favorite TKU professor, and I actually told that to someone who was a TKU professor, but thankfully I hadn’t had them yet. So I could still say, well, maybe there’s a shot

To

De phone Jen Rosner. But as of right now, still number one in my mind and I’m excited to talk with you today.

Yeah, no, I’m looking forward to talking with you as well. It’s an important topic. So yeah, a lot of ground to cover

People just really quickly, who maybe didn’t see episode one that we had you on, just a little bit of what you do in the Jewish Christian space and kind of where the Lord has you right now.

Yeah, I teach for a number of different institutions, TKU being one of them. I am a Messianic Jew. I’ve written a bit about Messianic Judaism, about contemporary Jewish Christian relations. My most recent book was called Finding Messiah, a journey into the Jewishness of the Gospel, which was intended for a more general Christian audience, not an academic audience, trying to get Christians to sort of wrestle with God’s ongoing covenant with Israel, the Jewishness of Jesus, the Jewishness of New Testament. I am currently working on a book that is tentatively titled the Jewish Gospel and Christian Identity, which is trying to think through Jewish and Gentile identity in the body of Messiah and how to approach those categories in a way that I hope is biblical and honoring of difference, but difference that doesn’t translate into hierarchy, which I think the New Testament is very strong about. But I think the New Testament is also strong about not erasing the distinction between Jew and Gentile, which I think are really important theological categories. So that’s a little bit about me.

Beautiful. Well, that’s great. We talked a lot about that in our last podcast, if anyone hasn’t listened to that, the Jew and Gentile distinction, but with equality. So today I want to talk about something that’s really just been on my heart and I’ve been trying to sift through and wrestle with regarding church authority and church council. So like you said, you’re a messianic Jewish woman and we often have to, in kind of the messianic space, and I’m getting my master’s in Messianic Jewish studies, we have to wrestle with what was the Jewish perspective, what then became the Christian perspective. But going into the early centuries,
Maybe it wasn’t so clean, maybe it was something that had to be really thoroughly thought through and wrestled with. And we are now on the other end of pretty much 1700, 1800 years of dominant Gentile Christian theology and understanding. And so we were talking a little bit before we hit record. My heart in asking you about church authority is because I see a growing trend, especially in the western evangelical space, people leaving the evangelical church or maybe other streams close to the evangelical church for a more liturgical or more historic denomination like Orthodoxy or Greek orthodoxy or Catholicism.

And

I think one of the main reasons why is because there’s deep roots.

There’s

A long line of history that kind of makes you feel grounded. And we kind of in the evangelical space are maybe more particularly than any other stream, very ungrounded, if that’s a word, have a lack of roots. Because we’re not saying we’ve been doing this for thousands of years. No, we haven’t. This is a relatively new movement. And so I understand the appeal of seeking for authenticity. What is the truest form of our faith and seeking for something ancient, especially now we don’t want to just only be individuals. What do I think? What do I feel? It’s like, no, no, what am I a part of that’s bigger than myself? And so as people make that leap towards maybe more ancient or more historical denominations, something that constantly comes up is this of church authority

And

The church councils. So you’ll see arguments online where people are talking, whether it’s Protestant in a Catholic, and the Protestants are very much sola script Torah. It’s only scripture that is the only thing that has authority. And the counterargument to that is, well, if Paul came to your church in the first century, what he said had authority, the apostle had authority. That was a continuation that continued to happen along the centuries. So there was always apostles, there was always people that were leading the churches and they had authority with the word kind of side by side. So I’d love for you to talk just briefly and then we’ll maybe get into some more specifics like the Council of an IIA things, councils that came together with authority.

But

Just on the forefront, what do you think of when I talk about authority and church authority, how should we begin to dissect that topic?

Yeah, it’s a great question. And I have 10 thoughts already based on just your little intro there, David. I think just, so let me just share a few thoughts that I have as I’m listening to you talk. I mean, I think that in an interesting way, you haven’t mentioned this, but I think this desire for a particular rootedness that evangelicalism certainly lacks, I think parallels with this interest in Judaism and things Jewish. So there’s an interesting overlap there. It might be we could parse that out, who’s interested in Eastern orthodoxy and who’s interested in Judaism, but I think the impulse is similar and there’s lots of directions that goes with people who are drawn to Judaism for these different reasons. But I think you have this, again, similar impulse for something that’s ancient and has these ancient pathways and rootedness. And I think it’s also very telling that that’s something that we are yearning for and seeing this longing for and transition in some cases away from evangelical evangelicalism for many people, which I think speaks to, and maybe we’ll get to this kind of the other end of the spectrum of what you’re talking about, which is this kind of hyper sola s scriptura, very skeptical towards church councils and creeds and that whole process because it’s being, it’s seen as man’s word over God’s word.
There’s a lot of, which I think speaks to as you’re saying, this backlash, this pushback to get back to something that’s more rooted. I’ll just mention briefly, I recently read a book by a dear friend and I say colleague, she’s another Jewish follower of Jesus author named Michelle Van Loon. Her book is releasing in August of this year. It’s called downsizing, letting Go of Evangelicalism’s.
And it’s just a really powerful critique of certain aspects of contemporary evangelicalism, but also speaking into this whole deconstructing widespread occurrence in our cultural moment and trying to get us to not really throw out the baby with the bathwater, but giving pretty legitimate critiques of these dangerous, problematic aspects of contemporary evangelicalism that I think also speak to and feed into this impulse that you’re talking about, which is a desire for rootedness that goes back farther than that. So that’s just a couple initial thoughts, but I think it’s a really important trend to note and to be talking about.

That’s so good. And I think that’s something that we all have to come into these conversations open-handed, Lord, show me Holy Spirit. Lead me to your heart and the truth, because if we all want to come and close handed, don’t touch my sense of comfort within my stream or my denomination or my traditions. So I think a good place to start might be just the idea that scripture needs interpretation. That’d be my first question. From your perspective, does scripture need interpretation? I know we’re reading in one of your courses, mark Kinzer’s book, Israel’s Messiah and the People of God, and he speaks a little bit about the Torah and his perspective is that it requires interpretation. It doesn’t fill in all the gaps, but I think to my evangelical ears, that can sometimes be blasphemous. What do you mean? If God wanted it in there, he’d put it in there, why would he need people to fill in gaps? So what is your perspective on just even the need for further interpretation? We just go scripture.

Yeah, right. I think that there’s kind of a myth in evangelicalism that we can just go scripture. Again, it’s kind of this hyper sola scripture which disregards or kind of ignores the fact that Luther and Calvin actually thought quite highly of church councils and creeds. So I feel like it’s even, again, it’s sort of this hyper Protestantism, hyper sola scripture that I don’t even think is necessarily at all what the reformers had in mind. The reformers wanted us to be following the correct tradition, not a tradition that had become corrupt. So it’s not that if we go back to the President Reformation where you get these kind of slogans, right, Sola s scriptura being a big one, I don’t think we’ve actually taken the time to delve into what the reformers actually meant by those ideas. And they’ve kind of swung so far in this direction that I think, and I think it’s important to note that it goes hand in hand with the enlightenment, enlightenment, individualism, the printing press, the fact that we can sit in our room by ourselves with our Bible, which was just not how people engaged with the word of God, the text
For a very long time. That’s actually a pretty contemporary thing that we would even give

Luxury.

Luxury. Exactly. And so I think on that regard, I very much agree with where someone like Mark Kinser is coming from, that both. And so when I think about these things, I’m always going to be thinking about Christian tradition and Jewish tradition, which both have a very rich history of interpretation. How have these texts been interpreted? And I think we have to do some careful work in engaging with and challenging, in some sense, Christian tradition or interpretation, also Jewish tradition or interpretation. These are these two traditions that have sort of developed in contradiction from one another. And we as those who in some sense stand in the middle of these two traditions, have to be mindful of the ways that each of them have been blinded. So I’m not going to say we have to just describe to it with no questions asked, but I do think that it’s a misnomer to think that we could just go back to how it was in the book of Acts, or we could go back to without all this stuff.
I mean, I think one of the things that doesn’t often get noted in these kinds of conversations is that the New Testament was canonized in a process that involved church councils, right? So you can’t even separate the New Testament, which would be like this hyper soul scripture thing from the councils that canonized it. And there’s at least some who would argue quite strongly that Constantine had a big role in the canonization of the New Testament. So if we’re going to be sort of anti Constantine, anti whatever, which we could do, and there’s some legitimacy to that, you can’t neatly parse out, well, God didn’t give us the canon as it stands. It didn’t come from heaven. It was developed through a process of wrestling and debating among church fathers and among church councils. And so even that, I think kind of blurs the categories a little bit of we have scripture and then we have tradition.
Well, it’s not quite that neat, and I’ll just make one more comment on that. There’s a great article that we could link maybe in the comments by Jerry McDermott who’s a Christian scholar who I really respect, and he basically says, it’s not about whether you’re following a tradition when you read scripture, it’s about which tradition you’re following. We can’t extract ourselves from our own context. And so it’s something I’ve written about in this book that I wrote with my brother-in-law called Out the Foot of the Mountain, and he’s a little bit more pushing in that direction of just the Bible. We just go to the Bible and I’m like, I don’t think we can do that. I don’t think we can bypass this sort of water that we swim in. We can’t get out of our context. We can’t get out of this long history that we are now a part of and just go back and read it through as a blank slate basically.
So again, Jerry McDermott is saying, which tradition are we a part of? Because even if we’re a part of this kind of hyper sola s scriptura, that’s still a tradition and that’s coming as a reaction and a response to these traditions that came before. And so it doesn’t just get plucked out of this sort of history or tradition, it’s just a moment in that. And so I think trying to think critically about the categories that we use and the way that we think about scripture and the way that we think about tradition is oftentimes an important starting point because it begins to sort of blur some of the distinctions that seem perfectly clear in the minds of certain people with certain perspectives.

No, that’s really good. That’s a great place to start. And I’m even thinking through areas where in scripture it almost seems irresponsible that God would allow humans to fill in gaps. And correct me if I’m wrong or add onto this, I think of the five daughters of Zelle Alpha Dad, if I’m saying that right, where they don’t have any husbands, or maybe they did, but their father dies. And so rather than the daughters getting the land, it was just going to go to the next kinsman leader that would be a man. And so the five daughters go to Moses and they’re like, this is not right. And he hears from God and he’s like, yeah, you need to listen to these girls. And it’s like, well, then why didn’t you say that in the first place? Why did we have to interpret that? Or it came to my mind, I think this was in Mark Kinzer’s book where he talked about not resting on or not working on Shabbat, but yet we don’t get a long list of what work truly is.
So we had to then develop through tradition and through authority of the time what work truly was. And I know in the messianic world, I know Jewish people who follow strictly to kosher, and then there’s different levels of that that are like, oh, we think the interpretation of milk and meat together because don’t boil the goat in its mother’s milk. We don’t believe that that meant cheese and meat. And you’re like, oh, okay. I don’t necessarily think that that’s what that scripture meant either, but you have to then basically say that that authority was wrong and now does everything that they said was wrong. Now, so is that your understanding of the tour and the scripture is that God didn’t say everything and it required Moses’ seat to fill in the gaps?

I do. I very much think that, and again, I think this has to do with the very categories that we use to understand scripture authority, tradition, et cetera, because I think that they’re much more interwoven than we realize. For example, going back to the canonization process, the biblical canon did not come down from heaven. It was debated and wrestled with. And so even that, I think we have to say even if we want to be giving high level of authority to the Bible, I think we have to give some level of authority to those who canonize the Bible and to the process that I would say the spirit used to influence in a certain direction towards canonization. And there’s lots that can be said about that process, but I think again, I think the scripture even deciding what books are in the Bible was a process of discernment among the early community.
So I don’t even think we can get to the question you’re asking without having already given some kind of authority to this process that I think it says a lot about God’s spirit being present with and guiding the community of God’s people. I think it’s a living, breathing tradition, and I think that tradition has had major flaws. We could talk about the shadow side of the Council of Ncia. We could talk about the fall of contemporary, evangelical, highly respected leaders. We could talk about human flaw and flaws and failings along the way, but I still think we have to say that the spirit of God dwells with his community and is in the process of that community’s life together in all of its blunders. I mean, I think that’s the story that the scriptures tell us, the story of Israel, the story of Israel’s journeying with God and rebelling against God, et cetera.
So I think in my mind, again, I can’t really neatly parse the categories because I think it’s about God’s presence with his people that has continued beyond the first century, the time when we have the New Testament written. And I think we have to have some sort of theological language to make sense of how God is guiding this process, which in my mind has very much to do with the canonization of the New Testament of the Bible as a whole. But also, and we can get into this with the decisions of church councils, which I like, mark Kinzer will push back against certain aspects of early church councils, but I also think we have to say something about God being a part of this process, otherwise where is God? You know what I’m saying? How do we make sense of church history with all of its blunders if God is somehow contained in the text and not anywhere else? And then how we understand the text to your point about interpretive questions of what does it mean to rest on the Sabbath or what does it mean to bind these words as a sign upon your forehead? There has to be a way to implement those things. So

Yeah, my very Western mind wants black and white. And I even said that when I was preaching last week, we desire black and white, just give it to me straight, yes or no. And I talked kind of facetiously about, well, nothing’s more black and white than the 10 Commandments. Do not lie. And then you read the narrative and people are like, boom, Rahab, are there Jews here? And she’s like, Nope. And you’re like, what? And then God’s like Rahab, you’re going to be my family forever because of what you just did, and you’re like, she just broke one of the 10 commandments. But it’s like being able to sift those things is hard because we want it to be simple and regarding authority, black or white, either the authority was right or they were wrong. I don’t want to sift through what they might’ve been wrong about and how’s that divine?
Even though we mostly as Christians know that the canonization of scripture happened a little bit over time and then was decided on in the council, we still have this idea that it kind of fell from heaven. Even if we don’t say that, we kind of have this idea that it fell from heaven. And so therefore we want to have that scripture of you can tell a prophet by if it comes true, and if he doesn’t kill him, that’s how we want to deal with the authority of were they wrong, and if they were wrong, then we have to throw out everything that they decided. So let’s talk about specific councils. So the canonization of scripture, was that nyia or is that a different Council

Again is an interesting topic, and there’s these different moments of where you have, for example, the first time that the 27 books of the New Testament that we have are listed as an authoritative canon. I could be wrong about this. I think it was 360 7. So I think that’s the first time that’s late. If it came from heaven, it came pretty late. There was a few hundred years where those guys didn’t have that canon, and there was other letters circulating and other conversations going on. Again, it’s a debate as far as I understand it in the academic world, some are saying that Constantine had a big part in that canonization process. Others push back and say he didn’t. But in any case, it’s part of this whole kind of life of the early church with these councils that are hammering out doctrine with this sort of political move that Christianity takes under Constantine’s reign.
So there’s a lot going on there, and so we can sort of talk about that, but let me just recommend a resource that I think is phenomenal if someone wants to dig into some of these questions. There’s a scholar who was at Southern Methodist University, William Abraham. He passed away a few years ago, but he has a book called Canon and Criterion, and it’s a phenomenal resource where he kind of wrestles through all these questions and he wants to talk about how in contemporary Protestantism, we have taken canon to be a criterion for truth and sort of epistemology. We know God because of the Bible, and he’s wanting to play with that and saying, first of all, again, the point that I’ve been making that when the early church comes up with the New Testament canon, it’s also canonizing a certain tradition and we can’t really separate those.
And he’s trying to detach the notion of canon from, and he gives this great example early on in the book of these two people who are debating about a moral issue. And one guy’s like Boom, kind of what you were saying, black and white scripture says boom, case closed. And he wants to press us to think about the canon of scripture is not necessarily the Trump card in moral debates as much as it is a way to be spiritually formed as a community. And so he’s kind of again, playing with these categories that I think in many evangelical language and communities, they’re just sort of understood in a certain way. Of course, the Bible’s the Trump card for morality issues, and it has to do with how we engage with the text and how we do or do not allow the text to wash over us and shape us as opposed to just being the source of moral authority. Anyway, it’s a really great resource that I would recommend if people want to dive more deeply into some of these questions.

Really good. And I know that I’ve heard it said before, and I agree with it for the most point, that the councils regarding the canonization of what books was one, there’s an interesting history of how that was created to, what would you say to actually Wright, what was his name, who was kind of creating his own canon, and they were like, wait, we have to actually put together the true canon. And they weren’t necessarily spreading out all of the gospel of Thomas and all these and figuring out which ones, but it was kind of already understood, but no one had essentially put it together in one codex. It was very much passed along by the churches. And so it was more of a deeper dive into the historical investigation of let’s make sure we know who wrote this, and it goes back to the apostles, but let’s dive into Nicea then because 3 25 ad, and I know N and the Council of naia, that’s a tricky one from Messianic Judaism because most churches have the Nicean Creed as their foundational theological statement. And maybe I’m overstretching it, but I remember going and looking at a bunch of different churches and a bunch of different streams and looking on their website for our beliefs page, and the most common one that I saw was the Ian Creed. And there’s even one that said the Ian Creed is the most tried and true proclamation of our faith, and so we stand on the tradition of EA and then they just listen to Ian Creed. So can you talk about the benefits and the positives of the Ian Creed,
And then can you also talk about what you have deemed the shadow side of Ian Creed? That’s very tricky with Messianic Judaism.

Yeah, I think if we look at historical context of the Council of Nyia, you have this what is later deemed a heresy arianism, which is that somehow Jesus came into existence at some point that he wasn’t sort of pre-existent with the Father from the beginning, this guy named Arius who’s teaching these things. And you have at the same time, the Emperor Constantine has come into power in 3 0 6. He had some kind of vision of Jesus as he goes into a battle and he becomes a Christian. There’s lots of writing about what that actually meant, and was that just political? Because Christianity is a growing movement in the Roman Empire, and that was politically expedient. We know that Constantine had some kind of syncretism. He worshiped the sun God, and he thought that that was sort of compatible with worshiping Jesus. And so Constantine, there’s lots of things going on in this time period.
So let’s just maybe parse him briefly one at a time. Constantine is the one who officially moves the day of Christian worship to Sunday. Jews had always been worshiping on the Sabbath, which is Saturday. It’s under Constantine. That gets officially moved, which I think was convenient for him because that’s the day of the worship of the Sun God. And so that’s awesome. Let’s just worship Jesus on the same day as his existing sort of pagan framework. I think it’s also an intentional move. Getting to your point about the shadow side to distance, Christianity from Judaism, which you have this kind of long process of the parting of the ways is I would say Constantine and Nasia are a pretty definite moment in that process. And so also you have Constantine convening the Council of NAIA and 3 25 to get all the Christians on the same page about lots of these different doctrinal disputes.
And so the Council of NAIA ends up coming very starkly against Aryan. We get this very high Christology that’s perpetuated and sort of codified in the Council of Nicea God from God, light from light, true God from true God begotten, not made this very lofty Christology that again is kind of slamming against Arian and his beliefs about Jesus, but it’s also at the Council of Niah that you get the official decoupling of Passover from Easter. So up until that time, the main tradition of Christians, how did you know when Easter was? It’s by when the Jews reckoned when Passover was. And so Constantine in the same way that he sort of decouples Sunday worship from Saturday worship kind of driving a wedge between the Jewish community and the Christian community, he decouples the sort of reckoning of Easter from the reckoning of Passover. So forever since then, it’s like a Linical accident. If those two events overlap, and I always like it when they do, I feel it’s kind of sticking it to Constantine a little bit. So all of that to say there, there’s complex things going on already, which I think Constantine was a problem, but he was also imbibing what was already going on. If we read the church fathers, if we read this polemic that’s already happening between Judaism and Christianity, Constantine is sort of, he’s breathing in that air and he’s making it more official in the he

Wants to do what we want to do. He wants to make it clean. Totally,

Totally. Yes.

Because early church fathers like Justin Martyr who they’re already having conversations about, you really shouldn’t follow Jesus and stay Jewish, whether they’re dogmatic about it or whether they’re just kind of inviting the, let’s not muddy the waters, but you can tell clearly there was muddied waters, there were Jews that were living as Jews, but following Yeshua, and you can see the wrestle with it in the early Church fathers. I dunno if you can name any other, I know Justin Martyr was

A big one. Yeah, Ignatius of I. Yeah. I mean John Cristi is later, but John Cristi is real strong on his kind of anti-Jewish rhetoric. So I mean, yes, it’s very much in the air in that time, and Constantine is trying to sort of hammer everything out, sort of unify uniform doctrine, hence these creeds. Again, there’s debate about how influential Constantine was in the actual canonization of the New Testament as we have it. But again, I think it’s a great example if we want to talk about Constantine in the Council of Nicea and the Ene Creed that we just simply cannot use these black and white categories.
I think I have been a part of churches that recite the ING creed every week, and I can recite the ING creed from beginning to end with no hesitation. My problem with the nice creed is what it doesn’t say, and I think it’s indicative of this environment in which it was forged. As far as we know, there were no Jewish at the Council of Nasia. It was an entirely gentile gathering. And I think that sort of bears out in the creed that we get. It never identifies God, the Father as the God of Israel, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God who rescues his people from slavery in Egypt. Those are the ways that God identifies himself throughout the scriptures. The ing creed never identifies God, the Father with the God of Israel. It also never identifies Jesus creed has lots to say about Jesus, but it never identifies him as Israel’s messiah.
It never identifies him as a Jew. It never identifies him as a son of David. It doesn’t put him in this lineage and in this sort of covenantal space that I think is really important to understanding who Jesus is. So I fully stand with the high Christology that is put forth in the nice and creed, but again, I think it’s a problem of omission. I think it’s a problem of what the Creed doesn’t say. That’s very much a product, as I said, of this historical circumstances through which the Council of NAIA was convened and in which the ene creed is sort of formulated. And so I think we just have to hold on to this tension of the creed did a really important thing in terms of counteracting. And I think that’s right. I think that’s true to the New Testament portrait of Jesus. I think it’s true to our understanding.
I think it elucidates our understanding of the person of Christ in a really helpful way. But there’s the shadow side to it and there’s the shadow side to Naia and to Constantine who has terrible things to say about the Jewish people at the Council of NAIA that we have recorded. But we have to kind of hold those things in tension and sort of hold the good with the bad, which I think as we can talk about is how I think we need to approach church tradition and councils and creeds more generally is we have to hold the good with the bad. I want to say God was in that conversation in the room where it happened in Nyia, but there was also these significant human blind spots that have kind of carried through the

Centuries. I often will read this. This is Constantine’s letter after the Council of Nyia, which was recorded by CEUs, and I won’t read all of it because pretty lengthy, but he’s talking about Easter and how he’s celebrating at the Council. We did it, you guys, we’ve finally unanimously adopted the celebration of Easter and says, we may transmit to our descendants the legitimate mode of celebrating Easter, which was we have observed from the time of our savior’s passion to the present day, we ought not therefore to have anything in common with the Jews for the Savior has shown us another way. And then he goes on to say, he says, again, separate ourself from the detestable company of the Jews, for it’s truly shameful for us to hear them boast that without their direction we could not keep this feast. How can they be in the right after the death of the Savior, have no longer been led by reason, but by wild violence as their delusions may urge them. And he goes on to say even more vehemently antisemitic things. So to me, that’s my struggle is you said it very graciously and you’re the messianic over here. Yeah. Not only did he not say things, but it’s almost as if he didn’t want to say them. There’s one thing of saying there’s a lot of Gentiles in the room, so maybe they’re not thinking about the God of Israel because in the Western Church we can meet Jesus first
And then kind of Jesus on the Old Testament, but he kind of floats over it. And so we can think of God as God the Father, and Jesus as Jesus the Son, and have no place for Israel. But it’s another thing to be ignorant of it. It’s another thing entirely to be aggressively. And you can hear in his voice, how dare they say that we can’t celebrate Easter without the Jews. And so it’s coming from an angry place or a painful place. And so I totally understand why so many of our Messianic friends would wrestle with whether church authority in general, or at least the Council of Nyia and how we have now even in the background, just taken it at face value.

And

I mean, I think that was probably one of the earliest iterations of replacement theology Sunday’s the new day and Easter’s the new holiday because we’re the new chosen people.

Yeah, no, it’s true. And I think that is often grounds in certain circles to throw out and to throw out cradle Christianity. And what’s interesting is that in some of those same circles where you have a real skepticism towards church tradition, you also have anti Trinitarian impulses. You have questioning about the divinity of Messiah. So we can’t let go of that without letting go of other things that I would consider to be pretty central towards lowercase Orthodox Christian or Messianic Jewish belief. So again, you can’t untangle doctrine from councils, and that’s very challenging. And on the topic of the Council of N, since we’ve mentioned Mark Kinser, he has a great essay specifically dealing with Nyia in his newest published collection of essays called Stones the Builders Rejected. So it’s another really good resource trying to wrestle with the council of an IIA from a messianic Jewish perspective that I think is phenomenal of trying to hold these tensions that you and I are talking about. So just another resource for listeners to be aware of.

It’s literally not throwing the baby out with the bathwater because we’re having to think through what may have been man’s own desires, and then what was God, how was God’s sovereign over it All we mentioned before recorded, we had a podcast with Preston Benjamin, and he, I think talked about this in a really balanced way saying, if we want to go back to the Church of Acts, which everybody’s like, yeah, let’s do that. Let’s get rid of all the fluff and all the ways that we’ve gone astray. Let’s just get back to the Book of Acts. And his question is, so are we saying that God has been absent for the past 2000 years? And you’re like, well, we don’t want to say that he’s obviously been doing something. So now we have the hard task of trying to figure out where was God moving and how is he remain sovereign over the church, and yet what needs to be redeemed, reformed, re-looked at? And that’s a painstaking task that requires us to get uncomfortable, but the covenant and conflict, we got to get uncomfortable, don’t we?

Right. That’s right. That’s right. And I think we would say, this is why for me, and I know that Mark Kinser approaches this similarly, I’ve learned a lot from him in this regard. This is why I think we have to pay attention to and sort of engage with in a manner that’s sort of balancing blind faith with brute criticism, church tradition, but also rabbinic tradition. Because once you have the parting of the ways between Judaism and Christianity, and as we’re talking about this very harsh stance that early church fathers take against Judaism, that Constantine takes against Judaism and the Jewish people, you have this official parting whereby Gentile Christianity kind of goes its own way and leaves behind sort of hitches itself from Judaism. Judaism continues on right in rabbinic Judaism. And I think as those, again who are kind of caught in the middle, if we believe that the Christian Church and the Jewish people are the covenant people of God that are currently in schism from one another, I think we have to be paying attention to how, in my perspective, God has been guiding both of those traditions in the intervening centuries. So I think again, to your point about milk and meat and these different rabbinic rulings, I am not going to say we have to listen to every single ruling of the rabbis. And many Christians will say, well, they rejected Jesus, so there’s no authority in rabbinic thought.

Be bathwater out. Yeah,

Baby bathwater out. But then we would almost have to say the same thing about the church tradition and where does that leave us trying to get back to the book of Acts, which I don’t really think we can do for a number of reasons. So I think we need to be kind of listening in as almost like a child of divorced parents to both of these traditions, because I believe that God has been guiding both of them because I believe that God is faithful to his people, and that doesn’t mean that we should say, we need to reject Jesus because the rabbis rejected Jesus, or we need to reject Judaism because the Christians rejected Judaism. It’s this place of tension, especially as a messianic Jew that we sort of stand within. But I think it’s dangerous to, again, as we’ve been talking about baby with a bathwater throw out the whole thing because I think that there’s really significant ways, even in their blindness and blunders, that God has been guiding these two covenanted communities.
There’s an author, a Catholic author named Paul Griffiths, who wrote a book called Israel a Christian Grammar, and he makes this very daring claim where he wants to say it’s a phenomenal, very provocative book. He wants to say that there are things that Christians need to learn from Jews about Jesus that they cannot learn from any other place. Wrap your mind around that like Christians, and he uses the terms church and synagogue, which makes it even a little more provocative. The church needs to learn certain things from the synagogue, that there’s things about God that the church cannot know from any other source other than the synagogue, which is saying that the church has fundamentally lost something in this parting of the ways, and the only way it’s ever going to learn that is by learning from the Jewish people. So that’s powerful. And it sort of speaks into this anti-Jewish bent in Constantine in the early church. He’s a Catholic, so obviously he has a pretty high view of church tradition, but his critique of church tradition is like, we need to be learning from the Jewish people. It’s a really amazing argument that I very much stand with what he’s saying.

That’s so good. Well, as we kind of go from ea, there’s several other councils, I think there’s the Vatican Councils, and then you get even into modern day where there’s been a post World War II rethinking of replacement theology and the covenant with Israel. So I’d love for you to talk a little bit about that. You have these ancient councils, which are very much kind of cemented as early church fathers where whether you’re Protestant or Catholic, there’s still some kind of authority we give that Protestants still have the New Testament, they don’t canonize something. So even there, you have a little bit of an understanding of the authority, but I’d love to hear your perspective on some of the more modern councils and Nostra ate where, if I’m pronouncing that right, where they had to rethink what theology the fruit of our theology is becoming.
Because I think that was the big wake up call after World War ii, which many Christians don’t even sift through today, that Germany probably was the most Christian nation in Europe, had biblical foundations, Gutenberg printing press, printing, the Bible. You had Martin Luther, the church reformist coming out of Germany. I think almost all of the great theologians of those 16th, 17th, 18th century, predominantly coming from Germany. And so you in some ways have a very Christian nation, which I think offends a lot of the conservative people today of we want to be a Christian nation. You’re like, that’s great. That doesn’t necessarily solve the problems because Germany was very much a Christian nation, and yet their theology or the seeds of the theology from the early 16th century blossomed into full antisemitism, anti-Jewish sentiment and Jewish hatred. So then we had to rethink our theology because this is where it got us. So I’d love for you to talk about the latter end of those councils.

Yeah, I mean, that was an awesome summary of what’s going on in Germany, this very rich, deep historical theological legacy that just is unbelievable. And Hitler’s drawing on that, right? He’s drawing on Martin Luther. He’s sort of drawing on these voices and twisting him in such a way that most Christians went along with it. I mean, the Catholic church makes an accord with Hitler during World War ii. So there’s a lot going on that I think we, as you kind of alluded to, ought to be wary of in our desire to be this Christian nation, whatever. I mean, yeah, let’s be a nation that serves God, but let’s be careful of how we brand ourselves. And so I think, yes, to talk about sort of contemporary modern church councils that the second council of Nyia in the early 1960s is a watershed moment in basically the entire global Christian Church because here you have a Catholic church council, and obviously the way that the Catholic church works is it’s very hierarchical.
There’s the magisterium, the teaching office of the Catholic Church. It’s kind of this trickle down effect. What gets decided up at the top, that’s kind of like what goes for the entire global Catholic church. And as you said, much of the impact of, there’s a lot of things that come out of the second Vatican Council, but I think for our purpose is one of the most, perhaps the most significant is this reorientation of the church’s posture towards the Jewish people and this recognition and repentance of how that has been so hostile in the history of the Catholic church. And so it’s a remarkable moment in terms of the church waking up to its deep seated supersessionism replacement theology. And that really becomes this blossoming of this whole new era that Protestantism is picking up on. I mean, it really kind of spreads far beyond even the sort of realm of the Catholic church in the latter half of the 20th century, early part of the 21st century where it’s, I would say in a very significant part, it’s the second Vatican Council in the 1960s that kind of spurs this whole kind of moment that we are living in of the church, recognizing the problem of anti-Jewish antisemitic thought.
That’s very deeply rooted. And so that’s remarkable. That’s a really important church council with, as you said, the document Nostra ate. That’s one of the document that comes out of the second Vatican Council, which is largely dedicated towards the Catholic church’s rethinking of its relationship with Israel and Jewish people. And so that’s huge, as I said, in its ripple effect because the Catholic church is such a big presence in our world, and because you have Protestant churches that sort of follow suit in that kind of repentance and reorientation of God’s covenant with the people of Israel, it’s really a very significant thing. And I want to say again, that God was very much there, God was in the room directing those conversations such that this major blind spot of the Christian Church over the last 1800 years, 1700 years is beginning to be corrected because of a church council. So that should give us something to think about as well in terms of, as you said, switching to sort of more contemporary church councils.

Well, and that reminds me of another tension that we have to have when viewing the Catholic church because wherever you land on your opinion of the Catholic church or even the historic Catholic church, I remember we would talk a lot about the church in the 12 hundreds, 13 hundreds, all the way to the 16, 18 hundreds. And we would talk about how self-proclaimed Christians, which that was nuanced language because we would say, well, Nazis were Christians, and they’d be like, whoa. They weren’t real Christians. They were self-proclaimed. So that gives a little bit of nuance to, okay, maybe they weren’t real Christians, but they wore belts that said, God is with us. And they were a part of this Christian nation. Like you said, many of the Christians and the priests and the churches were with them. So again, we don’t want it. We want to just believe that they were just evil, and if they were Christian, they were fake Christians. But regardless, we would say things like, well, the church did this X, Y, Z towards the Jewish people and the Black Plague, and they were blamed for this, and they were burned at the stake. And people would say, whoa, whoa, whoa. That wasn’t the church. That was the Catholic church.
And then we would have to say, well, for a hot minute there, that was the only church. What other option did you have? If you’re in Europe? You didn’t go to the non-denominational church across the street. So again, it’s keeping these things in tension. We want to just, well, no, that wasn’t us, the church. That was the Catholic church and where these things blend. So then to take it up even more modern day right now as we’re recording the Pope, Pope Francis has passed away. By the time this comes out, we might have a new Pope. So then I have two follow-up questions, one about rabbinic authority and one about church authority. So we’ve talked about, God must’ve been guiding this process even though there’s clearly human flaws and opinions that are drawn from our flesh, whether it was Constantine’s sentiments or something else. Yet, if God’s still guiding it, then why are we not Catholic then we be, if God’s guiding it and he’s used all these church councils in the past, especially with the canon of scripture. So then shouldn’t we be Catholic or at least give some authority to the Pope or how do you wrestle with that? I dunno if you’ve ever gotten that question before, but

Yeah, no, it’s a good question. I’ve had moments in my life almost where I was wanting to be Catholic. So that’s a fair question. I mean, I think there’s a number of different ways that we could answer that question. And I think just let me start off by saying to your point about, well, that wasn’t the church. That was the Catholic church. We were just talking a moment ago about Martin Luther, who’s incredibly toxic words about the Jewish people we’re just used straight up by Hitler. So if we’re going to bag on the Catholic church, this has to be equal opportunity criticism of the reformers. Sometimes when I teach this stuff in my classes about Martin Luther, my Lutheran students are scandalized because nobody talks about Martin Luther’s antisemitism in these circles where Luther is kind of the hero. And I think in a lot of ways, Luther was a hero.
Luther was picking up on widespread corruption in the Catholic church in his day, and I think he made some really valid points. Again, I don’t think he was sola scripture in the way that certain kind of evangelicals are today because he also valued church councils. Okay, so we need to say that about Luther. But Luther also had, I think, really extreme blind spots, and I think it causes us to wrestle with this Alexander seitan idea that the line between good and evil runs through the heart of every human being. There’s no saying they were the bad guys, but we have it figured out. And I think you get some of those kinds of lines in the sand between Catholics and Protestants or Baptists and Pentecostals or whoever it might be. And I think there needs to be a humility of saying the line between good and evil runs through the heart of every single human being.
There’s no pushing the bad guys out there. The bad is in all of us. That’s sort of like, I would say kind of fundamentals of theological anthropology and this desire to sort of other that and say, well, no, that was the Catholic church. I mean, I think Martin Luther’s words did at least as much damage in some regards as anyone else’s. And I think getting back to this book that I mentioned in the beginning, my friend Michelle Van Loon’s new book called Downsizing, look at Evangelical Leaders in America Today, that’s probably not, some of them are phenomenal, but we’ve had a history over the last 20 plus years of significant moral failings within evangelicalism. So that should give us pause. And so

We didn’t find the right stream. This wasn’t the answer

Among the 40,000 denominations of Protestantism. Yeah. So I think there is something to be said, and this gets back to your first question about this kind of desire for rootedness, this kind movement among evangelicals towards particularly Eastern Orthodoxy, but also Catholicism. I think there’s something to that. You know what I’m saying? I’m not going to go tell someone, don’t become Eastern Orthodox, don’t become Catholic. I think there’s a lot to draw from those traditions and what they’re based upon. I however, also have a great appreciation for the diversity of Christian expression. Do you know what I’m saying? I think there’s so much that we can learn from Pentecostalism. I think there’s so much that we can learn from all of these church traditions. And so again, I think it forces us into that place of not having a black and white answer on one hand, 40,000 Protestant denominations is a little absurd.
But on the other hand, there’s probably manifestations of the spirit of God to be learned from each of those and in each of these settings, and there’s this long history behind each one of them that I think we should pay attention to and we have something to learn from. And I think the Catholic Church does have these pretty significant blunders, but I think it also has, again, something that we can all learn from, especially when we talk about something like the Second Vatican Council and the way that it’s really sort of turning the tide of Christian anti Judaism, Christian Supersessionism, that was in many ways, as I said, this sort of significant kickoff of this current season that we’re in in terms of Christian thought and theology. So it’s a very mixed bag.

Well, thank you for allowing us to continue to wrestle through all of these questions. My last question before you have to go, do you have to leave right now? I time you briefly mentioned you flew over rabbinic authority, which could very well be its own podcast, maybe needs to be its own podcast
In the same way that saying that the Pope would be the authority for the church would ruffle many feathers in the Protestant denominations within Messianic Judaism saying that a rabbi or rabbis that rejected Jesus had authority or some kind of divine authority. I’m sure that would ruffle the feathers of many Messianic Jews. So now kind of switching streams from the predominantly Gentile church to now Messianic Judaism, what does that debate and argument and tension look like? Because there wasn’t Messianic Judaism in much of Jesus following history. The Gentile church made pretty clear you couldn’t remain Jewish and follow Jesus, or at least tried their hardest to make that impossible. And so you had the first reemergence of Messianic Judaism maybe in the late 18 hundreds, and then it gets wiped out in the Holocaust, which many people don’t talk about. There’s maybe I’ve heard estimates from 30 to 60,000 messianic believers in Europe before the Holocaust.
Holocaust kind of wipes that out. And then you get another emergence in the seventies where now we’re kind of on the tail end of that movement of Messianic Judaism kind of coming to life again. And where do you get authority? Because obviously you go back to the church councils. Well, that’s hard because we’re not even mentioning the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. We’re not mentioning Israel or the Messiah. We basically tell the gospel was Adam and Eve, they had this perfect life. They messed everything up. Everything was terrible. Then Jesus came and you’re like, whoa, we just skipped over all of God’s covenant with Israel.
So you look towards church authority and you’re like, well, that has a lot of tension and a lot of things we’re going to have to navigate. But you look towards Jewish tradition, well, I’m assuming you’re left with the big thing of, so we’re going to believe the authority of people that rejected the cornerstone of our faith, Yeshua. So how do you wrestle through that? And is that something that has obviously probably not been settled, but is that something that has pretty much settled in the different denominations of Messianic Judaism? Or is this still a hot button debate right now?

I mean, I think there’s different camps who approach that question differently, but I think in a way that I find helpful, your question was a bit leading in the sense of we can’t just look to church tradition. We can’t just look to church tradition. That’s a problem because, and this is where I come back to this divorced parents analogy as a Messian Jew, I feel like the child of divorced parents, the Jewish rabbinic tradition and the Gentile Christian Church. And so I feel like both of those kind of live in me in a way that needs to be attended to. And I think that when we have the kind of parting of the ways this process that Constantine played a role in, but you also have people before Constantine, people after Constantine coming and sort of cementing this separation between Judaism and Christianity. This is where I have to say in that schism, God is providentially guiding both of these traditions in schism from one another throughout the centuries.
And I think that both of them, I would almost say, are equally diminished by the schism. So in the same way that this is what’s so often said, the rabbis, we can’t give them authority because they rejected Jesus. Really, we’re going to say that about the rabbis, but then we’re going to give authority to the Nicene Creed, which has nothing to say about the God of Israel to Constantine, whose words you read out a few minutes ago. So I think we have to acknowledge that both traditions have blind spots, really significant spots, but that equally lacking. Exactly. And thereby equally helpful and informative as well. So I think there’s something that we have to learn from each of them, especially if we’re calling ourselves Messianic Judaism. As a Judaism, we have to reckon with Rabbinic Judaism, which is kind of the only Judaism that there is.
I mean, you could talk about CARite Judaism, which is the very small sect of Judaism that rejects oral Torah and rabbinic authority and wants to just, it’s kind of like the hyper soul scripture of Christians, but it’s Jews. But even they have their authorities, they have their leaders who are teaching them how to live CARite Judaism. It’s kind of a splintered sect off of rabbinic Judaism. And I think, again, so there’s these interesting kind of parallels, but for me, I’m not saying we have to sort of live under all of rabbinic Judaism’s rulings, but I think we need to be listening in to those conversations in the same exact way that I would say church councils have been pretty significant, including with Council of naia, a second Vatican council. But we have a unique vantage point where we can see the anti Judaism that’s baked into Christian traditions. So I relate to those two traditions quite similarly as both authoritative, guided by the spirit of God and deeply flawed. I don’t know if that answers the question.

No, it’s good. Mean, I think what you said about we don’t need to live under them, meaning accepting them wholesale, but we need to be listening and then allowing the Holy Spirit to lead us, to lead us into all truth.

And

The only negative side to that is that we might get it wrong and that it’s really hard to do. I remember when I first became a father and we had a very black and white conversation at what our kids would do to get consequences,
And it was disobedience, disrespect, and dividing mom and dad, if you do one of those three things, then you’re going to get consequences. And I felt great. I felt like I should teach a class on this. It was amazing. And then you get a few years in and those lines start to become blurry because you’re like, what if they’re repentant? What if they came to you first before you had to correct them? And so do the consequences change because they were repentant versus unrepentant? Do they get more severe and you’re like, I don’t know, just like

You need amendments to your parental constitution.

Dang it. I remember praying one day, I don’t remember which daughter it was, I have three and they all look like copy paste. So in my mind, it’s just the one in front of me around age three. And I am in that moment in my spirit trying to figure out do I give the consequences were by the law or do I listen to what I felt like the Holy Spirit was showing me, which is like, no, not now because of this repentant heart and all this kind of stuff. And I said to the Lord, so you’re telling me I have to be spirit led every time you telling me I have to try to hear you every time I have to give out a parenting discipline? And it was kind of like, yeah,

Remember

That whole thing about being spirit led no longer living in your flesh? And I was like, dang, that’s so hard because I can’t make it black and white.

Yep. Yep. It’s a great illustration. It’s such a great illustration. And again, I think that’s how I relate to these traditions. And I think it’s another remarkable moment that we’re living in where you have this wide, beautiful, loud conversation going on about these kinds of things and about rethinking the anti Judaism of the Christian Church. And while we’re at it, let’s talk about why rabbinic tradition is rejecting Jesus. I mean, by and large, if you’re getting the Jesus that’s being put forth by Justin, by Ignatius, by some of these anti-Jewish thinkers, we have to, I think when we get to later rabbinic tradition, I think we also have to ask what Jesus are these Jews rejecting? It’s Jesus who’s calling them to turn their back on their ancestral covenant with God. You sort of alluded to, I oftentimes show my students these conversion liturgies that we had from the seventh eighth century where Jews who wanted to become followers of Jesus once you get this sort of official parting of the ways had to officially renounce all of their Judaism, all of their association and affiliation and relationships with family practicing the Sabbath. Oftentimes they had to eat pork publicly in order to become a follower of Jesus. Like what? Yeah, I mean, if that’s the Jesus that’s being preached, I certainly hope these rabbis are rejecting that. Do you know what I’m saying? So it’s not even so easy as saying, well, those rabbis rejected Jesus, what Jesus was being preached. And that should make us pretty sober about church tradition in the same way, as I said, as you said, they both lost an equal amount and we get to or have to sort through that.

Well, and maybe we’ll add, you’ve given so many great resources, which I appreciate you. We can make sure that all of those are linked in the show notes. But one that we might add is David Stern’s diagram of the Israel and the Church and how we started very much as one unified ju Gentile, and then we splinter. And that happens not over night, but over time to where we are completely distinct. And Christian and Judaism are completely different religions into now a kind of coming back together. And then I think eventually coming to Romans 11 where every knee shall bow, and there’s Jew and Gentile, and there’s distinction, but there’s equality. So the last thing I kind of want you to just maybe tee into, and maybe this can go into another podcast, but what does the end look like? Does the end look like this Gentile understanding where we’re one, or is it two separate tracks that are going to just constantly keep going parallel? Or is there this coming together that will maybe create confusion of, oh, I guess I thought we were two, but now we’re one and obviously things that we’ve wrestled with today?

No, it’s a great question. I mean, obviously whatever we’re going to say is speculative, but I think the imagery that the Bible gives us is about a certain kind of unity very much. But I think there’s still quite clearly in my reading distinction within that unity, we look at something like Revelation seven where you have the 144,000 from the 12 tribes of Israel, and then you have those from every tongue and every tribe and every nation. So that to me is painting some picture of unified worship of God, of the lamb. But in still distinction, and this is my current work, I put a lot of theological weight on the distinction between Jew and Gentile, not as it’s been kind of distorted in lots of different ways, but as I think the Bible portrays these categories. So I think you have a widespread Jewish acknowledgement of Jesus, and I think you have this sort of unified worship of Jesus Jews as Jews, Gentiles as Gentiles. So again, I don’t know what building we’re going to be in. I don’t know. I’m not sure what sort of sign is going to be over the door, but I think that’s the kind of imagery that we get is this unity in distinction that is actually what makes the unity so powerful is because you have this powerful reconciliation between Jew and Gentile. This is what I think the New Testament such a strong thrust of the New Testament is about, but it’s actually being played out large scale. So

That’s really good. And it reminded me of a story that I heard from one of our, I think probably mutual friends, messianic Jewish scholar who was invited to the Catholic church and to talk with, I think was the Pope and some reigning cardinals. Again, I don’t know exactly too much how that structure works, but they called the Messianic, the Church of James, like we’re the church of Peter. You’re the church of James. I can’t remember if it was the Pope or if it was one of the cardinals. Let’s just say it was one of the cardinals, just because I want to misspeak. But they said, if you guys are who you say you are, there was a few Messianic leaders said, if you guys are who you say you are, then Jesus is a lot closer to coming back than I thought he was. And so there was this understanding of, wow, messianic Jews are coming back.
They’re starting to sound like the early church again. And I remember being in Israel three weeks ago and just kind of taking a pulse of what was happening in the land, and we’re talking to Israeli settlers. That can be great, but they can also be very aggressive and very anti anti-Arab, for lack of a better term. And so you’re like, oh man, they’re really aggressive. But I get their point in some ways. But other ways, I feel like they’re trying to make this way too black and white. And then we talk to our Orthodox friends, and again, we love our Orthodox friends, but then again, there’s areas that we just completely disagree theologically. And then I see a letter from the Sanhedrin inviting Trump to come, and I’m like, Sanhedrin, wow. And then I’m seeing our Messianic friends. I’m like, wow, man, followers of the way. And I take a second, I say, I think we’re back to all of the streams of Judaism that existed in Jesus’ day. We have the zealots. We have the Sadducees, literally a stream of orthodoxy that don’t believe in resurrection. They believe in reincarnation. You had the Sanhedrin invite Trump something. You have the Orthodox community that’s very much like the Pharisees and have that same theology. You have Messianic Jews who are following Jesus, but living a Jewish lifestyle. And I’m like, man, we’re back to Acts. You
Went back. You did it. You did it. And I’m just as confused as I think they probably were because you had people that were like, here’s how we handle Rome. And people were like, no, we just need to be more faithful, LA Torah. And he had the Essenes were like, we’re out of here, man. We’re going. And I don’t think that there was ever an easy answer of like, oh, let’s just do this black and white.

But

Jesus stepped into a very politically charged situation that was just wreaking with turmoil. And in that he stepped in to become the light and the hope. And one of his disciples was a zealot, and one was a tax collector, and Paul was a Pharisee. So he’s able to bring in all of these different understandings and say, you can find unity in me. And so that was a beautiful reminder of, we’re not going to solve the problem intellectually, but Jesus is going to come and he’s going to be the light and the unifier. So

Praise

God.

Very powerful.

Well, thank you so much for taking the time. I’m sorry for going overtime. I’m sure you

Have a

Lot of work to do.

No, it’s always fun to chat. I really appreciate the opportunity, so thank you.

Yeah. Well, I hope you have a good rest of your day and look forward to another email coming for another invitation for round three at some point. But we’ll give you some time to

This. Sounds great. We’ll

Recover from this.

No, it’s awesome. Sounds great. Thank you.

See you.