May 7, 2025 • 43 mins
In this episode of Christendom and with World,Brandt Klawitter shares his journey from the United States to Norway, where he now serves as a chaplain and educator. He discusses the spiritual landscape of Norway, the challenges of building a faith community, and the importance of understanding worship practices. The conversation delves into theological insights from Genesis, the tension between procreation and celibacy, and Luther's perspective on marriage and family. Klawitter emphasizes the role of procreation in Christian life and the practical implications of theology in mission work, offering encouragement to pastors and missionaries. The discussion concludes with reflections on legacy and faith in community.
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(00:04):
We are recording now.
Brant Clawwitter, it's good to see you.
So you, uh we were just saying that you and I have kind of switched in a way where youlive in my ancient fatherland and I live in your more recent fatherland.
(00:24):
I live in the Pruess family dream, I think.
the price of my dream.
you're in Norway, you married a Norwegian, Anna.
That's correct.
And you live off the coast of Norway on an island not far from Bergen, right?
It's an island group, called Aus De Vaud.
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It's about 667 islands, eight or nine are inhabited, several bridges, but you can't get tothe mainland without a boat or a ferry.
Yeah, man, that's just different world.
So you ended up there.
I guess that's kind of a long story, but um you were you were a chaplain LCMS chaplain.
(01:06):
were in Germany for a while.
Right, I was both stationed in Germany as a chaplain, but I studied in Germany while I wasin seminary.
Okay.
Okay, so you're at Oberursel?
I was at Oberursel.
What year were you there?
2006, 2007, and then I did a Vickridge in Northern Germany, um Gross-Ursingen, a yearafter that.
(01:27):
My brother David was there maybe a few years before that.
Or no, no, no, no, no.
He was the one that have been, I think when he was getting his PhD he went there.
Yeah, he was at mine's I.U.G.
And I was there later, so.
Okay, so that you would know that so my brother John was there too.
I think that was 2009 2008 something like that but anyway So then so now you're servingTell us a little bit about your work that you're doing
(02:00):
So, my wife, Ana, she comes from that island group where we live.
well, clearly she's got an interest in the people there.
And when I finished up my PhD work, I did my PhD at Medicaid's faculty, MF in Oslo.
(02:22):
And there's a school in Bergen that I applied and I got the position teaching churchhistory then.
And um it kind of worked well for the family.
She could be closer to where she grew up.
then, but also um if you think about kind of the spiritual situation in Norway and inEurope.
um
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You know, a lot of people don't go to church very often and what is offered at the formerstate church offering, the Norwegian church, you can't guarantee the content.
You wouldn't necessarily trust that they're going to hear it right um when they need tohear it.
um I can just say as an example.
um
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Where we are right now, the pastor there, he's one of the biggest advocates for uh thePride movement for a group called the Norwegian, what would you call it?
Queer Network.
Really?
is just to reiterate, this is on an island community.
So we're talking like beyond rural.
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So you would think in like a small kind of community like that, that if you were to havesome state churches out in the hinterlands that aren't as radical, right?
That they would be in places like that.
That's sort of like how when I was a kid in Minnesota, you did have
some churches in the ELCA that were not as, they were a little more on the conservativeside, even though they weren't, know, but you're saying this as like in that little
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community.
So the, I can say a little bit, the Norwegian state church, there's still an ongoingbattle, but it appears to be largely lost where as they drifted more liberal in the, let's
say the past 60, 70 years, originally they wanted to maintain freedom of conscience forthose who objected to, for example, women's ordination or other issues.
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As time has gone on, they have taken away that freedom of conscience to the extent thatnow if somebody is ordained, according to my understanding,
They cannot object.
In fact, I know it's a fact.
They cannot object to participating in a joint service with a female pastor, for example.
Wow.
So that freedom is gone.
That wiggle room is gone.
um So, So anyway, in Ostervolden, where we live, um there is there is an interest in, umyou know, how do you how do you reach out to family and friends and these people that
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they don't have a church for all intents and purposes.
They have what are called prayer houses.
And historically in the last, especially 100 years, but 150 years, you had missionorganizations.
um They're kind of like peripheral organizations, your Sunday schools, your missionorganizations that.
Here in the States, we would probably have included in the congregational life, but therein Norway, they grew up as sort of extra organizations that were supposed to uh supplement
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a church life.
And these, as time has gone on, they've become more independent and in some senses,replace some church functions, but not clearly.
So we work alongside these groups, I guess you would say.
So for example, there's gatherings of like some like handfuls of Christians out where welive who are they don't have pastors.
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They were kind of tangentially connected to the state church, but kind of not.
But they're used to having meetings in these prayer houses and.
Actually what happened during COVID, um we'd kind of been puzzling what can we do?
And in COVID, everything shut down like over here in the States.
um But in many ways in Norway, there wasn't the pushback that shouldn't we be havingchurch?
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It just stayed dead.
And we had been having church in our house since we moved out to the islands.
um But during COVID, I talked with some people at the prayer house and I said, hey,
There's not much going on.
You guys don't really have somebody who's coming out and talking.
I said, should the word of God just die?
Like, should we just let it go?
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And so I proposed that I didn't actually know where they stood.
And I didn't even know if they wanted to use the lectionary or anything.
But I said, you know, we could just preach through a Bible book.
I can do it.
And
And I said, as long as you're okay, I'm a Lutheran.
going to, and I just use the Norwegian classical confessional writing.
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So I'm going to be faithful to the small catechism and the Augsburg confession andscripture.
And if that's okay with you guys, then we can do this and hopefully everybody will beblessed by it.
And so we went through Ephesians and um
for a couple of years.
And then I think it built up some trust with some wider groups.
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So now we started at an old school there out where we live.
a group of Christians and we have services every other week.
And in some ways it's on a trial basis.
uh
because they weren't quite sure who's this stranger and this outsider.
And okay, I'm married into the island, to a family group there, but I just asked them, wetry it?
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And they thought, yeah.
So we've been doing that almost a year now.
um there's issues to go through.
They have different backgrounds.
The prayer house background to Norway have...
have brought in lot of different like evangelical stuff that you'd find here in the U.S.
or a little bit of charismatic.
And you were mentioning like dispensationalism.
There's that.
(08:12):
With some, And so there's gonna be issues to talk to, but by God's grace, we talk throughthings.
We have a Bible class that some come to, and we go through the small catechism there,working on translating the old 91 version, and we just go through that week by week, and
then we have a um little bit abbreviated, but service of the word um after that.
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And you know what, I'll just say, it's a huge blessing.
Yeah.
um after years with house church just at home and my brother-in-law, comes um to get tolook forward to Sunday morning and seeing other Christians and meeting up around God's
word.
um It's a huge high point, frankly, and we'll see where it goes.
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And uh trial year number two is coming up next year and um we'll just take it as it comes.
Yeah, we'll talk about laboring in the word of God and doctrine.
That's great.
So in these services, would, you said they're pretty simple.
I remember a couple of years ago, you were telling me that you were sort of introducingthem to litany or written prayer, something like that.
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Do they say, I would imagine if there's some of that kind of charismatic influence, somepeople might have an aversion to...
like the Lord's Prayer, do you find resistance to that?
do you guys, are they pretty good with saying the Lord's Prayer?
Like what is the
know, the Lord's Prayer, that's not going to be any issue whatsoever.
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of course, for some, you know, the old kind of stodgy church prayers, that wouldn't betheir natural way to go.
But what's interesting sometimes is when you, like, for example, you can show, I rememberwhen we went through Ephesians chapter three and Paul's prayer at the end of Ephesians
chapter three, and you can kind of diagnose the different parts of that prayer.
(10:05):
And it lines up very well with what we have in
normal collect yeah and you kind of show them that they're like whoa you know
Is that where he says, I raise my hands toward father from whom all.
Oh, I'm trying to, I tried to remember the Oh, if we had a Bible out, I could show it, butdear.
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Is it right behind me here?
Let's go with the new King James.
Yeah.
So, um, no, and I just remember that one.
It kind of opened some eyes and.
And so, okay, we can in the church service, use, um I'll just use a normal, um likeprayers of the church.
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But I, it's what's important for me is to talk about what we do and why we do it.
So that there's understanding.
Otherwise it, it would have the impression of me just reimposing.
Dead rights.
Exactly.
And it's just a pastor asserting his authority and, and, and that's not really the route Iwant to take.
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um
So, so here, um so for this reason, I bow my knees to the father, our Lord, Christ, fromwhom the whole family and heaven and earth is named.
So there's your, your grounding, your reasoning, right?
That he would grant you according to the riches of his glory to be strengthened with mightthrough his spirit in the inner man.
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There's your inner, your, your, your very simple prayer, right?
Um, inner man that Christ, and here's your purpose may dwell in your hearts through faith.
that you being rooted and grounded in love may be able to comprehend with all the saints,what is the width and length and depth and height.
So perfect.
Yeah, that's I never knew it before.
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I didn't know it.
And then I was working on the text that week and also I was like, wait, that's the call.
That's awesome.
That's great.
I'm use that from now on, because I teach about the collect.
I usually just use the Lord's Prayer.
Right.
Because you know, get in the Lord's Prayer, you know, the introduction, our Father who artin heaven, which is establishing who God is and who we are before Him as His children.
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Then the first part would be kind of like the rationale part, right?
His name is holy in itself.
His kingdom comes by itself.
His will comes by itself.
And then like the purpose or like the petitions...
with a purpose that we may have our daily bread, etc.
Anyway, no, but that one works really well.
(12:36):
So, okay, so I wanted to...
uh We don't have a whole lot of time to talk.
I wanted to jump into some of your studies, which I find very interesting.
uh We have...
It's been fun getting to know you.
We're of kindred spirits in ways.
It's some people...
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some people might call it a God thing like uh Hannah might, um but I call it providential.
Let's see, you have six children.
God has blessed you with six children.
He's blessed me with seven.
um And your pastor growing up was Pastor Herman Otten.
That's right.
Who had tremendous influence on you and your theological thinking and in your practicalthinking and
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And ah even just the way that you're talking here, having that sympathy for the lay peopleand not, and then being sensitive to why they would have a mistrust, not to justify some
kind of like brazen anti-clericalism, but to understand why there would be some of thatmistrust or slowness to trust a man of the cloth.
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Cause it's in their, from their perspective and their history that is so closelyassociated with the state church that jettisoned the treasure.
And so, so I think that's important.
That's such an important insight.
ah But one insight though, that you I think uh have also, I'm just judging this based onyour, the, the, acknowledgments in your dissertation.
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that you give Pastor Otten a lot of credit to getting you to think about something else.
And that is Genesis chapter one, verse 28.
Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it.
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And that you started doing some digging and you wrote a dissertation on this for yourdoctoral degree.
And uh I just find it very interesting.
I haven't read your whole dissertation, but I've read, I've kind of skimmed through uhparts of it.
so what, okay, so the question I want to start off with is, in the early church, you havethis interpretation, you have kind of two different takes on Genesis 1.28, be fruitful and
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multiply.
The first that you mentioned is really, really ones like what Irenaeus and who is theother guy that you sip was a Cyprian maybe.
I mentioned, yeah, there's several back there.
But it really comes to the fore in the late 300s.
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early on, they're really seeing the importance of this text against the Gnostics, Thosewho are gonna, as Paul says, forbid marriage and have this false sense of ascetic
humility.
But then when you get into the 300s, you start getting more of a monastic influence or amore aesthetic influence.
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What's the word?
There's acidic, which is acid.
Yeah, inkratism.
Okay.
So explain, explain to me the inkratism.
Essentially, uh just to go off what you're saying, there was a tension uh how they shouldinterpret it.
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Like, what is the meaning of be fruitful and multiply?
And in the early church, it seems the case was that there was a little bit of attention.
m Some of them, particularly against Gnosticism, uh emphasized creation and
the importance of marriage and having children and the yeah
But especially once you get to the 300s and this Inquitism, which goes along with monasticlife, as it begins to come up um and its significance for church life, a debate grows out
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of it.
Because of course, this Inquitism, this celibate life is in some ways,
the negation of be fruitful and multiply.
It doesn't have to be, but that's often how it was interpreted.
And then by the time especially you get to Jerome, he would say something like,procreation was made for the time up until Christ to fill earth, whereas celibacy was made
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to fill heaven.
And so it's kind of a...
really disdain for the uh creaturely aspects, the procreative uh nature of man.
And you have this tension there because not everybody was on board with Jerome.
uh You have, example, Jovian, but also others.
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He was condemned as a heretic, right?
But he went around, I think it was in Rome, if I remember right.
uh
actually encouraging monks to marry and or priests to marry, I can't quite remember, andwas somewhat effective in that.
Jerome and also Ambrose didn't like him.
So he had some pretty heavyweights against him.
But the long and the short was it led to a ruling, I think in the mid-380s, where I didn'treview everything, all the details of my book before we met, but where
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What formerly would have been within the pale of orthodoxy was now associated withJovinian's name.
And it was kind of on the outs for a bit over a thousand years.
And all you had to do if somebody talked too forcefully about be fruitful and multiply,you could just call them a Jovinian and your homework's done, right?
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it's like if you preach the gospel too much, you get called an antinomian.
Or if you preach the law too much, you get called a legalist.
Yeah, sure.
So that it's the first I heard of Jovinian was during when I was doing my STM research.
uh
I was studying the cross in the life of the Christian, specifically as I was taught inLutheran dogmatics in late 16th, 17th century.
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And I can't remember which one it was, but one of these old Lutherans, I think it was aguy from Tumingen, maybe Herb Render, Hafen Reffer, but anyway, took up the charge of
Jovinianism, specifically in talking about the cross.
And what I remember was that their Jovinianism was
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They didn't seem to embrace it at all.
They were still in the Reformation.
But the more I looked into Jovinianism, I thought, is he all that bad?
Did he just kind of get thrown under the bus?
ah Or did he actually have some serious heretical issues?
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And I can't actually answer that question.
wonder the same.
There's some bits and pieces about him that really make you wonder.
Like for example, he sees baptism as a leveling thing.
the works of the celibates are not better than the works of the married people, right?
And baptism, know, so I was like, well, what's so bad about that?
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So there's things that seem good, seem a little bit reformational in some ways, but Idon't know enough to give him a clean bill of health to put it that way.
I hear you.
So a question then is, kind of fast forwarding, suppose, to Luther.
uh So Luther uses this against monasticism, but then you say that it kind of develops intoa more salutary uh understanding of the Christian life other than just...
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a talking point against monasticism.
Right.
Right.
So he starts off saying, Hey, you monasticism really goes against nature, goes againstGod's mandate here, be fruitful, multiply.
Um, but eventually, and, one, and I, maybe you talk about this in your dissertation, Ijust haven't, haven't read it yet.
Um, is, uh, one thing that I find interesting is that in the earlier church, like middleages, the fourth petition, give us a stair of daily bread.
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was taken as Eucharistic.
And then Luther comes along and Luther takes his Eucharistic early on.
But by the time he writes his small catechism in 1529, it's all bodily needs.
And what's interesting that happens between, I don't know if it was 1520, sometime around1520 and 1529, what happens between that is he gets married and he has children.
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And it seems like there he has a very clear appreciation for the table of duties, theseregular stations in life being holy stations.
so do you see a connection there?
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Did you notice a connection there between the Be Fruitful multiply and the understandingof the fourth petition, Give Us a Stare at Daily Bread?
I guess you could make that I think chronologically certainly it develops during the1520s.
ah The first half of the 1520s is very geared against celibacy, whereas the second half ofthe 1520s is very much more about marriage and that's the lasting emphasis.
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um It's almost worth saying, I should say that when we talk about be fruitful multiply, Ithink the thing that really jumps out, what are we talking about here?
We can say it's an ordinance and this is God's will for creation.
But I think what was most interesting for me as I worked on this, and I should make abrief aside.
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The reason I took up this topic, do you know why it was?
Could I take a guess?
Well, you must have read an article.
Yeah, so Pastor Otten, he wrote by a lot of standards, things that people thought werecrazy.
But I was a child of the congregation and he was my pastor.
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And so finally I'm like, I'm just taking this on.
Like, I'm going to pick one of the craziest things that seems the most out there in myestimation.
And I'm just going to go with it.
And this was around 2009.
I started working on it.
And I had another option, but I went with procreation and contraception.
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And the more I dug on that topic, the more I found out that he had only scratched thesurface.
And you get into Margaret Sanger and all this stuff.
But what I really found out though is I didn't understand Martin Luther's logic and thereformers.
Like, how do they think about this?
How do they see the world?
And uh so it grew into a hobby and uh a dissertation later.
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But so it kind of started in this office with him writing his articles in a certain sense.
And, you know, from my judgment, I think he was right.
And I could say that a long time before I my PhD, but whatever.
So anyway, back to, but be fruitful, multiply.
It would be easy to think about the verse as a command, but it's not preeminently acommand.
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And I think that's the point.
Like if somebody was listening to this and thinking of reading my book and I was justgoing to give them the kind of in a nutshell what you need to know that we're talking
about uh in our parlance, we'd call it the sex drive.
uh What is it?
Right.
uh As you're approaching the reformation, it was, you know, it was concupiscence.
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It was purely sinful.
I think what happened during the reformation is in understanding
that God had spoken this word and the power of this word once spoken is in effect on allmankind.
the idea is God speaks and it creates, but not just creating the bodies and the parts andthese sorts of things, but even the desires uh that we dare not call and Luther, think, by
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the way, wouldn't call it the sexual urge.
He would call it the procreative urge.
Which I think is an important point.
It's very clearly.
Yeah.
And which is later.
And you can, there's some fun things you can do with those.
And if we have enough time, I might, I might give a little hint there, but um it's reallyabout what is this drive and what is its nature and is it only sin?
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And I think just uh to give a kind of easy summary on it, what Luther discovers, one isit's
terribly powerful and it's not for us to freely decide that I want to be a celibate.
I'm going to take this vow which God hasn't given me to take ah and prefer that tomarriage.
Luther saw that as testing God and instead Luther sees, so if you're struggling with this,right, or if this is an urge, a desire, an inclination God has put in you, understand what
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it is.
It's a drive, it's an inclination.
pointed or ordered towards the furtherance of human life.
It's ordered towards babies.
And so this sexual urge, think rightly speaking, uh in our following human nature, ittakes on something of an aspect of Luther's simile usus epicator.
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It's simultaneously created and good and ordered towards babies.
And it's also sinful.
And so Luther, and this was what I was gonna get to in his later lectures, if you gothrough the language he uses in his Genesis lectures to talk about sex, and he's got a lot
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of words in the Genesis lectures, you can go through and you can find all the Latin words.
But if you take him by the numbers, about half the time, if I remember off the top of myhead, he actually glosses what we would call sex.
He glosses that with,
either procreation or the work of procreation.
And that's a fun one to think about.
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Because what would it do to youth these days if instead of talking about sex, you said,know, this thing that you're struggling with is actually called the work of procreation,
right?
Like it would change thinking.
It absolutely would.
People would think about babies and God's gift.
Procreation, what's going on here?
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It's a divine work.
Yeah, so like you have to, yeah, and to see like when you are, you're an adolescent boyand you are fighting against your sexual urges and trying to remain chaste, but that what,
when you understand it as a work, you see it as something that has an end.
Yes.
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That there's, it's not pointless.
Right.
And I think today there's a kind of nihilism to sex.
And,
And so, so it's either about just suppressing it for the sake of just suppressing itbecause you don't want to end up with a baby or responsibility that you can't afford or
whatever.
But instead to look at it as you are actually laboring, you're working towards something.
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It's a good work to have in mind then the goal.
It brings to mind what Paul says in 1 Corinthians 9 about disciplining your body andrunning the race.
And not that children are the race, but they are sort of like an analogy of the goal.
There's a fruitfulness that we see in creation in the first article that resembles orreminds us of the fruitfulness of love, joy, peace, patience, et cetera, and eternal life.
(29:29):
anyway.
I'll add one more thing.
And so God with these drives that he's implanted in us and some people, if you know, forLuther, if you can live free and freely serve the Lord in a different capacity than
married life, more power to you.
Yeah, no problem.
But for those who are led in that way, God is leading them into his orders for life, if wewant to call it that.
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And
And I think that's, we could talk a whole nother time about that.
But one of the things about the orders for Luther is that these orders are accompanied bythe cross.
And they are, there's challenges, there's difficulties, there's thorns.
And these orders, therefore, God uses them what?
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To do what?
To increase faith, to look at His word, to trust that it is His word that establishes it.
And what else to lead us to prayer, to call upon Him for help in the orders He'sestablished.
And so there's something of a theological beauty, I think, to what's going on there.
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yeah, well I can say that God has taught me how to pray by giving me a wife and children.
In fact, even just today, you have a one flesh.
this is, you my brother Mark says, your children are evidence that you and your wife arethe same flesh.
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And there's almost like this, when I hear kids, I'm in one room and I hear in the otherroom,
kids kind of doing their thing.
And I hear, can sense, I can feel my wife's like stress.
And so I pray for my wife, know, pray for my children or if a kid's sick or whatever,know, you got, he gives you these things to teach you how to pray.
(31:25):
That's, yeah.
Yeah.
And that shows that, you know, that kind of pairs with Luther's, the three things thatmake a theologian.
Yep.
Absolutely.
prayer, meditation and testing.
Can I add one more thing about, kind of funny?
I'll just say uh in the 1520s, one of the remarkable things I ran into while I doing myresearch was the Reformation in Erfurt.
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And there was some real fireworks there between some followers of Luther and actuallyLuther's former professor who was totally against the Reformation, Bartolomeus Arnoldi von
Usingen.
uh
and um who really targeted the Lutheran preachers.
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I don't remember the names off the top of my head, but essentially the Lutherans were liketotally like lambasted for only supposedly preaching procreation.
Like you think the whole world and its furtherance just depends on you guys having babies,essentially what he's always accusing them by.
And he's got choice names for him.
He's actually kind of crude with them, but.
(32:30):
uh
But I think I found it interesting that the Lutherans at that time were also, um they werekind of made fun of for valuing life m and what furthers life in the way that they did.
um it kind of does like.
Well, I I get annoyed when someone makes a comment about uh how, you know, if you havechildren, if we actually get married and have children, teach our children the value of
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that, you know, then our church numbers actually will grow.
And now some people can be kind of crass or flippant about it and say, well, the bestchurch growth is having children.
But I think that what most of them mean is it's not just having children, it's raisingthem in the faith, teaching them to pray, to confess.
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But when I hear the response to that, the kind of knee-jerk response to that, well,there's real evangelism.
And I think, okay, these should never be...
against each other.
And in fact, ah when your kids are nurtured in the home, like olive shoots around yourtable, they become witnesses to the world themselves, right?
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And they learn to confess the truth.
So, yeah, I mean, there so many practical implications that we could get into on that, butI'm just, I find that very...
very helpful distinction that you made there between seeing it as just a sex drive, butthen seeing it as a procreation drive.
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And to your point about command, the guy who's commanded it, it's interesting to see howLuther speaks in his large catechism about the commandment in baptism, or the commandment
in the 10 commandments that...
On the one hand, you have the commandment of God, which is really just the law in thenarrow sense.
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But on the other hand, Luther speaks of commandment as something that has establishedsomething, right?
And that you can rest on the commandment, not in the sense that you're resting on yourworks to fulfill the commandment.
But that you rest on the fact that God has commanded it.
It reminds me of Psalm 133 about how blessed it is when brothers will in unity.
(35:09):
He ends the Psalm by saying, for God has commanded the blessing, life forevermore.
And I was just today reading through, I just read through Psalm 119 again, I was lookingat the Hebrew and it's really beautiful how
He sees, he's dealing with what we might in our confession speak of the law in its broadsense.
(35:36):
Right?
And do you see that?
Is that kind of, am I tracking with what your research, what you're noticing in yourresearch?
Like the commandment is, it's not just that God says, thou shalt have children, but thathe has commanded
it in the sense that he's instituted this, that he has ingrained it into his creation.
(36:00):
It's instituted, it's ordained, it's blessed.
Luther, he doesn't just use the word command, though he does use the word command in hisGenesis lectures, but I'm trying to remember, it's blessing, it's command, it's ordinance,
it's uh promise.
He's got so many different words for it.
And so I think if somebody would just say law, really doesn't do service to what's goingon there.
(36:28):
It's so much bigger.
Yeah, and I know that ah Did you have you went to st.
Louis?
Did you have Norman Nagel?
I didn't.
I was a little bit intimidated by him when I was a first year and I think he was doneafter my first year.
So I didn't.
Well, cause I mean, he would talk a lot about like the mandate, know, and make a lot outof that.
(36:51):
And it sounds very, very similar to what you've noticed in Luther.
So, well, that's really helpful stuff and what a practical thing for you to be able tostudy.
Yeah.
did get accused of that, but...
I made my dissertation of practical work because we were six kids, right?
(37:12):
It's kind of uncommon, right?
It's not everybody, but...
know, those are the best...
That's uh I was, I remember I was taken back on that when I, uh when I was doing my, my,my, when I did my STM, I thought I was doing like serious academic study, which I, you
know, I was reading, you know, reading stuff.
(37:33):
I wasn't thinking this was practical theology.
I thought this was like dogmatic, you know, historical theology.
And, but then one of the professors said, yeah, this is practical theology.
And it just kind of hit me.
But yeah, it is.
And actually,
theology should be practical.
And I think that there is a problem where theology is sort of compartmentalized into thisacademic thing.
(37:58):
And then practice, since you have that disconnect, you end up getting whatever passes aspractical theology ends up being just kind of psycho, know, psychology or sociology.
But so, yeah, I think that that's great.
so if we can, I know we're kind of
uh We don't have a whole lot of time left here because Hannah has to go bring my daughterto a volleyball game because Hannah is her coach.
(38:27):
But if you could just maybe summarize how has, I know you're teaching at this college inBergen, but specifically with your mission work, how has this
And if you could give some encouragement to just any pastor or any missionaries out therewho are congregations who are trying to, you know, promote the gospel where they are.
(38:55):
How has this study that you've done, this very practical study about be fruitful andmultiply helped you in your parish and in your mission work?
I think...
um
To answer that question, I think the easiest way for me to say it is uh it's kind of theblessings in general.
(39:19):
You don't have to do a PhD in this or that.
uh But the blessings I find in reading Luther or other faithful uh witnesses from thechurch's past is oftentimes it slows down your own Bible reading.
and causes you to see things in scripture that you normally wouldn't or didn't, insightswhich were far away from your own thoughts.
(39:48):
it helps you to kind of, and this would be a very Lutheran thing, as far as Luther goes.
His encouragement is always to help to see the world through the word.
That's what he really wants people to do.
And.
And so whether it's this area, whether it's looking, so this was, you know, procreation.
So how do we see it through the word and not through our own human eyes?
(40:11):
um But he does that in other areas too, um whether it's whether it's seen it, you know,death through the word or through the resurrection through the word, all these things that
exercise our faith.
And and I would just the encouragement then is to simply um I guess be blessed by readingum
(40:31):
know, faithful church fathers who help give and impart a better understanding ofscripture.
uh You know, sometimes we do well, we sit down with scripture and we can see these thingsfrom ourselves.
And sometimes it's good to sit at the fathers or the feet of faithful fathers.
who can help in that way.
And certainly Luther, there's so much to be gleaned from him.
(40:56):
So I'm a thankful recipient.
And even that, you know why I read through Luther before I even started my PhD proposal.
I got out of seminary and I didn't know what to read.
And I was like, what do I do now?
And Pastor Otten, I remembered him saying once, well,
When Luther's works were coming out, he read them a month at a time as they came out.
(41:17):
And so he'd read through them all.
was like, well, shoot, if he could do it, maybe I could get at least a couple volumes,right?
So I read through him.
That guy was a speedy.
I looked through the library and he's got notes in like every book.
I found this one book that was like 700 pages, some obscure like Seventh-day Adventistbook that I would not be interested at all in reading.
(41:37):
And I flipped through it and it's like he's got notes all over.
uh
no, he left me in the dust.
I mean just like his legacy in my mind.
Sure.
I'm still an underperformer.
I try but
yeah, but it's all right.
What's a blessing?
It is.
It's a real, you know, our fathers in the faith, our physical fathers who are Christians,you know, that I was just talking to my dad about like legacy of his dad, you know, we're
(42:04):
talking about that.
It's a blessing.
It's something that's very humbling and we thank God for those who have gone before us.
And so it's good to see the fruit.
Yeah, in all this and I pray for for you and for your family and your congregation andyour and your and the mission that God's entrusted to you and uh, yeah, I think that and
(42:27):
it's my hope, uh, and I think this is this goes back to The first petition how would bethy name?
My hope is that God's name would continue to be kept holy And his word proclaimed in histruth and purity to these people of God.
Yeah, so
Well, it was good having you, Brandt.
(42:48):
And I wanted to say just one thing that what's really cool is that your name is Brandt andyou live in Norway.
And one of my favorite Norwegian books, it's more of a play, is Heinrich Isben's...
Ibsen, Ibsen, yeah.
I always mix up that name.
(43:08):
Ibsen's play, Brandt.
But you are so different from that Brandt.
ah But anyway, well good to see you and uh this has been uh Christendom in the Worldbrought to you by Christian News.
Please like and subscribe and share wherever you find our podcast.
We are recording now.
Brant Clawwitter, it's good to see you.
So you, uh we were just saying that you and I have kind of switched in a way where youlive in my ancient fatherland and I live in your more recent fatherland.
(00:24):
I live in the Pruess family dream, I think.
the price of my dream.
you're in Norway, you married a Norwegian, Anna.
That's correct.
And you live off the coast of Norway on an island not far from Bergen, right?
It's an island group, called Aus De Vaud.
(00:44):
It's about 667 islands, eight or nine are inhabited, several bridges, but you can't get tothe mainland without a boat or a ferry.
Yeah, man, that's just different world.
So you ended up there.
I guess that's kind of a long story, but um you were you were a chaplain LCMS chaplain.
(01:06):
were in Germany for a while.
Right, I was both stationed in Germany as a chaplain, but I studied in Germany while I wasin seminary.
Okay.
Okay, so you're at Oberursel?
I was at Oberursel.
What year were you there?
2006, 2007, and then I did a Vickridge in Northern Germany, um Gross-Ursingen, a yearafter that.
(01:27):
My brother David was there maybe a few years before that.
Or no, no, no, no, no.
He was the one that have been, I think when he was getting his PhD he went there.
Yeah, he was at mine's I.U.G.
And I was there later, so.
Okay, so that you would know that so my brother John was there too.
I think that was 2009 2008 something like that but anyway So then so now you're servingTell us a little bit about your work that you're doing
(02:00):
So, my wife, Ana, she comes from that island group where we live.
well, clearly she's got an interest in the people there.
And when I finished up my PhD work, I did my PhD at Medicaid's faculty, MF in Oslo.
(02:22):
And there's a school in Bergen that I applied and I got the position teaching churchhistory then.
And um it kind of worked well for the family.
She could be closer to where she grew up.
then, but also um if you think about kind of the spiritual situation in Norway and inEurope.
um
(02:44):
You know, a lot of people don't go to church very often and what is offered at the formerstate church offering, the Norwegian church, you can't guarantee the content.
You wouldn't necessarily trust that they're going to hear it right um when they need tohear it.
um I can just say as an example.
um
(03:06):
Where we are right now, the pastor there, he's one of the biggest advocates for uh thePride movement for a group called the Norwegian, what would you call it?
Queer Network.
Really?
is just to reiterate, this is on an island community.
So we're talking like beyond rural.
(03:28):
So you would think in like a small kind of community like that, that if you were to havesome state churches out in the hinterlands that aren't as radical, right?
That they would be in places like that.
That's sort of like how when I was a kid in Minnesota, you did have
some churches in the ELCA that were not as, they were a little more on the conservativeside, even though they weren't, know, but you're saying this as like in that little
(03:58):
community.
So the, I can say a little bit, the Norwegian state church, there's still an ongoingbattle, but it appears to be largely lost where as they drifted more liberal in the, let's
say the past 60, 70 years, originally they wanted to maintain freedom of conscience forthose who objected to, for example, women's ordination or other issues.
(04:21):
As time has gone on, they have taken away that freedom of conscience to the extent thatnow if somebody is ordained, according to my understanding,
They cannot object.
In fact, I know it's a fact.
They cannot object to participating in a joint service with a female pastor, for example.
Wow.
So that freedom is gone.
That wiggle room is gone.
um So, So anyway, in Ostervolden, where we live, um there is there is an interest in, umyou know, how do you how do you reach out to family and friends and these people that
(04:57):
they don't have a church for all intents and purposes.
They have what are called prayer houses.
And historically in the last, especially 100 years, but 150 years, you had missionorganizations.
um They're kind of like peripheral organizations, your Sunday schools, your missionorganizations that.
Here in the States, we would probably have included in the congregational life, but therein Norway, they grew up as sort of extra organizations that were supposed to uh supplement
(05:27):
a church life.
And these, as time has gone on, they've become more independent and in some senses,replace some church functions, but not clearly.
So we work alongside these groups, I guess you would say.
So for example, there's gatherings of like some like handfuls of Christians out where welive who are they don't have pastors.
(05:52):
They were kind of tangentially connected to the state church, but kind of not.
But they're used to having meetings in these prayer houses and.
Actually what happened during COVID, um we'd kind of been puzzling what can we do?
And in COVID, everything shut down like over here in the States.
um But in many ways in Norway, there wasn't the pushback that shouldn't we be havingchurch?
(06:15):
It just stayed dead.
And we had been having church in our house since we moved out to the islands.
um But during COVID, I talked with some people at the prayer house and I said, hey,
There's not much going on.
You guys don't really have somebody who's coming out and talking.
I said, should the word of God just die?
Like, should we just let it go?
(06:39):
And so I proposed that I didn't actually know where they stood.
And I didn't even know if they wanted to use the lectionary or anything.
But I said, you know, we could just preach through a Bible book.
I can do it.
And
And I said, as long as you're okay, I'm a Lutheran.
going to, and I just use the Norwegian classical confessional writing.
(06:59):
So I'm going to be faithful to the small catechism and the Augsburg confession andscripture.
And if that's okay with you guys, then we can do this and hopefully everybody will beblessed by it.
And so we went through Ephesians and um
for a couple of years.
And then I think it built up some trust with some wider groups.
(07:23):
So now we started at an old school there out where we live.
a group of Christians and we have services every other week.
And in some ways it's on a trial basis.
uh
because they weren't quite sure who's this stranger and this outsider.
And okay, I'm married into the island, to a family group there, but I just asked them, wetry it?
(07:52):
And they thought, yeah.
So we've been doing that almost a year now.
um there's issues to go through.
They have different backgrounds.
The prayer house background to Norway have...
have brought in lot of different like evangelical stuff that you'd find here in the U.S.
or a little bit of charismatic.
And you were mentioning like dispensationalism.
There's that.
(08:12):
With some, And so there's gonna be issues to talk to, but by God's grace, we talk throughthings.
We have a Bible class that some come to, and we go through the small catechism there,working on translating the old 91 version, and we just go through that week by week, and
then we have a um little bit abbreviated, but service of the word um after that.
(08:35):
And you know what, I'll just say, it's a huge blessing.
Yeah.
um after years with house church just at home and my brother-in-law, comes um to get tolook forward to Sunday morning and seeing other Christians and meeting up around God's
word.
um It's a huge high point, frankly, and we'll see where it goes.
(08:57):
And uh trial year number two is coming up next year and um we'll just take it as it comes.
Yeah, we'll talk about laboring in the word of God and doctrine.
That's great.
So in these services, would, you said they're pretty simple.
I remember a couple of years ago, you were telling me that you were sort of introducingthem to litany or written prayer, something like that.
(09:22):
Do they say, I would imagine if there's some of that kind of charismatic influence, somepeople might have an aversion to...
like the Lord's Prayer, do you find resistance to that?
do you guys, are they pretty good with saying the Lord's Prayer?
Like what is the
know, the Lord's Prayer, that's not going to be any issue whatsoever.
(09:42):
of course, for some, you know, the old kind of stodgy church prayers, that wouldn't betheir natural way to go.
But what's interesting sometimes is when you, like, for example, you can show, I rememberwhen we went through Ephesians chapter three and Paul's prayer at the end of Ephesians
chapter three, and you can kind of diagnose the different parts of that prayer.
(10:05):
And it lines up very well with what we have in
normal collect yeah and you kind of show them that they're like whoa you know
Is that where he says, I raise my hands toward father from whom all.
Oh, I'm trying to, I tried to remember the Oh, if we had a Bible out, I could show it, butdear.
(10:26):
Is it right behind me here?
Let's go with the new King James.
Yeah.
So, um, no, and I just remember that one.
It kind of opened some eyes and.
And so, okay, we can in the church service, use, um I'll just use a normal, um likeprayers of the church.
(10:51):
But I, it's what's important for me is to talk about what we do and why we do it.
So that there's understanding.
Otherwise it, it would have the impression of me just reimposing.
Dead rights.
Exactly.
And it's just a pastor asserting his authority and, and, and that's not really the route Iwant to take.
(11:11):
um
So, so here, um so for this reason, I bow my knees to the father, our Lord, Christ, fromwhom the whole family and heaven and earth is named.
So there's your, your grounding, your reasoning, right?
That he would grant you according to the riches of his glory to be strengthened with mightthrough his spirit in the inner man.
(11:31):
There's your inner, your, your, your very simple prayer, right?
Um, inner man that Christ, and here's your purpose may dwell in your hearts through faith.
that you being rooted and grounded in love may be able to comprehend with all the saints,what is the width and length and depth and height.
So perfect.
Yeah, that's I never knew it before.
(11:54):
I didn't know it.
And then I was working on the text that week and also I was like, wait, that's the call.
That's awesome.
That's great.
I'm use that from now on, because I teach about the collect.
I usually just use the Lord's Prayer.
Right.
Because you know, get in the Lord's Prayer, you know, the introduction, our Father who artin heaven, which is establishing who God is and who we are before Him as His children.
(12:15):
Then the first part would be kind of like the rationale part, right?
His name is holy in itself.
His kingdom comes by itself.
His will comes by itself.
And then like the purpose or like the petitions...
with a purpose that we may have our daily bread, etc.
Anyway, no, but that one works really well.
(12:36):
So, okay, so I wanted to...
uh We don't have a whole lot of time to talk.
I wanted to jump into some of your studies, which I find very interesting.
uh We have...
It's been fun getting to know you.
We're of kindred spirits in ways.
It's some people...
(12:59):
some people might call it a God thing like uh Hannah might, um but I call it providential.
Let's see, you have six children.
God has blessed you with six children.
He's blessed me with seven.
um And your pastor growing up was Pastor Herman Otten.
That's right.
Who had tremendous influence on you and your theological thinking and in your practicalthinking and
(13:28):
And ah even just the way that you're talking here, having that sympathy for the lay peopleand not, and then being sensitive to why they would have a mistrust, not to justify some
kind of like brazen anti-clericalism, but to understand why there would be some of thatmistrust or slowness to trust a man of the cloth.
(13:57):
Cause it's in their, from their perspective and their history that is so closelyassociated with the state church that jettisoned the treasure.
And so, so I think that's important.
That's such an important insight.
ah But one insight though, that you I think uh have also, I'm just judging this based onyour, the, the, acknowledgments in your dissertation.
(14:28):
that you give Pastor Otten a lot of credit to getting you to think about something else.
And that is Genesis chapter one, verse 28.
Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it.
(14:48):
And that you started doing some digging and you wrote a dissertation on this for yourdoctoral degree.
And uh I just find it very interesting.
I haven't read your whole dissertation, but I've read, I've kind of skimmed through uhparts of it.
so what, okay, so the question I want to start off with is, in the early church, you havethis interpretation, you have kind of two different takes on Genesis 1.28, be fruitful and
(15:24):
multiply.
The first that you mentioned is really, really ones like what Irenaeus and who is theother guy that you sip was a Cyprian maybe.
I mentioned, yeah, there's several back there.
But it really comes to the fore in the late 300s.
(15:45):
early on, they're really seeing the importance of this text against the Gnostics, Thosewho are gonna, as Paul says, forbid marriage and have this false sense of ascetic
humility.
But then when you get into the 300s, you start getting more of a monastic influence or amore aesthetic influence.
(16:12):
What's the word?
There's acidic, which is acid.
Yeah, inkratism.
Okay.
So explain, explain to me the inkratism.
Essentially, uh just to go off what you're saying, there was a tension uh how they shouldinterpret it.
(16:33):
Like, what is the meaning of be fruitful and multiply?
And in the early church, it seems the case was that there was a little bit of attention.
m Some of them, particularly against Gnosticism, uh emphasized creation and
the importance of marriage and having children and the yeah
But especially once you get to the 300s and this Inquitism, which goes along with monasticlife, as it begins to come up um and its significance for church life, a debate grows out
(17:10):
of it.
Because of course, this Inquitism, this celibate life is in some ways,
the negation of be fruitful and multiply.
It doesn't have to be, but that's often how it was interpreted.
And then by the time especially you get to Jerome, he would say something like,procreation was made for the time up until Christ to fill earth, whereas celibacy was made
(17:44):
to fill heaven.
And so it's kind of a...
really disdain for the uh creaturely aspects, the procreative uh nature of man.
And you have this tension there because not everybody was on board with Jerome.
uh You have, example, Jovian, but also others.
(18:05):
He was condemned as a heretic, right?
But he went around, I think it was in Rome, if I remember right.
uh
actually encouraging monks to marry and or priests to marry, I can't quite remember, andwas somewhat effective in that.
Jerome and also Ambrose didn't like him.
So he had some pretty heavyweights against him.
But the long and the short was it led to a ruling, I think in the mid-380s, where I didn'treview everything, all the details of my book before we met, but where
(18:38):
What formerly would have been within the pale of orthodoxy was now associated withJovinian's name.
And it was kind of on the outs for a bit over a thousand years.
And all you had to do if somebody talked too forcefully about be fruitful and multiply,you could just call them a Jovinian and your homework's done, right?
(19:00):
it's like if you preach the gospel too much, you get called an antinomian.
Or if you preach the law too much, you get called a legalist.
Yeah, sure.
So that it's the first I heard of Jovinian was during when I was doing my STM research.
uh
I was studying the cross in the life of the Christian, specifically as I was taught inLutheran dogmatics in late 16th, 17th century.
(19:26):
And I can't remember which one it was, but one of these old Lutherans, I think it was aguy from Tumingen, maybe Herb Render, Hafen Reffer, but anyway, took up the charge of
Jovinianism, specifically in talking about the cross.
And what I remember was that their Jovinianism was
(19:48):
They didn't seem to embrace it at all.
They were still in the Reformation.
But the more I looked into Jovinianism, I thought, is he all that bad?
Did he just kind of get thrown under the bus?
ah Or did he actually have some serious heretical issues?
(20:09):
And I can't actually answer that question.
wonder the same.
There's some bits and pieces about him that really make you wonder.
Like for example, he sees baptism as a leveling thing.
the works of the celibates are not better than the works of the married people, right?
And baptism, know, so I was like, well, what's so bad about that?
(20:30):
So there's things that seem good, seem a little bit reformational in some ways, but Idon't know enough to give him a clean bill of health to put it that way.
I hear you.
So a question then is, kind of fast forwarding, suppose, to Luther.
uh So Luther uses this against monasticism, but then you say that it kind of develops intoa more salutary uh understanding of the Christian life other than just...
(21:04):
a talking point against monasticism.
Right.
Right.
So he starts off saying, Hey, you monasticism really goes against nature, goes againstGod's mandate here, be fruitful, multiply.
Um, but eventually, and, one, and I, maybe you talk about this in your dissertation, Ijust haven't, haven't read it yet.
Um, is, uh, one thing that I find interesting is that in the earlier church, like middleages, the fourth petition, give us a stair of daily bread.
(21:32):
was taken as Eucharistic.
And then Luther comes along and Luther takes his Eucharistic early on.
But by the time he writes his small catechism in 1529, it's all bodily needs.
And what's interesting that happens between, I don't know if it was 1520, sometime around1520 and 1529, what happens between that is he gets married and he has children.
(22:00):
And it seems like there he has a very clear appreciation for the table of duties, theseregular stations in life being holy stations.
so do you see a connection there?
(22:20):
Did you notice a connection there between the Be Fruitful multiply and the understandingof the fourth petition, Give Us a Stare at Daily Bread?
I guess you could make that I think chronologically certainly it develops during the1520s.
ah The first half of the 1520s is very geared against celibacy, whereas the second half ofthe 1520s is very much more about marriage and that's the lasting emphasis.
(22:48):
um It's almost worth saying, I should say that when we talk about be fruitful multiply, Ithink the thing that really jumps out, what are we talking about here?
We can say it's an ordinance and this is God's will for creation.
But I think what was most interesting for me as I worked on this, and I should make abrief aside.
(23:13):
The reason I took up this topic, do you know why it was?
Could I take a guess?
Well, you must have read an article.
Yeah, so Pastor Otten, he wrote by a lot of standards, things that people thought werecrazy.
But I was a child of the congregation and he was my pastor.
(23:35):
And so finally I'm like, I'm just taking this on.
Like, I'm going to pick one of the craziest things that seems the most out there in myestimation.
And I'm just going to go with it.
And this was around 2009.
I started working on it.
And I had another option, but I went with procreation and contraception.
(23:55):
And the more I dug on that topic, the more I found out that he had only scratched thesurface.
And you get into Margaret Sanger and all this stuff.
But what I really found out though is I didn't understand Martin Luther's logic and thereformers.
Like, how do they think about this?
How do they see the world?
And uh so it grew into a hobby and uh a dissertation later.
(24:18):
But so it kind of started in this office with him writing his articles in a certain sense.
And, you know, from my judgment, I think he was right.
And I could say that a long time before I my PhD, but whatever.
So anyway, back to, but be fruitful, multiply.
It would be easy to think about the verse as a command, but it's not preeminently acommand.
(24:43):
And I think that's the point.
Like if somebody was listening to this and thinking of reading my book and I was justgoing to give them the kind of in a nutshell what you need to know that we're talking
about uh in our parlance, we'd call it the sex drive.
uh What is it?
Right.
uh As you're approaching the reformation, it was, you know, it was concupiscence.
(25:08):
It was purely sinful.
I think what happened during the reformation is in understanding
that God had spoken this word and the power of this word once spoken is in effect on allmankind.
the idea is God speaks and it creates, but not just creating the bodies and the parts andthese sorts of things, but even the desires uh that we dare not call and Luther, think, by
(25:42):
the way, wouldn't call it the sexual urge.
He would call it the procreative urge.
Which I think is an important point.
It's very clearly.
Yeah.
And which is later.
And you can, there's some fun things you can do with those.
And if we have enough time, I might, I might give a little hint there, but um it's reallyabout what is this drive and what is its nature and is it only sin?
(26:08):
And I think just uh to give a kind of easy summary on it, what Luther discovers, one isit's
terribly powerful and it's not for us to freely decide that I want to be a celibate.
I'm going to take this vow which God hasn't given me to take ah and prefer that tomarriage.
Luther saw that as testing God and instead Luther sees, so if you're struggling with this,right, or if this is an urge, a desire, an inclination God has put in you, understand what
(26:39):
it is.
It's a drive, it's an inclination.
pointed or ordered towards the furtherance of human life.
It's ordered towards babies.
And so this sexual urge, think rightly speaking, uh in our following human nature, ittakes on something of an aspect of Luther's simile usus epicator.
(27:04):
It's simultaneously created and good and ordered towards babies.
And it's also sinful.
And so Luther, and this was what I was gonna get to in his later lectures, if you gothrough the language he uses in his Genesis lectures to talk about sex, and he's got a lot
(27:25):
of words in the Genesis lectures, you can go through and you can find all the Latin words.
But if you take him by the numbers, about half the time, if I remember off the top of myhead, he actually glosses what we would call sex.
He glosses that with,
either procreation or the work of procreation.
And that's a fun one to think about.
(27:47):
Because what would it do to youth these days if instead of talking about sex, you said,know, this thing that you're struggling with is actually called the work of procreation,
right?
Like it would change thinking.
It absolutely would.
People would think about babies and God's gift.
Procreation, what's going on here?
(28:07):
It's a divine work.
Yeah, so like you have to, yeah, and to see like when you are, you're an adolescent boyand you are fighting against your sexual urges and trying to remain chaste, but that what,
when you understand it as a work, you see it as something that has an end.
Yes.
(28:28):
That there's, it's not pointless.
Right.
And I think today there's a kind of nihilism to sex.
And,
And so, so it's either about just suppressing it for the sake of just suppressing itbecause you don't want to end up with a baby or responsibility that you can't afford or
whatever.
But instead to look at it as you are actually laboring, you're working towards something.
(28:54):
It's a good work to have in mind then the goal.
It brings to mind what Paul says in 1 Corinthians 9 about disciplining your body andrunning the race.
And not that children are the race, but they are sort of like an analogy of the goal.
There's a fruitfulness that we see in creation in the first article that resembles orreminds us of the fruitfulness of love, joy, peace, patience, et cetera, and eternal life.
(29:29):
anyway.
I'll add one more thing.
And so God with these drives that he's implanted in us and some people, if you know, forLuther, if you can live free and freely serve the Lord in a different capacity than
married life, more power to you.
Yeah, no problem.
But for those who are led in that way, God is leading them into his orders for life, if wewant to call it that.
(29:52):
And
And I think that's, we could talk a whole nother time about that.
But one of the things about the orders for Luther is that these orders are accompanied bythe cross.
And they are, there's challenges, there's difficulties, there's thorns.
And these orders, therefore, God uses them what?
(30:13):
To do what?
To increase faith, to look at His word, to trust that it is His word that establishes it.
And what else to lead us to prayer, to call upon Him for help in the orders He'sestablished.
And so there's something of a theological beauty, I think, to what's going on there.
(30:36):
yeah, well I can say that God has taught me how to pray by giving me a wife and children.
In fact, even just today, you have a one flesh.
this is, you my brother Mark says, your children are evidence that you and your wife arethe same flesh.
(30:58):
And there's almost like this, when I hear kids, I'm in one room and I hear in the otherroom,
kids kind of doing their thing.
And I hear, can sense, I can feel my wife's like stress.
And so I pray for my wife, know, pray for my children or if a kid's sick or whatever,know, you got, he gives you these things to teach you how to pray.
(31:25):
That's, yeah.
Yeah.
And that shows that, you know, that kind of pairs with Luther's, the three things thatmake a theologian.
Yep.
Absolutely.
prayer, meditation and testing.
Can I add one more thing about, kind of funny?
I'll just say uh in the 1520s, one of the remarkable things I ran into while I doing myresearch was the Reformation in Erfurt.
(31:49):
And there was some real fireworks there between some followers of Luther and actuallyLuther's former professor who was totally against the Reformation, Bartolomeus Arnoldi von
Usingen.
uh
and um who really targeted the Lutheran preachers.
(32:10):
I don't remember the names off the top of my head, but essentially the Lutherans were liketotally like lambasted for only supposedly preaching procreation.
Like you think the whole world and its furtherance just depends on you guys having babies,essentially what he's always accusing them by.
And he's got choice names for him.
He's actually kind of crude with them, but.
(32:30):
uh
But I think I found it interesting that the Lutherans at that time were also, um they werekind of made fun of for valuing life m and what furthers life in the way that they did.
um it kind of does like.
Well, I I get annoyed when someone makes a comment about uh how, you know, if you havechildren, if we actually get married and have children, teach our children the value of
(33:06):
that, you know, then our church numbers actually will grow.
And now some people can be kind of crass or flippant about it and say, well, the bestchurch growth is having children.
But I think that what most of them mean is it's not just having children, it's raisingthem in the faith, teaching them to pray, to confess.
(33:28):
But when I hear the response to that, the kind of knee-jerk response to that, well,there's real evangelism.
And I think, okay, these should never be...
against each other.
And in fact, ah when your kids are nurtured in the home, like olive shoots around yourtable, they become witnesses to the world themselves, right?
(33:57):
And they learn to confess the truth.
So, yeah, I mean, there so many practical implications that we could get into on that, butI'm just, I find that very...
very helpful distinction that you made there between seeing it as just a sex drive, butthen seeing it as a procreation drive.
(34:21):
And to your point about command, the guy who's commanded it, it's interesting to see howLuther speaks in his large catechism about the commandment in baptism, or the commandment
in the 10 commandments that...
On the one hand, you have the commandment of God, which is really just the law in thenarrow sense.
(34:45):
But on the other hand, Luther speaks of commandment as something that has establishedsomething, right?
And that you can rest on the commandment, not in the sense that you're resting on yourworks to fulfill the commandment.
But that you rest on the fact that God has commanded it.
It reminds me of Psalm 133 about how blessed it is when brothers will in unity.
(35:09):
He ends the Psalm by saying, for God has commanded the blessing, life forevermore.
And I was just today reading through, I just read through Psalm 119 again, I was lookingat the Hebrew and it's really beautiful how
He sees, he's dealing with what we might in our confession speak of the law in its broadsense.
(35:36):
Right?
And do you see that?
Is that kind of, am I tracking with what your research, what you're noticing in yourresearch?
Like the commandment is, it's not just that God says, thou shalt have children, but thathe has commanded
it in the sense that he's instituted this, that he has ingrained it into his creation.
(36:00):
It's instituted, it's ordained, it's blessed.
Luther, he doesn't just use the word command, though he does use the word command in hisGenesis lectures, but I'm trying to remember, it's blessing, it's command, it's ordinance,
it's uh promise.
He's got so many different words for it.
And so I think if somebody would just say law, really doesn't do service to what's goingon there.
(36:28):
It's so much bigger.
Yeah, and I know that ah Did you have you went to st.
Louis?
Did you have Norman Nagel?
I didn't.
I was a little bit intimidated by him when I was a first year and I think he was doneafter my first year.
So I didn't.
Well, cause I mean, he would talk a lot about like the mandate, know, and make a lot outof that.
(36:51):
And it sounds very, very similar to what you've noticed in Luther.
So, well, that's really helpful stuff and what a practical thing for you to be able tostudy.
Yeah.
did get accused of that, but...
I made my dissertation of practical work because we were six kids, right?
(37:12):
It's kind of uncommon, right?
It's not everybody, but...
know, those are the best...
That's uh I was, I remember I was taken back on that when I, uh when I was doing my, my,my, when I did my STM, I thought I was doing like serious academic study, which I, you
know, I was reading, you know, reading stuff.
(37:33):
I wasn't thinking this was practical theology.
I thought this was like dogmatic, you know, historical theology.
And, but then one of the professors said, yeah, this is practical theology.
And it just kind of hit me.
But yeah, it is.
And actually,
theology should be practical.
And I think that there is a problem where theology is sort of compartmentalized into thisacademic thing.
(37:58):
And then practice, since you have that disconnect, you end up getting whatever passes aspractical theology ends up being just kind of psycho, know, psychology or sociology.
But so, yeah, I think that that's great.
so if we can, I know we're kind of
uh We don't have a whole lot of time left here because Hannah has to go bring my daughterto a volleyball game because Hannah is her coach.
(38:27):
But if you could just maybe summarize how has, I know you're teaching at this college inBergen, but specifically with your mission work, how has this
And if you could give some encouragement to just any pastor or any missionaries out therewho are congregations who are trying to, you know, promote the gospel where they are.
(38:55):
How has this study that you've done, this very practical study about be fruitful andmultiply helped you in your parish and in your mission work?
I think...
um
To answer that question, I think the easiest way for me to say it is uh it's kind of theblessings in general.
(39:19):
You don't have to do a PhD in this or that.
uh But the blessings I find in reading Luther or other faithful uh witnesses from thechurch's past is oftentimes it slows down your own Bible reading.
and causes you to see things in scripture that you normally wouldn't or didn't, insightswhich were far away from your own thoughts.
(39:48):
it helps you to kind of, and this would be a very Lutheran thing, as far as Luther goes.
His encouragement is always to help to see the world through the word.
That's what he really wants people to do.
And.
And so whether it's this area, whether it's looking, so this was, you know, procreation.
So how do we see it through the word and not through our own human eyes?
(40:11):
um But he does that in other areas too, um whether it's whether it's seen it, you know,death through the word or through the resurrection through the word, all these things that
exercise our faith.
And and I would just the encouragement then is to simply um I guess be blessed by readingum
(40:31):
know, faithful church fathers who help give and impart a better understanding ofscripture.
uh You know, sometimes we do well, we sit down with scripture and we can see these thingsfrom ourselves.
And sometimes it's good to sit at the fathers or the feet of faithful fathers.
who can help in that way.
And certainly Luther, there's so much to be gleaned from him.
(40:56):
So I'm a thankful recipient.
And even that, you know why I read through Luther before I even started my PhD proposal.
I got out of seminary and I didn't know what to read.
And I was like, what do I do now?
And Pastor Otten, I remembered him saying once, well,
When Luther's works were coming out, he read them a month at a time as they came out.
(41:17):
And so he'd read through them all.
was like, well, shoot, if he could do it, maybe I could get at least a couple volumes,right?
So I read through him.
That guy was a speedy.
I looked through the library and he's got notes in like every book.
I found this one book that was like 700 pages, some obscure like Seventh-day Adventistbook that I would not be interested at all in reading.
(41:37):
And I flipped through it and it's like he's got notes all over.
uh
no, he left me in the dust.
I mean just like his legacy in my mind.
Sure.
I'm still an underperformer.
I try but
yeah, but it's all right.
What's a blessing?
It is.
It's a real, you know, our fathers in the faith, our physical fathers who are Christians,you know, that I was just talking to my dad about like legacy of his dad, you know, we're
(42:04):
talking about that.
It's a blessing.
It's something that's very humbling and we thank God for those who have gone before us.
And so it's good to see the fruit.
Yeah, in all this and I pray for for you and for your family and your congregation andyour and your and the mission that God's entrusted to you and uh, yeah, I think that and
(42:27):
it's my hope, uh, and I think this is this goes back to The first petition how would bethy name?
My hope is that God's name would continue to be kept holy And his word proclaimed in histruth and purity to these people of God.
Yeah, so
Well, it was good having you, Brandt.
(42:48):
And I wanted to say just one thing that what's really cool is that your name is Brandt andyou live in Norway.
And one of my favorite Norwegian books, it's more of a play, is Heinrich Isben's...
Ibsen, Ibsen, yeah.
I always mix up that name.
(43:08):
Ibsen's play, Brandt.
But you are so different from that Brandt.
ah But anyway, well good to see you and uh this has been uh Christendom in the Worldbrought to you by Christian News.
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