Credo 2026 | Soli Deo Gloria with Rev. Chris Palmer

24:37 what did you notice? So think about what we talked about, about the moral and the material. What did you see in that scene that was happening? Does anybody know what that is, by the way? Joyce doesn't know what that is? You don't know what it is? Oh, it's the ride of the Rohirrim from the Lord of the Rings, right? Come on. Yes. What did we see in that scene? What happened? What made it glorious. Peter Jackson, who directed that film, I think is one of the greatest of all time. But how did he make, yeah, go for it, Amanda. For who? Do you remember who they said? They said, courage for our friends, Mary. Courage for our friends.

25:30 I'm like, whoo, whoo, whoo, I gotta stop. Okay. Well, I shouldn't be, I've seen that movie a million times. I shouldn't be crying. But what else, what else happens? The unification, right? So you have all of these disparate people coming together for this one threat to overcome it. And what else?

25:50 Again, the potential sacrifice, yeah. And how did Jackson direct it? When you actually think of the film, how it was put together, what did he show you? The colors? What was coming up behind them too? The sunlight, right? The dawn, right? Yes, yes, yes, yes. So I want to distinguish glory maybe. That when we look at something and we behold it as being glorious, that there's a way in which it kind of makes a claim on us. That when I watch that film, that scene, One of the things that I think makes it glorious is because when Eowyn and Mary are fearful and they're afraid, and she says, take courage for our friends, right? That there's a way in which there's this kind of moral depth to that movie and that moment that I think kind of spills out into my own life.

26:49 It's not just about this aesthetic display of the beauty of a movie, but it's actually something that reaches out to me and says, Chris, maybe you should go and do likewise, right? That maybe you need to have courage sometimes for your friends. And I think this is, when we talk about God's glory, this is what I think differentiates it from, if you look at something, you could look at a tornado rolling, my family's from Wyoming, so this is the first thing that comes to mind. But when you may be sitting on the back porch and you're looking at a tornado 10, 15 miles out in the distance and you see it roaring across the plain, and you're like, that is something to behold. That is amazing. But I'm not sure if that's exactly what we mean. Unless there's a way in which the tornado is kind of reaching out and creating a claim on my life, calling me to respond in a certain kind of way.

27:45 Maybe there is, but I don't think that being glorified is just what we mean by, for example, being sublime, the subliminal, this act of feeling small in a particular moment. But there's something about how the thing that we are beholding reaches out and beckons us, beckons us to certain kinds of action. And one of the most glorious moments, maybe in my life, was when I got married, was when I was standing at the front of the altar in this tiny little church in New Jersey, and I looked down, and there was my wife standing at the other end of that row of pews, right? That there's something about, there's this kind of beholding that we have, this way that the thing that we see draws near to it in a kind of moral way, that when you are getting married, or there's a plethora of other examples, but there's this way in which beholding a certain person, beholding the person's face, maybe in particular, that there's a way in which that tells you something about the life that you are meant to lead.

28:48 Okay. The word glory, when we think of to God alone be the glory, this isn't just a Christian idea, as I've kind of intimated, but actually it comes to us from the Jewish scriptures first. So if you were a good Jew and you were in the synagogue one day, you would say this prayer, and this comes from the book of Deuteronomy. You would say, Shema Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Ahad, which just means, hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one. Or another translation of it is, the Lord is unique. The Lord is the only one of the Lord's kind, right? And so when we talk about, to God alone be the glory, that it raises this kind of other question for us. And the question is this, is what happens when we give the wrong thing glory? What happens when maybe I love Beyonce's music, but maybe she's not the one that I just need to glorify, right?

29:53 Like in herself all the time. Maybe that's not the ultimate source of glory, right? And we human beings, we are glory-giving creatures, right? When you love something or someone, the thing that we do in reference to it is we love to praise it, right? We do this with our son all the time right now. Even when he just got done with a crazy temper tantrum. We're like, oh my gosh, you're so cute. Right? But it's because we love to praise the things that we love. We love to glorify the things that we love. But the problem is that sometimes there's a conflict that happens is when we maybe take the center of what is ultimately and utterly glorious and maybe instead of putting it where it properly belongs in the Almighty, maybe we bring it down to earth and we start the ultimate container of our joy, our love, our praise, our happiness.

30:46 We put it in earthly things. And sometimes that is where we run into a certain amount of trouble. And so when we say, this is I think where the Reformed really wanted to make a point. in the medieval church, there was this thought. It was called deification or theosis. Deification, does anyone want to take a guess at what they think that means? so there's this sense about what it means to be saved is to literally become God, that it's literally, so theosis, right, theo, meaning God, that there's this sense of like the ultimate end of a human life is to become one with the Almighty, and there's this way in which, you know, there's this really, really old tradition that comes out of the fourth century AD. It comes and started in this gentleman named Athanasius of Alexandria. He was one of the most brilliant men of his time, but he said this. This is one of the most famous quotes. If you were going to go to seminary, you would hear this all the time. They said, God took what was ours, humanity, human nature, became a person, so that we might have what is rightfully his glory, godship, right?

32:10 And there's this idea that when Jesus comes down, that the purpose of that is so that humans might rise up. Right? And there is something true about this. The scriptures are full of language that talks like this. In 2 Peter, it talks about how when you've put away all of your kind of earthly ways, that you will share in the divine nature. It makes it sound like in some ways we are meant to become godlike, right? But my guess is that if I put that out to you now, that somehow you don't maybe think of your Christian walk as becoming a god. Is that right? I mean, respond to me. What do you think? Is this foreign to you or does this sound right? but if you would go, if we took a Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church field trip, after this presentation, we're going.

33:05 We're going to go to an Orthodox Church, and we're going to go sit through the divine liturgy, that there is still this way, that amongst our Orthodox brothers and sisters and siblings, that there is this sense that if you would ask them, well, what is the ultimate end of a human life? Is that they would tell you it's theosis. It is to become one with God. And so they have these amazing sets of practices to kind of overcome what it is to be human. And I think in some ways there's something important about that. And yet our forefather, John Calvin, says this. He says something a bit different. And I think this is why the Reformed Church in this sola Deo Gloria wanted to maintain this, is they wanted to maintain the integrity that it is God alone who is the source of all glory. And that human beings often get into trouble when we start thinking about ourselves, this is Scott's sermon, right?

34:08 As being the source of our own glory. That that's when we start going awry. And so Calvin says, well, true wisdom consists of two things. Who is God? And who am I? And in some ways, the Christian life, if you wanted to boil down what the Christian life is into one sentence, I'm kind of nervous about this. Don't hold me accountable to this later. But if you wanted to boil down what the Christian faith is, that it would be to know that God is God and I am not. Right? That I think in our earthly lives, those are maybe the two most difficult lessons to learn. Right? That I am the creature, not the creator. Okay, but I want to bring this forward. Jamie, where's Jamie? How long are we going? Whoa, okay, cool.

35:07 So I want to track this on to what's going on in the world kind of right now. I want to talk about maybe some of the ways that this theosis idea, this deification idea maybe gets us into trouble. And so the first, I want to talk about this guy. Do you guys know him? Okay, I was surprised. A lot of people don't know who he is. So Peter Thiel, and here, I want to caveat this. When we talk about real people, they are always children of God, right? That we can disagree with what they say, and we can say, hey, we've got good arguments that we think are different than your arguments. But ultimately, this brother, he's a fellow child of God, right? But Peter Thiel is the creator of PayPal, if you've ever used PayPal. He's a Silicon Valley bigwig.

36:04 He's really involved in politics, kind of just in terms of monetary investment and things like that. But he also is kind of one of the maybe ideological leaders of a certain strain of political thinking that's out there right now. And he's all about transhumanism. Does anybody know what transhumanism is? Transhumanism is the idea that through technology, that we can actually overcome some of the shortfalls of what it means to be human. That we can actually elevate ourselves beyond our natural capacities. And so you could make an argument, for example, that, well, I'm wearing glasses. I can't see you right now. And so maybe this is transhumanism, right? Maybe that in some ways is correcting something that I couldn't naturally have. But Thiel thinks that we should really be diving deeper into this idea of transhumanism. That in some ways, that we need to be investing our time, our resources, into the kinds of technology that would allow us to become more than we maybe naturally are.

37:13 And so one of the things that he particularly thinks is the problem of death. So Thiel is convinced that we can literally become immortalized through technology. that in some ways that if we, you know, and I'm not just talking about like uploading your brain to the cloud or something, but I'm talking about we can literally maybe come up with, you know, these manufactured human organs that would allow us to kind of live without a natural biological clock, right? And in some ways he thinks that this is the way that we will, and to be quite honest, he says it right here, that we will reach the kind of Christian end of days is by kind of manufacturing it to come about in space and in time. And so he says that the transhumanism isn't just changing your body, but it's also your need to transform your soul.

38:08 Your need to transform your whole self. And if Christianity promised you a physical resurrection, Easter, just passed it, that science is not going to succeed unless it promises you the exact same thing. Okay. But in some ways, this feels a little, maybe not to you, but to me this feels a little troubling.

38:35 Yeah? Okay. I don't want to assume. So, but there's this way, but I think if we're all honest beyond the laughing, I think there is a way that we are all afraid of death. And there's this way that to manufacture something so that we might not have to experience it, so that maybe we could live in eternity with the ones that we love most. That sounds pretty good, right? No, someone's in the back yelling no.

39:05 But I do think that this is something that gets a lot of traction because of the things that we fear. And yet there is this way in which to give God glory, again means to say that God is God and I am not, right? That there's this way in which are we ever in danger of thinking of some of our technology as a way to maybe become little gods ourselves, to kind of seek to control our own lives, even to the point of never having to die at all, right? There's something profound to the fact that in the Garden of Eden, when the writer is talking about this, that what is the fear that ultimately drives them? What is the fear that comes out of the garden? It's death, right? So there's this way, maybe we can just make it back into Eden by building the right technology. Okay, so that's one strand. That's one strand. And I'm sorry to do this, but I will. Here's the other one. Sorry.

40:04 But again, so, and here's what I want to say about this image. This image, I'm going to be very careful how I say this. This image, I think to me when I saw it, left me puzzled. Because in some way, if we have read our scriptures, there's something true about the fact that when God looks at us, God sees Jesus. That's why Jesus came into the world. No matter what you've done, no matter what you've said, that when God looks at you or me, that God looks at us and sees nothing more than his own son. And we always sing hymns, right? Well, there's no hands. Christ has no hands but your hands. But I think the thing that is most troubling about this image is the way that it associates very real things to very false ends, to very false ends.

41:07 That in some ways there's this, a certain celebration going on here that no matter what the truth of its claims might be, that is it true that the behavior of a Christian person is the behavior that maybe we associate with what's going on here, right? But again, I think it goes back to this idea, this very ancient idea of theosis, of deification, that literally, that God came into this world so that I myself could become God. It's an idea as old as the Christian church herself. But, as good Presbyterians in this room,

41:49 I, oh, let's not go there yet. I want to go back to what John Calvin said, that ultimately the source of the glory in this world is not me. And yet I am often a steward of it. One of the things I love to do as a pastor is I love to, in some of our older Presbyterian churches, is you'll sometimes go into a chapel or a very historic space. We had this when I worked in Waco. There were a ton of these plaques that were on the wall. And they would always say, to the glory of God and in loving memory of. And I think it was just this way in which even in the money that I give to maybe preserve a space or whatnot, that the first thing that was always preserved on that bronze plaque was not the name of the person who gave the funds, but it was to the glory of God.

42:44 And I wonder if there's a lesson in there about what it means to steward that glory. about when we think of our own success, for example, and we get it right. When we celebrate the gifts and the skills that God has no doubt given every single person in this room, how is it that we hold the glory that comes along with those gifts and those skills? How is it that even in our success, even in the things that we do right, when we receive the most praise from other people, oh my gosh, you are so good, Grant. how is it that we steward those things and how is it that our lives ultimately open up not just so that we receive the glory which feels good but how is it that our lives ultimately point back to the glory of Jesus Christ and to the and to God