This is the transcript of Restitutio episode 552: Seminary Convinced Me the Trinity Is Wrong with Susanne Lakin This transcript was auto-generated and only approximates the contents of this episode. 00:08 Sean Hey there, I'm Sean Finnegan. And you are listening to Restitutio podcast that seeks to recover authentic Christianity and live it out today. 00:24 Sean From her childhood in a Jewish family to A7 year stint with the Jehovah's Witnesses to years attending evangelical churches, Suzanne Lakin never felt comfortable with the doctrine of the Trinity. She signed up to attend Phoenix Seminary. 00:40 Sean A conservative evangelical school, thinking they would help her finally get to the bottom of it. 00:46 Sean She was willing to agree to the idea, thinking surely studying with scholars like Wayne Grudem, the Prince of Evangelical systematic theology, and others would answer her questions and settle the issue for her once and for all. Amazingly, the opposite happened this. 01:07 Sean Is her story. 01:09 Sean Here now is episode 552 Seminary convinced me that Trinity was wrong with Suzanne Lakin. 01:24 Sean Welcome to restitutio, everyone. I'm glad you're here with us today. My guest is Suzanne Lakin of California. She's an experienced author, copy editor and writing coach. She has a bachelors in English literary studies. And recently she completed her master's degree at Phoenix Seminary in Biblical. 01:46 Sean And theological study. 01:48 Sean She's especially passionate about the Old Testament. 01:52 Sean And Hebrew and I'm excited to share her story with you. So welcome to restitutio Suzanne. So glad to have you today. 02:00 Susanne Hey Salone, happy to be. 02:02 Susanne Here. 02:02 Sean Shalom. 02:03 Susanne I thought I'd throw something like you were in there since you and I have both done a little bit of Hebrew study. 02:08 Sean Why not? So let's start in the beginning. Tell us how you became a Christian. 02:12 Susanne Well, that was about 50 years ago, so I was raised Jewish atheist, which is pretty common. Some people think that's weird, but that's about how it is these days. The term is mothball Jew. That's what we call ourselves, which is basically you celebrate the high holy days and call it good. Although I was the 1st in my family that didn't go. 02:31 Susanne The temple and get bought, mitzvah and all that. But everybody in my family did suffer me and my brothers, which I regret today because I would have learned some Hebrew when I was young. 02:40 Susanne So I started kind of searching for the meaning of life when I was a teenager, and weirdly, I hooked into some hippie friends of mine who were really into the Bible. And they believe that the Bible told about spaceship. So we're going to come and take us away. It was the 70s and you know, there was a lot of post Vietnam War, angst and other. 03:02 Susanne Social undress that we're making. Everybody want to leave the. 03:05 Susanne I guess so. That got us interested in the Bible. My boyfriend and I, in fact my boyfriend, read something about Jesus getting baptized or whatever, and he said I better get baptized. We didn't know anything about the Bible. He walked down the street to some little Community Church and asked the pastor if he could get baptized, and they baptized him. It's like, I don't even think they asked him any questions other than. 03:25 Susanne The baptism questions, so it was kind of funny. 03:28 Susanne But I did get contacted by Jehovah's Witnesses at one point and then I my boyfriend, my best friend, a whole bunch of us, many of us Jewish, became Jehovah's Witnesses, and we we had just started Bible study with them and we, you know, they were it was 1974. And the big push in 1974 with Jehovah's Witnesses is that the. 03:48 Susanne And was going to come in 1975 because they did calculations. I don't. 03:50 Sean Oh wow. 03:52 Susanne If you know about that, but they're so they were really big on 1975. 03:55 Susanne Because they did some kind of. 03:55 Sean What an exciting time to join the Jehovah's Witnesses. 03:57 Susanne That's why they. 03:58 Susanne Had a huge influx in 1974 because they said they figured out the years and how long it might have taken Adam to name the animals and that had something to do with Jesus, you know, returning in his presence in 1914. And this generation will pass away. They have all kinds of weird ways. They compute all that stuff. And then when they get it wrong and all the dates. 04:17 Susanne Why they just? 04:19 Susanne Default to the one verse. I think it's in proverbs that says the way of the righteous is like a light that keeps getting brighter and brighter and that is the only scripture that proves kind of goes along with progressive revelation. But it proves that if you get it wrong, the light wasn't bright enough yet and you just. 04:39 Susanne Didn't kind of read. 04:40 Susanne Right, so I I have this thing about how churches do this too, how the whole church history thing as you know, like there's this whole belief that, you know, in accommodation that humans are weren't. 04:54 Susanne Weren't ready to know the truth, you know, so the Hebrews were never really given the truth about the Trinity. And there's all this other stuff, and that the light would just get brighter and brighter, and that would progressively reveal the truth. Until now we have it, or we got it in the Reformation or something. You, you know, it's you're better than I do. But I was a trouble witness for seven years. I was really active there. I became a pioneer. 05:16 Susanne They married a guy who is in New York at their world headquarters. So I worked at the world headquarters for a couple of years. 05:21 Susanne And I was very unhappy and very depressed and I just kept reading the Bible and having issues with a lot of their cultish doctrines and practices, especially the shunning and the whole blood thing. So I got out in 1981, and then I spent a couple of years on the line doing. 05:41 Susanne Interventions, this sort of helping other Jehovah's Witnesses that we're trying to get out or we're dealing with having to stay in because their whole family was in or their husband and kids were in and they didn't want to lose them because their shunning policy is really severe and horrible. I I know people who. 05:58 Susanne Basically got kicked out of their families and never spoke to their parents or their kids ever again. And it it's just terrible and they base it on a few scriptures. So it's, you know, it's bad. 06:09 Sean And then what happened after you left the Jehovah's Witnesses? 06:13 Susanne Yeah. So after seven years, it was kind of a choice. Do I want to catch suicide or should I just leave and let God destroy be an Armageddon? That was kind of like my choice because I was at my end, my wits end. 06:24 Sean Wait so? 06:25 Sean Miss Suicide or what about Armageddon? 06:27 Susanne That God's going to destroy me at. 06:29 Susanne Armageddon if I leave Jehovah's Witnesses. 06:31 Sean So you left thinking they're still right. 06:33 Susanne Well, I left not knowing if it was right or wrong. All I knew was that I couldn't stay in. So I just said to God, OK God, if this is really who you are and if this are you really gonna destroy me because I leave Jehovah's Witnesses, then fine, do whatever you wanna do. Your sovereign, your God and you know, I felt very at peace finally cause I'm like. 06:52 Susanne You're God. You're going to do what's right and it doesn't matter what I think. You know, I always kind of went back to Abraham talking to God about lot and Sodom. And Abraham looks at. 07:01 Susanne God and says. 07:02 Susanne Well, isn't the God of all the earth going to do what's right? I always felt. Yeah. God is going to do what's right if he feels like. 07:07 Susanne I deserve death. 07:08 Susanne Or whatever. Then fine. I could live with that. I just don't want to stay with. 07:11 Susanne My husband, I just didn't want to keep being a Jehovah's Witness. 07:14 Susanne I left in 81. I divorced my husband. I he stayed in until he died in 1993. I I was out of touch with him and all the witnesses, of course, cause I was shunned. 07:26 Susanne So even my best friends, everybody that I knew, everyone I was close to, I lost. My family was happy though, because they didn't want me to be a Jehovah's Witness. And then, you know, 20 years later, I became a Christian again and they. 07:37 Susanne Don't like that either. 07:37 Susanne So whatever I do so I basically left God, I never touched the Bible for 20 years. I married Lee and. 07:46 Susanne We got married in 1983, had a couple of kids and then 2004, you know, our lives just came crashing down and my husband actually moved away from where we were living and moved in with some friends of ours in Paradise, CA before it burn. 08:01 Susanne Down they were very avid believers and churchgoers, and they basically walked my husband through the Bible and he decided to give his life to. 08:12 Susanne Christ and get. 08:12 Susanne Baptized. 08:14 Susanne At that point, I kind of thought, alright, God, I'm going to give you another chance. I got all the Jehovah's Witness theology over here and the new world. 08:22 Susanne Translation. And then I got all this evangelical stuff over here. Half of this stuff. I don't believe half of that stuff I don't believe. 08:30 Susanne I'm just going to dig into the Bible and really study it, get into the interlinear and the Greek and the Hebrew. Not that I studied the languages, but just at least looked up the words and compare translations and try to just push out all the doctrinal influence and see what I could. 08:45 Susanne Just. 08:46 Susanne I wish I had your 14 or 16 part podcast. 08:50 Susanne Back then, how to read the Bible yourself? So yeah, there you go. But I a lot of what you taught I learned in seminary. So. Yeah, so that segues me while he was a baby Christian. And he's looking at me to tell him everything that's in the Bible. I sure formed his theology as. 08:52 There you go. 09:05 Susanne Along cuz I knew the Bible pretty well, I mean, I used to teach it a few times a week. I was in this full time ministry, you know. So I still even 20 years later, I still. 09:15 Sean You. 09:15 Sean Remembered it, huh? 09:16 Susanne Oh yeah, it's like riding a bike. And you know, Jehovah's Witnesses at least back when I was one, they were, you know, you had five meetings a week and you had ministry school, you read, you studied the Bible really intensely. And for that, I'm grateful my seven years as a witness was really, really helpful. 09:34 Susanne Because it taught me to question everything it taught me to check everything in the Bible. Of course I did that with Jehovah's Witness teachings and that maybe leave, but I never could accept, like, just going to a church and having somebody tell me what I'm supposed to believe. It's like, no, I'm gonna check this out. Which is why I ended up going to seminary right after I finished my bachelor's degree in 2021. 09:55 Susanne Finally, because of COVID I was able to do my last year online through Humboldt State University in California and finished this stupid decree that I started like 20-30 years earlier and I never finished because I started a business and have kids and life got in the way. 10:10 Susanne Right. 10:11 Sean After your husband became a Christian, you said I'm going to give this another chance. Did you guys go to a church out there? 10:20 Susanne Yeah, we went to a CMA, which is Christian missionary alliance. Yeah, we went to a really good church. I mean, super trinitarian. And even that, just like bug me from right at the beginning, cause I would have all this problem. Would they be praying to God? And then they'd say, yeah. And we're praying in in your name and Amen. I'm like, wait a minute. You're who you talking to? Jesus. You know, I would just. It would just mess me up. 10:40 Susanne So I never was able to get the Trinity. 10:43 Susanne Anything. I mean, it just never was taught. It never made any sense to me. And I honestly believe that anyone picking up the Bible and just reading through the Bible, they're never going to find it in there. And hearing it just sounds so goofy. Or my husband calls it goofy Polish. So now he's made-up. So I actually returned to God, return to faith. I didn't have any doubt about. 11:03 Susanne God being sovereign or the Bible being his inspired word, I just wanted to to sift through the doctrines and get as clear as I could cause I was just tired of all the, all the muddling. So yeah, I did a lot of just personal study on my own. We read a lot of books and, you know, read the Bible for. 11:19 Susanne Themselves. 11:20 Sean So then about 15 years after that is when you went back to seminary. Do I have that timeline right? 11:26 Susanne Yeah. So Lee became a Christian in, like, 2004 and then we just, you know, we we attended churches, we had a great church in San Jose where we moved to in California, Black Church and. And you know we we talked. 11:41 Susanne Got this our pastor there that we had for 13 years never once mentioned the Trinity, the deity of Christ, Homoousios, God man. I mean any of that stuff. He just never. I don't even you know if I asked him today, I wonder what he would say. Like do you believe the Trinity? I don't know what he'd say. I just feel like he just avoided it completely and focused on how do we live like Christ. 12:04 Susanne I mean, everything he taught was beautiful and wonderful, and it was all about practical. 12:09 Susanne And and you know, understanding the heart of God, the heart of Jesus. So it was great. Like we didn't have any issues. It was so nice and refreshing to not have an American flag on the stage. Like we hate the mixing of the politics and stuff. So that was our church for like 1314 years. And then COVID hit and we moved up here to Grass Valley. 12:29 Susanne We started going to another little local church here, but we just, you know. Anyway. So yeah, I went into seminary directly out of finishing up my bachelor's degree. I mean, immediately. I mean, I applied, like, the week I finished so I could send my transcripts. 12:43 Sean It was almost like you got into this gear of college and you just kept going. All right, let's do the. 12:48 Sean Next one. 12:49 Susanne Yeah, actually, the main reason I wanted to complete my bachelor's degree and I did it in English literary studies because I was almost done. I mean, had already done all the requirements and, you know, the school I went to didn't really have much of A religious studies degree. That was my objective, finished school so I could go to seminary because I I've got to resolve this. 13:09 Susanne Trinity thing, I mean, that was the thing that was really bothering me. I just. 13:13 Susanne Couldn't believe that 9999 percent of all the Christians in the world believe that God was a trying God and like I was, I called it that Elijah and the. 13:24 Susanne Cave complex Lee. 13:25 Susanne And I joke about this a lot, but we. 13:27 Susanne Felt like we're the only. 13:28 Susanne Ones like I've never heard the term biblical Unitarian or UCA. 13:33 Susanne Or or any of this stuff. I just figured I'm probably a whack a doodle that to believe what I believe, but whatever. I'll just deal with me in the Kingdom and it'll set me straight like he's gonna do with billions of other people when they're resurrected in the Kingdom, they're all gonna go. 13:48 Huh. 13:48 Susanne I thought I was going to be. 13:49 Susanne In heaven. Wait, this looks. 13:50 Susanne A lot like Earth. What the heck am I doing here? 13:53 Sean It's funny though, when people really talk about heaven, you ask them about it. They describe a paradise on earth where there's like trees and grass, right? It's so funny. Tell me about seminary. Then. Why? Why Phoenix seminary? And what did you want to study there? 14:01 Yeah. 14:08 Susanne Oh yeah, so I researched a lot of online seminaries. I definitely wanted to be online because I wasn't going to move or relocate, and I wasn't really near any big famous seminaries. Cost was an issue. And because of my GPA, Phoenix Seminary offered a 50% scholarship, so that saved. 14:24 Susanne A lot of money. My main requirement was Hebrew that that my program had to require biblical languages and I could have taken Greek too. But then I would have been so. 14:33 Susanne Confused because. 14:35 Susanne I could barely handle English very well, so and I'm a really slow language learner, so I've been studying Hebrew for like I don't know at least three years. I started studying it way before I started. 14:45 Susanne Seminary just kind of learning the alphabet and trying to learn some of the stuff to get me ready. Nothing prepared me for a year of really heavy biblical studies. I love, love, love, Hebrew. I'm just really slow at it, but I'm at the point now where I can pick up the Bible and I can read it even if I'm not quite sure which verb conjugation it is, which stem. 15:05 Susanne Because I can almost always figure out what's being said. Yeah, so there's always just a couple of weird words here and there that are only in the Bible. 15:15 Susanne A few times. 15:15 Susanne And you're like, what is that word? OK, so look it up. But it's really super fun. And as you probably know, cuz you just finished doing some studies of Hebrew. It's just a goofy language and. 15:25 Susanne And I say that if you don't know her. 15:28 Susanne So it your listeners don't know some Hebrew, it's just it's so funny language cause you can just move words around like a like a Tetris puzzle and then you don't have any to be verbs like there's no is or are in Hebrew. You know you say. 15:41 Susanne Chateau the man. The good. That means the good man. Right. You would know that. 15:45 Susanne Right, just figured. 15:47 Susanne It's like the construction is kind of wonkers, but I really enjoy it. That was my requirement was to get into a school that I could study. 15:54 Susanne Hebrew and I went through the whole the whole gamut. You know, I had to do all the theology surveys I had to do the whole Bible, all the surveys, Old Testament, New Testament. I had to do all of the topics like the soteriology, Christology, all the church history. And I I just want to say I'm so grateful for your church history course because as I was going through my year of church history. 16:15 Susanne Every week when I read watch my video lectures from seminary, you know, starting from the very beginning, all the way through till today, I listen to your podcast on the same topic at the in the same week. So and. 16:26 Sean Ohh that's so funny. 16:28 Sean What was that like? 16:28 Susanne You're going to. 16:30 Susanne Oh, it was so cool. So first I would listen to the the seminary lectures. You know, like beyond the Anabaptists or whatever, the Great Awakening, whatever it is. And then. And I would just go, man. And then. 16:41 Susanne I would. 16:42 Susanne Then I listen to yours and go. Oh, yeah. OK, that makes so much sense because, you know, as you know, like the books and all the lectures are so. 16:50 Susanne Venerating the church fathers and I don't even like using the term church fathers that, just like, make sticks like in my craw and I. 16:57 Susanne I told my the head of the school when we got in the discussion about my degree. I said look, I'm Jewish. I don't like the Catholic Church and I never have, and I do not believe that God used the Catholic Church for the first thousand years to disseminate the truth because they're a bunch of corrupt, evil, awful people. And you know, come on, buy their fruit. Like, what does? 17:16 Susanne The Bible say. 17:17 Susanne So just lost me on the. 17:20 Susanne Yeah. So I just really appreciated your perspective. And of course I've read lots of other things online, but I had to write papers for church history and. 17:27 Susanne So my last. 17:28 Susanne Paper for church history was entitled Martin Luthers's Place in the history of Christian anti-Semitism, and it was basically a diet tribe against. 17:40 Susanne Martin Luther and his disgusting hatred of. 17:43 Susanne Jews. But see, they venerate these guys, you know, you hear these people lecturing and they're like, oh, we love Calvin and we love Martin Luther. And they did such great things with the Reformation. Like, did you know that Calvin, like, had Michael survey just put to helped have him burn at the stake for not? 17:58 Susanne Believing the truth, I. 17:58 Susanne Mean. It just really bothered me and a lot of the literature. The books I would read. 18:03 Susanne Were very much like that. Like just adoring, they would say things like, well, they had their faults, but they did so much for the Reformation, you know, they were just such great people. It's like, no, they wanted great people. They were awful people. 18:17 Susanne You know, and when Martin Luther, you know, nailed his feces to the church door. He wasn't trying to, like, change rebellion against the Catholic Church, right. He was trying to work within the Catholic Church and seeing it anyway. 18:28 Sean Well, there's a lot there and in my classes we spent so much time on Luther and Calvin. Maybe just a little bit on swingly and I, I just remember like it was yesterday when the church history professor got to the Anabaptist, there was like nothing like literally one minute. And so when I when I did my my class. 18:48 Sean Was like I'm going to do 1 lecture on Luther and Calvin and that'll be that. And then I'll move on. And you know, I don't have as harsh of a view as you do on Luther and Calvin because there is still a lot of good, but I definitely don't want to say they just fine and and saintly people like they did really bad things. 19:08 Sean And you know, I don't think Luther would have ever claimed to be saintly. He was a little more in touch with his. 19:14 Sean Earthiness. Whereas, like Calvin, I think really would claim ultimate purity for all of his actions all of the time. So anyhow, So what was it like learning all this stuff like you're sifting through it? You're thinking this is good. This is this is questionable. And you're making your way through. 19:18 Susanne Yeah. 19:34 Susanne One of my professors was some pretty strict Calvinist and we did lot went through a lot of his systematic theology is pretty famous. It was interesting because. 19:41 Sean Yeah, I know that professor. Is that the? 19:43 Susanne Yeah. Wayne grudem. You know the the problem with the online program is you never really got to talk to your teacher. 19:50 Susanne I was able to talk to Doctor Grudem very, very briefly, because he gave a special talk on zoom that I attended and they had a Q&A. He's really like, very classicist. You know, everything like God is impassable, God doesn't feel any emotions. You know, he's really big Calvinist. 20:09 Susanne And like the whole predestination thing and everything, everything, you still have free will, but God's, it's already decided everything that you're gonna do and everything that's done, and everybody who's gonna be saved has already been chosen. And everybody who's gonna be, you know, burning Hell has already been chosen. So, like, what the heck? Why? 20:23 Susanne Should we do? 20:24 Susanne Anything I know we have these interesting discussions. We do discussion boards and things. 20:29 Susanne But I was able to ask one question live on a zoom and it was pertaining the name of God being in the Hebrew scriptures for thousands of years and why the ESB committee, which he was on, decided to use the Lord in Capital letters instead of going with the Tetragrammaton or or Jehovah or y'all or something. 20:49 Susanne And he just basically cut me off and treated me like I was just a stupid. 20:52 Susanne Idiot. And yeah, I'm sorry. I was really kind of taken aback that he was so rude to me because he just interrupted me and he just said, well, that's how the Septuagint, you know, uses. It was because the Step 2. And I'm thinking, well, let's see the Step 2 agent had, you know, added 100 lines to the book of Esther like these, these 70 guys, if they were really 70, took. 21:12 Susanne A lot of license and changing the Bible to the way they wanted it. What about the Masoretic text? Why don't we go back to the Hebrew? Why don't we go back to the fact that they're the Tetragrammaton is in the Old Testament? It's like 7000 times, not counting. Yeah, in like, Hallelujah. Like, you know, and I wanted to discuss that very politely with him, but he just wouldn't. 21:30 Susanne Have it he's like. 21:31 Susanne That kind of annoyed me a bit. 21:34 Sean Let me pause you there. I I want to make a comment on what you just said about the name of God. So yeah, the Sep 2 agent is the Greek translation from maybe around 200 years before Christ. You know, it's kind of speculative. Regardless, no Protestant Christians used the Septuagint. 21:52 Sean As their trans, like the SV did not use the Septuagint as the Bible, they translated into English. So like by their own usage of the Masoretic text, the SV committee is admitting that the Hebrews better than the Greek, and therefore we should translate from the Hebrew. But then they chose the Greek. 22:12 Sean Way of saying the name of God over the Hebrew is an inconsistency. You're absolutely right. 22:18 Susanne Well, you know, it's the Trinitarian bent too, because the more that you can muddle. 22:23 Susanne The identity of the Lord, I think you mentioned in one of your podcasts. I'm correct me if I'm wrong, but that for instance, like when Paul quoted from the Old Testament, the only times that he would refer to the Lord as Yahweh would be those quotes from the Old Testament referring to Yahweh, that the New Testament. 22:44 Susanne Writers, when they would speak about the Lord they were Speaking of their master, Jesus Christ, but they always referred to God. God was always the father. God is always Yahweh or whatever they went. Maybe they didn't put that name in there specifically, but to them there's one God, the father, right. So I think there's a deliberate. 23:00 Susanne The decision for a lot of these translation committees that I've listened to so many podcast episodes on translations and some of them on your show, you know, going back to talking with Jerry, we're all in different people. What are books that I really loved that I read in seminary was Leland Reiki's book The Word of God in English. And he's got a lot of books. I actually emailed him and I asked him this question. He was very nice. 23:22 Susanne Go back. We discussed a bit about why the name Yahweh or Jehovah is not in our Bibles in all translations, like why people aren't acknowledging it. 23:31 Sean What did he say? 23:32 Susanne He just said he. I asked him about the ESD committee and he said he really didn't know. I asked him like, why didn't this committee want to use that name or why aren't people using that in translation? So he was kind of vague about it. He said he didn't feel like it was really that important an issue. I'm not sure what his, I don't know. I think he's a Christian. I mean, I don't know. He's. 23:52 Susanne He's got a lot of books out. Maybe he's more of a philosopher or a linguist. He's more into linguistics. 23:57 Susanne Linguistics, but that's a great book if people want to get it. Leland Ryken's book The Word of God in English. It really was great, and I share it with my husband because it's all about all the different common translations. What their problems are. He compares like passages across a number of translations so you can see the biases. You know, like I said, because of having been a Jehovah's Witness and having the new world. 24:19 Susanne Translation, which I think in a lot of ways is a great translation in many instances, because I have compared so many Bibles over the last 20 years and some of those verses I think are are pretty good. I think Ray Franz had a pretty good handle on some of the work choice. 24:35 Susanne But I think yeah, you have to really compare a lot of translations and be really careful with these dynamic equivalent versions because they put in a lot of their biases and their doctrinal stuff. So that was my take was that the Lord, if you just changed God's name to the Lord in the New Testament, then yeah, of course Yahweh is. Jesus. I mean, there's the little. 24:55 Susanne Lord, even if it says there's only one Lord Jesus and there's one God the father, it just kind of I don't. 25:01 Susanne Know they flip. 25:01 Susanne Over that first and John, I don't know. 25:05 Sean So you think it's doctrinal bias, or maybe a fear of doctrinal clarity that's driving that. 25:11 Sean Yeah. What? What else? 25:11 Sean Were you about to say you said seminary was really good for something? 25:15 Susanne Yeah. So I got to study under John Meade. I don't know if. 25:18 Susanne You know John mean? 25:19 Sean Ohh that was one of my questions. I'm like did you get to study under John Meade cause? 25:21 Susanne Fun is awesome. 25:23 Sean I'm a big fan of his. 25:24 Susanne That John was amazing. I I I told him personally when I talked to him during one zoom session, I said taking your survey of the Old Testament and you know he's big on the Kingdom through covenant, you know gentries thing. 25:36 Sean Ohh yeah. Well he he recruited Gentry to come. 25:39 Sean He and Pete Curry. 25:40 Susanne Yeah, and you're. 25:41 Susanne Right. So I said, taking your Old Testament survey class was worth going to seminary and was worth paying the entire tuition so I could take your class. And he was like, he was like, oh, that's so nice. And I also have his newest clip that he did, scribes and something. I haven't done it yet. But, you know, he's so brilliant. He knows the Canon really well. It's. 25:59 Susanne Really. 26:00 Susanne Challenging to take the class because we had to go through cannon lists and compare and write papers, and then he made us like, go through all these Hittite treaties and compare that with the Deuteronomy, the Sinai Covenant. I mean, it was heavy, that was I told about my first semester. 26:16 Susanne I'm like, whoa. 26:18 Susanne This is intense, so I loved his class and that was super great. I also studied with Doctor Thigpen, Michael Thigpen, who is a amazing Old Testament scholar, and his expertise is in Jeremiah is his main book. But he also is really knowledgeable, Isaiah, Ezekiel. You know the major prophets. So I took his survey. 26:37 Susanne Class for the prophetic books and wisdom literature, and I also took his he had a special Jeremiah elective and that was great. I mean, I had to write a lot of papers, but I really learned so much about the Book of Jeremiah. And Even so, this is totally worth all of that. My Hebrew teacher was fantastic. 26:56 Susanne A year of biblical Hebrew was just like they cram, like five years of Hebrew into one year, and then every week you're doing, I don't know what. 27:04 Susanne They call it you. 27:05 Susanne Know you take this passage. You know you would just have us do a different passage from Genesis and we had to break down every single word. What is it? What does it mean? Parse it out with what stem it is and. 27:16 Susanne All the different nuances to language I, yeah. Just massive amounts of keeping homework, but it was really. 27:22 Susanne Super fun, but I'm done. 27:24 Susanne It's like people are like. 27:26 Susanne Why don't you, you know? 27:27 Susanne They said that they'll let they'll transfer my credits to another school. Like why don't I go to another school and get a degree using those credits? And I'm like, I'm exhausted. I finished. My undergraduate went right into the seminary, finished all that? Yeah. 27:42 Susanne So I think if I ever if I ever were to continue, I am fascinated by. 27:49 Susanne More of the psychology of religion, and I think when I was listening to Stephen Nemish and I think it was on your podcast you're talking about why people are so afraid to face certain doctrines, like to look at the Trinity, I have a just a case in point. I have a friend who I've been very, very close friends with, like one of my best friends. 28:09 Susanne Yeah. 28:10 Susanne And a couple of months ago, you know, she was just going through a lot. Her mom's dying and she's an evangelical. She's really big on everything. You know, the the main ones, Trinity, Hellfire, blah, blah, blah going to heaven when you die, all that stuff. And we would never really have much discussion about the Bible, you know, except for things we had in common. I don't even think she knows that I'm a Unitarian. 28:31 Susanne With faith but. 28:32 Susanne I was talking to her on the phone and trying to encourage, and I was trying to think of a way to like kind of share the gospel with her, to try to encourage her because her mom's dying and her mom is not a believer and she really, really, really believes her mom is gonna burn in Hellfire for the rest of her life. And hey, I just happened to have written a whole. 28:47 Susanne The book on on Hell, you know, that's published with the same publisher you have. So that's a topic that I've researched on and off for about 40 years that it's something that I'm very passionate about, meaning that the scriptures do not teach that God is that kind of a awful God help do. 29:05 Susanne Those kinds of things. 29:06 Susanne So I was trying to encourage her and she got. 29:08 Susanne Really defensive and really mad and really emotional, and I think it shattered our friendship and now we kind of are politely talk. 29:15 Susanne Every once in. 29:15 Susanne A while, but she was like, you think you're so smart. You went to seminary. I read the Bible every year. And I know what it says. 29:23 Susanne I know the Bible teaches Hellfire. I know my mom's gonna burn in hell, and I'm thinking, God, how do I reach her? Like, how do I help her drop her defenses so that she can hear, like, you know, I just think of that verse that Jesus quoting from Isaiah, whatever about these people they hear, but they don't hear. They close up their ears. 29:43 Susanne Just close their eyes. They can't heal them because they have built this wall and that's what I see. And I have been talking to a lot of Unitarian Christians and people like in leadership positions. And you see, and I'm like, we really need a training program that teaches psychology. 30:02 Susanne I don't remember if it was you, but there's been some podcast episodes lately just about how to deal with people's biases and how to. I mean, I think it was yours. Where you talking with Jerry or somebody? I don't remember on how to get past the biases. Like when you're talking to somebody, how to build sort of a rapport, common ground so that. 30:23 Susanne People don't shut these doors so they can't hear the truth about the Kingdom and about God and about Christ. 30:30 Sean Let's let's go back to seminary for a second. Would you say that going into seminary, you. 30:36 Sean Pretty much wanted to believe in the Trinity and you figured people of the stature of the Great Wayne Grudem, the Prince of Evangelical systematic theology and and others that they would, they would be able to disabuse you of any kind of questions or concerns you had regarding theological. 30:56 Sean Contradict philosophical contradictions or biblical strange readings or whatever is it was that your your mindset going in or was it? 31:04 Sean They're like, I know this is wrong. I'm going to keep my head down and I'm just not going to bring it up because I, you know, I'm already convinced. What, what was your mindset going in? 31:14 Susanne It is the former, definitely. I mean, I had to sign a statement of faith and I, you know, I had to affirm their statement of faith, which is, and they don't mention the Trinity bid that say God exists in three persons. And I'm like, OK, I'm willing to like, let's let's go with that. I'm willing to agree at this point that that's a possibility. So I was good with that. I didn't go in with any kind of like. 31:34 Susanne I'm gonna. I'm gonna prove them wrong or anything. I definitely felt in my heart that it was gonna be a hard sell to get me to believe the Trinity. But I did feel like if anybody could convince me, they could. 31:45 Susanne And seminary wood. And so that was one of my main reasons for going the other main reason was I just, I just wanted to, like, have an excuse to be having to study the Bible 12. 31:54 Susanne Hours a day. 31:55 Susanne You know, and after I learn how to write papers and, you know, I just. I just really wanted to just dive in, you know, and have that immersion into the Bible. 32:04 Sean And and what happened as far as your beliefs go on who Jesus is? 32:09 Susanne Everything that I studied and all the systematic theology books and all the materials and articles and everything that I read, I just kept coming back around to what I had always believed and seen in the Bible. You know that it just there was. There's nothing in the Bible that teaches the deity of Christ or that God is a try. 32:27 Susanne Personal God or that? 32:29 Susanne There's, you know, Jesus is a God, man. There was incarnation and you know all these things, I mean that I already had studied pretty heavily on my own. I I just kept waiting for some light to come on like to like for me to go. Ohh. I get it. 32:41 Susanne Now. 32:42 Susanne The Bible really is a secret code book, you know, and only the elite that have some special gift from God can really understand it. You know that. So it just, you know, kind of harkened back to the whole gnostic. I felt like it was like it was like, Gnosticism, 2.0 or something where, like, only, like, really special people can get it. So you have to just trust the. 33:02 Susanne Theologians and the pastors and all those people who say ohh, yeah, the by God is a Trinity. You know, the common person, can't you know, can't find that in the Bible, but just trust the church fathers, they, you know, they had. 33:16 Susanne You know I. 33:16 Susanne Don't know an extra portion of Holy Spirit or some kind of thing like that. Yeah. So that was. Yeah, that's right. Landed. 33:23 Sean I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how you got exposed in the aftermath. I know. 33:29 Sean You. 33:30 Sean Also have shared this on a different podcast, but maybe just in a brief way. You could just go through that. 33:36 Susanne By the time I got to the end of my last semester and I saved church history for last because I knew this was going to happen, I just. 33:44 Susanne Knew it. 33:46 Susanne I went through everything and then I think my last two classes were churches 3. 33:50 Susanne 1:00 and 2:00. 33:50 Susanne So year a year study all the way through church history. I'm like, Yep, Yep. Yep. All this stuff is just made-up, and it's just. 33:58 Susanne You know, I just. 33:59 Susanne It was kind of like the icing on the cake, so by the time I got to my last semester. 34:04 Susanne All these papers I started writing, I had to write a paper on Calvin's institutes, and I started pulling in all these things that he wrote in his book that just gobbledygook about Jesus's essence and how sometimes he knew he was God, and other times he didn't. And you know the, I mean, it was like he was throwing these terms around all the Greek terms, the homosexuals and all this stuff. 34:26 Susanne You know, and I'm just like pointing out in my paper, this is ridiculous. This doesn't make any sense. This is illogical. There's no scriptural basis for this. Blah, blah, blah. So, you know, my professor somehow got a hold of my paper, probably because the PhD student that was like monitoring the class red flags, went off in his head and he gave it to my history professor. 34:46 Susanne Who happened to be the Provost and the, you know, interim president of the school now that Brian Arnold left? 34:52 Susanne He emailed me and just said, what is your stance here? I read your Calvin institutes. It seems to me that you don't believe in the deity of Christ and that started some emails back and forth. And when it's very straightforward. I, you know, people said to me why you just lie. I'm. 35:05 Susanne Like wait. 35:06 Susanne Excuse me, I. 35:08 Sean Because you're a Christian. 35:08 Susanne Am a. 35:09 Susanne Yeah. He's like Christian. Like I don't. Not gonna lie. 35:12 Susanne And also I saw this as an opportunity that God could use for me to witness or make a testimony to some very big higher up people. 35:21 Susanne In in evangelical Christianity Today and and you know, so I I just started in my emails. I started going into my whole list. You know, I even think I used the Sean Finnegan, five points of how, you know, the Holy Spirit's not a person like, you know, the name, you know, nobody praised to him. You. 35:37 Susanne Know I did. 35:39 Susanne Yeah. So, see, I learned a lot from you. 35:41 Sean Well, that that wasn't original from me either. I learned that from someone else. So. 35:41 Susanne Yeah. 35:47 Susanne We all encourage one another one. 35:49 Susanne He only wrote me back a couple times until he finally realized like ohh you are a heretic and then he stopped communicating with me altogether and he'd be buying the student advisor who my student advisor and she wrote me a couple of times and said well, we're not gonna let you graduate because obviously you don't believe in the. 36:08 Susanne Unity any longer and. 36:10 Susanne Because he said, well, do. 36:11 Susanne You believe in the deity of Christ. 36:12 Susanne And I said well. 36:13 Susanne I do, but not in the way you probably mean it would. 36:16 Susanne You like me to explain? You know crickets, so. 36:20 Susanne So yeah, and so I did recently get a final letter from the student advisor saying all the higher ups had a discussion about my situation and they all agreed not to let me graduate. And the reason for that is that, well, this is the way we've always done it and we just didn't feel like we should try to. 36:39 Susanne Make any major changes. 36:41 Susanne You know in our policies, because I said like, if you're not going to let me graduate because I've changed my views, why aren't you researching all the students that have graduated in the last 40 years and just make sure that they haven't changed their views so you could resend their degrees because they were faithfully represent Phoenix seminaries belief system. 37:00 Susanne It's not like I was getting an mdiv or getting confirmed to be a minister or something of a denomination. I I did a. 37:07 Susanne Master of Arts. 37:08 Susanne I went through a program to learn what the Bible taught and I completed it with like a 3.9, you know, GPA. I feel like I earned my degree. So when he said, oh, we're just, you know, we feel we should just stay with what we've always done. 37:22 Susanne And I wrote. 37:24 Susanne It's good to know that people who really believe the Bible and wanted to please God back during the Reformation time didn't have that attitude, because otherwise we would have never had the Reformation if they just said Ohh well, the Catholic Church is the way it's always been. We don't want to make any ways. We don't want to change our policies even though they didn't admit that the policy was wrong. But. 37:44 Susanne He was kind of hinting at that because to ask somebody to. 37:49 Susanne Promise that they will never change their beliefs by the time they graduate because you have to reaffirm your statement of faith when you graduate. I mean, I know people that take 10 years to get their degree because they're working full time. Some of them are pastors already. So like what happens if 10 years? 38:04 Susanne Down. 38:05 Susanne The line you say to them, oh, my beliefs have changed. 38:09 Susanne How can they make you promise that you won't change your beliefs? I told them. I said this is illogical and unreasonable. I mean, it's one thing when you start a program. Say yes, I agree with your statement of faith, but you can't say I understand that I'm gonna have to keep that same belief. 38:24 Susanne By the day, on the day I graduated. 38:26 Sean So you spent thousands of dollars and multiple years of your life. 38:31 Sean And in the end, they just said no, we're not going to give you a degree. 38:32 Yeah. 38:38 Susanne Yeah, because that's the way they've always done it. 38:40 Sean That's that's unjust. 38:42 Susanne Well, I I'm still working with the Arizona State Board of Private Post secondary education. 38:47 Susanne Although they're it's hard to get them to do anything, but they are looking into it. There's case law that kind of can work on my side not to get my degree, but to get at least a refund. I audited and for less money if I wasn't planning on getting a degree. So yeah, so I'm kind of pushing on that and I keep telling them, look, I really want to push them to at least give me partial refund. 39:11 Susanne So far it's kind of dragging along, but I'll keep at it. I'll see what happens. You know in the latest saga there's something like a three-year statute of limitations. And I started this right away. So I have lots of time to keep pushing this. I got, you know, initially Brandon Duke was helping me try to find a lawyer to see if I could maybe do. 39:30 Susanne You know, some kind of legal action, but you know, the law is pretty much on the side of a private religious institution that if they can just, you know, we want to just give degrees to people who believe what we believe and they have the right to do that, cause it's not a public school that's publicly funded. 39:45 Sean The take home lesson. 39:47 Sean Is find out from the seminary ahead of time. 39:52 Sean If you have to believe in the Trinity when you graduate and you have advised others on this and saved others some serious pain and suffering, so that's the take home. 40:04 Susanne Yeah. So I'm happy about that, that you know celebrities. 40:07 Susanne But I do. And I did say. 40:08 Susanne This to this professor and. 40:10 And. 40:11 Susanne I was pretty clear, I said. 40:12 Susanne Like I kind of felt like saying, well, what would Jesus do? You know, like that little saying because I'm thinking if you're, if you're all about the Great Commission to make disciples, I mean, I get having a school where you want to train people to be pastors and missionaries and all that to teach what you think is the truth from. 40:27 Susanne The Bible I. 40:28 Susanne Get that? But at the same time. 40:31 Susanne Why don't you let Muslims and atheists and Jews attend seminary? If your hope is that they will come to an accurate knowledge of the truth by being exposed to your teachings, then why aren't you being inclusive instead of exclusive? 40:47 Susanne So. 40:48 Susanne Crickets, I still didn't get any response back, but. 40:50 Susanne Maybe that put like. 40:51 Susanne Some thoughts in their head that maybe things will change. I don't. You know, I don't expect it, you know. 40:55 Sean Yeah, you can't underestimate the influence, you know, even a a hard question can have on somebody, even if in the moment it seems like you're talking to a brick wall, God can use those things. I I did have a question about Brian. 41:08 Sean Arnold, because he had been their church history guy. So you you didn't get to take any classes with him. 41:15 Susanne No. Well, I did. I took my writing and research class, which was fantastic. I took hermeneutics from him. 41:21 Sean He seemed like. 41:21 Sean A really good teacher to me, I don't know. 41:23 Susanne Oh, he's great. He's great. And I did like the graduate research and writing class was excellent. I wrote a good paper and I learned how to do that. His from a Nuggets class was really good, although it was kind of weighted heavily on, you know, veneration of the church fathers and their for manual method. 41:38 Sean He's big into church history. 41:40 Susanne Oh yeah, that's his thing. 41:41 Susanne So I didn't take his church history classes. I took those from Doctor, Doctor Paul and David. 41:47 Susanne But I I really liked Brian Arnold. I mean, he was. He was amusing. He was. He kind of reminds me of you in. 41:53 Susanne A lot of ways, just really entertaining. 41:54 Sean I like him too. 41:55 Susanne Yeah, yeah, he's fun to listen to you and I I learned. I mean, I learned a lot. I mean, the hermeneutics class was hard. I mean, our big paper that we had to write was on Romans 11. He said I picked the hardest passage in the entire Bible for you to, like, figure out what it, what does it mean? What does the elect, you know, like, so we had to do. 42:15 Susanne Massive, you know, word studies and bring in Atlas images. I mean we. 42:20 Susanne It's like a huge amount of stuff to do to do the hermeneutical study on that. But I learned I got some great skills. I know how to do word studies really well now, so that I just feel very confident when I do my research so that I kind of know I'm getting the best information that I can. 42:39 Sean I want to back up a second in your story and ask you how you first came across other Unitarian Christians like you. You mentioned coming across this podcast for us. 42:49 Sean Studio, were there others that you came across before that? How did you land connecting here? Yeah, go ahead. 42:56 Susanne Yeah, I was. I was just really prayerful, like getting into seminary. And like, you know, like I said, having the Elijah. 43:01 Susanne Complex and like God. 43:02 Susanne How can I be the only person that? 43:04 Susanne Feels this way. 43:05 Susanne And I discovered an excerpt from Kermit Zara Lee's book The Restitution of Christ, which was out of print. And I think I hounded him for six months, saying, will you please get this? 43:15 Susanne Book out. Is it evil? 43:15 Sean He did. 43:17 Susanne He did because of me, I think. And he sent it to me. I have a copy it right here. I was so impressed by the chapter that I read. I'm like, ohh. This is what I believe. I knew from church history about Unitarianism and everything, but I didn't know that there was, like, a biblical Unitarian presence in the world today, you know. 43:37 Susanne And that there's a lot of biblical Unitarians floating around, so from Kermit Zarley's book, I don't know how I somehow connected to. I found Eric Chang's book the only true. 43:48 Susanne And we had that, I think there was a footnote or something in there that referenced the YouTube channel, the 21st century Reformation. So I got on to that and started watching some videos of like Anthony Buzzard. But then that is where my husband and I discovered your 20,000. 44:08 Susanne Part of course. Well, you had two of them, right? You had the church history one, but the first one we went through that was really helpful for my husband. Especially was the the God the ones. 44:17 Susanne You got for. 44:17 Sean One God overall. 44:18 Sean Now. 44:19 Susanne Yeah. So we watched every single one of those and then we learned. Hey, Sean Finnigan has a podcast. And then so from there we, you know, all the different people you had in your podcast. And like, huh. There's Bill Schlegel, and he's got one God report. And then there's Dale Tuggy. And he's got Trinity's podcast. And then there's. And then there's the. 44:34 Sean Right. Yeah. You start to see more and more of the community. 44:39 Susanne And we joined that and. 44:40 Susanne We're like ohh, this is really cool. 44:42 Sean And that's where you met John Truitt and the allegiance to the king at the UCA or. 44:48 Susanne Through you, I think you might have recommended it to you an online fellowship and I think somebody recommended. I thought it was you. Maybe that might have directed us that way. 44:50 Sean For me, OK. 44:56 Sean Yeah, you were asking about online fellowship. I. Yeah, I probably did recommend them. We'll talk about allegiance to the King and and how you're connected with them now. 45:04 Susanne Yeah. Thank you so much. I really want to put a plug in for allegiance to the king. I love our online fellowship. You know, there's members in six continents. 45:13 Susanne The thing I love about it is that we don't have a pastor. It's not like a church with one pastor. We have a number of Members that were pastors for many decades, and it's just so encouraging because we have a whole bunch of people teaching for and they are in all different countries, you know. So I teach once a month, I'll be teaching next Wednesday, I guess. 45:33 Susanne So there's teaching on Wednesday nights and Sunday mornings, depending on where you are in the world. 45:37 Susanne It might be a different day different. 45:39 Susanne But it's really nice. Yeah. So we we just meet on zoom and I just think it's absolutely fantastic. 45:45 Sean And and if somebody wanted to connect, what's the website? 45:49 Susanne OK, so you can go to a2kchurch.org and that's letter A and then #2 and K, yeah, H dot. And then there's the Facebook group allegiance to the king. If you want to watch a lot of. 46:00 Susanne The. 46:01 Susanne There's two YouTube channels, so there's the allegiance to the King YouTube channel, which has a lot of the more lengthy sort of Bible studies. 46:08 Susanne The Christian Virtual Fellowship is where you know what I teach through, and that's also a different YouTube channel. I think we're we're working toward combining it all into something more streamlined. 46:21 Sean And and what about salt and light? You mentioned that earlier. 46:24 Susanne Yeah. So that's a. 46:25 Susanne Nice group. I think you connected me with because that meets on Tuesday evenings and mostly and wolfies groups. We we we do prayer we just catch up on how everybody's doing. It's really all about community in Christ and trying to live like Christ in the world. It's not a place of forum to like argue doctrine or push doctrine. 46:43 Susanne On people's throats, it's real. 46:45 Susanne The the emphasis is on living out the faith, you know, so I just, I think it's just. 46:51 Sean This must have been very encouraging to you to discover that there are living communities of Christian Unitarians, biblical Unitarians, throughout throughout the world, right, must have really been, I think, a relief. Maybe for you. 47:07 Susanne Ohh yeah, it's. 47:07 Sean Is that how you would describe it? 47:09 Susanne Yeah, relief. But it's also really exciting. I just see God just doing stuff, you know, working and moving. And I, you know, I just like, believe the way all of all of you guys do that are teaching on biblical Unitarianism and trying to get the truth out is just really believing that God is just going to grow this. 47:27 Susanne And and have a 21st century reformation. So because so many people are so disillusioned, so many people who claim to be Christian don't really know much about the Bible or God, and they're not getting that help in their life to, really. 47:42 Susanne The word empowers you. The truth empowers you. God's spirit empowers us to have authority and to live in this world with amazing. I don't even how to begin talking about it. I mean, I just feel like so many people need God need the truth, need fellowship, need community. And they're not getting it where they're at. So I'm just. 48:03 Susanne Excited to see what God's doing and it's interesting that when it's when I started seminary and really digging into these questions that God seemed to like pull us out of the churches that we were attending regionally. 48:15 Susanne And we're like. 48:17 Susanne Where do we go? You know, we're stuck in this cave all by ourselves. And God, snow, come here. Also. You're there's a whole bunch of people over. 48:23 Susanne Here just come. 48:23 Susanne Over here and got me out of The Cave. 48:26 Sean Very cool. If you were gonna snap your fingers and change one thing about. 48:32 Sean The Unitarian biblical Unitarian community. What you've seen so far out there, what would? 48:38 Sean Three. 48:39 Susanne I would just like to have more conferences in California. 48:43 Sean OK. Two East Coast centered, not enough West Coast. 48:46 Yeah, just got. 48:47 Susanne Back from Kentucky. So we had a big a 2K gathering. It was really fantastic. 48:51 Sean But let me ask you about being an author, since that's like such a big part of who you are and your you have your pen name CS Lakin. Maybe you could just talk a little bit about that as far as especially. Well, let me ask you this first. What kinds of books have you done? Because I think you have a good range of different kinds of books. 49:11 Right. 49:12 Susanne I have about 30 books published, so about 20 something novels and 10 or at least 10 or more writing craft books. So I write nonfiction, but it's everything is pretty much focused on writing. I'm a writing coach and focus on fiction, so I have a lot of books on fiction craft. I have a lot of online courses. 49:32 Susanne On fiction writing, I teach at conferences. I was keynoting in Ireland last fall and keynoting up in Anchorage, AK. 49:39 Susanne October, but this is all on writing. Yeah. So the only non fiction book that I have that's biblical base is my book. He'll know. And I use my married name for that. 49:49 Susanne Yeah, hell, no. S Miller is my is my married name. So yeah. And I also have like I have a 6th book historical Western novel series and that's with a different pen name. Charlene Whitman. I've always loved writing. I come from a family of writers. And so I've been, you know, writing and publishing novels for a lot of years. And I'm a book copy editor. So I've been editing. 50:10 Susanne I probably have worked with maybe 6000 writers. 50:14 Sean You have kind of inherited in a sense this this whole world from exposure from your parents in Hollywood. 50:20 Susanne Yeah, I mean, I grew up in Hollywood with a screenwriter, producer, mother. My dad died when I was young, so she raised her three kids, got in, broke into Hollywood as a screenwriter, she wrote over 430 scripts that that were made into TV episodes. Like, she created some series like, I don't know the. 50:37 Susanne Teas and Flamingo Road and all these different soaps and things like that. My brother also was a producer writer. He produced like Dallas and Falcon Crest and a bunch of movies. My stepfather was a director, producers. So he did a lot of TV movies. It was all television. They didn't do feature film. But so I was raised, like, reading a lot of screenplays. 50:58 Susanne And sitting on sets and sneaking in like it would, my mom would have offices and different TV studios, and I would sneak into sets and watch some film, mash or lost in space or something like that. So kind of fun for a while. We. 51:11 Susanne Lived in Beverly Hills, yeah. 51:12 Sean Double. 51:13 Susanne Yeah. And you know, so my life was kind of like growing up in Hollywood. My mom was story editor on Mod squad. She was the first female story editor in Hollywood. But I used to like, you know, go when they would go on location. Like to the LA Zoo or something to shoot something. I would like always sit on Peggy Lipton's chair when I was like, what, 10 years old? I'd wear dark sunglasses, and I would. 51:33 Susanne Pretend to be some kind of movie star or something, cause I got to be like everybody else had to stay outside the the barricades, you know, and I got to be like I gotta be. 51:41 Susanne In you know part of. 51:43 Sean If somebody's watching this or listening. 51:45 Sean To it that. 51:46 Sean Has a book that they've written you offer critiquing services, right? So maybe mention a little bit about. 51:52 Sean That. 51:53 Susanne Yeah. So I have a website called Live Rights Drive and it that's WR ITE live right drive. So you can find all my stuff on there. My coaching packages, mental packages like I said, I work with thousands of writers. I help people all the time to write books. Actually, while I was out in Kentucky, I was chatting with one of the gals there who wants to be a writer, and she's at a writers conference right now. 52:14 Susanne And I helped her for a while. Just, you know, talk to her and gave her some tips and things, assignments, things to do with her writing. And she's going to send me some stuff, and I'm going to try to help her. I edited and proofread kernel Charlie's last vote on. I forgot what it's called. I gave him the title to the. 52:30 Sean It's called the restitution of Jesus Christ. No, the restitution. 52:32 Susanne Oh, no, not that one. Yeah. No, I didn't work on that book. I worked on his book, the Church Gospel corrupted. 52:38 Sean The gospel corrupted, yes. 52:40 Sean I just interviewed Kermit on both. 52:42 Sean Of those books. 52:44 Sean And that interview will probably come out after this one. So this is a good advertisement to stay tuned. 52:51 Susanne I gave him his title. I said, look the way nonfiction titles work is you always have one or two words, right? Isn't yours like, 2 words? Kingdom journey. So you usually have one or two words for your title and then you have a really. 53:01 Susanne Long subtitle. That explains what the books. 53:04 Susanne I think his title was something like how the church corrupted the gospel. I said OK, that's a terrible title. You need something different. So it's like the gospel corrupted. OK, that sounds like the Davinci Code that works, you know, and then he also sometime. So yeah, so I I edited that book and then I just recently just did some proofreading on Dustin Smith's book on the. 53:24 Susanne Christology and the Book of Job, I mean, not like he needed a lot of editing, but it was just like some little technical proofreading kind of things. So yeah, that's the kind of stuff I do and. 53:32 Sean Yeah, so people can get in touch with you if they're interested in getting your services. You also have online courses that people can purchase to. 53:42 Sean Learn how to write better, which is important. You know, to communicate well. 53:46 Susanne You know, I've had at least 5000 people take my courses and some of them have taken all of my courses. Yeah, my courses and it's. 53:52 Susanne Fun yeah, so. 53:53 Susanne I that's my big thing is writing and editing and and I maybe I'm not sure if I'm going to write any more theology books. If there's some topic that kind of gets under my skin, I'll probably maybe think about doing another. 54:06 Susanne But there's, like, so many great books already written that I normally don't want to write a book unless I'm frustrated. And it's like Tony Morrison said, if there's a book you want to read and you can't find it, then. 54:18 Susanne You should write it. 54:19 Susanne And that's probably why you wrote journey too, and I'm really excited that you want to put your how to read the Bible for yourself as a book or maybe a workbook or something. 54:28 Sean Yeah. Be like a small group guide type book and you can read and then have questions. 54:31 Susanne Yeah, I think it. 54:33 Susanne Needed. I mean even around the. 54:35 Susanne World in a lot of different countries, they need that. 54:39 Susanne They need all that information and everybody, well, I'm excited about that book to come out for sure. Get on it. 54:45 Sean Very good. Anything else that you'd like to bring up before we? 54:48 Sean We finish our conversation. 54:51 Susanne I really am grateful for you to have me on and I encourage people who want to go to seminary or to get some sort of advanced degree or even just an education in the Bible. I think it's really, really helpful to go into the enemy camp to say it like that because that's how I felt, especially the last couple of years. I felt like it was. 55:11 Susanne The enemy camp because in the discussion boards and stuff I would sort of hint at like things or ask questions about these different doctrines and people would be concerned. They'd say I'm really concerned about your answer, Suzanne. I'm concerned about your immortal soul. I'm worried that you're gonna burn and. 55:26 Susanne You know, Michael, thank you for your concern. OK. Kind of concerned about you too. I'm not saying that you know that we need to send armies into enemy camp and try to, like, convert them or convince them they're wrong. I mean, if God leads you to do something like that, I felt very led by God to speak up and to state my truth and to speak up for the character of God. 55:46 Susanne And the person in Jesus. 55:48 Susanne But that wasn't my intention going in, of course, but I just. I just feel like, you know, you should do that. You should find a way if you want to go to seminary. You want to get that education, you need to know that you're gonna be taught a lot of stuff that you probably don't agree with, but I think it's really, really important. Just like when you go to any other country and you learn their culture, you wanna know, like, how do they think? How do they live? 56:09 Susanne What do they believe? And then, you know, like Paul says, you have to be all things to all people. You can't really have discussions. 56:16 Susanne With evangelicals or Trinitarians, if you don't really understand where they're coming from and why, and it's not just about proving one verse, I mean something different than they think. I mean, it's really getting their mindset and understanding that if they've been indoctrinated, I mean, I I consider evangelical Christianity. 56:36 Susanne Cult because any any religion or religious belief that. 56:40 That. 56:41 Susanne Makes you so fearful that you call someone a heretic and you're scared of them because they're trying to have a discussion with you about an intellectual topic. That should be a red flag. You know, in terms of old behavior. So I just feel like it's important that we, you know, that we're aware of that. And I would just encourage people to just try. 57:02 Susanne Be open minded and listen and just see where they're coming from. I have friends on my street. They're Mormon, you know, super conspiracy theorists, evangelicals, you know, we talk about all kinds of stuff. I just try to avoid certain subjects because they just don't want to get into useless arguments, which is Paul warned against it. 57:21 Susanne Thank you, told Timothy. The objective is to love our neighbors and to find common ground. So that's really the thing that I that I'm aiming for is like, how can I love my neighbor? I can bring their trash can up. They might be a trinitarian, but like, can't I just bring their trash can up and show them that I. 57:35 Susanne Care about them. Like, come on. You know we need to do that. 57:38 And stuff. 57:39 Sean Very good. Well, Suzanne, thanks so much for talking with me today. 57:42 Susanne Thank you, Sean. It's been a lot of. 57:43 Susanne Fun I appreciate it. 57:48 Sean That brings this interview to a close. What did you think? Come on over to restitutio.org like the word restitution with no N and find episode 552. Seminary convinced me that Trinity was wrong with Suzanne Lakin and leave your comments, questions and. 58:05 Sean Feedback. 58:05 Sean There. 58:06 Sean Speaking of feedback, we've had a couple of people comment in on our last episode about helpful tools to study the Bible, and one of those was none other than Suzanne Lake and herself, who wrote the following, she said. I did hours of training on logo software and I gave up completely beyond my ability to navigate. 58:28 Sean Even with pages of notes. 58:31 Sean And Blue letter Bible is my go to for looking up verses comparative translations and interlinear though of course I'm always finding the Hebrew translation wonky in spots. But that's me. 58:45 Sean And then we had two other comments come in just on the Facebook post. Oh, by the way, if you're not in the rest of Studio Facebook group and you're a Facebook user, why not join? And if you're a user on a different social media that allows groups, why not start a rest studio group where you hang out online just so that we can have engagement? 59:04 Sean And share ideas. Someone named Ziad wrote in. What do you think of the net Bible notes? And also constable? No. 59:14 Sean Kermit Zarley replied. I like Nat, Bible notes and blue Letter Bible is my go to also, but not because I'm following my editor. Referring back to Suzanne Lakin, as you heard in this interview, she edited Kermit Zarley's book, and I'm having him on this podcast. 59:33 Sean Next week, so stay tuned for an interesting interview with the PGA Pro golfer Kermit Zarley. Turn scholar turns biblical Unitarian Christian activist and author and Evangel. 59:48 Sean List stay tuned for him next week, but anyhow, just wanted to make a couple of comments on these comments that have come in. First of all, I left out websites in my helpful tools survey last week. 1:00:02 Sean Was that on purpose? 1:00:05 Sean Well. 1:00:06 Sean I think to 1° websites come and they go. 1:00:10 Sean And the other resources I think are a little more stable in another sense, I I guess I'm just sort of biased in favor of Bible software. I have been a Bible works guy forever. When they went out of business, it was very sad, but then I was able to make the transition to accordance, which very much feels like. 1:00:30 Sean Bible works doesn't actually run as well, which is sad, but anyhow that's a subject for another day. Bible works accordance logos. That's where I'm at. I honestly never have a reason to go to one of these websites where they offer freebie. 1:00:45 Sean Relations. So I'm a little bit ignorant on what they even are, but I'm thankful that Susanna Kermit both commented in that Blue Letter Bible is the place to go. I'll have to check it out sometimes. Sounds like a place where you can get. 1:00:59 Sean A lot of. 1:00:59 Sean Different Bible verses. I know Bible Gateway is another one that people use and there is one called. 1:01:05 Sean Rub or something like that. Hey, whatever works for you is just fine with. 1:01:10 Sean The idea is to get access to the translations. I also ended up buying a lot of hardcover translations for the Bible because. 1:01:20 Sean A lot of times they don't license, especially the Jewish translations like I don't think Robert Alter is available on accordance. I think logos still doesn't have shocking. I'm not sure about that. And there are a couple of other Jewish translations that I have only in hardcover. Some of the more. 1:01:36 Sean Unique translations like NT Rights and John Golden Gay went in together on the Bible for everyone translation. Some other ones that I have just looking at my shelf done by individuals are not available in the Bible software or on those websites. So I think there is definitely a place for having physical Bibles still as well. 1:01:56 Sean And you are looking to compare on specific verses. 1:02:01 Sean So thanks for sharing about Blue Letter Bible on Ziad's comments and kermits about the net Bible notes. I strongly agree with them. I have been a net Bible fan since the early 2000s, have always loved the philosophy and approach of the NT Bible. 1:02:20 Sean People and have enjoyed. I can't say that I've read all 60,000 of the footnotes, but I have certainly enjoyed many of the footnotes. I found them unusually honest, especially for an evangelical committee where people are absolutely convinced that they have to believe what the Bible says. 1:02:41 Sean And so that creates a a pressure as Jason as Jason, David Beduhn remarked in his book Truth and Translation that creates the pressure, what he calls the Protestant burden to make the Bible say the sorts of things that they know it's supposed to be teaching based on their evangelical assumptions and dogs. 1:02:59 Sean Whereas other camps are less burdened to have the Bible say what they want it to say, anyhow, I think the net is a really good example of evangelical scholarship, courageously speaking, truth as much as they possibly can. Of course, presuppositions are invisible to us most of the time. 1:03:18 Sean So I'm not. 1:03:20 Sean Trying to ascribe malice to anybody who who doesn't do that, but I do think the net is really exceptional, a lot of their comments are really helpful and they do give multiple options instead of just saying the way they think it is, which I think is super great too. So yeah, you should go out and buy a net. 1:03:41 Sean Bible? Come on, if you're. 1:03:42 Sean Going to if you're going to be serious about Bible study and you want to Bible, that's going to have lots of footnotes to tell you what's going on with the main you scripts tell you what's going on with. 1:03:50 Sean The translation options. 1:03:51 Sean Tell you what's going on with the context, at least to some degree historical context. The Netfile is really a good choice, and it's free at net.bible.org. If you'd rather have the website. 1:04:02 Sean I cannot comment on the constable notes. If anybody else knows about that Bible and those notes from plain old Bible Chapel that Ziad had. 1:04:11 Sean Listen, I'm not familiar with it, so sorry I can't comment if any of you are come on over to rest studio.org and find Episode 551 helpful tools to understand the Bible. Leave your comment there or on the Facebook group if you prefer, and I would love to hear more engagement on this very important question. 1:04:32 Sean Look, your tools are going to define. 1:04:33 Sean You and I think I made pretty clear in that episode last week that if you're using all free but out of copyright 1800s or 1700s resources, guess what? They have significant limitations on what scholarship was available, what discoveries were made, and they tend to be way more biased and invisible. 1:04:53 Sean And unaware of their bias, which is problematic. 1:04:57 Sean I think modern commentaries and research tools are better for you. I mentioned last time the Zondervan Illustrated Bible background commentary. I used this commentary. I don't want to say every day, but like all the time I've heard Tim Mackey endorse it multiple times on his Bible projects podcast John Walton. 1:05:16 Sean Was involved with the making of this, at least the Old Testament side of it. So I mean, these are some really great names endorsing this and I have certainly found that it is very helpful. So I would definitely suggest, especially if you have Bible software to get the digital very. 1:05:31 Sean Bit of that paper version is probably even better because of the glossy pictures, and I know I'm sounding like a commercial here, I promise you I'm not getting paid by any of these people. I just want you to have good resources because good Bible tools are going to help you engage and understand the scripture better. 1:05:51 Sean And bad tools are going to get you stuck in corners that you don't need to be stuck in where there are answers and there are solutions and there is helpful comparable information to. 1:06:05 Sean Get you thinking in a way that they were thinking at that time, which is really the great key to interpretation that many of us miss out on. So take a look at all that. Thanks, everybody for tuning in. If you'd like to support restitutio, you can do that at our website, restitutio.org catch you next week and remember the truth. 1:06:24 Sean Has nothing to fear.