The University as a Microcosm of the Universe | Marshall King

On this episode of Anchored, Soren is joined by Marshall King, assistant professor of Biblical Studies at Carson-Neuman University in Tennessee. They discuss Marshall’s interest in languages and his view of exercise as a metaphor for language learning. Marshall dives into understanding the university as a microcosm of the universe and archaeology as a similarly omnibus field. They conclude by exploring the roots and definition of digital humanities, and why Christians ought to explore this area of study as a part of their heritage. 

Transcript

Soren Schwab (CLT) (00:01.077)
Welcome back to the Anchored Podcast, the official podcast of the Classic Learning Test. My name is Soren Schwab, VP of Partnerships here at CLT, and today we're joined by Marshall King. Marshall King joined the faculty of Carson Newman in 2021, having served previously as the coordinator for undergraduate research assistants at the University of Notre Dame's Advanced Institute. In 2016, he was awarded the Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship through the U .S. Department of

for advanced study in modern Hebrew at Yale University. He has also been a doctoral resident at the National Humanities Center 2020, as well as a fellow with the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Program, Humanities Without Walls 2021. He teaches primarily in New Testament courses with an academic interest in the Paulian letters and Hebrews, as well as literary theory and digital humanities. Beginning in the 2023 -24 academic year.

He inaugurated an academic minor in the study of archeology, drawing on his academic and professional training in archeology, where he has excavated in Cyprus and Israel. Marshall has a BA in Christian ministry from Crichton College, an MA in archeology from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, an MA in religion from Yale Divinity School, and is an ABD status for his PhD from the University of Notre Dame in Christianity and Judaism in antiquity.

Marshall, welcome so much.

Marshall King (01:29.885)
Yeah, well, thank you, Soren. That degree is a mouthful. And you would think there'd be some marketing experts that say we've got to shorten it up. And we do. We typically say CJA, which shortens it up a bit, but even so, it's a mouthful. Well, good.

Soren Schwab (CLT) (01:33.717)
It is.

Soren Schwab (CLT) (01:41.461)
CJA.

Man, I mean, then all these, yeah, all these degrees and abbreviations, you know, but coming from the guy who works for CLT, I can't, you know, speak too much there.

Marshall King (01:53.469)
That's right. Yeah. What is Google CLT? And then you see all the other brands and stuff like that that may come up. Yeah.

Soren Schwab (CLT) (01:58.293)
It usually gets you to the Charlotte Airport. Yes, we're still competing for a pool ride from the Charlotte Airport. One day, one day, Marshall. Well, it's an honor to have you. We're really excited. And as we always do, we're going to start the podcast by talking about our guest's own educational background. So talk to us a little bit about your journey. What kind of schools did you attend, K -12 and beyond?

Marshall King (02:02.173)
Ah yeah, yeah.

Marshall King (02:18.717)
Sure, like many people, I think I was coming of age and getting primary school when there still were probably less than 100 classical schools in the nation. So this would probably have been in the 90s. Early 2000s, I think there started to be an acceleration in the proliferation of classical schools. And so I was educated from seventh grade to 12th grade in a classical school in Memphis, Tennessee.

And so my education has been, at least in terms of the secondary level, has been influenced at the ground with the classical approach. And part of that looked like languages. We took Latin since, you know, the folks who had been in the program longer than me had many years of Latin. I had it from seventh grade to twelfth grade. And the last two years of college or high school, eleventh and twelfth, we did Greek.

But we also did a little mixture. We didn't use other, the same type of curriculum. We kind of had a mixed curriculum where we did different textbooks and different approaches. And we had history and government class. But I think the thing that was distinctive in those years was we did that fontase approach where we went right to the sources. So, you know, you're reading primary text and you're dealing with questions of, you know, formative, probative questions that have occupied.

the big conversations, the great conversations, and we would go back to the text. And for us, the text is those classical works, whether we're talking about the Gallic Wars with Julius Caesar, or we're talking about the Old Testament and the New Testament, or we're talking about St. Augustine's Confessions. So we did a lot in primary text. And by the time I got into college and stayed local in Memphis and went to Crichton College, I continued those interests, taking

classes in Greek and doing some summer Latin work and just stayed within that world. The Crichton's honors program was a great books program. I was influenced by Mortimer Adler in those years, you know, his preface to the great books work. But it was someone I admired and still admire and Mortimer Adler's Padaa proposal, I think it still has a lot of guidance and wisdom to instruct not only, you know, primary and secondary schools, but also

Marshall King (04:34.461)
ecologists in the value of ancient conversations that still have value today. But I was primarily interested in language studies. That's been a constant beat of my career and my life has been the rhythm of language. So I wanted to do archaeology because a lot of what we know about language comes from archaeological excavations through inscriptions that are found and uncovered and texts that are found. One of the best

Soren Schwab (CLT) (04:43.733)
Mm -hmm.

Marshall King (05:03.901)
collection hoard is from Oxerancus, which is a trash heap that was excavated. And lo and behold, it contains hundreds of letters and documents that have been lost for centuries. And archaeologists recover this material and then the language person gets to read it. But I got interested in that world of discovery. So I went on and did an MA in archaeology, but it was really there working in archaeology that I discovered how useful

the classical approach had been to me because archaeology is like a microcosm of the university. And by that, I mean, you have specialists from all different ranges of the university gathered together as a team. So you and archaeological excavation are going to have students working together with professors and specialists who know languages. So you have the epigrapher, you have people that work with coins, you have people that work with pottery. So you have the ceramic analysis people.

You have people that work with botany. You have all kinds of things just collide into an archaeological excavation. And one of the things I noticed that I think I had as a benefit because of my classical education was the ability to speak across disciplines and that there were natural gaps within disciplines where different specialists were not able to really talk well to one another because there was just the siloed use of terminology and concepts and the approach.

But I'm a big fan of classical education because it does give a student the ability to have conversations across different disciplines in a really natural way. And I saw firsthand in archeology the absolute importance of having a conversation across disciplines. And it's something you can learn later in life. And you sometimes learn it out of necessity.

But I feel as though I was privileged in having already had a head start in that ability to have a conversation with the archeobotanist, to have a conversation with people that are doing dendrochronology, have a conversation with the ceramic analysis experts, the architects, whoever's on the site. And it's a real team effort, not need a lot of consultant ability to do archeology. Languages continue to be the beat. I went to Yelp Divinity School, mostly focused on Greek, Latin, but picked up

Marshall King (07:23.453)
had picked up Hebrew and Syriac, Arabic, Coptic, Ge 'ez. I'm not going to be able to give you the litany because I don't remember offhand, I had to go look at my resume, but it's there. All that time and I'll speak to why I did languages in a moment and then all that paid off working on a dissertation on kind of the issue that required a lot of expertise in different languages. But a quick...

word on why I did languages and perhaps this may preempt some questions but the reason I valued languages was for me language study in college was very much like exercising in this sense. If you keep up with an exercise regimen it can in a lot of ways structure your entire day. You benefit a lot from that structure. For me languages was taking language courses.

it kept me disciplined. And that discipline was I knew I needed to set and do my paradigms or declensions for this language for an hour at a time. And then I knew after that I could do other things. But it was just discipline that language allowed me to have throughout college semesters. And I had noticed years where I didn't have a semester, I didn't have a language where that discipline slacked. But where I had languages, getting in and just sitting down and doing the work.

structured my entire college career, structured my graduate work. It was beneficial having that kind of accountability to a language. Because if you don't do it, what happens is you fall behind. And when you fall behind in the language, that gap just accelerates as you begin to translate. And so keeping up was an issue, and it was an existential threat not to keep up. So it helped me stay good with languages but accountable to all my other material also.

Soren Schwab (CLT) (09:11.861)
I like the analogy with exercising and I'm trying to get back to Italian studies. I'm going to Rome later this year and that gap is abundantly clear. It's also very clear I'm running a 10K next month and I didn't run for a while and the getting back into, right, if you kind of stop the exercising, that's the hardest part and that's so often the discouraging part, right? Do you feel like with languages, it's that initial kind of shock, right, where that gap maybe widened?

Marshall King (09:28.413)
Mm -hmm.

Soren Schwab (CLT) (09:42.069)
Is it still easier to get back into it, you know, and just need a little bit of patient and repetition and you feel like you can pick it back up pretty quickly?

Marshall King (09:50.365)
You do. My own biography bears out that I can drop a language and not touch it for a little bit of time. I don't know how long that would be, but then I can usually pick it back up and read it. And the vocabulary sticks, the system of the language sticks. You're right though, that if you do keep with the metaphor of a strength training in the same way when you're first getting into the gym and your muscles are torn and you're

Soren Schwab (CLT) (10:02.549)
Mm -hmm.

Marshall King (10:19.677)
You're fatigued and everything's painful. Well, in some ways that is like jumping in at a ground level with a language. For students, they ask me, what's the hardest language? Well, practically it's your first language after your mother tongue. Whatever that next language you learn essentially is the hardest language for you because you're having to learn not to think just about communication, which is what we all do naturally because the gifting God's given to us. But outside of communication is the system of language.

Soren Schwab (CLT) (10:27.189)
Thanks.

Marshall King (10:48.093)
And to get the system of language, which we call grammar, you got to take a step back. You have to do analyses and you're thinking differently about language that you're not accustomed to. And that difference creates tears that you need to allow to heal. And then you get better at the language. And I think that's true in language in general. And it's also true in language families. If you used to an Indo -European language, or you're doing Italian, it would not be a gigantic stretch then to start to work in Spanish or to work.

or for those that retroject back into Latin. And then from Latin into Greek because of the Indo -European family. But even if you spend all of your days doing Latin and Greek, the moment you want to jump into an Afro -Asian language like Egyptian or Hebrew or Arabic, suddenly you're doing a different part of your body altogether. You're no longer doing biceps. You now have to do leg day. And in the same way leg day,

Soren Schwab (CLT) (11:37.077)
Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.

Marshall King (11:43.037)
doesn't benefit at all from what you've been doing for your biceps. So too, you know, this language study, there's a difficulty in acquiring Semitic languages. And so again, I tell students when our Divinity School students ask us, you know, is Hebrew difficult? Well, it's hard if this is your first Semitic language. If this isn't, then you understand how the Semitic verbal system functions in theory.

And you basically are just filling in, you know, paint by numbers, just with grammar. You're being told how this system fits in and you fill it in. So for me, I have, I return again to the idea of muscle memory that, you know, once you're out of the gym, you can usually more rapidly increase strength if you have muscle memory and same thing with languages. If you, if you decided to take a semester off, there is that initial discomfort when you join back in, but it's not like starting day Nova. It's not starting new.

Soren Schwab (CLT) (12:38.133)
Yeah. Well, it's all about realistic expectations. And I think, you know, signing up for 10K when you haven't run in a while, I knew when I start practicing again, it's going to be hard. Like I'm going to hurt for a while. I think the great lie with with languages now is that it shouldn't be hard. You don't have to do much. Right. I mean, you can just download this app and you can just learn Spanish in a few weeks without doing any any memorization. Right.

any vocabulary. And so I think when you learn a language and it becomes hard, oftentimes the default is, oh, I'm just not a language person. Right? I'm just not built for this. That's just not how I, instead of sticking with it and knowing, it's going to be hard until you have that initial framework, right, that you can build upon. But it's not easy learning a language, even Spanish. You know, a former teacher here, my students and I wanted to teach them German. And they're like, no, we're doing Spanish because it's easy. Like you said, well,

Marshall King (13:17.725)
Mm -hmm.

Soren Schwab (CLT) (13:37.685)
easy to find it, right? And if it's your first foreign language, you still have to understand your conjugations, right? You still have to understand basic grammatical concepts and those come painfully, right? If you have no framework for them.

Marshall King (13:51.645)
No framework. The good news is if you afford yourself the structure and you say, I'm going to hold myself accountable to this material this amount of time a day, that structure will benefit from it. You'll start to see development. And you should extrapolate that to your other fields of study as well. And as much as it's easy to see your progress you're making in a language, because you can see how well you can now read as opposed to what you couldn't do at the beginning of the semester. In other words,

Soren Schwab (CLT) (14:12.949)
Mm -hmm.

Marshall King (14:19.005)
courses where you don't have that bit of tangibility where you can actually see it. So here I mean like philosophy or even theology. You don't always know where your progress is, but you can have a lot of confidence that if you are being faithful to your studies in the same way you've progressed through language, you've progressed through philosophy, you've progressed through theology, it's harder to see, but you're doing it. You are making progress.

Soren Schwab (CLT) (14:41.717)
Yeah. Well, let me go back to something you said earlier that really resonated with me. The idea that, you know, classical education had certainly helped you kind of understand the whole and especially in archaeology. And so kind of connect those dots for me. And maybe I know we've talked before we started recording about kind of that omnibus approach.

And so tie those things together, right? The study of archaeology, classical education, and the idea of kind of a cross -departmental kind of dialogue or omnibus approach.

Marshall King (15:18.685)
In my estimation, this approach of the omnibus, which is it's not throwing everything at you except for the kitchen sink or whatever the adage is. It's a recognition that the world God created is intelligible. You can make sense of it. It's something that you can, like we've done here with language. Language isn't nonsensical. If it were nonsensical, none of us would be able to accomplish communication.

It's a recognition that in the same way language is sensible, the world around us is sensible. It's intelligible. And what I mean by the omnibus approach then is the recognition of the integrated nature of knowledge. That it's not, you know, it's not truth according to this field of study, nor that field of study, but it's truth in as much as it correlates to God's creation and those things that we can bear out through scripture and through empirical observation. And

your research. So I like to think about archaeology, like I said, as a type of microcosm of the universe and the university and the university itself sometimes gets remarked as or called a type of microcosm of the universe. So you have this, you know, this nestic thing, we have the universe over here, and then the university, and then I would assert that archaeology is in that lineage because it replicates the system that's larger than itself.

And I used to tell that that was my pitch to students. Why do archaeology? Well, do archaeology because almost any interest you have, whether it's art history or it's philology slash linguistics or it's anthropology or it's religious studies or you name it, if it's animals, archaeology will have a place for you because it is an omnibus field. It's a place where we need everyone's voice and intellect to join together to do research.

So I used to think of that just as a one way street. You know, you have the universe, universities and archeology, but I've come to realize that there's the backward compatibility that an archeology excavation actually gives us a small scale version of the university that allows us to think about the university in a different way. And what I mean by that is this, the excavation has central questions. We all always excavate with questions. We don't excavate with no.

Marshall King (17:39.997)
we have a guiding set of questions. We dispense our resources according to what we think is going to be best ways to answer these questions. Different archaeological sites within a site, different fields within a field, different squares. And that is the archaeological site. It's a combination of squares and fields and then workers. And I don't know what we would do archaeologically if we were asked to excavate a site without our guiding questions. If we actually didn't have questions,

about the site, we have no business excavating it. And as I've kind of matured, I've come to realize that's true of the university too. And by that, I mean, if we don't have guiding questions for our university, what are we actually excavating? What are we trying to get at? And you have these big questions of being and knowing and how we should act and these big questions, of course. And...

I think we have to restore guiding questions. We have to get back to that. And one of the guiding questions that I have is how do the disparate fields of study connect together as a symphony trying to answer the big questions of life? And archaeology is just a metaphor in some ways for the university's own endeavors in trying to not just produce knowledge, but to answer big questions.

And we do that as archaeologists and we do this as universities, at least I hope we would. You know, at Carson Newman, we are privileged to have a provost who is putting forward a set of questions that are guiding questions and the big one we're all wrestling with as a university, you know, not just the Bible and theological studies department, but across the university is the question of Christian anthropology as it relates to artificial intelligence. And it's a really important question. You're going to answer that with an omnibus approach.

Soren Schwab (CLT) (19:04.245)
Mm -hmm.

Marshall King (19:33.885)
But we do the same thing in archaeology. We don't call it omnibus, but we call it interdisciplinarity. But that interdisciplinary approach sometimes can be, you do it after the fact. You let the archaeobotanist do her thing, and you let the philologist do his thing, and you let the dendrochronologist do his thing, and you just let these different specialists do their thing. But there has to, at the end, be someone who's bringing all this together into a cohesive answer to the question.

And I think in a lot of ways, archeology has been helpful to me because as a younger faculty member, you try to get your head around what the university is. Is it a community service? Is it a think tank? And there's different articulations for it. For me, it's a giant archeological excavation with guiding questions in different fields of studies representing their disciplines and trying to answer the question, but not in isolation, in unison with one another.

Soren Schwab (CLT) (20:30.197)
Yeah, it's absolutely fascinating. I'm going to have a couple of follow up questions here. And first of all, I have to say I've been really, really impressed with Carson Newman. I had not heard about Carson Newman until I joined CLT. And the more I learn about it, the more I'm falling in love. And I think it's because of what you just outlined. And when I went to public university in Germany and I saw...

exactly the opposite of what you're saying, right? I saw a, you stay in your field, you stay in your lane, right? I mean, they're all separate buildings, right? I didn't see students that studied other fields and, you know, I was a literature major, like, why would I have any conversation with the math people, you know, or the science people or any other people around me, or even the other humanities departments, it was completely isolated, which progressive education has kind of led to. And so,

what you're proposing is a very different approach to education. Does it have something to do with the telos? Why are we doing this to begin with? And if the value proposition of a university is just to learn some basic skills, albeit maybe useful skills, are we missing the mark? And I feel like a lot of the smaller Christian or liberal arts schools have...

different approach to this and they also seem to be thriving. It seems like Carstner Newman is one of those. So from your time, and I know you joined in 2021, but what sets the school apart maybe from a University of Tennessee or Tennessee State?

Marshall King (21:57.469)
Sure.

Marshall King (22:06.557)
Sure, sure. Well, I mean, the history of universities in our country is, in a lot of ways, a melting pot. And one of the contributions the German university made to our universities is the research model. The research model is the experts. And because that's the model, then the greatest product a university can produce is knowledge.

And so you're only a good university in as much as you're produced these Fulbright scholars or as much as you've produced these Nobel Peace Prize winners. And there's absolutely nothing wrong with being thankful your university has produced those types of individuals. But I think at Carson Newman, the question's not issue of product in terms of knowledge for its own sake. That's just vainglorious. It's transformation and it's formation. It's getting people to learn how to live the good life.

in honor of God and what he's given to us. And what that practically means is we have to give our students the skill sets to live in a world that's changing and is still accountable to these older questions that have vibrantly helpful answers about what is the purpose of a human being. This may be the teleological, not just of the university, but of the individual. What is a person's purpose? What...

Where are we from and where are we going and how do we connect to others? And I would say that the distinctive thing about Carson Newman, in addition to, you know, this is a place you can come and do serious contemplation and work, it's also a place of community. And by that, I mean, it's a place where we're being shaped by one another. We're being shaped by each other's intellect. We're being shaped by each other's lived experiences. We're being shaped by each other's faith.

And so because of the shaping that's going on and the formation that's going on, I don't think we're interested in just producing a person who is going to be on the face of a magazine or something like that. We're interested in producing a person as God's designed them to be. And we're not in the business just of, and I may be speaking out of line, but I would say Carson Newman's not in the business just of production of knowledge, but in the formation of people for God's kingdom.

Soren Schwab (CLT) (24:21.941)
Yeah.

Marshall King (24:22.749)
So, and that's what we're all striving towards. But I think you can't do that as well as you would hope if you allow your university to be completely siloed, if you allow the research model to dominate how your university is structured. And the results of that siloing is students are going to enter a world that has real problems. And when you enter a world that has real problems, you're not going to be able to answer those problems with your discipline alone. Your discipline can't.

answer the big questions of what's going on in the world. I mean, AI is one of those fields where who gets to answer the question of how do we react to AI? What's the proper use of AI? Is it just attorneys that answer that question? Is it just ethicists that answer that question? Is it just the medical field that answers the question? I mean, you think about the use of AI and is it appropriate to use AI training models on people's MRI scans? These are profoundly difficult questions.

Soren Schwab (CLT) (24:56.629)
Yeah.

Marshall King (25:18.717)
If you teach a student only to think about the world around them through their lens of their discipline, when they enter the real world and have to deal with AI and how they respond to it, and AI is just a placeholder here, it's any old issue, they're gonna have to be able to relate to real world problems using a diverse approach. And that includes being able to have conversations with people outside of your discipline. And that's a difficulty to teach. Again, you can learn it as necessity dictates.

but it's best to be prepared going into the world to address real world problems.

Soren Schwab (CLT) (25:51.221)
Yeah, yeah. And I know you said placeholder, but it's a perfect segue because I was going to ask you about this term that I've been seeing more and more recently, digital humanities or digital humanism in light of AI and the ever -changing field. Can you define the term and what is it and how is it going to evolve with the emergence of AI?

Marshall King (26:17.117)
That's a good question. And, you know, that's a long one. That's worth its own podcast. But in like a nutshell, digital humanities, and it's different than, you know, transhumanism and those kinds of concepts. Digital humanities is more than just the use of machines to help you do your humanities work. So it's more than just using a machine to tabulate the use of these verbs or nouns. It's more than that.

Soren Schwab (CLT) (26:22.421)
But yes, yeah, I got three minutes more.

Soren Schwab (CLT) (26:32.245)
Mm -hmm.

Marshall King (26:45.597)
It's a mental approach. It's a mental framework for how you think about your field. So that's one thing. But I would tell students, they're kind of shocked by this because they think digital humanities, oh, it's a new thing. Actually, it's not. It's a thing that is a part of our Christian heritage. It started probably in 1948 -ish, 49, 50, 51. In that era, it was a Catholic Jesuit priest named Roberto Busa, an Italian, who was working on his dissertation on the

the works of Thomas Aquinas. And he had this bold idea that he wanted to index the entirety of Thomas's works, which was, had no one thought it was even possible. So he approached, he reproached Watson at IBM, who was a trustee at Columbia, and pitched the idea of I want to index this 13 million word document. And Watson told him,

Soren Schwab (CLT) (27:25.557)
with.

Marshall King (27:40.669)
You know, you're a crazy man, this can't be done, but I'm happy to help you. And he gave him the access to a few IBM machines. And over the next five years, he indexed the entirety of Thomas's works and it's the index to Mysticum that was produced. And he became the founding father. You can go to IBM's website right now and just go to keyword search, Roberto Busa. He is considered, if you had a Mount Rushmore,

of digital humanists, or digital humanities, he would be on the Mount Rushmore of digital humanities. He's considered the forefather of the entire field. And after he finished the index domesticum, he went on to work on the Dead Sea Scrolls. And he digitized all the fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls by punch cards.

punch cards and he had hoped that it would generate a new field of study, not just of linguistics in which he was interested in trying to figure out if computers could help solve obliterated text, which he discovered 85 % of text could be recovered using a computer's sense of predictive modeling. He invented what would become the hyperlink in theory because he needed to have a way to work through the indexed homistical and flash quickly. So he invented the theory of the hypertext, which all of our

Internet's based off of. He doesn't invent the hypertext, but the theory behind it. And he invents natural language, language processing, which undermine under, you know, it is what chat GPT is based off of. He invents the models that will be these big things in digital humanities and now in AI. So if you had to define it, recognize it's a part of our heritage. It's not something we're latecomers to. We're at the ground level with this.

Soren Schwab (CLT) (29:15.445)
Mm -hmm.

Marshall King (29:27.197)
And what I mean by that is it emerges out of a sense that the world is intelligible and that world includes language. And because it's intelligible, we can teach a machine how to replicate that language. And that's amazing to me. It's just fantastic. You know, chat GPT is just a prediction modeler. It just says this word usually follows after that word. And it can say that because we fed it human language for however much. But

To put it in perspective, they said that the index Thomistical would have taken 50 scholars, 40 years to accomplish, and he was able to accomplish it in a five -year period using the IBM, I think, 706 machine. So, you know, that's a short answer to a long discussion of the way in which Christians should think about not selling their birthright, you know, like Esau.

Don't sell your birthright. You're at the ground level with this. So much so that IBM's own website lists someone in your tradition as one of the founding fathers of natural language processing in digital humanities. Don't squander that inheritance by not having good answers to the question of how we respond to AI, how we respond to digital humanities. That's not to tell people how to think, but it is to encourage them to think about.

the complexity of the questions as it relates to the history that it was someone who was a Jesuit priest who came up with ideas.

Soren Schwab (CLT) (30:52.693)
Yeah, fascinating, fascinating. Yeah.

Marshall King (30:54.685)
It is fascinating. Roberto Busa. Not a lot has been written on him, but BUSA for those that are interested.

Soren Schwab (CLT) (30:59.957)
We're gonna go on IBM and I'm gonna fact check you. I believe you, but just to verify. Right, right. Amazing, amazing. Well, this has absolutely been delightful, Marshall. Of course, we have one more question, which especially for our scholars, for our academics, is a really difficult question to answer. If there's one book or one text that you can point to that has been most impactful, most influential in your life, what would it be and why?

Marshall King (31:03.933)
Yeah, go ahead. I encourage you. Yeah. As long as they haven't updated it in a while, he should still be on their main website.

Marshall King (31:31.197)
That is a good question. And for me, it's 1 Thessalonians. And the reason is when I was learning Greek, the teacher I had made us spend an entire semester translating 1 Thessalonians over and over and over and over again. I think we probably did it 20 times in the semester until we basically had it memorized as high school students. But there's a particular string of verse, there's a verse there that has stuck out to me since I was a teenager and I live by it, especially whenever I have moments of

of needing the confidence that we all need in Christ. And it's Paul talking about the hope that we have in Christ Jesus. And he says, whether we are awake or asleep, we will live with him. And by that, Paul means, you know, awake or asleep using euphemistically, whether we are alive or we have deceased, we will live with Christ. That's everything. That's all of it. That's our entire life and whatever happens to us. We die, we go up to be with the Lord, all of our existence, we will live with the Lord.

There's a lot of confidence I take in that verse and 1st Thessalonians as a whole, because it's just a wonderful letter.

Soren Schwab (CLT) (32:37.461)
Absolutely beautiful. Well, I appreciate you so much, Marshall. This was great conversation. Again, we're here with Marshall King, who's on the faculty of Carson Newman University in Tennessee. So go check that out if you can follow his work. Marshall, thank you so much for joining us today.

Marshall King (32:53.917)
Sure, thank you.