#GruntGod ep.1: David Peters
The first installment of a revolutionary exploration of faith and service.
Transcript
Introduction
Hello, and welcome to Grunt Works. I'm brother Logan Isaac, broadcasting from Albany, Oregon. Today in this episode we're going to be discussing Cain and Moral pain with Reverend David Peters, an Episcopal priest former army chaplain, former enlisted Marine. Church planter. And David Peters is also the founder and prior of the Hospitallers of St. Martin, my community, that I serve as a director of education. The Hospitallers of St. Martin is an ecumenical, interfaith monastic community within the Episcopal tradition that focuses on prayer, [00:01:00] reconciliation, and Hospitallers for all those who have experienced war, poverty and violence. This is part of the Grunt God season pass, which is an illumination, an expansion upon God is a Grunt and more good news for GIs, which I released with hase in 2022, GruntGod Season Pass is me re-releasing it as a self-published book, which you can get from the website, pewpewhq.com.
Just look for merch and search #GruntGod. The season pass includes every chapter from God is a Grunt and more good news for GIs, including ad free podcast episodes and an icon that is unique to each chapter. Today's episode is on Cain and Moral Pain.
In my chapter, " What have we done?" Where I talk about genesis and morality, I don't like using the word moral injury because. We don't really [00:02:00] have in the west and in the English speaking west A, a robust construction or understanding of the moral person upon whom an injury might be inflicted.
What do we mean when we talk about moral personhood? I don't think we have a really good account of what that means, and so I avoid using the word moral injury. I prefer using the word moral pain. Or combat stress instead of trauma, because within the military, it's difficult to admit weakness. It might endanger your job stability, it might endanger your personal relationships or professional relationships, which are the same thing when you serve 24/7 beside your coworker. You are gonna be friends too, whether you like it or not. And that's one of the things I really appreciated about military formation. And David is one of those people. David back in, I wanna say 2016, founded the Hospitallers of St. Martin with a Lutheran pastor, Lynn Smith Henry, [00:03:00] and I didn't take vows until November of 2019. But what David has built and what David has done is just really incredible. He's written a number of books. One of the ones that we talk about in the episode is called Death Letter: Sex War, and the American Experience.
I can't remember what the subtitle is, but you should check that out. If you don't have it, you should get it through bookshop.org and support The Chapter House, which is Grunt Works' physical headquarters in Albany, Oregon. if you're in the area, you can come check it out.
You can also look find out more information at pewpewhq.com/bookstore. Support David by buying his books on bookshop.org and support chapter House at the same time. In this chapter we talk a little bit about, or I'll say, I don't wanna say it's a trigger warning because I think it's a really good conversation, but it does include mentions of sex and violence.
In particular, [00:04:00] David makes this really incredible connection in the intimacy of both sex and violence and how we talk about it, but we don't want to talk about it. And soldiers and veterans live in that liminal space of knowing that they carry something that is supposed to be unseen. And Cain carries this mark.
You'll see in the icon it's a cross and it looks like a wound, like something had hit him and it had scarred over. But it also makes me think of the ash cross that we take on our forehead on Ash Wednesday. And Cain represents to many Christian Americans. A cautionary tale at best. And he's the first person who kills another human being.
Abel, his brother, is the first person in the Bible to die. It's something nobody knows anything about within the story of the Bible, and it puts key in this really precarious position. But what I point out and we talk a little bit about is that Cain should not be just interpreted [00:05:00] as a bad guy, as somebody we should not be like.
'Because almost every character in the Bible has something positive and constructive to tell us. Otherwise, the authors, the composers of the Bible wouldn't have included them. As a writer, myself and David is a writer and author, if we don't want you to learn something, we're just not going to include it.
Everything that I put into God is a Grunt is there for a reason. Cain is there for a reason, a constructive positivist reason, and I won't get into too much here, but I do hope you'll read the chapter. Go to pewpewhq.com/merch either buy the season pass
or you can get the chapters individually. You can search on the website for just this chapter on Cain and Moral Pain. And whenever you purchase it, you'll get the most up to date version of the ebook chapter. You'll get the icon, you'll get this episode downloadable without ads. But you can also listen [00:06:00] to it with ads on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, wherever you listen.
Right now it's being uploaded with First Formation, my morning podcast for rank and file believers who want to get up and pray. But. This may become the preseason for another flagship podcast for Grunt Works. It's not set in stone, it's just a vision, a dream right now. Sparkle in my eye. But I think you'll really appreciate the conversation that two veterans are having about the first killer. He does it premeditatedly, Cain does, but a lot of the violence that soldiers do is not premeditated. The only premeditation is happening somewhere up at, federal or regional level. And we are just there to carry out orders and it's up to us often without any moral training to make significant moral decisions at the heat of the moment. And that is a lot of weight to bear. And you'll see in Cain in this icon, [00:07:00] he's bearing a lot of weight. He's carrying moral pain that feels to him to be unresolved. But the hopeful element that we talk about in this episode is that, that mark, that wound is a mark a signal of protection that nobody should punish Cain. Nobody should force Cain away because that is a divine mark of protection and it's explicit in Genesis. And so I appreciate you listening. I hope you leave your thoughts and concerns in the comments on the podcast or wherever you listen, wherever you engage digitally. And of course you're always welcome to head to pewpewhq.com and join the conversation there.
But without further ado, here is Reverend David Peters and I talking about Cain and Genesis and Moral Pain. I hope you get as much out of listening to the conversation as I got discussing it with David, myself.
Interview
Logan M Isaac: all right, [00:08:00] so we're here to talk about Cain and moral pain. I'm talking with Reverend father, actually, shoot, I should have asked, do you want me, should we be saying father or brother?
David Peters: Brother's Good or David, do you know?
Logan M Isaac: David? All right, Logan, I mentioned that because you're the prior of the Hospitallers of St. Martin, ChristianSoldiers.org. And I am the Director of Education for the Hospitallers. The Hospitallers are hosting. Grunt Con on October 25th, 2025. So little plug for the Hospitallers. David, it's great to have you. I'm gonna jump right in and say I was really deliberate about using the language of moral pain and I know that's coming right up to moral injury before I, and I don't need to get into why.
I have some nuances around moral injury, but I would really like to hear your work with moral injury and some of what you really want our listeners to hear when we talk about some of these subjects.
David Peters: Yeah, it's a fascinating [00:09:00] discovery. I think if you could put that word on it for me to find a word or concept that captures an experience I've had, and I think that is the goal of all.
Discourse science, study, even theology, to put a name on something that is a amorphous feeling or experience. It's never accurate, a hundred percent or perfect. No definition is when we say I am this or I have this. There's always nuances to that. But to me the concept of moral injury and what moral pain in this case really does capture something that.
That has not been really talked about in the sa in this way before, and I've just found it to be a helpful way of reading the Bible as well to look at scripture through that lens of moral injury of how people are experiencing the kind of suffering that comes from doing harm to [00:10:00] others. Sometimes in the line of duty, sometimes because of anger and rage sometimes.
Just not being able to do good things creates a sense of I'm not good anymore. And I've had that feeling a lot as a veteran coming home, I'm not good anymore. There's something wrong with me. And I felt that very palpably in weird situations where I knew cognitively that I was welcome and I belonged in a place and it was easy to just participate in something, but I, there was something that held me back.
Or kept me away and made me feel that I'm not good anymore feelings. So to me, that's where moral injury has helped me understand myself and others.
Logan M Isaac: I suppose we should mention what, can you define moral injury? I think, I know, I don't, I haven't kept up with the conversation, but could you say in just a couple words what you mean or what is meant in your understanding when we talk about moral injury?
David Peters: It's a [00:11:00] wide ranging topic that originally started in a Jonathan. She book, he's credited as the first person to use that term, and he uses it in a, about Vietnam veterans and Greek mythical heroes in the ilead who feel betrayed by their higher headquarters in Vietnam. Troops on the ground would call back for instructions.
They'd be given instructions and they would, the instructions wouldn't fit their experience. And they would feel that betrayal that they weren't cared for. And
Logan M Isaac: the Greek, you're speaking of, his Achilles in Vietnam and Odysseus in America in the seventies or early eighties, I don't remember.
David Peters: He writes those in the nineties when he is nineties in bed with cancer.
He's, oh, he's like beating the Iliad in the original Greek, like you and I would do Logan if we were laid up in the hospital. Yeah. We pull out the Greek Iliad and we're reading,
Logan M Isaac: I brought it on my honeymoon actually.
David Peters: I'm sure you
Logan M Isaac: the Robert Gels translation. I absolutely have it. Yes. Bush.
David Peters: Not in the [00:12:00] original Greek though, that's really the, that's where the cancer world, so Jonathan
Logan M Isaac: Shea CR helps.
In the nineties, he helps Vietnam vets contextualize what had been called Vietnam syndrome before then was called Shell shock. There's all I pitched a book that's still in early manuscript form on the history, the theological history of PTSD. And my concern, which I alluded to earlier, is if moral injury is just the same thing that we've been calling all these other things, let's get to the root of it.
And when I was at Duke I participated, or right before I came to Duke, I participated in the Truth Commission on Conscience and War. Was Akima Brock and Gabriela Lai. And, in the context of that organizing that Truth Commission, which I did as an undergrad in Hawaii before I came to Duke, they had us take a class on truth commissions and the structure and the purpose and stuff.
And I think that made me start asking [00:13:00] questions as Brett Lit's article on moral injury began, became popularized. And so when I hear you say this realization, this, which is an inter, it's. It feels like it came to you. You, and maybe I should speak for myself. I certainly have been in a situation where I felt like in conversation or in community, or even just in social transactions, I get the sense that people think I'm a threat.
That they're afraid of me, even though, like I'm loud and may I'm pretty cshe, but that doesn't mean I've done anything wrong. And I articulate that because. I used Cain where I came to Genesis and began really digging into it after I had done some processing. I didn't really get into the Bible until after seminary, but it strikes me and I, I.
When I encounter Genesis and you have this darkness and this void that [00:14:00] God comes to and speaks and creates effortlessly, the darkness to me feels like what we would call melancholia, which is also an old Spanish name for Shellshock. And so for me as a vet coming to the Bible and seeing like.
Melancholia depression. Nostalgia is another word for it. And God coming to us and introducing light and introducing order or reintroducing and I'll the other thing that. For me was distinct from what I hear you describing before I went to war for some reason. I know the reason my parents split up when I was 13.
I began shoplifting and I got arrested and then I was like, oh, I'm a bad guy, because I literally in handcuffs, I asked the officer, where do you want me to sit in the front seat? And he is no, the bad guy. Sit in the back. I was like, oh, I'm the bad guy. Now I'm white. It didn't stay on my record, but. I, [00:15:00] that was what was introduced to me.
And so going forward, I went to church because I thought it was the right thing to do. But when I entered the military, I was concerned with, am I a good person? Am I a good man? Am I a good soldier? And through Iraq and when I came home, it was that it was. I was constantly trying to prove or disprove that hypothesis instead of what I hear, and correct me if I'm wrong introducing this problem of Logan or I, David.
Others are identifying in me a problem or a disorder where, but for me, the context by circumstance was this internal hypothesis that other people are helping me to prove or disprove. And I wonder if that resonates with you or if that. How do you come to scripture and what does scripture do in relationship or in the context of other human beings that God has also created?
Good. [00:16:00]
David Peters: Yeah, that's that is what we're, I think always doing as humans is trying to figure out where we fit in certain communities and in our own community and life. We're doing it unconsciously. Most of the time. We're not always asking about or anything, but. Most of the Bible is about groups of people.
There are, I'm trying to think of like stories of we like adventure stories that have the lone wanderer Yeah. Ing and in modern, film, it's like Star Wars classic, Luke Skywalks journey, but he's in community. And that's part of you. You wouldn't have a movie. There are movies with just one person and there's, but there's, there're very few, most of.
So we're always part of that community and scripture. I like what you said about Genesis. Genesis has always fascinating 'cause it's used as a bludgeon, as a tool to fight against science. When the story of evolution, it's used as a prescription for human life. Even Jesus [00:17:00] uses it that way.
When he says, when they come to him with questions about marriage and divorce, he says, look at Adam and Eve. They were. One flesh and they shouldn't be separated and
Logan M Isaac: yeah.
David Peters: People have always used that, the creation story about themselves. And I like that you said that formless and void.
You said it was a
Logan M Isaac: bludgeon it's almost like apha, like I deserve a bludgeon. I'm speculating, but I bring up Genesis because in that questioning I was thinking about getting outta the military as a co After Iraq, I went to a New Testament history class, and that's when I really engaged with scripture.
And so I have this question. Genesis becomes an answer to my question, am I a good person? That's how I was created. Am I going to fulfill that? And I say in the chapter on Cain and Moral Pain, that if there's two things that are written into the source code of creation, it's togetherness and goodness and evil or it doesn't say evil early on, it says it is not good. It's not [00:18:00] tove to be bad. This Hebrew word meaning isolated, alone, and so evil as we think of it, to me is like it doesn't exist. It's like Augustine's privation. What we should be talking about is what is good. And are we orienting ourselves in that direction?
But I want to hear more about especially in scripture. 'cause the first part of grunt God or God as a grunt and more good news for gis. I situate scripture and individuals. Would you say more about how Genesis or the wider Bible influenced and informed your understanding your faith journey as a veteran in particular?
David Peters: Yeah, I think that the question of that, the origin story for goodness is something that Christians have disagreed on for thousands of years too is humanity good? And there's enough evidence in the Bible, other verses to say no, we're not good inherent.
Logan M Isaac: Yeah. Yeah.
David Peters: Even the issues around what we call Calvinism today.
Of are we totally [00:19:00] depraved? Which some Calvinists don't think that means you're like all bad or anything. But we are always asking that question of am I good? In fact, I've heard it from so many people. Usually when they do something terrible in a relationship they'll say almost self reflectively.
I'm not a bad person. And then they'll say something bad They did,
Logan M Isaac: but yeah.
David Peters: Yeah. And that's about is, I think that's Aristotelian or some other philosopher. It's like you, your you, your actions are tell what? Determine whether you're good or not. Yeah. Not about what you feel or think.
Now, the problem with religion and when you're raised in a religion, there's a lot of interrogation of thought of whether you're having good thoughts or bad thoughts. And so you learn to like really privatize your thought life so that no one can probe in there and find out if you're good or bad. In fact, most humans have all kinds of thoughts all day long that we would consider bad and good happening simultaneously.
Some of it's [00:20:00] self-protective. I like what you said about the inherent creation. In the beginning God said it was good. Yeah. And the goodness of that is in the worth of it. Like the worth of us as a person. I think that's. The road to suicide for a lot of us veterans. Yeah.
Logan M Isaac: Yeah. Is
David Peters: that feeling of worthlessness?
I can't think of a better word to
Logan M Isaac: catch. Yeah. Or I've heard of stories where people, typically, men, their justification for ending their own life is I'm trying to help my community, I'm trying to help my family. I'm a burden. Let's, it seems as though how we come to the Bible. Nobody is reading the Bible at birth, but you inherit, other people's interpretations and context through your parents, through your community.
And it strikes me like if you're pretty self, sure if you lack a certain humility, that seems in my mind to fit with that. Classification of [00:21:00] Genesis as a bludgeon to correct behavior according to my standards and expectations. But if you come to a certain amount of humility, I think it was Alexander Campbell who said the circumference around.
A proper hermeneutic is, or a godly or virtuous hermeneutic is humility. You can't read the Bible without humility, and when you're actively wondering, if you go to the Bible with questions, it has answers or responses. And so that's why I was like. When I taught this Bible course from darkness to light about soldiers in scripture, old and New Testament, and that's where I realized like the black ooze, melancholy, it's literally what it means in the Greek.
And I can, yeah, and I can make all kinds of fun metaphysical theories about. Creation. But like the Bible for me is an answer to prayer. And if you don't know how to pray, if you don't know how to be humble and ask for things that you need, that you don't [00:22:00] have, or if you ask improperly, the Bible will not be as wholesome as a tool for you.
Is that or am I being hard? And I also wanna know yeah, it
David Peters: makes sense and it's the tension of that is the trap of Genesis too. The trap of humanity is that you're create, we're created good. God says it's good. Lots of stuff is good. And then there's this like trap setup of the temptation.
Yeah. And and then and immediately, and I always ask people this, how long do you think Adam and Eve were in the garden before the events of this? We're not talking like normal time and space. Yeah. The story as it's told. Yeah. Some people will say weeks, days, yeah. Months, years, or they'll say three hours or two hours.
Logan M Isaac: Yeah.
David Peters: Depend on how quickly, like when you have ice cream in the fridge or freezer, how quickly you eat it,
Logan M Isaac: yeah.
David Peters: For me, like I could probably stay in that garden one or two hours before I started talking to the snake and whatnot. Yeah. And then this the first baby they [00:23:00] have immediately after Yeah.
Is teen who murdered. He's born into
Logan M Isaac: it.
David Peters: His brother and he.
Logan M Isaac: Yeah.
David Peters: And so right in the story of goodness is all this other stuff that we see around us all the time in humanity. And to me that's the tension of my inner life too. That my inner life is good. I am good. I, God created me this way, but I also have a lot of stuff in me that is not easy to put in that goodness box.
And that's where the story of. The real story of Genesis, that as it's told, always counters the, and this is not to get I dunno, maybe look at our cultural moment now. We look at we're always, I dunno how to say this, but there's, when it comes to the military, there's a problem in one part of the world.
We shouldn't deploy the military there, we should send teachers, now that's the maybe liberal position of
Logan M Isaac: yeah.
David Peters: The world is just a little sad because they're not educated [00:24:00] enough,
Logan M Isaac: yeah. Yeah. I was in JBL m the other day for the to get ready for the conference and right outside the military clothing store, there's these big posters and they don't, the military, the army does not call SF operators.
It calls them advisors to this day. Come be in as a recruiting poster for sf. 'cause first festival forces group is there and the one of the ranger bats, I can't remember. And so like, how we use language, how we play with language is a double-edged sword. An instrument can either be a weapon or a musical instrument.
And so like how we use scripture is determined by our own original sin, whatever that might be. Whatever inherited. Black ooze that kind of can get in our perception, our eyes like scales. Before we go to a break, I wanted to get your sense of do you think that military families, military service members, veterans, do you think that [00:25:00] they, by merit of their service, and I have my answer to this, but I want to hear what.
I want, I'd like to hear you reflect on does military service imbue people with a certain lens? And is that lens useful? I have my Marshall Hermeneutic. I don't, I haven't proved it or put it out there, but I think that we do. But I'd really love to hear, especially also since you're a commissioned not a commissioned officer, an ordained clergy person like you get to see both sides of that.
I'm wondering if there's. What you think that, what gifts might we be missing when we assign the name to our experiences as only pain or darkness?
David Peters: Yeah. I think every Christian or even any person who's read the Bible for 2000 years, not that they're all reading it at all those times, but who heard the story?
Just like when we see a movie, there's part of us that sort of puts ourself in that story. I was in a hospital visit this yesterday. With a very young person who was [00:26:00] reflecting on Ignatius of Loyola with me about him putting himself in the story. So
Logan M Isaac: yeah, that's right. That's
David Peters: the, that's looking at it through the lens of our experience.
I don't think we can look at anything without that lens and that lens. And as long as we don't claim that's the only way to read the Bible or something, I think it's good to look at it through your lens and and that's where we learn. Actually things that we probably didn't know about the, but that's why if you read a commentary on Genesis from 200 years ago, you'll find really true, wonderful things in almost any commentary of Genesis, except for maybe some really awful ones.
But you'll also miss a lot of stuff that you might need for your modern life today, because 200 years ago, there were different issues that people were experiencing and those commentaries were addressing. So I think, yeah, I think it's always true. And military families, people with military experience, veterans, however we categorize us should bring that experience to scripture.
And you're [00:27:00] doing that? Yeah that's we're doing it. Yeah.
Logan M Isaac: I wanted to mention that Ignatius and Spiritual Fitness is one of the chapters in Grunt, God in part two on Tradition. And now that we've talked about Lens, when we come back from the break, we're going to talk about this icon of Cain that I created with the help of ai I commissioned from ai.
So stick around, listen to a couple ads or skip through 'em, and we'll be right back with brother David Peters.
[[pause]]
Logan M Isaac: Alright, we're back with Brother David Peters, author of several books you should check out at Bookshop.org. Buy his books and support independent booksellers. David, I'm just gonna jump right into the can icon because I am, this is one of the first icons that I like commissioned with AI after I figured things out.
And here you'll see Cain is, downtrodden, you can't see his pupils. Some of the things that stick out to me he's carrying a shovel because he is told by God that the ground has cursed him and he's going to have to toil. And one of the favorite, [00:28:00] my favorite things is like in which I talk about and God is a grunt and more good news for gis the ground.
It throws some dark humor in there. Oh, you think your brother's compost? Okay, you're gonna have to work for your food now. And so he is carrying this soil and he is actually, there is no bottom half of him. He is in the ground and so he is cursed from the ground that he had messed with.
And you'll see. By the shovel, there's a star with kind of a badge. And that's to me, a reflection of the dual tasks of humanity that Cain just forwent and he disclaimed any responsibility to protect and serve, which we get into in the Joshua chapter. I'm interviewing Tobias Win Wright on just policing, and Joshua the military commander.
But here you see it's on the ground and there's little pieces missing because he said, I am, I really, my brother's shemar, my brother's keeper [00:29:00] protector. And he left out the Abba, which means work or toil or till. And his halo, it's cracked. His halo to me looks like a cut down tree. Cain, the first of humanity is a cut down tree before he could reach his full stature.
He's been cut down and even the wood is beginning to crack on his halo and you can see dark shadows behind him. And finally the. Just cross. You can't quite tell if it's a wound on his forehead or, I remember like we burn trees, they are fuel for our fires and what keep us warm. And so it's not an ash cross, but it is a cross as his head is backgrounded with a cut down tree.
Would you like me to leave that up or have you seen enough of the Yeah, I have melancholia and dark void.
David Peters: Yeah, the ground [00:30:00] driven from the ground, the man who has cultivated the plants and grown them and is yeah, not,
Logan M Isaac: yeah, his offering was of the first fruits of the ground, whereas Abel's offering was the first, the fat lings of the flock.
David Peters: Yeah. Maybe we should just tell the story real quickly of Cain and Abel. 'cause not everybody's up on Bible stories.
Logan M Isaac: Hit me with it.
David Peters: Adam and Eve, right after they leave the Garden of Eden, it says that they Adam knew his wife, a sexual euphemism.
Logan M Isaac: Oh. Yeah.
David Peters: And she conceived the first time.
And that's Cain. And Cain is born. She says, I've gotten a man from the Lord. Which is a funny thing to say. 'Cause he is a baby. Yeah. But it's maybe just male. I got a male. 'cause that's the first thing you look at when the baby comes out. That's it's a little man came outta the out of me.
That's, in the story of the innocence of Adam and Eve being lost, the awareness of their [00:31:00] reproductive issues and pain and suffering, all that comes into that story and then it Cain becomes a tiller of the soil cultivating crops.
Logan M Isaac: Before that. They did not know each other until after they are kicked out.
Is that, I wanna double check. I think that's the case. And we now have a culture that, I love the language of sex positivity because it reorients just because it happened after the fall does not make it bad. Even though we, as humanity fell, we cannot be recreated to be bad. Big issues with original sin.
If it means that we are born outta the womb bad. I think that rewrites the story, but we do not conceive and the man at least who's typically thought to. E expected to climax in order to produce children that is only seen and narrated after the fall. And so that's one of the things I pick up on.
I didn't realize like even Cain knew his [00:32:00] wife after he goes to Nod or whatever, and you're right, it's a sexual euphemism. Anyway, I want you to. Up. Good one. Sorry. Yeah.
David Peters: And even the Adam and Eve's temptation eating, the fruit has sexual overtones. Their nakedness is exposed and yeah, the loss of innocence and that is the human story when you, and it's true for violence and sex.
To me, they're flip sides of the coin. You grow up in a sense of innocence. So that's why most people say the world used to be good. Now it's bad. You were a kid,
Logan M Isaac: and you have a book on that, don't you?
David Peters: I think maybe post-traumatic God, something like that.
Logan M Isaac: I thought you had one on. Lemme
David Peters: check.
Oh God. Section war
Logan M Isaac: death letter. God, section war. Oh yeah. Check that out@bookshop.org listeners. Thank you.
David Peters: Yeah. And so this loss of innocence, and it's true, you grew up and then you find out about your own sexuality, suddenly it's revealed to you. Usually it's through some strange experience that you have.
Yeah. And then you're not innocent anymore. You hide this part of yourself. You're, [00:33:00] yeah, you're masturbating. You're like keeping that on the DL and you think you're the only one to ever do it. And you wonder, am I good? Am I bad? It feels good. Hozier
Logan M Isaac: has this awesome lyric, like the first time the fir, oh, what is it?
But basically the first time you orgasm and he's talking in terms of genesis is this bad? Is it bad? And. It's not supposed to be, and yet we've inherited, we've accumulated this corruption or darkness and we forget, like that's not how we were made, but yeah. No, I, anyway.
David Peters: Yeah. And then, and that, that's so true.
And it's the human experience. And then violence is not the same as sex, but it has that same forbidden quality to it, or, yeah, it has to. And intimacy. Find intimacy. We wanna make sure we're not just, everybody's doing it with everybody. Violence. Yeah. Yeah. Or sex. Every culture has taboos around violence and sex that are hard to explain, and they go very deep into the culture that almost without explanation, of course, you wouldn't have sex with your [00:34:00] sister.
We, we would say, yeah. Point blank. And the revulsion from that, the taboo of that is similar to taboo of violence because it is violence even though it's a whole different thing. So sex and violence have that same taboo quality, and Cain is the first. Child born into this world of their, his parents who are now awake and aware and are wearing clothing and are struggling like yeah.
Logan M Isaac: Yeah. It's a difficult metaphor, but yeah. Their eyes have been opened. Like I always think of the original sin not being murdered, but when you eat the fruit. It doesn't matter what happens magically out in the universe. It's like I now believe I have knowledge because I've been told that this thing is the tree of knowledge and your synapses and everything are exactly the same, but that's where arrogance comes in.
That's why I think humility. Is the cardinal virtue and pride or arrogance is the cardinal [00:35:00] sin because everything that follows seems to rely on the assumption that I don't need to consider other people. I don't need to consider God. I am capable of making a moral decision in isolation all by myself.
David Peters: Yeah, it's so isolating and the, anyway, so Cain is born. He has a brother that follows shortly after it says Cain tills the ground, creates, grows crops. And then his brother is a a sheep herd or goat herder. So he's taking care of animals and that does have historical or anthropological, archeological connotations.
Logan M Isaac: Yeah. Farmers, nomads versus sedentary. Yeah. But they're in the same family, which is should, we should remind ourselves that humans, we've always been in the same family. So all acts of violence are Fratricide brother against brother. Like all of 'em. Yeah. Including the people we don't know in every war and everything, which is the great horror or scandal of wars when you [00:36:00] discover that the people you're killing are a lot like you.
David Peters: When they, yeah. Families, kids, they're not like you. Yeah, that's the, anyway, so it, the, it says they are called to go sacrifice. There's no criteria for the sacrifice, given that is in the scripture. Yeah. He just
Logan M Isaac: makes, he like improvises
David Peters: and he, Cain, the older brother brings the crops.
He's grown. Abel, the younger brother, brings the lamb that he's raised and they offer these to God in some kind of burnt offering. To God. And God is pleased with Abel's offering the blood sacrifice of the animal and God is displeased with the sacrifice of Cain. Now, we, you could debate all day of Hey, he wasn't told, but neither, Adam and Eve weren't told everything either in the garden.
Yeah. So you could argue they were told things through Adam and Eve and, but anyway, because of this, anger and jealousy, we might call it or envy of Cain for [00:37:00] Abel's Acceptance By God, CA's or Abel's goodness. Cain kills his brother. It says he struck, he takes him. Is it, I have the language here, but he he says
Cain was angry and is Cain was angry the minute the sacrifice was not accepted. God looked with favor on Abel. He looked with disfavor on Cain, and Cain became angry. His face was downcast. Cain says to his brother, let's go out to the field. While they're in the field. Cain attacks his brother and kills him.
Logan M Isaac: Premeditated. Yeah.
David Peters: That's important to the story.
Logan M Isaac: Yeah.
David Peters: It's not murder fully in an American legal system unless you had some premeditation to violence or some something.
Logan M Isaac: Yeah.
David Peters: So we see the first child born in the world kills his own brother, and we can say he didn't know that was gonna happen.
Maybe we don't. It's a mystery. But yeah,
Logan M Isaac: nobody's died yet in the story. Yeah. Yeah.
David Peters: Ultimately [00:38:00] the result is the same and god has this conversation with Cain, which is nice in some ways. Yeah.
Logan M Isaac: This, it's not a fun conversation, but Yeah. God comes to Cain.
David Peters: Yeah. It's and this is where he says, where is your brother Abel?
Yeah. And then and Cain's answer is a classic. It's a zinger. We still use Am I my brother's keeper? Yeah. And not in my
Logan M Isaac: business. Yeah.
David Peters: Yeah. And then this curse is put on him. That's where the mark is put on him. That protects him. The mark. I And you have a, as a cross. I like that.
Logan M Isaac: Yeah.
How do you take the mark? There's a book that helped me situate the mark of Cain. I'm looking for it on myself. I can't find it offhand, but there's a whole like. Literary cycle history with a mark of Cain and whether it's horns and like his children mistook him for an animal in the forest and hunted him.
Or whether it's like rays of light like Moses, 'cause we'll [00:39:00] get to Moses in the next chapter. But like, how do you read the mark? I know in God is a grunt. I say like it's a mark of protection. 'cause God is pretty clear. I think. I was raised. I was raised to think it was a form of humiliation.
Everybody sees it and that's how Cain seems to interpret it. But they will see me and do what do to me what I did to my brother. But Cain says, or God says, no, no one will touch you. And the unspoken implication is like even you, you're protected from yourself. If soldiers are. Turn to Cain to understand what it means to have killed someone.
Meditated Lee, or not. Like we could say that Mark is shame, but we could also interpret it, a double-edged sword. The same difference is saying God's no, you're not. No one's going to harm you. They'll know that you have my protection and. Hopefully you understand Cain also I am protecting you, and that, that dwell I'm wondering if, what [00:40:00] were you raised to think of as the mark of Cain and what do you think is a, i Is that different from how you see it now?
And if not, how do you run that through your head?
David Peters: Yeah, I agree with you in that it is a protection. When I was in Iraq, a soldier, one of my soldiers shot somebody and killed him, and that was, he was in a guard tower. Somebody shot at him, he shot back, and the guy died. They went out there to the building and they found the dead body of this person that had shot.
And that was the end of the story. Everyone. And this guy came to talk to me. He said, everyone was congratulating me on the shot, and I was actually jealous, as a chaplain with no gun. I was like, wow, man. I could have done something like that. Maybe, wow, this guy's. But then he said he got real quiet and he said I think, I don't know I don't know why they were congratulating me.
I feel like I crossed a line or something. He said he mumbled that out. Like in a,
Logan M Isaac: how old was this guy?
David Peters: Yeah, soldier's [00:41:00] age, twenties, probably.
Logan M Isaac: I I guess what ranked maybe
David Peters: like 1920 specialist? Yeah.
Logan M Isaac: Okay.
David Peters: Yeah. I don't know his age. And, and I wouldn't share it anyway 'cause of the time and date and, Stanford?
Logan M Isaac: Yeah.
David Peters: There's do you think
Logan M Isaac: he really didn't, I was 22 or 20. I turned 23 in Iraq, and if somebody had congratulated me, I would've known immediately. Like that's, that fits in. Infantry culture and it wouldn't have been, no, I'll speak as myself in Iraq. I was like, I'm trying to be a good person.
How do I do that? And I got like people that my unit didn't like it when they learned that I didn't fire in return during an ambush. But tactically that was actually called for anyway. Him saying, I don't know why they congratulated me. Feels off, and that's why I asked is age.
David Peters: I, and I'm probably misquoting him.
Okay. Paraphrasing of the I don't know why they did that [00:42:00] or I don't, more of I don't like it,
Logan M Isaac: okay.
David Peters: Similar to when I came back from Iraq and went through the Dallas airport. Every was cheering. There was this big group of people cheering and I thought like, why are they cheering?
That was my first initial thought, huh. They shouldn't be cheering for me, for us. I this and that was the shame part of it. Like the,
Logan M Isaac: yeah,
David Peters: this guy was sharing it with me, the sort of maternal figure in the unit so that, he probably was pretty happy that his friends were congratulating him on some level.
Yeah. But there was some, and that was where I, and I didn't know what to say to him, and I just listened. I didn't say you're just doing your job kind of thing. Although that is a true answer. Yeah. And it's that idea of Cain because he's done this thing to his brother.
And what this soldier did is not the same thing as Cain, morally we would legally and all these different things. Yeah. The essential issue of the essence is
Logan M Isaac: there.
David Peters: The Civil War veterans would call seeing the elephant. They would have this, they'd train, they'd march around, they'd shoot their guns, [00:43:00] but until you're in a battle, you didn't see the elephant.
And then you saw the elephant. And that cross, it's same with the sex thing in, in the Garden and Adam and Eve, like there's thinking about sex and then there's the experience. Yeah. There's thinking about violence, which we think about violence all the time. We think about sex all the time.
Logan M Isaac: Yeah.
David Peters: But the experience of it is the real thing. And it's after that experience. And that's where I think that now they know good and evil. Now they've had the experience. Yeah. They
Logan M Isaac: know.
David Peters: It's a knowing that we always say, I wish I didn't know that about that celebrity when they get Yeah. I wish I could unsee that that we talk about with trauma a lot.
So the, this protective mark of Cain is, to me it has something to do with the image of God too or God's presence. This guy belongs to God don't do anything to him. And the truth is, all of us look like God. We are in [00:44:00] the image of God. Yeah. So the problem with we bear
Logan M Isaac: the essence of God, just like the essence of killing and the essence of sex.
Yeah. One, I don't wanna interrupt. I think you're on a very important tangent. I want you to finish one, one last thing of, the problem with murder is that it, it destroys the image of God in as another person's life that God made. Yeah. That seems to be the problem of Cain and Abel of killing Abel.
David Peters: And that, and so that protective mark seems to me to be like, and I think a cross would be a beautiful sort of retroactive moment that a symbol on his head. Or the name of God, which these are, in the story, pre literate people maybe, but
Logan M Isaac: yeah.
David Peters: But, or something else that we don't even, can't even conceive of.
Or maybe just the face of God, which that's another thing I don't even know, but there is a face of God talked about in the Bible.
Logan M Isaac: Yeah.
David Peters: Kinder parts. And
Logan M Isaac: there's something in that knowing of knowing an experience, like [00:45:00] it's a sexual euphemism, but it's also. I have not killed, or to my knowledge, I was an artillery man.
I did a lot of artillery. It's, I probably did, but I do not know. I do not know. And I think within military and veteran culture, like that is a real thing. And I wonder if the mark of God, maybe it isn't like an actual, like symbol. I talk about in the book how typos and stereotypes and cliches, tropos, they're like.
Embedded. It's like embossing on someone's soul. If you destroy a soul, an image of God that sits with you, you carry it. And people who know. Who have heard the truth of your experience, which might include having killed another human being and being in fear of that mark, and yet also the distance that it creates can be a both a bad thing and a good thing.
The bad thing being like a. The togetherness is broken down and you [00:46:00] need to restore that somehow, and yet that isolation to, to preserve the taboo, to preserve the essence or the dignity or the likeness of God in that soul that is no longer here. It's like a both and I love that knowing, and I'll close with the conscience and conscientious objector.
I learned the Latin literally means like with knowledge, you can't pretend you don't know, except with like mental illness and dementia, Alzheimer's at the end of life. You can't say you don't know. Once you know it's there and it's there for good, it's a mark. But yeah, I the. Not conflation, but the intermixing with sex I think is really, yeah, it's really important element that I didn't get into.
And God is a grunt. And I hope people pick up your book death Letter, God, sex and War at bookshop.org. David, do you have anything left that you want to share with our listeners before we we call it in and shut it down.
David Peters: I don't always like my face, and [00:47:00] as I get older, I look at my face and I say, I'm looking old, or, our faces are, but in, in warfare since the dawn of time, people have been changing their faces to paint them to put big hats on helmets, face masks we wore Yeah.
Glasses in rack. Like you do all these things to, to, so that image is not there, which I don't know if the face is the ultimate image of God, but it seems like. There's something to that. 'cause Jesus even uses that example with a coin, which has a face on it. You know whose image is on the coin?
Yeah. You read. So there's something about our faces that are part of that, like beauty of humanity that we experience relationship in. I think maybe a, for me just to say like, whenever I feel shame, I've gotta say. My face is like looking at God and God's looking at me. And God's not ashamed of me.
No matter what I've been through or what I've done or feel or anything like that, the truth of [00:48:00] life is that God is looking at me. God's favor is looking at me and I'm looking at God. And when I look at God, the other stuff kinda gets a lot better.
Logan M Isaac: And that was Cain's fear. I will be driven from your face.
I will not be in your presence. And God argues back, which suggests no, there's nowhere you can go or you won't find me. And some in the Vietnam generation, like rightly believe, like God is not in war. And I don't know. I don't, I, it's hard for me to accept that, and I don't think I do, but I absolutely see where like, how could God be in all this, but man, it's good. God is not ashamed of you. If anything, if you need a mark, you write it on your forehead. God, you're not alone. God is not ashamed of you. David, thanks for taking your time. I love it. Thanks for being with us. If you wanna learn more about him you can Google him, Reverend David Peters and get any [00:49:00] number of his incredible books at Bookshop.org/shop/pewpewhq.
This has been Logan Isaac, and David Peters for the first installment of the Grunt God season Past. Thank you for listening. Thank you, David, for being here with me. Any last words?
David Peters: I just I love you all and and I love you, Logan. Thank you for being my friend through all this. Thank you.
Logan M Isaac: Thank you.
