Dennis talks with psychologist Richard Beck about his latest book, The Book of Love. Richard is a professor of psychology at Abilene Christian University and a Senior Fellow of the Saunders Center for Joy and Human Flourishing. The book weaves Richard’s own faith journey together with the Hebrew Scriptures, the Gospels, and the early church. The conversation asks what it looks like to read Scripture through the lens of love, and why that is so hard when anxiety about “getting it wrong” sits underneath so many biblical arguments. Richard writes for both conservatives and progressives, so listeners on either side will probably hear something they like and something they don’t.
In This Episode:
- Grace for bad readers of Scripture (14:46). We expect to reach heaven as sinners, so why would God be graceless toward our biblical misinterpretations? Dennis and Richard discuss extending grace to those who read differently, on both sides.
- The cross as a theophany of love (18:50). Richard argues against penal substitutionary atonement while pushing back on a progressive view that skips over the cross. The cross, he says, delivers two messages at once, judgment on human sin and love from the foundation of the world, and the parable of the prodigal son holds both.
- Prophetic self-criticism (30:32). Israel put its own worst failures into Scripture. Richard says that courage is stunning, and wonders where we have lost it, since most prophetic speech is aimed at God’s own people.
- Acts 10 and Acts 15 (34:59). Richard connects Peter’s vision and the Jerusalem council to his first book, Unclean, and to the psychology of purity and disgust. He draws on the Wesleyan quadrilateral to show how experience can shape how we read, noting that at the council “the stories won that day.”
- Fruits of the Spirit as coordinates (49:18). Discernment about where God is at work is not vague, Richard says, and it cuts both ways. He points to Paul’s call to let judgment begin with the house of God and says, “You are the one being evaluated here. Stop evaluating other people.”
- The current moment (53:45). Richard offers a critique for each side of the political aisle. For the Christian right, he points to divine solidarity with the oppressed, the teachings of Jesus, and pluralism as a sign of the kingdom. For the progressive side, he points to the risks of reducing Scripture to social justice and the need for forgiveness, reconciliation, and hope.
Links
- The Book of Love by Richard Beck
- Richard’s Substack, Experimental Theology
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00:00:24 --> 00:00:29 Welcome, everyone, to Church and Main, a podcast for people interested in the
00:00:29 --> 00:00:31 intersection of faith, politics, and culture.
00:00:31 --> 00:00:33 I'm Dennis Sanders, your host.
00:00:34 --> 00:00:38 So when I was growing up in Michigan back in the 1980s, one of the things I
00:00:38 --> 00:00:43 did a lot, especially in church, and of course I went to a religious school,
00:00:43 --> 00:00:47 is I memorized Bible verses.
00:00:47 --> 00:00:52 And it did a good job because I can still remember a lot of those verses to this day.
00:00:53 --> 00:00:58 And the thing that I remember growing up is how we viewed the Bible.
00:00:58 --> 00:01:07 The Bible, I mean, as a kid, it was a book of stories, but it was also considered a rule book of sorts.
00:01:08 --> 00:01:12 And being young, I accepted this up to a point.
00:01:13 --> 00:01:17 And when I say I accepted up to a point, it was interesting because the verses
00:01:17 --> 00:01:19 that I memorized, especially those from Romans,
00:01:21 --> 00:01:28 weren't as much a rule as much as it was describing who God was,
00:01:28 --> 00:01:35 that God was less about the rules and more about loving, imperfect, and sinful humans.
00:01:35 --> 00:01:43 My favorite verse that I learned 40-some years ago and still remember to this day is Romans 5.8.
00:01:44 --> 00:01:49 But God commended his love toward us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.
00:01:53 --> 00:01:57 So, is the Bible really a rule book telling us what's permissible and what isn't?
00:01:59 --> 00:02:07 I can't rule. I can say that it's not that it isn't a rule book.
00:02:07 --> 00:02:14 It's not that it's not a book that has some morals, but that's not the whole
00:02:14 --> 00:02:19 view. In fact, I would go as far as saying it's not the view of the Bible.
00:02:20 --> 00:02:27 Psychologist Richard Beck believes that the overarching view is that God is love.
00:02:27 --> 00:02:36 And the book that we hear in our churches that tell us about God's story is really a book of love.
00:02:38 --> 00:02:45 And so, in this episode, I am talking with author Richard Beck on his latest book, The Book of Love.
00:02:45 --> 00:02:52 The book frames an autobiography of Beck's own faith journey with an exploration
00:02:52 --> 00:02:56 of the Hebrew Scriptures, the Gospels, and the writings of the early church.
00:02:58 --> 00:03:02 And in the book, he addresses important questions about biblical violence,
00:03:02 --> 00:03:05 human dignity, suffering, and salvation.
00:03:06 --> 00:03:11 And especially in this episode, we're going to be talking about especially two,
00:03:13 --> 00:03:21 views, and one of them is Jesus' death on the cross, and then also in Acts 10.
00:03:21 --> 00:03:25 And I think that those two are going to be an interesting way of how we look at the Bible.
00:03:26 --> 00:03:34 And they show a God that is a God of love that has loved all of us from the beginning of time.
00:03:35 --> 00:03:41 So a little bit about Richard Beck. Richard is a professor in the Department
00:03:41 --> 00:03:46 of Psychology at Abilene Christian University and is the Senior Fellow of the
00:03:46 --> 00:03:48 Saunders Center for Joy and Human Flourishing.
00:03:49 --> 00:03:54 He also teaches in Doctor of Ministry programs at Fuller Theological Seminary
00:03:54 --> 00:03:56 and Abilene Christian University.
00:03:57 --> 00:04:01 Besides the Book of Love, he is also the author of several books,
00:04:01 --> 00:04:06 including The Shape of Joy and actually one that is one of my favorites, Hunting Magic Eels.
00:04:07 --> 00:04:13 He is married to Jana, who is a high school theater teacher, and they have two sons.
00:04:14 --> 00:04:20 They attend Highland Church of Christ in Abilene, Texas, where Richard serves
00:04:20 --> 00:04:23 as an elder and adult faith Bible class leader.
00:04:24 --> 00:04:28 And lastly, and I think also very importantly.
00:04:30 --> 00:04:36 Richard serves as a prison chaplain at the Maximum Security,
00:04:37 --> 00:04:43 French Robertson Unit and has written and spoken extensively about his experiences,
00:04:43 --> 00:04:45 working among the incarcerated.
00:04:46 --> 00:04:51 So with all that, here is my interview with Richard Beck.
00:05:09 --> 00:05:13 Well, I want to welcome you on to the podcast, Richard, and I always like to
00:05:13 --> 00:05:18 start off by knowing a little bit about you and your faith background.
00:05:19 --> 00:05:22 Yeah. No, excited to be with you, Dennis.
00:05:23 --> 00:05:29 My faith background, I grew up in the Churches of Christ in western Pennsylvania.
00:05:29 --> 00:05:32 Erie, PA is where I grew up. A little tiny church of about 100 members.
00:05:32 --> 00:05:37 And if anybody knows about the Churches of Christ, it's a branch of the American
00:05:37 --> 00:05:43 Restoration movement and it's the more sectarian and people would even say maybe
00:05:43 --> 00:05:45 fundamentalist aspect of the restoration movement.
00:05:45 --> 00:05:50 You're disciples, you're the more progressive ecumenical wing of it.
00:05:50 --> 00:05:53 But the Church of Christ have gone through a lot of change over the last couple
00:05:53 --> 00:05:58 of generations. So I think there's still that sectarian side of our denomination,
00:05:58 --> 00:06:03 but then there's the more ecumenical side and that's kind of my sandbox.
00:06:04 --> 00:06:07 I'm actually not a Bible scholar or a theologian, I'm a psychologist.
00:06:07 --> 00:06:09 I had a call to the ministry early on.
00:06:09 --> 00:06:13 Actually, my latest book, The Book of Love, I talk about a sermon I delivered
00:06:13 --> 00:06:20 to my denomination in college that didn't go very well, and that pushed me away from pulpit ministry,
00:06:21 --> 00:06:24 into something else. And so that's when I pivoted to psychology.
00:06:26 --> 00:06:34 But my work in psychology is to kind of integrate faith, theology, and social sciences.
00:06:34 --> 00:06:37 And so that's kind of what I spend my time exploring. And so when people read
00:06:37 --> 00:06:42 my stuff, they'll see me coming at things a little bit from a psychological
00:06:42 --> 00:06:45 perspective to get into theological topics. So that's kind of my church background,
00:06:45 --> 00:06:47 ecumenical, Churches of Christ.
00:06:47 --> 00:06:53 And my writing is from the psychological advantage, thinking about the life of faith. Okay.
00:06:54 --> 00:06:58 Well, I wanted to talk to you today about your latest book, which is called The Book of Love.
00:06:59 --> 00:07:08 And you get into talking about hermeneutics and kind of how we understand the Bible.
00:07:08 --> 00:07:10 What led you to write the book?
00:07:12 --> 00:07:20 Well, like I said, the opening story I tell in the introduction of the book is trying to,
00:07:21 --> 00:07:27 and this would be back in the 80s, to have a hermeneutical conversation with
00:07:27 --> 00:07:34 a group of people in a denomination that wasn't even aware that they had a hermeneutical lens.
00:07:34 --> 00:07:37 And by that, just an interpretive take on scripture.
00:07:37 --> 00:07:44 So we were a group where the online meme the bible says it i believe it that
00:07:44 --> 00:07:46 settles it kind of a plain sense hermeneutic,
00:07:47 --> 00:07:52 and so what i discovered then is to even entertain alternative interpretations
00:07:52 --> 00:07:57 of scripture you have to kind of begin a layer back by even just stepping into
00:07:57 --> 00:07:59 hermeneutical self-awareness to just,
00:08:00 --> 00:08:04 realize that there are many different ways of interpreting Scripture,
00:08:04 --> 00:08:07 and you're invested in a particular one.
00:08:08 --> 00:08:14 But if you can't even address those preconceptions and assumptions,
00:08:15 --> 00:08:20 then the whole conversation of exploring and growing in the faith gets stalled.
00:08:21 --> 00:08:24 In kind of angry debates about what is obvious or not obvious.
00:08:25 --> 00:08:30 And so, the first part of the book, before you even get into this conversation
00:08:30 --> 00:08:35 about how to weed it, you got to kind of deal with some of those background assumptions.
00:08:35 --> 00:08:40 And I think this is mainly more for people who come to the book from a more
00:08:40 --> 00:08:44 conservative, evangelical perspective.
00:08:44 --> 00:08:48 I think there's a little less hermeneutical self-awareness on that side.
00:08:48 --> 00:08:51 There is still that kind of plain sense hermeneutic.
00:08:51 --> 00:08:55 I don't think it's as much needed for the liberal progressive side,
00:08:55 --> 00:08:59 especially those who've undergone deconstruction, because deconstruction kind of just is a,
00:09:00 --> 00:09:05 hermeneutical journey to try to explore different ways of reading scripture
00:09:05 --> 00:09:08 in light of science or changing political views or whatever.
00:09:08 --> 00:09:11 So I do think there's hermeneutical self-awareness on the progressive side.
00:09:11 --> 00:09:17 So I think they have different issues than the conservatives,
00:09:18 --> 00:09:20 but the book is written for both sides.
00:09:20 --> 00:09:24 But that hermeneutical piece at the start, I think, is more for the beginning,
00:09:25 --> 00:09:29 questioner about Scripture or even people kind of a really settled take on Scripture
00:09:29 --> 00:09:32 that's a pretty hard take and not willing to entertain questions.
00:09:33 --> 00:09:37 It kind of reminds me of the old saying about fish not knowing that they're wet,
00:09:39 --> 00:09:45 or even not knowing that we all have kind of a certain bias of how we look at
00:09:45 --> 00:09:47 Scripture, how we think about things,
00:09:47 --> 00:09:51 and that this book, it sounds, it tries to help people understand,
00:09:52 --> 00:09:56 we all look at the Bible from a certain standpoint, a certain viewpoint,
00:09:56 --> 00:10:02 and we have to be honest about that as we look into Scripture. Right.
00:10:03 --> 00:10:09 And then that's where my psychology comes in, because I do think it's not just
00:10:09 --> 00:10:12 people being ignorant or stubborn.
00:10:13 --> 00:10:17 Because I think it feels that way to people who are trying to have a conversation
00:10:17 --> 00:10:18 about a different reading.
00:10:18 --> 00:10:21 You pick any of the issues that we fight about,
00:10:22 --> 00:10:25 that when you're on the opposite side, it can seem like this person is just
00:10:25 --> 00:10:30 stubbornly unwilling to admit that there's another way to look at this,
00:10:30 --> 00:10:33 another way to connect the dots. And I don't think that's what it is.
00:10:34 --> 00:10:38 I argue in the first chapter, once I kind of say, hey, everybody kind of has
00:10:38 --> 00:10:42 a hermeneutic, let me welcome you into that.
00:10:43 --> 00:10:44 Don't play the ostrich.
00:10:46 --> 00:10:50 Stale the chapter. Don't be an ostrich. Don't stick your head in the hermeneutical sand. Admit it.
00:10:50 --> 00:10:55 But the minute you admit it, that raises issues of anxiety.
00:10:55 --> 00:11:00 Because if I am admitting, and I think anybody who's been on a journey of deconstruction,
00:11:00 --> 00:11:05 sometimes this happens in your own faith exploration. Sometimes it happens a
00:11:05 --> 00:11:09 lot in seminary where you begin realizing, oh, oh, wow.
00:11:09 --> 00:11:15 There's uh christian smith calls it pervasive hermeneutical pluralism which
00:11:15 --> 00:11:19 means just like it's a pervasive i mean there's so many reads and you can kind of see the,
00:11:20 --> 00:11:23 the fragmentation and and and
00:11:23 --> 00:11:31 then the anxiety is well which one of these is like the the truth and uh,
00:11:32 --> 00:11:36 you know a generation ago we called it the you know a post-modernism like is
00:11:36 --> 00:11:38 any of these you know how do we know any of these are true?
00:11:39 --> 00:11:44 And, and that then raises a concern about making a mistake.
00:11:45 --> 00:11:52 And thus, so I, I, I use the theory of what's called attachment theory in psychology.
00:11:52 --> 00:11:55 And I've done a lot of, I've done a lot of empirical research on this.
00:11:55 --> 00:12:00 So it's not just in theory, but I've done research on what's called attachment to God.
00:12:00 --> 00:12:03 And if you know anything about attachment theory, it's kind of the close,
00:12:03 --> 00:12:07 affectional bond you have with a parent. Well, We have a similar dynamic with God.
00:12:08 --> 00:12:11 And when that attachment is good, we call it a secure attachment.
00:12:11 --> 00:12:14 You're pretty confident that the attachment figure is reliable,
00:12:14 --> 00:12:16 is going to love you kind of unconditionally.
00:12:17 --> 00:12:20 But when we have anxious attachments in our love relationships,
00:12:20 --> 00:12:25 and this applies to God as well, then there's this separation anxiety.
00:12:27 --> 00:12:34 A rejection sensitivity. And so once you ask people to step into this hermeneutical
00:12:34 --> 00:12:38 conversation, their anxieties start rising because they feel like,
00:12:38 --> 00:12:40 well, I don't know what the truth is and what if I make this wrong?
00:12:40 --> 00:12:44 And they got that attachment figure in the background, a rumbling God kind of
00:12:44 --> 00:12:47 going, hey, you better get this right because if you get this wrong,
00:12:47 --> 00:12:49 then you're going to be damned.
00:12:51 --> 00:12:55 So, there's a deeper, I think, to read the Bible as a book of love,
00:12:55 --> 00:12:59 there's a deeper healing that has to occur at the level of the psychological
00:12:59 --> 00:13:03 attachment to God, where our attachment to God is secure.
00:13:04 --> 00:13:09 And that security creates what psychologists would call a secure base of exploration.
00:13:09 --> 00:13:13 In fact, I've actually done research on this where we assess the attachment
00:13:13 --> 00:13:19 of college students, secure or anxious, and their willingness to engage in theological
00:13:19 --> 00:13:21 questioning or biblical exploration.
00:13:22 --> 00:13:27 And I've shown that the ones that have a secure attachment are more likely to
00:13:27 --> 00:13:29 explore and ask questions.
00:13:29 --> 00:13:32 Not to the detriment of their orthodoxy. We also measured that.
00:13:32 --> 00:13:34 They were still orthodox.
00:13:34 --> 00:13:39 But they were willing to at least expand and explore because they had the security.
00:13:39 --> 00:13:44 And those that were anxious, yeah, were maybe orthodox, but were really unwilling
00:13:44 --> 00:13:49 to even, you know, ask a question outside the bounds of that security.
00:13:49 --> 00:13:53 So they didn't have that secure base of exploration. They couldn't explore because of the anxiety.
00:13:54 --> 00:13:57 And so that's kind of a bit of the early psychology in the book.
00:13:57 --> 00:14:00 Like, hey, these are some big issues we got to deal before we even get into
00:14:00 --> 00:14:02 the hermeneutical chapters of the book.
00:14:03 --> 00:14:07 We got to deal with hermeneutical self-awareness and then our attachment anxieties
00:14:07 --> 00:14:09 once we step into that awareness.
00:14:11 --> 00:14:17 That reminds me of something that you wrote in the book about basically atonement
00:14:17 --> 00:14:20 and talking a little bit about,
00:14:21 --> 00:14:26 the ways that you frame it early on is using Jonathan Edwards' sermon,
00:14:27 --> 00:14:29 Sinners in the Hand of an Angry God.
00:14:29 --> 00:14:36 And that if you have that kind of understanding of God, that makes it very hard to,
00:14:38 --> 00:14:41 you kind of have this hermeneutic where you do have to get it right,
00:14:41 --> 00:14:44 because if you don't, well.
00:14:46 --> 00:14:47 That's sermon.
00:14:48 --> 00:14:53 And so it's that kind of sense of struggling with that.
00:14:53 --> 00:15:01 I mean, it feels like in a lot of ways it boils down to having what almost is a hermeneutic of grace,
00:15:01 --> 00:15:07 of knowing that we are going to mess up sometimes or get it wrong,
00:15:07 --> 00:15:13 but that there is a God of love out there that's not ready to pitch us into hell.
00:15:15 --> 00:15:19 Yeah, no, I think that's well said. I think fundamentally behind every question
00:15:19 --> 00:15:24 we ever discern hermeneutically, we're really just discerning this background question.
00:15:26 --> 00:15:29 Is God a God of grace? Or is he going to kind of play some sort of last minute
00:15:29 --> 00:15:32 gotcha when we get to the pearly gates?
00:15:32 --> 00:15:37 And what I find kind of odd sometimes is the way we're really willing to admit
00:15:37 --> 00:15:42 that from a moral perspective, like I think most of us understand grace as a
00:15:42 --> 00:15:46 moral thing, like I am not a perfect person and I'm going to get up to heaven,
00:15:47 --> 00:15:50 with a very mixed moral portfolio.
00:15:50 --> 00:15:53 A lot of regrets, right? A lot of things.
00:15:53 --> 00:15:56 A lot of things I broke and never got the chance to fix.
00:15:57 --> 00:16:00 And yet, when we get to scripture...
00:16:02 --> 00:16:08 It's almost like a graceless expectation, you know, like, no, you got that wrong.
00:16:09 --> 00:16:14 You know, like you've interpreted that wrong and therefore it's,
00:16:14 --> 00:16:16 it's a damnable offense.
00:16:16 --> 00:16:23 And so I do find that a weird asymmetry where the message, like in evangelical
00:16:23 --> 00:16:27 spaces, you know, they're good on the message of grace.
00:16:27 --> 00:16:30 You know, even the reforming, that's one thing about the reform Calvinistic
00:16:30 --> 00:16:32 perspective. Even though I don't like a lot of the theology,
00:16:32 --> 00:16:35 I appreciate what they're trying to do. They're just trying to like preach a
00:16:35 --> 00:16:38 message of grace that is so massive.
00:16:39 --> 00:16:43 And so I applaud them for that. And yet, then when you get over to the biblical
00:16:43 --> 00:16:47 issue and people read the Bible a little differently than them,
00:16:47 --> 00:16:50 then they become like really judgmental. Like, oh, no, no, that's going to get.
00:16:51 --> 00:16:57 So I do wonder about that, about what it is psychologically that we all know
00:16:57 --> 00:16:59 we're going to get to heaven as sinners. Yeah.
00:17:00 --> 00:17:03 But we're also going to get to heaven as bad readers of scripture.
00:17:04 --> 00:17:07 We're going to, right? Like nobody agrees. So somebody's wrong.
00:17:08 --> 00:17:10 But why do we think then God would somehow...
00:17:13 --> 00:17:20 Be graceless towards, you know, theological, biblical misinterpretations.
00:17:21 --> 00:17:28 And to be clear, I mean, because I don't think anybody reaches a biblical interpretation out of malevolent,
00:17:30 --> 00:17:35 desire or a willful disobedience. I mean, they get there because they're trying to be faithful,
00:17:38 --> 00:17:43 to that particular perspective. And that's kind of why I have a lot of grace.
00:17:43 --> 00:17:46 Like, listen, I grew up in a very conservative space. And even though I viscerally,
00:17:46 --> 00:17:54 you know, vigorously disagree with many interpretations of scripture to my right, I get it.
00:17:55 --> 00:18:01 You know, I get where they're coming from. I don't agree, but I like I see how
00:18:01 --> 00:18:03 they were raised. I see how they connect the dots.
00:18:06 --> 00:18:07 So I get it.
00:18:10 --> 00:18:13 And so I'm not going to throw them under the bus. You know, I think they're
00:18:13 --> 00:18:16 trying to do the best they can, even though I might disagree with them.
00:18:16 --> 00:18:20 And so if I can have grace for them and God's grace is much greater,
00:18:20 --> 00:18:25 you know, than mine, then I think he's going to have grace.
00:18:25 --> 00:18:28 But I would also ask the conservative readers to extend the same grace to people
00:18:28 --> 00:18:32 who are reading it kind of in a more progressive, liberal way, you know, as well.
00:18:33 --> 00:18:38 They're following their conscience and where they think Christ is calling them as best they can.
00:18:39 --> 00:18:43 That's a little far afield of the book, but I do think your point about grace
00:18:43 --> 00:18:49 and its role in doctrinal or even, you know, these biblical questions I think is an important one.
00:18:50 --> 00:18:54 One of the things that is interesting that you bring up in the book is this
00:18:54 --> 00:19:02 whole concept of atonement and how conservatives and progressives view it.
00:19:04 --> 00:19:09 And how kind of both kind of can fall short on that.
00:19:10 --> 00:19:15 Yeah. Would you kind of be able to kind of explain a little bit more about that?
00:19:16 --> 00:19:20 Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so again, you know, I'm writing a book.
00:19:21 --> 00:19:26 Maybe this was foolish of me, like with two audiences in mind.
00:19:26 --> 00:19:29 I think most books about how to read scripture are kind of playing to their
00:19:29 --> 00:19:30 audience in their echo chamber.
00:19:31 --> 00:19:36 And as I'm writing the book, I'm kind of thinking about my most liberal,
00:19:36 --> 00:19:43 deconstructing friends and like, hey, here's how you can read the Bible better as a book of love.
00:19:44 --> 00:19:47 But I'm also thinking about where I've come from and from more conservative,
00:19:48 --> 00:19:53 even the evangelical fundamentalist space and how they could read the Bible as a book of love.
00:19:53 --> 00:19:57 And sometimes that involves like alternating chapters. Like here's a chapter
00:19:57 --> 00:20:01 that I think kind of moves towards a progressive concern. And then the next
00:20:01 --> 00:20:08 chapter will follow with something more that I think conservatives and evangelicals need to hear.
00:20:08 --> 00:20:12 Which means I think I'm never going to get a five-star review because I feel
00:20:12 --> 00:20:15 like just when you agree with me, you're going to flip it to the next chapter.
00:20:15 --> 00:20:18 And somebody's going to like take a star off because like, I don't like that
00:20:18 --> 00:20:22 part of the book. So the joke I've been telling people is like,
00:20:22 --> 00:20:24 you will like half of the book.
00:20:25 --> 00:20:29 Like half the book. But in the atonement chapter, that's one of the chapters
00:20:29 --> 00:20:33 where I'm trying to do both at once, okay?
00:20:34 --> 00:20:36 And I don't know if I'm successful, but I'm not.
00:20:38 --> 00:20:43 But it's an attempt to, I think, so some of my chapters are just sharing the
00:20:43 --> 00:20:47 riches of the biblical scholarship, but some of the chapters I think are like
00:20:47 --> 00:20:51 creative. And this is one that I think is kind of creative.
00:20:52 --> 00:20:58 And what I want to say to the conservative side.
00:21:00 --> 00:21:05 Is what's called penal substitutionary atonement, the idea that,
00:21:06 --> 00:21:14 the wrath of God is like stuck on us and God can't save us unless there's some
00:21:14 --> 00:21:18 sort of sacrificial mechanism or switch that gets flipped.
00:21:18 --> 00:21:24 And my argument is that that's just a very pagan view of God.
00:21:24 --> 00:21:29 Like God does not experience internal conflict. There is no conflict between,
00:21:29 --> 00:21:33 his justice and his love, between his holiness and his mercy.
00:21:34 --> 00:21:39 According to the church fathers, all of those words are synonyms of love, right?
00:21:40 --> 00:21:43 So for them, I'm trying to.
00:21:46 --> 00:21:52 Deal with that. view that viewpoint but on the progressive side um,
00:21:53 --> 00:21:58 i i think what they do is either they don't either really look at the cross
00:21:58 --> 00:22:00 at all they find it a bit scandalous,
00:22:01 --> 00:22:05 and would rather just focus on jesus's ethical teachings and so there's this
00:22:05 --> 00:22:08 kind of bloody thing that happens at the end of the story that you're like i'm
00:22:08 --> 00:22:10 not quite sure about all that,
00:22:11 --> 00:22:15 um because of all the atonement triggers that they have around it.
00:22:16 --> 00:22:23 Um, but, but I try to argue the book. No, I mean, there is something about the human predicament.
00:22:23 --> 00:22:28 And I would even say human sin that comes into view in the cross.
00:22:28 --> 00:22:33 You're not seeing a sacrificial fix, but there is, I call it a theophany,
00:22:33 --> 00:22:37 which is a tech, which is like a fancy word for a divine revelation.
00:22:37 --> 00:22:42 So the cross is a theophany of love. And the theophany of love is bivalent.
00:22:42 --> 00:22:46 It has two takes. On the one hand, it is a grievous indictment.
00:22:46 --> 00:22:48 Like here's what human sin has wrought.
00:22:49 --> 00:22:55 And here's where human sin stands in light of the holiness of God. And it is dismaying.
00:22:55 --> 00:23:00 I mean, so we stand there kind of stricken at the foot of the cross.
00:23:00 --> 00:23:04 It's the same kind of strickenness you see in Acts 2, where Peter preaches the
00:23:04 --> 00:23:06 first sermon and they hear what they've done.
00:23:07 --> 00:23:14 And they're just like, oh my, like, this is, they look around like, this is bad, you know?
00:23:14 --> 00:23:17 And that's the first, you know, like, this is bad.
00:23:17 --> 00:23:22 And I think progressives need to hear that. There is a kind of sign of contradiction.
00:23:22 --> 00:23:27 Contradiction uh this is from the infancy narratives of christ where this he
00:23:27 --> 00:23:33 will be a sign of contradiction a sign that will be like so it comes in as a kind of judgment and yet,
00:23:33 --> 00:23:37 and this is where i think progressives do well by by by valiant symbol it's
00:23:37 --> 00:23:39 also at the very same time,
00:23:40 --> 00:23:44 uh a symbol of and yet and yet despite all of that,
00:23:45 --> 00:23:48 you're loved and and.
00:23:51 --> 00:23:55 Because Christ dies for us while we were yet sinners, while we were enemies.
00:23:56 --> 00:24:00 And it's paradoxical because Paul says, right, while we were enemies,
00:24:00 --> 00:24:02 we were reconciled. Well, that doesn't make any sense. Like,
00:24:02 --> 00:24:04 how can you be a reconciled enemy?
00:24:04 --> 00:24:06 And the answer is that by valence, you were an enemy of God,
00:24:06 --> 00:24:09 yet God, you were reconciled.
00:24:09 --> 00:24:14 So, to use language from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, if you lean too much into the
00:24:14 --> 00:24:18 strickenness and the judgment and the like, this is the penal substitutionary
00:24:18 --> 00:24:23 frame, like this is what you deserve, death, then that becomes.
00:24:24 --> 00:24:29 You know, that God's this monster that, you know, but I think if you turn it
00:24:29 --> 00:24:33 into the progressive side and it's just like God loves you, then you miss,
00:24:33 --> 00:24:35 well, why this bloody display?
00:24:36 --> 00:24:39 You know, couldn't he just wrote like a valentine in the clouds?
00:24:39 --> 00:24:44 I love you, humanity. Like there's something grievous about this Valentine's
00:24:44 --> 00:24:48 Day card that warrants attention too.
00:24:49 --> 00:24:55 Because if it's just this, I love you, then it becomes this Bonhoeffer call like cheap grace.
00:24:55 --> 00:25:02 So I'm trying to preach to both sides and say, you need both of those and hold
00:25:02 --> 00:25:06 together. As we stand at the cross, you're hearing two messages simultaneously.
00:25:06 --> 00:25:11 The strickenness one, like your sin stands judged at this foot.
00:25:11 --> 00:25:15 But yet, at the very same time, you have been loved from the foundation of the world.
00:25:16 --> 00:25:18 Even despite all this, you've been reconciled.
00:25:18 --> 00:25:23 And I think the clearest narrative way to preach that is just the parable of the prodigal son.
00:25:25 --> 00:25:26 The father's love...
00:25:28 --> 00:25:33 Doesn't change. It's constant. And the son journeys out into a far country and
00:25:33 --> 00:25:35 comes back. And when he comes back, he's stricken.
00:25:37 --> 00:25:41 When his own sin comes into view, he's dismayed and repentant.
00:25:42 --> 00:25:45 And so he wants to come back and go like, I'm so sorry, let me fix it.
00:25:45 --> 00:25:49 And the father's like, you don't need to fix it. Like, welcome home, you know.
00:25:51 --> 00:25:55 But it's important that he gets to that point, you know, of being stricken.
00:25:55 --> 00:25:57 So it's a bivalent story.
00:25:57 --> 00:25:58 But importantly for me, for the
00:25:58 --> 00:26:03 conservative side, the father is just waiting for the son to come home.
00:26:03 --> 00:26:08 That's it. That's all he wants to do. So that message of grace,
00:26:08 --> 00:26:12 like the secure attachment, like you can always come home. God's not mad.
00:26:14 --> 00:26:17 Yeah, I think one of the things, because you talk about, especially in the book
00:26:17 --> 00:26:24 about the whole, if God had written just a big valentine, I think it,
00:26:26 --> 00:26:35 doesn't understand then the depth of the sin or the rupture in the relationship.
00:26:35 --> 00:26:39 And I think that's kind of where the cross comes in to understand that rupture.
00:26:42 --> 00:26:48 And where I think the conservative side, sometimes its focus is on that,
00:26:49 --> 00:26:53 but as you said, it almost sounds akin to,
00:26:53 --> 00:27:00 well, we have to find the version to sacrifice the volcano to appease the god,
00:27:00 --> 00:27:02 which is, as you said, very pagan.
00:27:04 --> 00:27:10 And so I think both of those, what it really comes down to is holding things in tension. Mm-hmm.
00:27:12 --> 00:27:15 Well, and unfortunately, as we know online, we don't do that very well,
00:27:15 --> 00:27:17 do we, right? No, we don't.
00:27:17 --> 00:27:21 You know, we do kind of fall into simplistic, you know, narratives.
00:27:21 --> 00:27:28 And for the progressive side, to your point, right, like, even though progressives
00:27:28 --> 00:27:32 have, don't like that sinner is in the hands of an angry God and,
00:27:33 --> 00:27:36 you know, talking about sin, God needing to forgive us.
00:27:37 --> 00:27:41 But, I mean, I think progressives understand the problems with the cosmic valentine
00:27:41 --> 00:27:44 in the sky. Like, hey, you're all doing great down there.
00:27:44 --> 00:27:46 And everybody is God's beloved.
00:27:48 --> 00:27:51 Like kind of a divine sanction of like how things are going.
00:27:51 --> 00:27:55 They're going to be the first step and go like, well, that's actually not true.
00:27:55 --> 00:28:01 There are some people that are like not, you know, I mean, from a political
00:28:01 --> 00:28:03 perspective, it's a bit of a dumpster fire.
00:28:03 --> 00:28:13 And so they should get that indictment, that prophetic no from heaven.
00:28:13 --> 00:28:20 And that's what the cross is. It's this like, this is what we do to love. We kill it, you know.
00:28:22 --> 00:28:26 And we do it every day in big and small ways. And some of it is interpersonal
00:28:26 --> 00:28:32 and intimate. And some of it is systemic and economical. But we are tearing the world apart.
00:28:32 --> 00:28:34 And God is saying no. And the cross is that.
00:28:35 --> 00:28:41 So that's why that Valentine looks so grievous. It's trying to catch our attention and say, stop.
00:28:42 --> 00:28:46 But not like in a sinners in the hands of an angry God, but stop for our own good.
00:28:47 --> 00:28:50 It's to kind of go back to the secure attachment.
00:28:51 --> 00:28:55 It's the stop of the loving, caring, securely attached parent.
00:28:55 --> 00:28:59 You know, it's that stop. Like this is a stop for your own good.
00:28:59 --> 00:29:04 But if this is not, this is why judgment and love are synonyms that because
00:29:04 --> 00:29:08 properly understood, if I'm giving consequences to my child or I'm telling them
00:29:08 --> 00:29:11 to stop, you know, hurting themselves or hurting another person.
00:29:12 --> 00:29:16 That's all of a piece of other concern for the child.
00:29:18 --> 00:29:21 So these aren't competing. And this is where the conservatives get messed up.
00:29:21 --> 00:29:27 These aren't competing conflicts that have to be somehow reconciled in some
00:29:27 --> 00:29:32 sort of sacrificial, like, pagan-like fix. It is rather, these are synonyms.
00:29:32 --> 00:29:35 Like, consequences are expressions of love.
00:29:36 --> 00:29:41 And a love that doesn't have consequences isn't all that very loving.
00:29:41 --> 00:29:45 So yeah so we're trying to but it's a complex thing to kind of keep all that
00:29:45 --> 00:29:49 balance and not let it kind of fall apart into a very overly simplistic either,
00:29:50 --> 00:29:57 saccharine sentimentality on the progressive side just love everybody and everybody's god's beloved,
00:29:59 --> 00:30:03 because then you would evacuate speech of prophetic fire,
00:30:05 --> 00:30:09 and also looking looking in the mirror like a hard look in the mirror yeah i
00:30:09 --> 00:30:12 mean but on the yeah go ahead i was just saying that was the other thing i was
00:30:12 --> 00:30:15 going to bring up is that that part of,
00:30:15 --> 00:30:20 that is that the cross also focuses on,
00:30:20 --> 00:30:27 our own sin our own maybe role in injustice and not caring for our neighbor,
00:30:28 --> 00:30:30 that if we don't look at that then.
00:30:32 --> 00:30:37 And just think everything is great then well we're kind of lying we're lying
00:30:37 --> 00:30:39 to ourselves Yeah, yeah.
00:30:40 --> 00:30:42 Yeah, because it's easy to...
00:30:44 --> 00:30:48 And I talk a little bit about this in the book, about the prophetic imagination
00:30:48 --> 00:30:52 where, you know, it's easy for Moses to look at Pharaoh and say,
00:30:52 --> 00:30:54 let my people go, you know.
00:30:54 --> 00:30:57 And so it might be easy to look at like a political figure, like a Putin or
00:30:57 --> 00:31:01 Donald Trump and go like, that's the problem. You know, that's the Pharaoh.
00:31:01 --> 00:31:08 And I get it, right? I get it. But most of the prophetic speech is not directed
00:31:08 --> 00:31:11 at the Pharaoh, but it's directed to Israel's own self.
00:31:12 --> 00:31:18 And there's a moral and they include that that's the crazy thing they include
00:31:18 --> 00:31:20 that moral self criticism in scripture,
00:31:20 --> 00:31:24 um like who does that who who says you know what we want to include in the bible
00:31:24 --> 00:31:29 is like the worst things we've ever did like like the israelites were like burning
00:31:29 --> 00:31:34 their children to molek like they were like engaged as child sacrifice and they're like hey let's put,
00:31:36 --> 00:31:42 Let's put that in the Bible to be perpetually reminded of our own complicity in this kind of thing.
00:31:42 --> 00:31:45 And that courage I find absolutely stunning.
00:31:46 --> 00:31:49 I know a lot of progressives get triggered by the Old Testament,
00:31:49 --> 00:31:54 but to me, I am just like in awe of its courage to kind of go like,
00:31:55 --> 00:32:00 here's how we messed up and we're going to include it and sit with that.
00:32:02 --> 00:32:08 Perpetually. And there's a lot of, you know, progressives or liberals that are
00:32:08 --> 00:32:12 willing to judge oppressors, but like to your point, very unwilling to kind
00:32:12 --> 00:32:16 of go like, hey, here's how I am contributing to the mess.
00:32:17 --> 00:32:24 Yeah, I think the other thing I've seen, and I didn't grow up with the role of confession.
00:32:26 --> 00:32:30 But I kind of got it going to a Lutheran seminary and being around a lot of
00:32:30 --> 00:32:35 Lutherans, is in some ways the cross is a sense of confession,
00:32:35 --> 00:32:37 that we've fallen short,
00:32:38 --> 00:32:42 we've messed up, and that we kind of need that.
00:32:42 --> 00:32:50 And it is uncomfortable, it is, you know, bloody, but it's a reminder of how
00:32:50 --> 00:32:55 we've fallen short. It's not just the pharaohs in our world, but also us.
00:32:57 --> 00:33:02 Yeah you know it's interesting just just as an anecdote about this is that when
00:33:02 --> 00:33:04 i teach spiritual formation classes,
00:33:04 --> 00:33:08 um one of the things we'll talk about is like the use of the you know the orthodox
00:33:08 --> 00:33:12 the jesus prayer um lord jesus christ son of god have mercy on me a sinner,
00:33:13 --> 00:33:18 and every time i talk about that prayer progressive spaces somebody says i don't
00:33:18 --> 00:33:21 like that last part the sinner part.
00:33:22 --> 00:33:26 So I pray it, Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy, period.
00:33:26 --> 00:33:35 So they just lop off the confessional part. It's just like, I don't need to say that about myself.
00:33:35 --> 00:33:39 So have mercy for what then? Yeah, exactly. I'm not sure.
00:33:39 --> 00:33:45 But again, it's that allergic reaction to that language.
00:33:45 --> 00:33:49 And listen, I get it. Like when people are deconstructing and they've been shamed
00:33:49 --> 00:33:54 and guilted, I mean, I get how depending on where you're on your journey,
00:33:54 --> 00:33:57 you need to maybe kind of distance yourself from the language of the sinner
00:33:57 --> 00:33:59 and lean into the language of the beloved.
00:34:00 --> 00:34:05 But again, if you, if you don't back to your point, keep it all in tension,
00:34:05 --> 00:34:08 then the whole thing gets kind of distorted.
00:34:09 --> 00:34:10 Uh, and, and so.
00:34:12 --> 00:34:15 Yeah, so a balance must, yeah, it's hard to keep that balance,
00:34:15 --> 00:34:17 but I think it's absolutely critical.
00:34:17 --> 00:34:22 If you're just a sinner, then you have the guilt-ridden sinners in the hands of an angry God.
00:34:23 --> 00:34:28 If you're just the beloved and you aren't willing to admit the way you break
00:34:28 --> 00:34:37 things and have hurt people, then it becomes a therapeutic sentimentalism rather than Christianity.
00:34:39 --> 00:34:43 One of the things you also bring up in the book is actually one of my favorite stories.
00:34:44 --> 00:34:50 Stories. You go through the Bible, and there's one part where you go through the book of Acts.
00:34:51 --> 00:34:56 And one of my favorite stories is the story of Peter.
00:34:59 --> 00:35:06 In Acts 10, and his kind of maybe second or third conversion,
00:35:07 --> 00:35:15 of preaching to Cornelius and how that kind of changed the church in reaching
00:35:15 --> 00:35:20 out beyond its Jewish origins to Gentiles.
00:35:20 --> 00:35:26 I'm kind of curious what led you to kind of share that story,
00:35:27 --> 00:35:29 to include that story in the book. Yeah.
00:35:30 --> 00:35:34 Well, I think my original interest in that story goes back to my first book.
00:35:34 --> 00:35:37 Some people might be aware of this, but it's called Unclean.
00:35:38 --> 00:35:41 And Unclean is a book about purity
00:35:41 --> 00:35:46 psychology, disgust and contamination psychology, and its impact upon,
00:35:48 --> 00:35:53 moral psychology, but also social psychology. Not just how we think about sin,
00:35:54 --> 00:35:56 but how we think about the sinners.
00:35:56 --> 00:36:00 Um and also the third part of the book is about the body how the body becomes
00:36:00 --> 00:36:05 a location of um anxiety like disgust or contamination anxiety so it's the kind
00:36:05 --> 00:36:09 of gnostic attempt to flee the body anyway um,
00:36:10 --> 00:36:15 and what was interesting to me in in thinking through acts 10 from that kind
00:36:15 --> 00:36:21 of purity psychology is that purity psychology disgust psychology tends to be
00:36:21 --> 00:36:24 kind of a boundary monitoring psychology.
00:36:25 --> 00:36:27 It's a quarantining dynamic.
00:36:29 --> 00:36:35 And so when Jesus gives the apostles this mission to take the message to all
00:36:35 --> 00:36:40 the nations, and the word nation there is ethnos, to all the ethnicities, they don't.
00:36:41 --> 00:36:46 There's a sense where like, this is just for us. It's just a Jewish enclave
00:36:46 --> 00:36:50 of, and so God has to kind of decisively, and that's what you see in the book of Acts.
00:36:50 --> 00:36:57 The Holy Spirit is pushing the church and leading the church out of its insularity,
00:36:58 --> 00:37:03 to that cosmopolitan universal message for all people.
00:37:04 --> 00:37:08 And that decisive event happens in Acts, where...
00:37:09 --> 00:37:13 Peter has the unclean animals vision and he's like, rise people,
00:37:13 --> 00:37:16 rise, Peter, kill and eat. And I can't because it's not kosher.
00:37:16 --> 00:37:20 The voice says, do not call something unclean that God has made clean.
00:37:21 --> 00:37:27 And the vision is about food, which is the natural domain of disgusted contamination
00:37:27 --> 00:37:30 psychology, protecting you from ingesting unclean food.
00:37:31 --> 00:37:34 But as we know, it's really a story about human beings.
00:37:34 --> 00:37:39 It's about unclean people. And so when the Holy Spirit pulls him to Cornelius' house,
00:37:40 --> 00:37:43 he says at the very beginning, you know I'm not supposed to associate,
00:37:43 --> 00:37:49 but God has taught me to not call anybody impure or unclean that God has made clean.
00:37:50 --> 00:37:58 And so the kind of boundaries of otherness are eradicated, and he steps across
00:37:58 --> 00:38:04 this kind of, into this unclean space as he had previously understood it.
00:38:05 --> 00:38:07 Because there's like a second Pentecost.
00:38:09 --> 00:38:14 What happens? Then, so that's my initial interest is the way that us,
00:38:14 --> 00:38:18 them, insiders, outsiders is regulated by purity psychology.
00:38:18 --> 00:38:20 That was my initial flush.
00:38:20 --> 00:38:24 For this book, my interest was in,
00:38:25 --> 00:38:32 the hermeneutical crisis that the Holy Spirit created, that God did something,
00:38:33 --> 00:38:38 and was doing things through those new converts up in the church of Antioch
00:38:38 --> 00:38:42 that kicked off the first apostolic council in Acts 15.
00:38:43 --> 00:38:50 And so I use the whole Acts 10 story as kind of like this detonation and experience
00:38:50 --> 00:38:53 where the Holy Spirit is active amongst unlikely groups of people.
00:38:54 --> 00:38:58 And the church had to think through how it read scripture and its own tradition
00:38:59 --> 00:39:01 in light of that new activity.
00:39:02 --> 00:39:08 And so I'm using Acts 10 to kind of,
00:39:09 --> 00:39:13 The breaking, the quarantine, so to speak, in that chapter, and then what that
00:39:13 --> 00:39:16 did hermeneutically to the church going forward.
00:39:19 --> 00:39:22 And what do you think is the role for that today for people?
00:39:22 --> 00:39:28 Because I think one of the things that I found, and this is going way back years ago,
00:39:30 --> 00:39:38 for me was what it meant about my own sexuality of being gay.
00:39:38 --> 00:39:44 That there was something about that. And I think that's why that story has meant a lot to me.
00:39:45 --> 00:39:51 But what do you think that story means for the church in our context today? Yeah.
00:39:52 --> 00:39:53 Well, I think,
00:39:56 --> 00:40:02 to kind of go back to what I talk about in the early part of the book, that,
00:40:03 --> 00:40:09 That before you can draw straight lines from text to kind of doctrinal positions,
00:40:09 --> 00:40:13 because I think that's where people start kind of backing off,
00:40:14 --> 00:40:21 when we say like, hey, here's the textual reasons for inclusion of all sorts.
00:40:22 --> 00:40:25 That people, back to the hermeneutical thing, were like, well,
00:40:25 --> 00:40:29 I don't like, like the way I use it in the early part of the book is I talk
00:40:29 --> 00:40:32 about how certain, because of our hermeneutics.
00:40:34 --> 00:40:38 Certain readings feel warm or cold to us.
00:40:39 --> 00:40:42 And that's just, that's something from the American philosopher,
00:40:42 --> 00:40:47 William James, certain propositions, hypotheses seem plausible,
00:40:47 --> 00:40:49 warm, and some just are dead and cold.
00:40:50 --> 00:40:56 And so for me, as we talk about the Bible, we could talk about those conclusions.
00:40:56 --> 00:41:01 But if you kind of jump to those conclusions, then mainly you're just going
00:41:01 --> 00:41:06 to be just talking past each other because what seems obvious and alive with
00:41:06 --> 00:41:09 possibility to the other person just seems dead and cold.
00:41:09 --> 00:41:16 And then we kind of stare across this kind of abyss of biblical incomprehensibility.
00:41:16 --> 00:41:18 We're just living in different imaginative spaces.
00:41:18 --> 00:41:25 So what my book's trying to do is kind of back up and say, what we need to do is some prior work on,
00:41:26 --> 00:41:31 warming ourselves to enlarge the realm of imaginative capacities on how we read
00:41:32 --> 00:41:33 something like Acts 10 and Acts 15.
00:41:35 --> 00:41:36 And so for me in that story...
00:41:38 --> 00:41:43 Is, uh, to use some nerdy stuff is there's this, I don't, you mentioned the
00:41:43 --> 00:41:48 book. Cause I think sometimes you mentioned stuff in books, people stop reading.
00:41:48 --> 00:41:54 Um, uh, but it's called the Wesleyan quadrilateral for readers that don't know,
00:41:54 --> 00:41:58 but these kind of, there's four things that kind of feed in the way we read
00:41:58 --> 00:41:59 the Bible, the Bible, obviously.
00:41:59 --> 00:42:03 So there's this, the words on the page then there's your tradition,
00:42:04 --> 00:42:07 um the denominational context you're probably in,
00:42:08 --> 00:42:12 a third one is reason so there's kind of a logical way you put all that together
00:42:12 --> 00:42:17 and try to make sense but the fourth one is experience that that things happen
00:42:17 --> 00:42:21 to us and our experiences of the i i guess we call it the humanism,
00:42:23 --> 00:42:26 of of life right the the human experience itself.
00:42:29 --> 00:42:34 Affects the way we read scripture and go like, I see the humanistic consequences
00:42:34 --> 00:42:38 of this reading, the way it excludes, the way it harms, the way it kind of cuts
00:42:38 --> 00:42:42 even across my moral intuitions. Like, I mean, I get it.
00:42:42 --> 00:42:46 I mean, I've grown up with these certain ways of reading right and wrong,
00:42:46 --> 00:42:48 but as I experienced life, I'm just like.
00:42:51 --> 00:42:56 That seems kind of hurtful. You know, like just our own consciences kind of
00:42:56 --> 00:42:58 start rubbing up against our traditions.
00:42:58 --> 00:43:05 And what seems to be the most obvious loving thing to do is somehow been made
00:43:05 --> 00:43:09 problematic by a religious inheritance.
00:43:09 --> 00:43:13 And you see this in the Gospels where Jesus, there's like a woman.
00:43:14 --> 00:43:19 Oh, there's a man with a shriveled hand on the Sabbath. And it's the Sabbath.
00:43:19 --> 00:43:22 So it's a rule. You know, there's a concern there.
00:43:22 --> 00:43:28 And Jesus looks around and says, is it lawful to do good on the Sabbath?
00:43:28 --> 00:43:31 Now, it's a striking question because it's like,
00:43:32 --> 00:43:36 He's just like, of course, it's lawful to do good. Like, like,
00:43:36 --> 00:43:41 like your moral, any compassionate person would say, well, yeah,
00:43:41 --> 00:43:43 of course, like, like, let's, let's not get all tangled up.
00:43:44 --> 00:43:47 Like, so there was a sense where their, their fundamental, their,
00:43:47 --> 00:43:55 their first human compassionate response was rendered problematic or even wrong.
00:43:55 --> 00:44:00 That's what I mean by like, but, and, and they couldn't say anything.
00:44:00 --> 00:44:01 And then scripture says, Jesus got mad.
00:44:03 --> 00:44:06 And I think he gets mad at a lot of people because the humanistic,
00:44:07 --> 00:44:08 compassionate response.
00:44:10 --> 00:44:16 Is being ignored in favor of a legalistic, black and white, rule-following,
00:44:16 --> 00:44:19 finger-wagging kind of thing.
00:44:20 --> 00:44:25 So what I'm trying to do in that chapter, to come back to your question,
00:44:25 --> 00:44:31 is to basically say when they had that hermeneutical conversation in Acts 15,
00:44:32 --> 00:44:40 the side that won really didn't have biblical support or traditional support.
00:44:40 --> 00:44:47 What they had, because if you recall, the Gentile Christians in Antioch,
00:44:47 --> 00:44:51 Paul and Barnabas representing them, come south to Jerusalem,
00:44:52 --> 00:44:55 and they just share what the Holy Spirit's up to.
00:44:55 --> 00:44:59 They're just like, well, listen, I get how circumcision is the way we do it
00:44:59 --> 00:45:06 traditionally, because there was a way for Gentile converts to become Jewish,
00:45:06 --> 00:45:09 which was to undergo Gentile, you know, they were Gentile proselytes.
00:45:10 --> 00:45:13 So it wasn't just the Bible, it was tradition. If you want to get access to
00:45:13 --> 00:45:18 the promises made to Abraham, here's the door, circumcision.
00:45:18 --> 00:45:21 And now there was this other, like they were skipping in line,
00:45:21 --> 00:45:26 they were just getting baptized. But yet there's these stories of God obviously
00:45:26 --> 00:45:29 at work, the visible fruit to the Spirit in their lives.
00:45:30 --> 00:45:34 And as the title of the chapter says, the stories won that day.
00:45:36 --> 00:45:41 And I would even draw attention to the hermeneutical ambiguity. of the conclusion.
00:45:41 --> 00:45:46 Because when James gets up and renders his verdict, right, he hears the biblical
00:45:46 --> 00:45:50 argument, he hears the traditional argument, he hears the Holy Spirit experiential,
00:45:51 --> 00:45:53 argument, and then he says,
00:45:55 --> 00:45:59 it seemed good to us, you know, and I want to underline the word seemed,
00:45:59 --> 00:46:00 like they weren't certain.
00:46:00 --> 00:46:05 They're like, this goes back to that secure attachment, like the Holy Spirit's
00:46:05 --> 00:46:06 leading them out in this new,
00:46:08 --> 00:46:11 There's a novelty here that is very unsettling.
00:46:15 --> 00:46:19 And they're like tentatively kind of going in that direction.
00:46:19 --> 00:46:23 And it's not a settled deal. Like Paul deals with this issue all the way through
00:46:23 --> 00:46:28 the rest of his epistles, how tentative this was, how he had to keep sticking
00:46:28 --> 00:46:31 up for this new humanity, as he calls it.
00:46:31 --> 00:46:35 But so what I would say to people is, you know,
00:46:38 --> 00:46:43 to put, before we just start cracking the Bible and go like,
00:46:43 --> 00:46:48 here are the rules, kind of say, what is the Holy Spirit doing?
00:46:48 --> 00:46:53 Let's open up capacities for attending to human suffering, to human,
00:46:53 --> 00:46:57 to virtue in places we don't expect it. Because that's the way the Jews felt
00:46:57 --> 00:47:00 about the Gentiles. Like, we don't expect virtue from them.
00:47:01 --> 00:47:06 They're evil. And yet, there it is, fruits of the Spirit emerging amongst those followers in Antioch.
00:47:06 --> 00:47:13 And so if we expand that part of the equation, then I think certain hermeneutical
00:47:13 --> 00:47:16 moves become warmed with possibility.
00:47:17 --> 00:47:23 And I think a more generative, open-hearted conversation can take place when we have that.
00:47:24 --> 00:47:27 And so that's, to me, what I'm trying to do in that chapter is kind of open up.
00:47:30 --> 00:47:35 What is allowed to warm readings into scripture, especially for people that
00:47:35 --> 00:47:36 kind of begin with the text,
00:47:38 --> 00:47:42 in that kind of, but they're beginning with the text with their kind of hermeneutical
00:47:42 --> 00:47:45 heads in the sand. And so they can't really see that.
00:47:47 --> 00:47:51 Possibilities, you know, beyond a certain traditional reading.
00:47:52 --> 00:47:58 Yeah, I think it's interesting because when we talk about going back to the
00:47:58 --> 00:48:00 Wesleyan quadrilateral and experience,
00:48:01 --> 00:48:05 I think that there's always a fear when you say experience, it's just going
00:48:05 --> 00:48:09 to be kind of throwing something out and we're just going to listen to whatever you're saying.
00:48:10 --> 00:48:15 But I think it's really all what it kind of boils down to when you're talking
00:48:15 --> 00:48:19 about the stories is how is the Spirit moving in those stories?
00:48:19 --> 00:48:26 Because as I think you even said way earlier, if we only just limit God to the Bible.
00:48:29 --> 00:48:35 That limits God. We don't see where God is working in our lives, in the world now.
00:48:36 --> 00:48:40 And that's kind of what happened with the council So, in Acts 15,
00:48:40 --> 00:48:46 it's really an example of how God was moving in the lives of people that was
00:48:46 --> 00:48:50 beyond the law in that case.
00:48:51 --> 00:48:56 Yeah. And I don't think the discernment, and I think I agree with you,
00:48:56 --> 00:49:00 I don't think this discernment about where God's moving is vague.
00:49:00 --> 00:49:05 I think we have very clear indicators what the fruit of the Holy Spirit looks like.
00:49:05 --> 00:49:08 Peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, self-control, love.
00:49:09 --> 00:49:14 Like, there's some very clear signs where...
00:49:18 --> 00:49:23 The Spirit is operative. And so, it's not a vague, yeah, anything goes.
00:49:23 --> 00:49:26 I mean, we are looking for virtuous kinds of things.
00:49:28 --> 00:49:36 So, we have coordinates to locate where God is active. And I would say that cuts both ways.
00:49:37 --> 00:49:43 Where things are ostensibly Christian, and there is very little kindness,
00:49:43 --> 00:49:46 very little love, very little gentleness,
00:49:47 --> 00:49:53 very little peacemaking and that's your kind of hey not everybody says lord
00:49:53 --> 00:49:56 lord is going to enter the kingdom of heaven like that's that's that kind of like i,
00:49:58 --> 00:50:03 i think that cuts both ways um both outside the church and inside the church
00:50:04 --> 00:50:09 in a very um crucial way that i think we don't pay a lot of attention to,
00:50:12 --> 00:50:15 can you kind of expand on that a little bit more because there's it seems like
00:50:15 --> 00:50:18 a lot there to unpack. Well, I mean, I think I, well, I just,
00:50:19 --> 00:50:21 I guess what I'm saying is it's, it's, it's,
00:50:24 --> 00:50:29 there are ways that Christians themselves are not displaying the fruits of the spirit.
00:50:29 --> 00:50:33 It's back to my point about Israel's moral self-criticism.
00:50:34 --> 00:50:39 That, that's what I see lacking in a lot of Christian spaces is a willingness
00:50:39 --> 00:50:44 to judge the depravities of a culture gone, gone wild. Yeah.
00:50:47 --> 00:50:52 Very similar to what you see in Romans, where you look at the pagans and you're
00:50:52 --> 00:50:55 like, oh, they're terrible. But then he flips it and goes like,
00:50:55 --> 00:50:58 and by the way, you're on the hook too.
00:50:58 --> 00:51:05 And who are you to judge? You know, and that's what I mean.
00:51:05 --> 00:51:12 So, you often see the stone throwing at the lack of virtue in the culture,
00:51:12 --> 00:51:16 but Christians themselves are not displaying the fruits of the Spirit.
00:51:16 --> 00:51:20 Just look online, the way we treat the world.
00:51:21 --> 00:51:22 And so, I'm always struck by
00:51:22 --> 00:51:26 what Paul says. He goes, let judgment begin first with the house of God.
00:51:27 --> 00:51:33 First people under the microscope are not the sex workers. They're not the illegal immigrants.
00:51:35 --> 00:51:41 It's us. We go under the microscope first. And I think that's going to be quite
00:51:41 --> 00:51:43 a wake-up call, in my opinion.
00:51:44 --> 00:51:50 And listen, I'm in the church too. So I'm with that group. I'm with that group.
00:51:52 --> 00:51:57 And that's concerned me every day about whether or not my life,
00:51:58 --> 00:52:02 and this is the life I live in front of my sons, the life I live in front of
00:52:02 --> 00:52:04 my wife, the life I live in front of my students,
00:52:06 --> 00:52:12 my online life, and my church life where I serve, that the fruits of the Spirit
00:52:12 --> 00:52:14 are visible across all of that.
00:52:14 --> 00:52:19 Like, like that is my number one concern, um, that when the judgment begins
00:52:19 --> 00:52:23 with me as a Christian, as a Christ follower, um, I at least,
00:52:24 --> 00:52:27 uh, again, I believe in grace, but, but,
00:52:28 --> 00:52:30 but it's not, it's a costly grace.
00:52:31 --> 00:52:33 You know, I'm working towards those things.
00:52:34 --> 00:52:39 And so I hope anybody I disagree with politically, religiously,
00:52:41 --> 00:52:43 I don't care who's standing in front of me,
00:52:45 --> 00:52:50 that they would say Richard Beck is kind, that Richard Beck is gentle,
00:52:50 --> 00:52:51 that Richard Beck is loving.
00:52:53 --> 00:52:58 And I don't know Maybe I don't want to be judgmental of a lot of Christians
00:52:58 --> 00:53:01 But I just feel like that kind of Moral.
00:53:04 --> 00:53:07 You are the one being evaluated here. Stop evaluating other people.
00:53:07 --> 00:53:10 You are the one being evaluated. So kind of live up to that.
00:53:11 --> 00:53:13 And if Christians kind of began with that,
00:53:15 --> 00:53:23 kind of moral self-inventory, I think our reputation would improve in the world.
00:53:25 --> 00:53:31 People would be happy to see us online and in the world because we would be
00:53:31 --> 00:53:34 known as loving, kind, and gentle. people.
00:53:39 --> 00:53:43 This is kind of leads into a question i probably should have asked earlier but.
00:53:45 --> 00:53:49 What does this book how does this book speak to our,
00:53:50 --> 00:53:55 current moment especially our current political cultural and social moment because
00:53:55 --> 00:54:01 i think we've kind of been talking about it in some ways, but there is,
00:54:02 --> 00:54:11 a lot going on in our politics that I think does boil down to hermeneutics,
00:54:11 --> 00:54:15 how we understand Scripture, how we understand God.
00:54:16 --> 00:54:20 How does this book speak to that moment? Mm-hmm.
00:54:22 --> 00:54:31 Oh, goodness. You know, the moment is so big. Um, you know, I mean, I definitely think from.
00:54:33 --> 00:54:39 The, you know, if I'm, if I'm looking to like the evangelical,
00:54:39 --> 00:54:45 the Christian right, um, I think everything I've just been saying is,
00:54:45 --> 00:54:47 is, is, is part of that answer.
00:54:47 --> 00:54:50 So I won't necessarily repeat it, but.
00:54:52 --> 00:54:55 So when I'm thinking about the book and the chapters that I kind of have aimed
00:54:55 --> 00:55:00 at them, like we've already talked about atonement theory, but that's more insider
00:55:00 --> 00:55:03 baseball, you know, you know, that's just.
00:55:04 --> 00:55:07 But I think the outward-facing cultural moment chapters is like,
00:55:07 --> 00:55:15 I have a chapter called Tell Old Pharaoh, Let My People Go, where I try to introduce,
00:55:16 --> 00:55:18 for that side of the political aisle.
00:55:20 --> 00:55:25 Kind of a liberationist hermeneutic, that God has a divine solidarity with the
00:55:25 --> 00:55:28 victims, with the oppressed, with the marginalized.
00:55:29 --> 00:55:38 And I see that idea of divine solidarity with the victims missing in that side
00:55:38 --> 00:55:41 of the, like there's just a default lack of compassion.
00:55:41 --> 00:55:46 In fact, it's gotten so bad on that side that they're writing books now talking
00:55:46 --> 00:55:50 about how compassion is a sin. Yes, I know. Yeah.
00:55:51 --> 00:55:54 It's toxic. It's a sin. It's problematic for Christians to have empathy.
00:55:54 --> 00:55:58 I mean, that's how bad it's got over there. It's the moral confusion that I
00:55:58 --> 00:56:00 talked about before, where Jesus says, is it lawful to do good?
00:56:00 --> 00:56:03 And the answer now is pretty clear on that side. Yes.
00:56:04 --> 00:56:06 It's bad to do good things. Like, that's what they're saying.
00:56:06 --> 00:56:11 To do good things is stigmatized. It's the blasphemy against the Holy Spirit.
00:56:11 --> 00:56:14 You know, Jesus casts out an, you know, he exercises a demon and they go,
00:56:14 --> 00:56:18 that's the devil's work, right? This good deed is wicked.
00:56:18 --> 00:56:20 And he's like, you can't be forgiven for that sin.
00:56:21 --> 00:56:28 Like, if you guys think good is bad, like, man, like, I don't know.
00:56:30 --> 00:56:38 Like, you're pretty stuck. Okay. So to me, that's, I have a concern about over there.
00:56:38 --> 00:56:43 Listen, I get how we need to have a good and orderly immigration policy.
00:56:44 --> 00:56:49 I agree. Like, of course. Like, there's a pragmatic challenge about how to deal
00:56:49 --> 00:56:53 with the volume in an orderly way. I get it.
00:56:55 --> 00:57:02 But just the default hostility toward immigrants and any conversation about
00:57:02 --> 00:57:05 trying to welcome, to just be hospitable. Like you're in Minneapolis,
00:57:05 --> 00:57:10 like you guys have experienced this in some very traumatic ways.
00:57:10 --> 00:57:16 I was there recently and visited the shrines to those who have been killed.
00:57:17 --> 00:57:18 Like Americans being shot in the street.
00:57:19 --> 00:57:26 You know, I mean, it's troubling. So, yeah, you want to say something? Nope, go ahead.
00:57:27 --> 00:57:28 I was just going to say, I agree with you.
00:57:29 --> 00:57:35 Yeah, yeah. And then the other thing I do is, and when I talk about the Gospels,
00:57:37 --> 00:57:40 a chapter called This is the Way, borrowing from the Mandalorian,
00:57:40 --> 00:57:42 maybe a bit cheesy, but I took it,
00:57:43 --> 00:57:48 kind of putting the actual teachings of Jesus back on the radar screen.
00:57:48 --> 00:57:53 I think one of the things that happens too much in evangelical spaces is that
00:57:53 --> 00:58:00 Christ's death on the cross is the only thing about Christianity, that he saves sinners.
00:58:00 --> 00:58:03 But there were actually these moral teachings that Jesus called us,
00:58:03 --> 00:58:05 things like loving our enemies,
00:58:07 --> 00:58:13 and concern for the outcasts. And so those are some of the things in the book where I'm trying to.
00:58:17 --> 00:58:20 Literal teachings. And that's the interesting thing. It's like they want to
00:58:20 --> 00:58:24 be biblical literate until it's like the sermon on the mount.
00:58:24 --> 00:58:27 Then that's not, don't take that literally, you know?
00:58:28 --> 00:58:31 So I wanted to put the words of Jesus back on the radar screen.
00:58:31 --> 00:58:35 I wanted to put kind of a liberationist hermeneutic that begins back in Exodus.
00:58:35 --> 00:58:37 It goes all the way through scripture, through the New Testament.
00:58:39 --> 00:58:43 And the other thing I put on the radar screen is from the work of John Barclay,
00:58:44 --> 00:58:47 Paul and the Gift, is the social implications of grace.
00:58:47 --> 00:58:54 Grace isn't just a vertical dimension, but grace is, because of Christ's unconditional
00:58:54 --> 00:59:01 gift, there is now neither male nor female, slave nor free, or Jew or Gentile.
00:59:01 --> 00:59:04 The social hierarchies and differences have been eradicated.
00:59:05 --> 00:59:11 And so I want that on their radar screen too, because pluralism for Paul is a sign of the kingdom.
00:59:12 --> 00:59:20 Ethno-homogeneity is not a sign of the kingdom, because that's what Paul's constantly
00:59:20 --> 00:59:21 resisting in his epistles, is,
00:59:22 --> 00:59:26 that the tendency for those little churches of Jews and Gentiles to split into
00:59:26 --> 00:59:29 their ethnic silos, for Paul,
00:59:30 --> 00:59:32 is a five-alarm fire.
00:59:32 --> 00:59:36 If you look at, all of his churches are going to fracture into ethno-nationalistic
00:59:36 --> 00:59:40 cul-de-sacs and he's like you can't do it because if you do that,
00:59:41 --> 00:59:46 then the new humanity where the walls of hostility have been broken down it
00:59:46 --> 00:59:50 will not be visible to the world like you have to be pluralistic it's it's just
00:59:50 --> 00:59:56 like that's the evidence of the gospel is pluralism and i so those are some things i kind of speak,
00:59:57 --> 00:59:59 concern for the oppressed I'm just...
01:00:00 --> 01:00:03 A literal adherence to the teachings of Jesus, like in the Sermon on the Mount,
01:00:03 --> 01:00:10 and understanding that pluralism is a sign of the kingdom coming against kind of ethno-nationalism.
01:00:11 --> 01:00:14 Now, on the progressive side, they're probably amening as I go through all that.
01:00:14 --> 01:00:16 They're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
01:00:17 --> 01:00:20 So where do I have concerns for them?
01:00:21 --> 01:00:26 My concerns for them are actually more religious and metaphysical.
01:00:27 --> 01:00:31 And what I mean is that a lot of liberals have, in this cultural moment,
01:00:31 --> 01:00:38 have extracted a social justice, like I was talking about, hermeneutic,
01:00:39 --> 01:00:41 and they just kind of jettisoned all the rest of it.
01:00:41 --> 01:00:45 So I call this the everything but Jesus is problematic hermeneutic.
01:00:45 --> 01:00:50 You know, the Old Testament, problematic. You know, the crucifixion of Jesus,
01:00:50 --> 01:00:55 problematic. Paul, the most problematic dude of all.
01:00:55 --> 01:00:58 And Revelation, really problematic.
01:00:59 --> 01:01:02 But Jesus being nice, love it. And,
01:01:03 --> 01:01:08 but I think, I think when you do that, when you reduce the scripture to just
01:01:08 --> 01:01:12 social justice, it culminates in what we are now calling, like literally within
01:01:12 --> 01:01:15 the last month, woke 1.0.
01:01:16 --> 01:01:21 You know, it culminates in kind of that woke, the puritanical,
01:01:22 --> 01:01:24 justice forward, shrill.
01:01:28 --> 01:01:31 Dead end. And it's a dead end in a couple of different ways.
01:01:31 --> 01:01:32 And I'll just mention too quickly.
01:01:33 --> 01:01:41 One, it's a dead end because it's morally one note, you know.
01:01:43 --> 01:01:48 The moral life is more complex than just the revolution. And the people that
01:01:48 --> 01:01:51 are the best evidence of this are the revolutionaries themselves.
01:01:52 --> 01:01:53 They tend to fall apart.
01:01:55 --> 01:02:01 Sin catches up to them as well. And so we need to have a richer moral portfolio,
01:02:02 --> 01:02:03 where we can play more keys on the piano.
01:02:03 --> 01:02:07 And by that, I mean there is justice. And justice might even be for many of
01:02:07 --> 01:02:11 us the leading edge of the gospel call.
01:02:12 --> 01:02:16 But there has to be also, like we've been talking about, like self-complicency and grace.
01:02:17 --> 01:02:24 There has to be capacities for forgiveness and mercy and reconciliation or forgiveness.
01:02:24 --> 01:02:29 Because I've even seen forgiveness stigmatized on the left. So if the right is stigmatizing,
01:02:31 --> 01:02:37 empathy, the left will stigmatize forgiveness and reconciliation, you know?
01:02:39 --> 01:02:40 They don't want to make peace. They want to win.
01:02:43 --> 01:02:48 So that's the first thing I think progressives need. And this is where I think,
01:02:48 --> 01:02:53 you saw certain moral capacities in the American civil rights movement,
01:02:53 --> 01:03:01 from 55 to 65 when King was leading it because he was pulling from a moral reservoir of Christianity,
01:03:03 --> 01:03:08 where all the virtues from mercy to justice were combined.
01:03:08 --> 01:03:12 And he was calling us not toward winning the next election, but to what he called
01:03:12 --> 01:03:16 the beloved community, right? The pluralistic beloved community where reconciliation
01:03:16 --> 01:03:18 between enemies was happening.
01:03:18 --> 01:03:25 Well, that idea of reconciliation between enemies today, woke 1.0 would be considered,
01:03:26 --> 01:03:27 like siding with the enemy.
01:03:27 --> 01:03:31 Like, you get canceled for that kind of thing. Mm-hmm.
01:03:33 --> 01:03:37 But then the second thing I would say for the progressives that have just reduced
01:03:37 --> 01:03:41 it to social justice is just like hope. There's a...
01:03:43 --> 01:03:45 I think one of the reasons why...
01:03:47 --> 01:03:51 The social justice impulse kind of ends up at a dead end is because,
01:03:51 --> 01:03:56 um, well, history isn't really controllable.
01:03:56 --> 01:03:59 Things like you can, you know, Trump could be reelected and then you're like,
01:03:59 --> 01:04:07 so the despair and the dismay can lead to either, um, just checking out,
01:04:08 --> 01:04:12 you know, people give up, um, or it could be, or it could affect their mental health.
01:04:14 --> 01:04:20 So there's a lot of um people don't know this but there's um a positive correlation
01:04:20 --> 01:04:22 between political liberalism and mental health problems,
01:04:23 --> 01:04:25 and i think a lot of the mental health problems that you see among liberals
01:04:25 --> 01:04:29 is because they do lack a capacity for hope um,
01:04:30 --> 01:04:35 and and so and by hope i mean like hey if i can't i have to trust that i will
01:04:35 --> 01:04:38 do the good work today but i have hope,
01:04:39 --> 01:04:42 that God will ultimately, you know, this is King's idea of bending the arc of
01:04:42 --> 01:04:46 the universe is slow, but it bends towards justice. Like he had an eschatological hope.
01:04:47 --> 01:04:55 And I don't think, so on the left, the rallying cry of love has been replaced with justice.
01:04:56 --> 01:04:58 And I think there's a consequence for that.
01:04:59 --> 01:05:08 And also the justice without hope leads to a variety of pathologies as well for that movement.
01:05:08 --> 01:05:12 So I don't know if that's what you're looking for, but those are some of the
01:05:12 --> 01:05:16 things where I think the book is speaking into the cultural moment on both sides,
01:05:17 --> 01:05:20 asking everybody to do better. Everybody has different kind of work to do,
01:05:20 --> 01:05:22 but I think all of us can do better.
01:05:22 --> 01:05:29 And maybe in each of us doing better, a possibility for some conversation,
01:05:29 --> 01:05:35 some more generous conversation can happen, which I think our politics desperately like needs.
01:05:36 --> 01:05:38 Um, so, yeah.
01:05:38 --> 01:05:42 Yeah. I mean, I think especially in our moment, uh, grace is not,
01:05:43 --> 01:05:46 um, very prevalent in our politics.
01:05:47 --> 01:05:50 Um, on either side. Yeah, it isn't. On either side.
01:05:52 --> 01:05:58 Um, if people want to know more about you, um, where should they go?
01:05:58 --> 01:06:01 I know you have a great sub stack that I follow.
01:06:02 --> 01:06:06 Um, but just if there are any other links or things that they should go.
01:06:07 --> 01:06:11 Yeah, no, that's pretty, that's pretty it. I'm pretty scarce on social media.
01:06:11 --> 01:06:15 Yeah. I have a sub stack called experimental theology and I write Monday through
01:06:15 --> 01:06:17 Friday on that. So you can follow with me.
01:06:18 --> 01:06:20 And then if you want to see any of this book or others, ones I mentioned,
01:06:21 --> 01:06:26 um, yeah, wherever you get your books, uh, just put my name in and they'll,
01:06:26 --> 01:06:28 and they'll pop up. Uh, yeah. Okay.
01:06:29 --> 01:06:32 Well, thank you. I probably need to have you back on sometime in the future
01:06:32 --> 01:06:36 because there was a lot of other stuff I wanted to get to, but we're already
01:06:36 --> 01:06:40 at an hour and I don't want to hold you too much longer. Tax everybody's attention
01:06:40 --> 01:06:43 span. Yeah. Yeah. So thank you.
01:06:43 --> 01:06:45 And, And we'll talk again soon.
01:06:46 --> 01:06:48 Yeah. Thank you, Dennis. Lovely conversation.
01:07:18 --> 01:07:23 As per usual, I'm always interested to know about your thoughts on the episode.
01:07:24 --> 01:07:28 Please, if you're interested, if you have thoughts, if you have comments,
01:07:29 --> 01:07:36 feel free to drop me a line at dennis at churchandmain, all one word, dot org.
01:07:37 --> 01:07:42 I will include links to Richard's book, The Book of Love, also to his substack
01:07:42 --> 01:07:46 Experimental Theology, which is a great substack.
01:07:46 --> 01:07:51 I love, it's one of those subsects I love to read every day.
01:07:53 --> 01:07:57 Again, if you want to learn more about this podcast, listen to past episodes,
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01:09:02 --> 01:09:07 So that is it for this episode of Church in Maine. I'm Dennis Sanders, your host.
01:09:07 --> 01:09:11 As I always like to say, thank you so much for listening. It does really mean a lot.
01:09:12 --> 01:09:15 Take care, everyone. Godspeed. And I will see you very soon.