Better Ways to Read the Bible with Zach Lambert

[00:00:05] Speaker A: This is the Return, a podcast about religious reconstruction in a world of deconstruction. I'm Jordan Maddox. [00:00:13] Speaker B: And I'm Dustin Maddox. [00:00:14] Speaker C: We are not related, different spell. One of the things that we've discovered again and again on this podcast is that a lot of people today know exactly what deconstruction feels like. They know what it's like when beliefs stop making sense, when inherited faith begins to crack, or when experiences collide with what they were taught to believe. But what comes after that moment is much less clear. Reconstruction doesn't trend on social media in the same way deconstruction does. It's often slower, quieter, and deeply personal. It raises questions like what do we keep? What do we let go of? And is it possible to rebuild a faith without simply returning to the same structures that caused harm in the first place? Today we're joined by pastor and author Zach Lambert, founder of RestoreAusin and author of Better Ways to Read the Bible. Zach is an incredible resource both in how to read the Bible and different lenses to look at it. But he's also someone that spends his ministry walking alongside people who are asking a lot of the questions that we come back to again and again on this show. In this conversation, we talk about what deconstruction really is, why so many people experience it, how churches can create safe spaces for honest questioning, different ways to read the Bible that are unlike the ways that many of us were taught to, and what reconstruction can look like in real lives and communities. Here is our conversation with Zach Lambert. [00:02:14] Speaker B: All right, Zach, thanks for joining us from our country's greatest country. And so we've got an Austin related question to begin with, which is settle, settle the argument. What is the greatest barbecue in Austin? [00:02:28] Speaker D: It's tough. I think it has to be Franklin. But here's the catch for me, it's not worth standing for six hours in line to get it. It's not that much better than the second place or the third place. Now, if you make a whole day of it, if you take a ice chest of beers out there at 8am and you just hang out, you drink the national beer of Texas, Lone Star. It's basically like water on a hot day. Yeah. If you want to do that, then make a whole experience of it. But you really can't go wrong. That's what I tell people. If a barbecue place has made it in Texas longer than a year, it's. Excuse me, in Austin longer than a year. It's amazing. I would actually say probably my favorites beside Franklin are Leroy and Lewis and Interstellar, and they're not nearly as bad on the line, so I could talk about this for a long time. I don't want to die. Try. [00:03:16] Speaker A: I'm a barbecue person. [00:03:18] Speaker C: That's. [00:03:18] Speaker D: Barbecue is great. [00:03:19] Speaker A: That's where I line up. And I think there isn't that Aaron Franklin's brother or something? I forget the connect. There's, I don't know, webs of connections. [00:03:27] Speaker D: There are a lot of Texas barbecue, [00:03:29] Speaker A: and then there's another one that's like a little trailer. It's thistle or with thistle weight, something as a kind of. What's that? [00:03:38] Speaker D: What's called nickelweight. [00:03:39] Speaker A: Nickelweight, yeah. I appreciate that one because they had the ice chest waiting for you with the beer. The compliment. [00:03:45] Speaker D: Pretty nice. [00:03:50] Speaker A: All right, one more. One more Austin question. [00:03:52] Speaker D: Do you. [00:03:52] Speaker A: Do you own a cowboy hat? [00:03:54] Speaker D: I do not. My dome is too big, I think, for any of the ones that come directly off the racks. I'd have to be a custom job, and I don't have that kind of cash. [00:04:01] Speaker A: So there's no pressure, though, to get a cowboy hat in your neck. [00:04:05] Speaker D: No, there's not a lot of cowboy hat wearing from your average citizen here in Austin, to be honest with you. A lot more hipsters than cowboys. [00:04:13] Speaker A: Well, we want to jump into a lot of different topics around deconstruction and reconstruction, but I want to start by talking about Restore Austin before we get into kind of the nitty gritty. And I'm curious, because we're talking about different ways to enact faith that meets people where they are. So when someone walks into your church, what's going to feel familiar and then what's going to feel different for them? [00:04:36] Speaker D: Yeah. The answer to that question certainly depends on the person's background. Right. And so if they are coming from no church background, then just some of the. Hopefully the welcoming vibe, the directional stuff like that'll all feel at least maybe not familiar, but comfortable. Oh, I know where I'm supposed to go. We really are designing it with that primarily in mind. Somebody who's never been to church before, hasn't been in 20 years, and they're just giving it a shot, and they walk in, we want them to feel really welcomed and also just know where they're supposed to go or what to do. Now, if you come from maybe you grew up Catholic or really high church background, you're not going to recognize a lot of the kind of, like, more modern adaptations of church that we're doing, but you will recognize weekly communion. And we talk about it in you know, not fully Catholic ways, obviously, but we talk about it in ways that are accessible, depending on regardless of your background. And then certainly if you have evangelical background and you're walking in a lot, is going really feel familiar in the sense that we have a big band. I'm teaching 30 minutes, like an evangelical and kids ministry, coffee, donuts, all that is supposed to be very modern, very low church, very accessible. And then lastly, if your mainline background, you're going to recognize a lot of the theology, especially if you're Wesleyan background mainline. So what we're really trying to do, I say, is just meet anybody where they are, but specifically pair this with modern evangelical expression of church, with much more kind of Wesleyan mainline. A little bit people might say progressive. I'm not sure that actually helps us in delineating it, but more mainline Wesleyan theology that's specifically very inclusive and justice centered and Jesus focused. [00:06:15] Speaker A: Let's jump into kind of some definitions here, because this podcast is really built around bridging the gap between deconstruction and reconstruction. It's America's great fascination around deconstruction. But when I have conversations about people with. About people, about reconstruction, with people, there's. [00:06:32] Speaker C: It feels foggier in some ways. [00:06:34] Speaker A: We know what it's like to tear things down. It's more complicated to rebuild. So we just recorded a conversation with Brian Zond and he actually disputed the term deconstruction. So I'd be curious, when you think of that word, what associations do you have and how would you define the [00:06:49] Speaker C: process that's going on for people? [00:06:51] Speaker D: Yeah, that sounds like Brian, first of all, to dispute anything that he wants to dispute. Yeah, I think that the framework is helpful, actually. I like to pair three together. So construction, deconstruction, reconstruction. Paul Ricoeur is a. He was a French philosopher and he talked about first naivete, sophistication, and second, naivete. Richard Rohr talks about this kind of same three sequences. I cannot remember exactly the terminology he uses. But essentially the idea is that we all build a faith at some point in our life, some kind of structure. And I like the construction. I like the house image, actually. So we're building this house of faith and we're kind of laying it brick by brick. And some of it happens for us when we're really little, depending on if our parents are exposing us or guardians are exposing us to church or faith spaces. We're being told what's supposed to be in the foundation of that. Right. So depending on your church, there might be something like, oh, here's the creed as a foundation, or the Bible as a foundation, or the resurrection of Jesus as a foundation. But then there are also things, depending on your background, that enter into that foundational aspect that a lot of others would dispute as foundational. So not necessarily like historically Christian foundational, but maybe like historically Southern Baptist foundational. That's what I grew up. My grandmother believed wholeheartedly in the resurrection of Jesus and that you should not ever dance. So those were. She held those about the same weight, [00:08:13] Speaker A: you know, primary beliefs. [00:08:15] Speaker D: And those are both primary beliefs for her first tier. First tier. And so for her deconstruction, looked like she went to Baylor, one of the first women in her family to go to college, and she found all these other Christians there who occasionally liked to dance on the weekends. And they didn't catch on fire. They weren't immediately condemned to hell. And so she was like, maybe that dough dancing thing is actually not like a core belief or one that I even want to carry forward. So I like the analogy of she took that brick out of her house of faith and began to examine it and say, where did this actually come from? Is it from Scripture? Is it from my tradition? Is it just from the obsession of the pastor I grew up under, what is it? And then we got to decide, right, what we do with that brick. And so the taking it out is the deconstruction part of it, right? We're taking it out and we're trying to figure out what to do with it. And then the reconstruction is deciding, okay, am I going to just put it back in and reconstruct that way, or am I going to throw it away and reconstruct with something else? Right. I'm going to take a different belief about dancing or social issues or whatever it is, and I'm going to put that back in its place, kind of reconstruct something. Now, again, the analogy falls short at some point, but there are people who. They've done so much deconstruction and so little reconstruction that they've really gotten more into demolition, and they've just taken the whole thing down, which, honestly, like, that's not what we're trying to help people do. But I understand why people get there. I understand the level of trauma and all of that stuff that they've endured, and they're just like, I just can't do it anymore. I'm going to push this whole thing down and walk away. All that to say, I actually think the whole framework is really helpful when we talk about it. I think as anything Gets really popular, like deconstruction. It can have concept creep, and it can get. People are connecting it to, like, Jacques Derrida and people like that who Talked about deconstruction 100 years ago in, like, philosophical terms. And that's not really what it originally started to be about when we were talking about it in church spaces. But all that to say, I don't dispute it as a term, but I do think it's important to clarify the whole structure. [00:10:18] Speaker A: So when you're meeting people that are in this process, what's the ratio between the people you meet that are deconstructing versus the people that are in the demolition process? [00:10:30] Speaker D: We don't maybe 90 10. Deconstruction versus demolition. If people are stepping into Restore on a Sunday or to a small group or wanting to get coffee with me or something, they're usually giving it a shot. Even if it's one last shot they're going to get, they're giving it a shot. And so there are certainly people who have gone to Restore for a little bit or I've hung out with for a little while, and then they've just said, sorry, I tried, but I can't do it. And they go into the full demolish. What I always leave them with, though, is, hey, you can demolish this. Walk away. And there is always an open invitation to walk back and start building again at any point with us anywhere else. And so I don't think of demolition as like, a permanent state, honestly. I think about it as just like. Like those houses you see, where somebody just runs out of money or effort or whatever, and they're like, I'm just leaving the slab and I'm walking away. But a lot of times they come back and something gets built there at some point. [00:11:25] Speaker B: Do you find Zach, like, continuing on with the house imagery and metaphor for deconstruction? In my pastoral experience, I find a lot of people who don't quite have a house. They have, like, maybe a small shack, something like. And they've been told, like, this is it. This is what you have to live with. And there's a couple stories in the book that you share about. Sounds like people who've come with similar types of experiences where they've only had one peg to hang the entire thing on. Like, where do you think that comes from? And how do you help people navigate around, like, to build a more spacious house? [00:12:07] Speaker D: Yeah, yeah. Not to mix metaphors. In the book, I talk about it as, like, a basement. And a lot of us grew up in this Kind of dark, dank basement. And it was a high control religious environment. And we were told, this is what Christianity is, this is all that there is. And then at some point we discover, oh, there's like a, a staircase and then like a door up there that goes somewhere. And the people in charge are like, don't ever go up that staircase and do not open that door that just leads to apostasy and heresy and the slippery slope to paganism. And if you stay down here in the basement though, you're going to be safe and you're going to be safe from all the other scary things. But for most people what happens is at some point they make their way up those steps, they open that door and they realize there is this huge house of historic Christianity and not even just the last 2,000 years, but even right now, so many different forms and expressions of Christianity. So what you realize is there are so many other forms of Christianity, there are so many rooms in the house, so to speak, Right. Where you are wandering into one and you're like, oh my gosh, this is Central American liberation theology. I had no idea that this was a part of Christianity. Right. Or I'm stepping into black church tradition, the confessing church tradition in Nazi Germany. Right. There's all kinds of things all the way back to some of the first churches in the ancient Near East. And that the house of faith is much bigger than you could ever have imagined. And that actually it's a lot more kind of beautiful and expansive than the people in charge of the basement ever led you to believe. And so for us, I, I think what we're trying to do is to, as people have made their way up the stairs and open the door and they're just taking that first step. Sometimes you need like somebody to take you by the hand and say, come look at this room and come look at this room and come sit down for a second on the couch and take a break. And we want to be people who are helping folks on that journey as they first step up out of that basement. [00:14:03] Speaker A: Yeah. And there's another kind of dimension to this. We're talking about just kind of internal reflections on deconstruction and individuals journeys oftentimes. And I had this experience, I know Dustin's probably had this experience. We'll be talking to parents who, their kids have gone away to college and they read Foucault and they're back eating their vegan Thanksgiving meal and telling their parents that they no longer believe the things that their parents spent 18 years trying to instill in them. How would you communicate about deconstruction differently with someone like that? A parent of a child? [00:14:35] Speaker D: The parent, yeah, I always am a person who especially in this case, tries to help people think through it in the concept of like reverse engineering. So I'll say, what's your hope for your kid? And we gotta start there because I think a lot of people are operating out of fear depending on their religious environment, right? So they're attempting then to control the behavior, the thought processes or whatever of their child. When in reality the process of going to college, of reading, of exploration, of differentiation is very normal. And like almost everybody goes through that, right? And what actually pushes them further away are the fear based attempts to control. So what I would is what's your actual goal? And almost all of them, it's I want them to love Jesus. I want them to treat people really well, love God, love neighbor. I want to have a good relationship with them and I want them to have a good relationship with the rest of our family. I want them to find a spouse and have a family. And like those are their aspirations are all these things. And what I'll say is, okay, is one refusal of a regular burger and an ask for a vegan burger, is it going to get in the way of all these hopes? Probably not. But if you start making that the huge issue, right? Or you, you start like freaking out when they ask you a question about this deeply held belief that you have in a way that feels antagonistic and you get defensive. That's actually what's going to get in the way of some of that preferred future because it's going to push you guys apart and you might not ever be able to reconcile it at some point. So the advice I give to parents is to say think long term, trust that they are the kids that you raised them to be. You've instilled values in them, they're going to ask questions they're going to doubt. And I would also say the fact that they're sitting around your table pushing back, asking you those questions is actually a huge win because so many folks, they don't feel safe or comfortable doing that with their parents when they get into college or young adulthood. And so that's indication that you've done something really right is that they're there pushing back. And I'm telling you that if you will receive those questions, help them through a process even of deconstruction and reconstruction, walk through it with them, they're going to be a lot less likely to Just bail on your relationship and start asking those same questions somewhere else. Because here's the truth, right? Those questions don't go away. They get asked somewhere else. And you're probably not going to like the other places that they're asking those questions, right? Online spaces or whatever else. You'd much rather have them asking those questions to you around your table. [00:17:02] Speaker C: Totally. [00:17:03] Speaker A: Is that similar to how you had those conversations, Dustin? I'm curious. From a pastoral level. [00:17:08] Speaker B: Yeah. I will also ask what are you afraid of? Name it. Get specific. And a lot of times people are. It's not like eternal conscious torment, although sometimes it's that. A lot of times it's, I am afraid of what this means for, like, our relationship or what this says about me as a parent that I somehow failed in my duty to raise somebody as a follower of Jesus. And I don't remember where I heard this said, but one sign of you've done your job as a parent is that during that developmental stage of college, emerging adulthood, your children will begin to push back on your values with the values that you gave them. But they're. It's going to come at it from a different angle or generational expression or something like that. So it's kind of actually maybe a way of reframing it is you've done your job and it's just really uncomfortable. And they're. They're trying to, to soil the nest so that they can push their. They can spread their wings and fly and get out. So I think that is, is also helpful. [00:18:20] Speaker D: I love that. I also think it gives me the opportunity sometimes to do some deconstruction with the parents, some healthy deconstruction. So Dustin talked about, sometimes it is a fear of eternal consciousness torment. Sometimes it is that proverb playing in their mind all the time. Right. Train up a child in the way they should go, and when they're old, they won't turn from it. And they've been told if I had trained them upright, they wouldn't have turned from it. Looks like they've turned from it. And a lot of times they've been told that turning does equal eternal conscious torment in hell. And so they're rightly, deeply afraid about that because that's their framework. And so for me, then I get a chance to talk to them about what's actually a better understanding of salvation and a proverb like that and all of those kinds of things. Things. And then that gives me a chance even to enter into more of a let's deconstruct and Reconstruct some things right now with you. [00:19:09] Speaker B: Yeah, that's good. And so I think one of the things I most appreciated about your book is the process in which the first part of the book is really you're do. You're facilitating that deconstruction journey around the Bible itself. And so you, you give four unhealthy, unhelpful, harmful, toxic. We can keep the superlatives coming. Lenses for the scriptures. So we've got literalism, apocalypse, moralism and hierarchy. So could you, for people who haven't read the book yet, could you just kind of. Those are often on ramps for deconstruction. So could you unpack some of those brief. [00:19:54] Speaker D: For sure. I also want to say, and I appreciate that that's what came across in the book because the hope really is to lay out a path here. Here's some things to let's to deconstruct and then here's some things to reconstruct. So yeah, glad that came across there. [00:20:05] Speaker B: Yeah, you go in Reconstruction, which I really appreciate it. [00:20:08] Speaker D: Yeah, thanks. I appreciate that too. Okay, so yeah, literalism is really just reading every biblical passage as if it must be factually, historically or scientifically literal, often missing any kind of nuance or genre. I'll skip and come back to apocalypse. Moralism is another one using the Bible as this kind of rule book to control behavior that's often again divorced from any kind of contextual or cultural considerations. What I'll say quickly about those, and the reason why I like to group them together, is that I'm really not saying that there is nothing literal or moral in the Bible. That is the opposite. If you read the book, that's the opposite of what I'm saying. But I was. People who haven't read it, I want people that are listening to know there are very literal things in the Bible. Right. When Jesus says the most important thing is to love God and love your neighbor, he meant that very literally. There are moral imperatives in the Bible. We like to think of the Ten Commandments, do not kill. That stuff's important. There's 2,000 plus verses about caring for the poor, marginalized and oppressed. Those are moral imperatives that we have as followers of Jesus. Right. What I'm saying is the reductionist nature of the literalism and moralism lens of saying I'm reducing this big, messy, complex collection of writings to just a moralistic rule book or like a literalistic scientific book or history book or something like that, especially through a kind of modern Western, post Enlightenment mindset. And that really falls apart and becomes pretty dangerous at some point. [00:21:31] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:21:32] Speaker D: The last two are Apocalypse and hierarchy. Apocalypse is just interpreting scripture, obsessed with end times, judgment, fear, hell, violence, rather than the much bigger and better and Christ like theme of kind of renewal and restoration of all things. I think we all know the downsides of the apocalyptic understandings of text. But I will say I talk a lot about the Left behind series in my book and things like that and the damage that can be inflicted from this, just being in constant fear of God and God's return in Christ. But another piece of this, right, is if you believe that someday Jesus is going to come back and essentially murder, wipe out everyone who disagreed with him, then it actually makes it a lot easier for you to justify murdering or wiping out anybody who disagrees with you right now in God's name. And that's where it gets really dark. And we've seen this in, on small scales like cults, in large scales like American foreign policy, it's all over the place. So that's Apocalypse. The last one is hierarchy. Leveraging scripture to prop up power structures which usually elevate some people and diminish others based on usually like inherited characteristics. Stuff like gender, race status, sexual orientation, citizenship. It's a big one we're seeing right now. This is essentially saying God has given us this book in order for us to discern who's in charge and who is subservient. The funny thing is it's always the people saying this that end up in charge. So one important thing to discuss when you're talking about harmful lenses is asking who does this benefit? Who does a lens like this benefit? And hierarchy is just problematic in so many ways. They're all bad. All four I grouped into that harmful category. But I would probably say hierarchy has the largest body count, so to speak. Right. This is the lens of Nazi Germany which said a certain type of German Lutheran are ordained by God to be in charge of everyone else and they're allowed to use violence in order to do that. It's the lens of chattel slavery. It was the lens of Native American genocide on and on. And so you've seen the extreme power that comes from not just I am in charge of you, but God has ordained me to be in charge of you and told me that by any means necessary, I can keep that power. That gets pretty dark pretty fast. [00:23:55] Speaker A: Yeah, I grew up with that potpourri of beliefs. I was raised that way. What was challenging for me, and I'd be curious for you to reflect on this is I deconstructed when I got into college and that all those things transpired for me. And then I started attending mainline progressive churches. And my immediate reaction was they're just trying to twist things to make us all feel better because morally the Bible is questionable. That was my immediate knee jerk reaction. And I mentioned this on the podcast before, but I even attended a church where the rector of the parish at the pulpit was like, this particular section of the Bible is not really morally evolved enough, so we're just going to discard it. You could ignore it. And it just felt, it felt like rationalization or it felt like my parents would often, I'm the oldest in my family, they would leave me in charge in terms of babysitting duties and they'd leave a little note. And I used some amazing hermeneutical tools to make that note, serve my ends. And I'm actually in charge of what food we eat. I actually get to pick the television station we watch. I know the note looks like it means this other thing, but really it means I am the dictator of this house. And so when I so I had this kind of experience of progressive religion that just felt a little disingenuous to me. And I'd be curious your reaction to that, Jordan. [00:25:12] Speaker D: I think that's so fair. Also, I love that story about the note and our kind of of me centered hermeneutics that we do with anything. It's such a perfect illustration of how so many of us are tempted to read scripture and how we have to fight against that. But yeah, I think your observation is fair. I think a lot of people, I think there's two pieces that come to mind. So one is that I think some people experience that stepping into a more progressive church because they have been taught in more high control religious environments that anything other than this is manipulation. It is cherry picking. It is not faithfully understanding scripture. So some of it is deconstructing even that mindset and saying, okay, there's more creative ways to engage with some of these texts. But then on the flip side though, it does happen. Like your story of let's just not engage with this because it's not morally evolved. I think that's a cop out. I'm not a fan of it. I think there are so much better ways not to accidentally quote the title of my book. There's so many better ways to engage with the Bible than ah, that second is problematic. I think there's a lot healthier ways to see it. And one of them that I go back to a lot is just the idea of how the Bible came about. My friend Karen Keane, who's an amazing scholar, wrote a book called the Word of a Humble God about inspiration and how kind of God works with human authors and God's kind of humility to partner with humans to write scripture. It's really beautiful. And that's really how I understand the process of, of scripture and scripture writing. And so it means that God and Rachel Held Evans talked about this all the time, right? God, like humbling God's self. God stooping is what Rachel said all the time. Yep. Stooping down to meet us where we are. And the truth is that there are biblical authors who God met where they were, and they were not in great places. They still were caught in some of these cultural patterns of the best God is the one who wins all the wars and slaughters all the bad people. Or the most successful God is the one that enables his people to take over large swaths of land or something like that. We see this even with Jesus when he comes on the scene, the expectation that he was going to overthrow Rome and take back the political throne. And he keeps saying, you're missing this. And I think it's okay for us to go back and say, you know what, maybe Joshua missed it when he really felt like he was supposed to slaughter all of the Canaanites in Jericho. Men, women, children, animals. Like, he missed it and we miss it sometimes. That's, I think, such a healthier way of preaching or engaging with the text, like really wrestling with it to come up with these kind of healthier interpretations. And the last thing I'll say about that is we have precedent for this. And I'm not Even talking about 2000 years of Christian history. We definitely do. Where we have evolved a number of times around traditional interpretations. Science is a huge one, right? They were hanging people for saying, no, I think the earth revolves around the sun, not the other way around. Like they were saying, you go against the Bible, you get a firing squad now. So we've evolved since then, but at the same time, actually, firing squads probably didn't exist back then. But anyway, I digress. We also have biblical precedent for this. And in Acts 15, the Jerusalem Council passage, right, it's this incredible text where there were these group of people who believed that some folks had to become Jews before they could become Christians. And then you have Paul and Peter are coming back to Jerusalem to give testimony that, no, it seems like God is giving God's spirit to Gentiles without Them ever observing any kind of Jewish law or being circumcised or anything. And they all come together and they hear testimony. And then James, one of the heads of the church, gets up and he starts quoting these Old Testament passages and he's, you know what? Basically, I think we've misunderstood this whole thing. And here's a text that actually feels like it talks about gentile inclusion way back then. So let's focus on that one and not these other ones about you must be circumcised. Like, he did it right in the midst of the early church. And they made a decision based on the evidence that they were experiencing of the Holy Spirit coming upon Gentiles, that they were going to reinterpret Scripture in light of that new experience from Jesus and the Holy Spirit. And I think that gives us helpful precedent to do the same as we continue the trajectory of Christianity. [00:29:23] Speaker A: Let me ask a follow up to that. So I remember I went to a lot of versions of Jesus camp as a kid. I was raised Southern Baptist. And oftentimes, oftentimes they would say there'd be like a Bible study morning where you would go get your breakfast and [00:29:35] Speaker C: go meet with your counselor. [00:29:36] Speaker A: And they'll be like, why don't you go off and read your Bible for 30 minutes? And I was just like, hell, yeah, I'll do that. And so I would go off and I'm alone with my Bible and just making my way through complicated Old Testament prophets. And I'd be like, of course I understand, because I'm supposed to, right? And I think the challenge that I see when I'm looking at your book, if I gave your book to somebody without maybe some of the helpful direction you provide in it, and they just see these as like, tools in a toolbox, and they can just pick which one they want in a particular situation. It's a little bit like, I've got a friend who's a contractor, and he was. He came over the house to see a project that I was working on. He was like, like, buddy, you're using the wrong tool. He's like, now this job's a little more expensive. How do what is what? Because there's a hermeneutic, which is just a fancy way of saying how you look at things. What is the tool? We need to discern the tool. How do we pick and choose which way we read the Bible? Obviously, there's some genre questions here. If you read poetry literally, then you've got multiple problems. But how do we choose which tool is Appropriate because there's some patches that are controversial where you have two sides of, of a debate and they'll use very different tools. And I think those are both somewhat valid in how they approach it. So how do you. [00:30:51] Speaker D: Yeah, and that's really what the whole second half of the book is supposed to be about, which is here are four healthier lenses, Jesus, context, flourishing, fruitfulness, that give us healthier interpretive outcomes, so to speak. And then I end the book really with this call to healthy and diverse community for all Bible interpretation. Basically your point, like, none of the tools matter if we're just doing this on our own with very little understanding or just trapped in our own biases and experiences. When we're in healthy and diverse community, we make better decisions, we run things by each other, and it just helps a lot. But I'll focus in for a second on the final lens that I give, which is this fruitfulness lens. And it's this idea that we should be prioritizing interpretations that lead to better fruit. Jesus said, you will know my followers by their fruit. Paul later picks up on that theme and enumerates the fruit of the spirit. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self control. I think what that means for us is that our beliefs, our behaviors, and our Bible interpretations should be leading to more love, joy, peace, patience, kindness in us and in the world. And so if that's what's happening, then I think we can trust this is a really good and healthy Bible interpretation. And if it's not, then it should at least cause us to reexamine some things. But to your point, Jordan, sometimes you're engaging with a passage and there are a couple of options that lead to love and joy and peace and patience. This might feel controversial for somebody who wrote a book about the Bible, but like, at that point, I'm not sure it matters a ton which one is like right or wrong, you know what I mean? [00:32:23] Speaker B: Against these things there is no law. [00:32:25] Speaker D: Exactly. Right. Like, I think that gives us the freedom, especially because we're all coming from different places and things. Like, I've interpreted individual pastors differently at different points in my life that have led me to the outcomes that I think God was leading me toward. And I think that's actually really healthy. Let me say one more thing about that. I'm doing a Doctorate of ministry at Duke right now, and our first semester we had an Old Testament class with Ellen Davis, who's just an unbelievable Old Testament scholar, and then she co taught it with a rabbi that she's been longtime friends with. And we talked about a little bit about inspiration and obviously the class is almost all Christians. And Ellen asked the class, how were you taught that you could know the Bible is inspired by God? And almost all of us said some version of. Because there's one right. Meaning for every single passage. I'll never forget. The rabbi is just like cracking up and we're like, what's so funny? And he says that's the exact opposite of how we were taught to understand that the Bible is inspired by God. We were taught that like a diamond that twists and there's so many different beautiful parts of it that actually the multiplicity of beautiful interpretations means that God is in every piece of this. Right. And I was like, never forget that. Like, I think that's just so beautiful as a way to look at biblical interpretation. [00:33:42] Speaker B: Yeah, that's so good. What do you. So what's coming to mind? And I'm curious your thoughts on this act like the My mind is going back to the basement and coming up to the big spacious house metaphor. And I think if the dank basement is apocalypse and moralism and literalism and we need a tour guide to help us explore the rest of the house in discerning like what are more fruitful Jesus centered ways of reading. My mind goes to the the road to Emmaus passage and Jesus coming alongside people with a apocalyptic, moralistic, literalistic, hierarchical lens. And he becomes the interpretive guide for how we understand how these things work. What does that bring up for you? [00:34:37] Speaker D: I love that passage. I think it is the best deconstruction reconstruction passage. It's. To me, it's literally Jesus showing up somewhat magically, it seems right. Just appearing on the road post resurrection and basically saying, you guys are understanding this wrong. You need to deconstruct these harmful beliefs. And he just walks with. And I love the road analogy. Right. Like he's literally just walking them through this process gently but directly of you need to deconstruct these harmful beliefs. And here are some reconstructed healthier ones. And then at the end they're like that was Jesus. They like how the scales fall or whatever. And that's the text I talk about a lot when people like to decry the whole process of deconstruction reconstruction. I talk about this a bunch in the book, but nobody chooses this. I make this dumb statement about nobody wakes up one morning, grabs a cup of coffee and says I'm going to question everything I've ever believed today. Everything I hold dear. I'm going to toss it up. It happens because something we believe comes into conflict with something we experience. Experience. And gosh, if only we could all have Jesus come alongside of us and walk with us during that process like those two guys on the road to Emmaus did. But I do think that we can in some form, in that we're supposed to be the hands and feet of Jesus walking people through that process, just like he did and gave us that example. [00:36:03] Speaker A: Yeah. Let's talk about local church level and how reconstruction is facilitated. I'm sure both of you being pastors have gotten those emails from someone who maybe visited the church for the first time, and they're asking a series of very loaded targeted questions about what you believe and are they safe in a community? And really, that's just a litmus test for whether they want to trust you to help them in that reconstruction process. And I'm thinking about, you know, building stable communities when you have a lot of people that are questioning core ideas that can be tricky to, like, be hospitable, plus have a strong center. So how do you think about that tension between those two things and creating a hospitable environment? What does that look like for you? [00:36:46] Speaker D: That's a great question. So many things come up. So I don't know if you ever heard read about, like, the paradox of tolerance, this idea that if you are just purely tolerant, then you'll end up tolerating intolerance all the time. Right. And so an axiom that we use a lot is everybody's welcome, but not anything goes. So everybody is absolutely welcome. Everybody has a seat at Jesus table. But it doesn't mean you can act however you want, specifically harming other people around the table. But on the flip side of that, if people are asking, like, am I completely safe at restore? So, you know, a great example, right, is somebody in the LGBTQ community sends an email and says, what's your policy around this? All that kind of stuff. And so we have a very clear policy that says there is no limitation based on your sexual orientation, gender, anything like that, and your full participation in every part of the church. So everything from attending to being in a group to being an elder, it's not a factor in your participation. But what I can't guarantee is that nobody is going to, like, say something under their breath to you or give you a weird look. The church is not, like, massive, but it's large enough that I don't know everybody that goes there. I don't know exactly what you're going to experience. So what I tell them all the time is I can't promise this fully, like, safe space where you will never encounter anything uncomfortable or offensive. What I can promise that is if something happens, I will absolutely address it. I will talk with you, I will talk with the person who you feel like offended you, and we can work through a process together. Because I actually think that is such a beautiful countercultural thing rather than just further polarizing more and more, we actually kind of work through problems. And as doing this for a decade, what I've realized is that there are really mean things that happen to people and there have to be direct reprimands for other folks. Hey, you can't talk to them like that. Hey, you can't treat them like that. But a lot of times somebody hears something that really was more like triggering of something that happened to them before that wasn't at all intentional by the person, and we go through this little. I wouldn't even call it a mediation process. That sounds too formal. We just talk it out and they both come to the understanding of, oh, there was no ill intent here, and I can believe the best about the other person. And we actually end up growing through that relationship and through those conversations. So those are some of the tools that we try to use to make sure that. Because I think we can be really clear about policies and things like that. But attempting to police every single person at any church really doesn't help. And I think it's just a recreation of fundamentalism. And I don't have any desire to be some, like, progressive fundamentalist of here's the new box that you have to be inside of. Especially when people are just stepping out of the basement and trying to explore. And to say, you got to come to this room and lock the door and you can't ever leave, that's just recreating the same bad structures that we came out of. [00:39:39] Speaker B: I'm curious, just on. On like Sunday to Sunday level, like with that policy, do you have. Do you also have people in your community who would not would disagree with that policy, but disagree agreeably? They're like, yeah, we can be here, even though we don't necessarily. We're not necessarily on board with that or what's that dynamic look like? [00:40:02] Speaker D: Yeah, I think the way I'd frame it is obviously these things are of different importance to different people. Right. Like, there might be someone who is. You know what? If I was gay, I think I would pursue a life of celibacy. I think that's what God's called. Me to. But that doesn't mean that I need to require that of every single person at this church. That would be what I'd say we'd have. I don't think we'd have a lot of people who are like, I think that a gay person being like, we have a pastor that's gay on our staff. I don't think that somebody is at restore saying, a gay pastor is an egregious sin, but I'm going to overlook it. You know what I mean? I don't think there's not that much level of, like, cognitive dissonance for people. But I liken it a lot to. I talk about it the way we talk about divorce, which is. Okay. Divorce is talked about in a bunch of different ways throughout the biblical narrative. Jesus talks about it pretty strongly, other people less. It's. If you asked every person in our church, when is it like, okay, or biblically permissible to get divorced? You'd have a bunch of different answers. Probably just as many different answers as people about situations and remarriage and all that kind of stuff. And so what I say is you might look at somebody else who's been divorced or divorced and remarried and say, I don't know if I would have gotten divorced in that situation, or I don't know if after divorce I would have pursued remarriage because of how I understand this text or that text. But it doesn't mean that they should be discriminated against in our church because they did something different than I would have done. And the same thing is true for a gay married couple. Like I said, you can think if I was gay or we have a couple people who are gay who are celibate. And so, like, you can hold that 100%. And I would never want to get up and say, they're like, you're wrong. You're living in sin because you're trying to pursue celibacy. Again, I think that's just a recreation of. Of the same terrible stuff. Instead, I think we would say, wow, you can hold a personal understanding of a biblical text and not prescribe it to everyone else. In fact, I think that's just an unrealistic way to have a community of any kind. [00:41:53] Speaker A: Yeah, we've got a few more questions to wrap up here. I wanted to ask you because I think people remember stories, and I curious if you have any stories of reconstruction that you could share or anything that comes to mind, obviously respecting people's anonymity. But I think we have a lot of Models for what deconstructing looks like. We've seen that. I was. I listened to that liturgist podcast for all those years. But I think sharing stories of what positive reconstruction looks like can give people like a picture. So is there anything that comes to mind specifically in that domain? [00:42:26] Speaker D: Absolutely. I share a bunch in the book. I'll actually share one though, that I didn't. I touched on the book, but I didn't share the reconstruction. I didn't share the whole story. So I talk about a guy named Bo in the book, in the apocalypse chapter who was made to go through a judgment Hell House thing, basically like a recreation of eternal conscious torment at 8 years old. And he is crying and. And I know this because he sent me a promotional video that he's in of him crying after the Hell House video or after the Hell House experience that the Hell House company still shows on their website. And he's 30 now. The reason he texted me this video is because we started like a four or five part series on Revelation and after the first week, he plays bass in our band and he texted me and he was like, oh, check this out. Isn't this so funny? It's like some of the stuff you were talking about today. And I like watch the video and it's this eight year old crying. And I was like, dude, this isn't funny at all. This is like terrible and tragic and. And we ended up. He was like, you're probably right. I'm just like laughing to keep from crying. But could we talk? Because the truth is, this first sermon was like a little triggering for me. I've just put that in a box and not examined it at all for all these years. And so we had coffee and talked and then we went through the whole rest of the series. And by the end it wasn't like a magical thing. But by the end he said, gosh, there's actually. This is really beautiful, actually, like the return of Jesus, the redemption of all things, the new heaven and new Earth, this idea of restoration rather than just torching it all. Like, I had no idea this was there. I just avoided all of this stuff since I was 8 because of all the trauma. And now he like is into it. And he, I think, actually has a lot more both current and eternal hope because of those texts that I. And I think that's what they're supposed to provide. I'm a big understanding of Revelation as like this guide for dissidents in the age of Empire thing with the eternal hope of the restoration of all things like, we. We need that bad right now. And for him, he was like, gosh, I got to trade this old thing. So for him to carry the metaphor, like, he demolished that part of his little house of faith. He just pushed the whole thing over and said, I can't do it again. And he walked away for 22 plus years. And then through the work that we did together, he built up that little piece again. And it was so much healthier and more beautiful. And now it's like a little room he can go sit in when he's feeling especially troubled by our world or lacking hope for the future. And it's that space that maybe inspires a little bit more. Yeah. Healthy faith that he's really been looking for. [00:44:59] Speaker A: Yeah, it's almost. There's no tracks for this. It's really an individual because it's so mixed up with people's emotional journeys, psychological journeys that you can't really. There's no model here. And I know some people listen to this podcast and go, where's my model to help people reintegrate in faith? And I'm like, the assumptions in your question are the problems. Because we're all unique and we all have different things. I was, my dad is a Southern Baptist minister. I was raised in that environment. I went to Christian schools. I went to. And then I went to a super secular left wing college and had that journey, encountering kind of more progressive fundamentalism. And so we all have our unique journeys. And I think what my perspective, echoing what you're saying, is just meeting people where they are and not being dogmatic about the process and allowing people to explore things in safety. I think that goes a long way. Is that your experience, Dustin, when you've worked with people that are trying to reintegrate? [00:45:58] Speaker B: Yeah, it's, it's. Eugene Peterson said pastoral ministry is the most contextual thing on the planet. It just, you have to get into the nitty gritty details of somebody's life and experience to know, to get to those questions like we were talking about with parents, but like with people as well. It's what happened. Oftentimes when I think the thing that I come across the most is people having issues with a particular church and the way that they did this thing or the other. And it, it's typically after a few questions that we get down to a person. Yeah, that this person hurt me in this way. And it's okay. That's a different sort of thing. And yeah, not on the. That's on the reconstruction side of kind of building or deconstruction side. On the reconstruction side, I just had a conversation yesterday with a person who had some questions about hell. [00:46:57] Speaker D: And [00:47:00] Speaker B: after a few questions, it became clear I'm not worried about hell as, like, just an existential threat for other people. Yeah, Like, I'm worried that my. I'm on that trajectory right now. And so then how do you come alongside and help people in those circumstances? Yeah, that's. [00:47:19] Speaker A: I think that's a great ending point, Zach. We close this podcast with what we call reconstruction recommendations, book recommendations we've discussed on prior episodes that some people are blessed to live in communities where there is healthy environments for them to participate in, that there's a reality that some people live in small towns or places that, you know, don't have hospitable environments that will allow or are hospitable to that kind of process. And so they neither need to rely on abstracted things like church online or chat groups or Reddit or whatever. But I'm. I'm a librarian by day, so I care about books. What. What are some books you'd recommend to people that are maybe starting that process of reconstruction? Obviously, your book is a great place to start in thinking how to use the Bible in ways that are healthy. But beyond that, what would you recommend for people? [00:48:10] Speaker D: Yeah, that is the first thing I would say is that I have no understandings that my book is going to be perfect for everyone's journey or complete anyone's journey. But I definitely wrote it with that group in mind, you know what I mean? Because I really wrote it out of our community, and that's what our community is. In addition to that, I would say everything that Rachel Holt Evans has ever written is. Has been deeply impactful for me. Specifically searching for Sunday, as if you're doing some deconstructing, reconstructing on church specifically. I think on the reconstruction side, I have benefited tremendously from liberation theology, which I talk about in one of my chapters in the book. So James cone, the Cross in the Lynching Tree, anything from Gustavo Gutierrez, any folks like that, the Boff Brothers. It's just fantastic stuff that's really helped me, I would say outside of theology and stuff, though, I've been really inspired by memoirs or by biographies of people who have held fast in important times. Right. Like I have some of these people behind me up here, Dr. King and Mr. Rogers and Fannie Lou Hamer and tons of folks. Right. That's James Baldwin, so lots of folks that. Dietrich Bonhoeffer's one for me. Strange Glory. Charles Marsh is one. His biography on him is incredible. [00:49:25] Speaker B: Fantastic. [00:49:26] Speaker D: So good. Like, I love that kind of stuff because I walk away with, like you said earlier stories. This is a real person who stood tall, courageously, stepped out in faith at a time when the world desperately needed it. And I need that every day to keep stepping into this work. So I'm a huge fan of that kind of stuff as well. [00:49:45] Speaker A: That's fantastic. Yeah. I think in our most prior podcast with Mr. Zahnd, he was recommending people get in Dostoevsky. I think there's some intermediate stages before you jump into the 800 page rushing. No, Dustin's working through one of those right now. [00:50:00] Speaker D: Yeah, they're good, but they're a slog. Yeah. [00:50:03] Speaker A: Zach, this has been so much fun. I really do appreciate you taking the time to talk with us again. The book is Better Ways to Read the Transforming a Weapon of Harm into a Tool of Healing. I think it's a fantastic book to just rethink how flexible we are in our tools that we have available to us to look at this very complicated library of texts. And so I think it's a great place for people to start if they want to re engage. Zach, thank you so much. [00:50:30] Speaker D: Thank you guys. It was a blast to talk.