Episode Transcript
[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 A: We are not related.
[00:00:16] Speaker B: Different spell.
[00:00:29] Speaker A: Welcome back to the Return. I'm Jordan Maddox. In this episode, Dustin and I sit down with Brian Zahnd, a pastor and writer for a conversation about faith, doubt, and what it actually looks like to rebuild when the version of Christianity you inherited no longer feels like it can hold the weight of real life. Brian shares a story of his journey from a dramatic teenage conversion during the Jesus movement to leading a large and successful church to the moment in midlife when he realized something was off and began searching for something deeper and more rooted. We talk about what people mean when they use the word deconstruction, why so many people get stuck in the space between belief and disbelief, and how Brian found his way into historic theology, philosophy, and a richer understanding of the Christian tradition. This is a conversation about holding on to Christ while rethinking everything else. About the difference between Americanized faith and historic faith and about what it takes to move from tearing things down to actually building something new.
So I want to start with a general question. Can you talk, Brian, a little bit about your faith journey? We're going to get into kind of mechanics of different aspects of faith journeys as we look structurally at what deconstruction looks like and what reconstruction looks like. But can you tell us a little bit about yours to start?
[00:01:55] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:01:56] Speaker C: I grew up in a family that went to church.
I suppose that influenced me.
I didn't hate it. I didn't like it. It was just there.
But in.
When I was 16, I had a sudden, dramatic, unanticipated, uninvited, really, encounter with Jesus Christ. This is during the Jesus movement. And it just kind of like overnight I went from the high school Led Zeppelin freak, everybody called me Fry. That was my nickname to the high school Jesus freak.
And I think a lot of people thought for the first week or so it was a joke.
But as time went on, they would come up and they say, fry, I can't believe what's happened to you. I would say, yeah, I know, right? I can't believe it either. But it's happened.
And by the time I was 17, I was leading a ministry.
This is the Jesus movement. It was called the Catacombs. We met in the basement of a dive bar on 3rd street, and it was mostly a music venue.
And. But there would be occasionally somebody would speak, and I would do some of that. But that's what became Our church five years later, the catacombs. We got out of the basement of the dive bar and bought an old Methodist church that was derelict and nobody wanted. And that's where we started. And our church stayed small for a long time.
Then it really grew really fast, really big in the 90s, that was quite a wild ride.
And as I entered my 40s, by the metrics that Americans like to measure success in ministry, I had it made. Everything was good, right? Big, successful, all of those kinds of words. And I was increasingly disconcerted, dissatisfied.
I just felt like this. Something was off.
I didn't have any kind of crisis of faith regarding Christ.
I just thought that the Jesus that had enchanted me years earlier deserved a better Christianity than what I knew.
It just seemed too shallow, too consumerist to way too American.
And that's when I started to do something about it. I didn't know what to do.
I'd been successful in ministry, but I was just in that general Malou of charismatic word of faith. It's just what I didn't make any decision to join it. It's just the Jesus movement led to the charismatic movement, which I describe as good until it wasn't.
And then. And I just was on a.
But it's almost like I was on a bus. And at about 40, I woke up and thought, I think this bus is taking me where I don't want to go. And I didn't know what to do other than I had this instinct, I'm going to start from the beginning. Now, by the beginning I meant the beginning of the church. I knew the Scriptures.
So I started for the first time in my life reading Church Fathers.
And this was interesting. And I also returned to an. An interest that I'd had as a teenager but had abandoned. That's philosophy. And so I began reading philosophy and patristics. And that went on for several years until I had a breakthrough and began to really find the goods, what I call the good stuff, serious theology.
And so I just immersed myself. At first it was NT Wright and then Walter Bergman, Stanley Hauer, Wass, Carl Barth, people like that. I was just reading immense amounts and it was like I'd struck gold. Eyes like, where have you been all my life? And I was spending maybe six hours a day reading that sort of stuff, but never was it a chore. It was always a delight. It was an adventure. It was a discovery, of course, that began to change my preaching.
And I remember announcing to our church in 2004 in August, I said, I'm packing My bags from the charismatic movement. I'm moving on now. I did it with enough rhetorical skill that people applauded until I actually did it.
As long as it was just a high point in a sermon, people dug it. When I started actually doing it, we were able to lose about 1500 people. And that was interesting.
The big issue. I made a lot of changes, and most of it would have been acceptable, but when I began to critique America not as a kind of biblical Israel, but as a kind of biblical Babylon, this is 20 years ago, man. That's. That was a bridge too far for a lot of them.
[00:06:55] Speaker A: Pissed a lot of people off. Yeah.
[00:06:57] Speaker C: In other words, just to sum up here, because I know I've gone on about this a little bit, I've got 44 years to sum up here for you.
[00:07:03] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:07:04] Speaker C: So the first half of my maybe adult life as a Christian was.
It was exciting. It was somewhat popularized Americanized Christianity. And then at about 40, midlife, I began to rethink everything and became very serious about both historic and academic theology. And that changed everything for me, Changed every change. My audience, it changed my preaching. It changed everything. And that's when I began to write. When people ask me how many books I've written, I say 12, which is not true.
I've written 14. There were two books written earlier on, like, in my 30s.
These are my bastard children that I do not claim.
Do not ask me the titles, because I will not tell you. If I could buy them all back and throw them in the sea, I would.
[00:08:00] Speaker A: But such is life, Tongues of fire and whatnot. I want to ask you, do you. Was for you, was that moment when you took to the books, was that a period of deconstruction? Would you classify it that way?
[00:08:14] Speaker C: How to respond? First of all, I had. By the time I was doing that, I was also reading philosophy, and I'm familiar with Jacques Derrida, and I understand where the term comes from. It's from philosophy of language. It has to do with text. It has to do with Derrida's understanding that because words are signs pointing to signs, no text has a final and fixed meaning. And you can always deconstruct the text.
And I would say, no, that's not what I'm doing.
So I wouldn't have used that term. And when I was doing that in the early 2000, the term deconstruction was not yet in vogue.
I'm not a fan of the term. I just think we should probably just use it for. Within the philosophy of language. With Derrida, but that's not going to happen. Cat's already out of the bag. I don't like it because it sounds too much like destruction.
And I wasn't interested in destroying faith. I just, like I said, I just decided that I realized that the Christianity I knew did not seem worthy of the Christ who had long fascinated me. And so I was just on a quest to find something better. My metaphor that I use, I wrote a book on it, is water to wine. I just said, okay. It was like I realized that the Christianity knew now in midlife, was watery, it was weak, the party was almost over, at least as far as me being enthralled with Christianity itself.
And then the miracle happened and the water turned to wine.
But I don't avoid the word deconstruction because it's what people use, but it's not my go to.
People from the outside watching me at that time probably today would say that's what was happening, but that isn't the way I thought about it.
[00:10:03] Speaker A: Let me ask you a follow up on that. So, you know, we. Because it sounds like you're describing a whole process of someone coming to terms with the simplicity of their faith and deepening it. And that's, I think, when whatever this, whatever we're going to call this process of letting go of childish things and growing into more mature things looks, you know, what Richard Rohr would be talking about in terms of moving from the first half to the second half of life. What we encounter sometimes, I know Dustin and I experience this, is we see people that are just. They're in that vat where they smash up the grapes of their feet and they just can't get out.
[00:10:40] Speaker B: And they just keep.
[00:10:41] Speaker A: They're smashing the. They're stomping around, smashing the grapes, and we never get wine because they can't get out of the bucket.
[00:10:46] Speaker C: And.
[00:10:47] Speaker A: And that that transition to building something new doesn't. Doesn't arrive. So what would you. What do you think is going on there?
[00:10:55] Speaker C: Here's what I think's going on.
First of all, deconstruction, if we're going to use that term, is primarily an evangelical slash fundamentalist phenomenon.
[00:11:08] Speaker B: And.
[00:11:11] Speaker C: So evangelicals with a fundamentalist overtone have been convinced all of their life that their version of Christianity is the only really valid one, not mainline liberal Christianity, not Catholicism. They'd never even heard of orthodoxy, probably.
And so this is the only version of Christianity that is legitimate. And when that becomes untenable, they will leave that because they can't stay but they also leave believing that they have to leave Christianity because there's no other option.
In one sense what happens is in a complete fatal deconstruction where the faith is entirely lost.
Oftentimes what I see is former Christian fundamentalists jettison the Christian but retain their fundamentalists fundamentalist there. And I would say let's maybe work on getting rid of the fundamentalism and see if there's a possibility of remaining Christian. It's. They're not so much popular these days as they were. Their heyday is passed. But you had the four horsemen of the atheistic apocalypse. Dennetton, Dawkins and Doc. Yeah, if you read their stuff, it's really, they really are fighting against the straw man. It really is that, that you have to be a fundamentalist to be a Christian. So when I meet some of these angry atheists, I describe to me the God in which you do not believe, which is an interesting question by the way. Describe to me the God that you do not believe in and they can do it. Oh, then they will tell you. They go and I say I don't believe any of that.
I don't believe in that God either.
But I am still a Christian. And so I think they get stuck in it's fundamentalism or let's say, I'll be more charitable, it's evangelicalism or nothing. But that's not the option. Within the Christian faith there's a lot more options than evangelicalism. Americanized fundamentalist leaning evangelicalism.
[00:13:34] Speaker B: Totally. And I'm reading Ryan Burges's new book right now and he is looking at the social science surveys and stuff he's saying in America. Here's all the charts and graphs to prove it. Christianity is seen by the population as fundamentalist evangelicalism. Like that, they are one and the same thing according to the most invisible.
[00:13:56] Speaker C: Expression of Christianity in America for sure.
[00:14:00] Speaker B: So when, so when you started you, when you went back to the beginning and you found the good stuff, like when you learned about the other forms and flavors and histories of Christianity, what did you discover and where do you think things went wrong to get us to this place where we are today, where there's. It's evangelicalism or nothing.
[00:14:24] Speaker C: American evangelicalism is embarrassingly ignorant of long church history and tend to be dismissive of it.
So that's a problem. I would say that all realms of theology began to be transformed for me, soteriology and Christology which became actually much more robust.
Etc.
A lot of them I could say, okay, I wouldn't. I'm not necessarily changing, deepening.
I'm becoming more historic in how I understand these things. But the realm of eschatology, that was something that just had to be demolished. That's where actually deconstruction did turned into destruction in a good way. Because the left behind late great planet Earth dispensationalism that is endemic in America and then from America goes around the world is a disaster. It's a theological disaster.
And that just had to be just thrown out, that had to be gotten rid of.
Other things are much more sacramental. Today our church is I People ask me how would what is Word of Life? What is it?
And we are a non denominational church, which I don't actually don't believe in. But I mean I can't go back and undo history. And we're here and.
But I would I describe myself or our church as a rock and roll Anglican in that we still have the contemporary music. Because I belong to the people that fought the battle to bring the electric guitars and drums into the church. I'm not going to take them out.
[00:16:11] Speaker B: A grateful nation salutes you.
[00:16:14] Speaker C: But we very much pay attention to the church calendar, the lectionary, the Book of Common Prayer is central to our public church life. So that was a big change.
I forgot what the question was. Now I'm rambling.
[00:16:30] Speaker B: Where do you think things went wrong?
[00:16:33] Speaker C: I think part of it went wrong with American exceptionalism, which is actually a.
A thing. It is in us that Americans think we do everything the best and why would we pay attention to anybody else?
And so then you have a Christianity that is very unrooted, it doesn't have a long history and it takes on the attributes of America itself because see, America is a behemoth.
It is so big that it's not one thing, it's four things. It's a nation, like a nation state with its borders and all that. It's a culture.
So I've been in like 50 countries, but I've never left America because it's exported across. Yeah, it's a cult now as a nation and a culture, America is a mixed bag. But there's much that is to be celebrated. There's much that's admirable, there's much that's inspiring. But then you move into the realm of empire.
I describe empires as rich, powerful nations who believe they have a divine right to rule other nations and a manifest destiny to shape history according to their agenda. And the Bible, though celebrating nations always critiques empires. And then finally a religion.
Americanism is a Religion. And so the primary challenge for the pastoral vocation here is that we are tasked with making disciples of people who are already thoroughly discipled into a rival religion. But it's a rival religion that borrows so heavily with Christian vocabulary, image, language, that people confuse the two.
So I, I think that's where a lot of things have gone wrong, is that that American Christianity is very modern, very recent, very unrooted, not very conversant with long history and the wide ecumenical width of the church.
And so that tends to magnify our problems.
[00:18:43] Speaker A: Yeah, Let me jump in here and ask some follow ups to something you said a minute ago, because I was, I was brought up in those environments that you're describing and I think still has left an imprint, like I call it the exclusionary imprint, where it's hard to think outside of the paradigm of there's one way, and I think what you're describing is going in with a scalpel and trying to extract that, to give people this perception that there is a variety of options and those are equally okay. But that's. How do you communicate that to someone that has been in the evangelical church that has that the binary is almost like a tattoo on their brain?
[00:19:27] Speaker C: I know, I don't. You do. I don't know how you do your best.
I think there is a constant you can hold on to, and that is Christ himself, who for me remains endlessly fascinating.
And the interesting thing about Jesus, one of the things that Christians will confess is that he is, yes, he's Savior, he's Lord, Son of God, but he's also judge.
And you know what?
That's, I think, incontrovertible because he's already judged. People know that if you want to talk about a perfect life, a perfect human, it's Jesus Christ. And that's why when you see Christian nationalism in America, it does irreparable damage to the church and the witness of the church, but somehow Christ is above that.
You know, atheists understand they may not believe in any of this, but they'll say the Jesus that is present in the Gospels is not like that.
And so if we can hold on, if we say, look, I'm not going to sacrifice Christ, but everything else is negotiable.
I think you may. That's like stripping it down to the studs. And now we're going to have to rebuild from there.
If American evangelicals were running the early church, we would not have four gospels because they couldn't handle the cognitive dissonance of difference.
So for example, in The Synoptic Gospels, Jesus in anguish in the garden of Gethsemane, real agony. In John's Gospel, there's none of that.
There's none of that. And in fact, John says there was a Roman cohort, 600 Roman soldiers come to arrest Jesus. That's not mentioned in the Synoptic Gospels. And when they say he, Jesus initiates everything, he strides forth and says, who are you looking for Jesus of Nazareth? I am. And they all fall down now.
And we know John is the last gospel written. So did John say, I've done some really in depth journalism here and I've discovered that Matthew, Mark and Luke missed some key elements and that, no, John has a different agenda. He's telling us the story in a different way. There's no transfiguration in the Gospel of John because the whole gospel is Christ transfigured.
And so if I were, if I were to theorize, John is not interested.
He's not interested in just doing his doing journalism.
He isn't interested in what we would call historical critical analysis. What he's interested in is he's telling his story and he says, you know what, the empires of this world are going to bow and fall before Christ. And so he tells it that way. But that's a subtlety that, that's a willingness to play with the text that Nietzsche called the gay science. But what that would really mean is like the playful wisdom that John and all the gospel writers, they're not doing journalism, they are doing creative theology in storytelling.
And that kind of, that lends the possibility for richness and depth and beauty to the gospel that American evangelicals just don't understand. They can't accept. They would fight against, and they will. Then you'll see them try to go on their, their foolhardy quest to harmonize the gospel's imperfection in some way. And it never works. And you don't need to do it.
[00:23:36] Speaker A: Yeah, I remember I, in my Christian high school that I went to, I was, I'm a pastor's kid. So I always had some kind.
[00:23:44] Speaker C: I raised three pastors kids.
[00:23:46] Speaker A: I always had some ammo. So I remember raising my hand in my Bible.
[00:23:49] Speaker C: Michi was a pastor's kid. That tells you a lot right there.
[00:23:52] Speaker A: Yeah, yep. Got lost in those mountains. I, I remember I tried to juke him. I raised my hand and I was like, why is there no evidence that a Roman census took place?
Yeah, how does this compute with inerrancy? And I got some big befuddled answer or whatever. But I was still operating on this principle, like it, even when I was challenging it. I was mirroring back to them the kind of dichotomies that they created for me. And I've talked to a lot of people over the years about how they think about the Bible because the Bible is so complicated for people as they're reconstructing, because there's parts that seem to be talking about them. There's parts that have been so strongly interpreted that it's hard to unsee that interpretation. My wife loves, she loves the pastoral epistles. Those are her favorite. She reads them all the time to remind herself of my authority.
The Bible has a lot of challenges. And I'm curious, for people that have exited faith and coming back, what does it look like? What does discipleship look like with the Bible? I guess is what I'm asking.
[00:25:04] Speaker C: That's a large question.
[00:25:06] Speaker A: Yeah, we can break it down.
[00:25:08] Speaker C: What I want to respond by saying this.
Four entities, Jesus, the church, the Bible and Christianity.
Four things, Jesus, church, Bible, Christianity.
They are related in some ways, they interact in some ways, but they are not the same thing.
We get ourselves into terrible real life theological quagmires if we confuse them. Jesus is the crucified and risen Logos and fleshed out however you want to. We can recite the Nicene Creed if you like, or whatever. The church is the gathered community of the baptized confessing that Jesus is Lord and seeking to follow him.
The Bible is the canonical text. The Hebrew Bible appended in mass as a giant prequel to Christian Scripture that has been identified as canonical. And then Christianity. Christianity is the religion. See, this is evangelical. They hate it when you say that.
Oh, Christianity, religion, it. No, see there you've mixed Jesus and Christian. It's Jesus that we have a relationship with. Christianity is the religion that grows out.
[00:26:33] Speaker B: Of.
[00:26:35] Speaker C: The soil of Scripture. The confession that Jesus is Lord, the life of the church. And it's good that Christianity is a religion because as such it is capable of change and development.
We have our canonical text here.
We can't add or subtract the books. I guess somebody can try, but that's not really going to work.
But then you come up against the traditional embarrassments of, for example, the Bible never issues a categorical condemnation of the institution of slavery in either Testament. Now there are, I would say the seeds for abolition can be found in the New Testament or maybe even the Old Testament too. But as far as a verse that just come out and say slavery bad.
It doesn't do that. But that's all right because The Christian religion, rooted in the soil of Scripture, is capable of producing entire branches, limbs and bowels of abolition.
So that Christianity is a religion is good because that means it's capable of growth, development, and even change.
You. But among a lot of evangelicals, they're all just the same thing. Jesus, the church, they're not sure what the church, the Bible and Christianity are all just one thing. And so that if you find something wrong with the Bible or something archaic, something that doesn't seem to have any particular resonance in the 21st century, then the whole thing falls apart because everything's bound so tightly together. But it doesn't need to be that way.
[00:28:17] Speaker B: Brian. So to let me just.
[00:28:20] Speaker C: I just want to throw this in. For whatever reason, I actually consider myself just. I don't know. I have no idea who the audience here is. I consider myself a theological conservative in the sense that I pay a lot of attention to church history and the patristics.
Now, that has nothing to do with current culture wars. I'm definitely not that. But I don't think that's conservative at all. That's. I don't know what it is. It's some sort of.
I don't know what it is. It's not conservative. So grotesque.
[00:28:51] Speaker A: That's the word I would use.
[00:28:52] Speaker C: That's a good word. It's a good word. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:28:55] Speaker A: What were you going to ask, Dustin?
[00:28:57] Speaker B: So to zoom in on in. In the same way you've created some differentiation, but in, in terms of. Of relationships.
When, when we talk about the Bible itself, I've heard you talk about three. Three kind of different approaches or levels of coming to the scriptures themselves. Right. We've got the literal, the historical critical, and then the mystical or the analogical. So could you walk us through those from your perspective and how they help with the.
How those are the soil out of which fruit can grow.
[00:29:36] Speaker C: So people will ask me, there's a lot of violence in the Bible. I said, oh, man, tell me about it. There's a whole lot of violence in the Bible. And they are maybe concerned about children.
And I generally say, look, they just need to know the stories.
Okay, just. I don't think you are making. I don't. I think it's just a kind of poverty. If a child grows up and doesn't know the story of. Doesn't know the story of David and Goliath. This is just part of richness of culture, if nothing else. So we probably approach the Bible, most of us, as children and in some way or form literal. We hear these stories.
But then if we stay on a journey, then we can begin to do our historical critical stuff. No, we're not going to believe in a literal six day creation. The point is you got two creation stories. You got the Elohimist and the Yahweh and we can do all of that sort of stuff and do our JEDP and all of that. That's good. I like a lot of the historical critical. The quest for the historical Jesus isn't that great. Let's learn about who the Pharisees really were and who were the Sadducees and Jesus as a. Within his own context of the first century. The problem is you can never reach that Jesus because that's when you have Lessing's broad ugly ditch that you can't ever.
That Jesus is always and permanently inaccessible. Maybe you can get close, maybe you can understand some things, but you'll never encounter the one who walked in sandals upon dusty hills of Galilee. That's just. You can't go there. And so that's where things can begin to break down and people walk away.
But there is this, some call it a second naivete.
I would maybe talk about it being more of a mystical reading where scripture is understood as a sacrament, not as a.
Not as an archaic text to be analyzed to the nth degree. Although I'm fine with those that do that.
There is a. There is an academic purpose to that, but I don't think it's by any stretch of the imagination the highest level of encountering script. It's Scripture.
Scripture that we. That word scripture and scripture needs to be engaged with ultimately sacramentally. Sacrament I understand, as a material means by which we participate in heavenly realities.
And at some point I'm going to have to set aside my quest for the historical Jesus. My historical critical reading. I. I understand that stuff. It lurks, it's in the background. I can pull upon it if I need it.
But rather I want to be. I want to fall into the story. And I think this is part of possible to a certain extent. Remember in C.S. lewis's the Voyage of the Dawn Treader, you have the young children at the opening of the book, they're inside on a rainy day and they see this interesting painting and they want to really examine it. And so they get on a chair and they're staring very closely at it and it's got this cool. It's a ship with a dragon's prowl and everything. And they, as they're peering very closely at this painting, they fall into the painting. I don't mean they fall into the canvas, they tumble down inside the painting and they have to be rescued and their adventure begins. I want to just inhabit scripture in that sense. I just want to be there.
And is that possible? I think it's possible for me, I regard scripture as well, to go back what I was talking about earlier. If I'm in Luke and Jesus is sweating blood, okay, that's the story right now. And what. How does that speak? What does that say? If I'm in John and 600 Roman soldiers are just falling down before him.
Okay, then that's what happens there.
And I don't have to try to reconcile them. In fact, I'm not troubled in the least by that.
These great storytellers, these great bards, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, they're going to approach the same subject in different ways.
And I just, I've reached a point where I have no problem with that and I see their artistry.
I don't know. Again, I don't think I'm answering your question, but I'm. No, it's good. I'm taking stabs at it.
[00:34:12] Speaker A: Yeah, you were. You're circling it. I often think about, was it a problem that we told people to go sit in their bedrooms alone with their Bibles with highlighters and crap and the book of Romans?
[00:34:25] Speaker C: Yes.
[00:34:26] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Or Revelations or whatever Stanley Harwell says.
[00:34:31] Speaker C: And he says this, he's pithy and he's funny and I say it's mostly a joke, but he's. But he says all we can do now is take the Bible away from people.
And I can't.
[00:34:44] Speaker A: Yeah, you might be onto something there because it can be a weapon.
[00:34:48] Speaker C: So the idea that the Bible is a.
Is a private gift to you. Here's your Bible.
Go sit by yourself and understand it.
That's absurd.
Yeah, I'm fairly proficient.
I mean, I'm like almost a professional involved and I still have the hardest time with parts of Romans. I've written a foreword for a scholar on Douglas Campbell. I wrote the Forward, one of his books on the book of Romans. But still, that is a difficult book and I'm as equipped as most people.
And the idea that this is this. I don't even want to say it because it sounds snobbish. I don't mean it this way. I mean it pastorally. But the idea that just lay people are going to sit around and open up the Bible and just. It's going to be self evident, it's not. It's a Difficult book. The Gospels are a little different. Just let the story enchant you. But that doesn't mean what is the actual proper interpretation of, of the parable of the 10 virgins? That's a tricky one.
[00:35:56] Speaker B: Sure.
[00:35:57] Speaker C: That's a. I don't, I'm not sure that I have settled on what actually is going on there. But that's all right.
[00:36:04] Speaker B: I on.
I've heard you say at one point, if you were suddenly appointed in charge of re canonizing Scripture, if you were able to take the Bible back and say, here's how you should read the Bible, because I think that's where we get mixed up too, right? We're handed a cod and we think we read it like we read Dostoevsky. But it's different than that. We read it. It's. We're entering a library and a history and cultures and all languages, all of those things. So how would you, where would you start us off? If somebody's like, how do I come back?
[00:36:41] Speaker C: Here's what I say, we'll go further on that. But here's what I say.
I talk about the Book of Revelation, which actually I love and I think in one sense it's the most relevant New Testament book for American Christians today. But you have to learn how to read it, right? If I were in charge, if I was the Pope of the world and I could just issue an order, here's what I would say.
All you preachers out there, you got 65 books. If you want to have the Apocrypha, you can have that too. I don't have a dog in this fight. And you can preach from all of them.
Book of Revelation, you have to obtain a license.
You're gonna have to go to some classes, you're gonna have to pass a test. You cannot preach from that book until you have a license.
So that's what I would do with the Book of Revelation because it's been over abused, you understand? I do love the Scriptures.
To this day. I spend, people say, how much time do you spend just reading the Bible?
I said, every morning I try to keep it to about 30 minutes, because if I don't, I'll read, I'll stand, I love it. I'll just spend too much time reading. This is not studying, this is not preparing sermons. It's just inhabiting the text, just living in that terrain. So I love it. But I also see how it can be abused and how it can be weaponized. And Paul at one point says the letter, which he means scripture, in fact, David Bentley Hart translates it that way in his New Testament translation. Scripture kills, but the Spirit gives life because it is. What's being referred to is the letter of scripture.
The scripture without the spirit of Christ.
It can kill people. It can kill faith, it can harm people. You can do lots of damage with the Bible.
And I, we. We've all seen it done. We know about this, right?
[00:38:41] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:38:41] Speaker B: And I think that's what people are protesting a lot of the time when.
When they're deconstructing is there's critiquing the thing based on the values of the thing and saying, this is not how this is meant to be used.
[00:38:53] Speaker C: So I was tasked on a particular occasion to speak to a whole bunch of young people, teenagers, which, by the way, is terrifying.
I. That's the hardest thing in the world for me. On. They gave me. Here was the title of my talk, what's the deal with the Bible?
And so I started with.
I started with. I think it's Exodus 21, 20 and 21, which says, When a slave owner strikes a slave and the slave dies, there shall be a penalty. But if the slave lives a day or two, there shall be no penalty, for the slave is the owner's property.
[00:39:46] Speaker B: There it is.
[00:39:46] Speaker C: Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
So that's why I started. I read that because I'm. See, I'm not going to hide it from him. So I read that and I say, how many of you disagree? And that's expensive. What it's saying here is if a slave owner beats a slave to death and they just die on a spot, that's not cool. So we're going to have to find this guy or something. But if the slave lingers a day or two and then finally succumbs to his injuries. And it also says male or female. So you even have the picture of a man beating a woman slave, and she hovers between life and death for two days, and then she dies. And everything we say, that's okay.
We're not gonna worry about that. How many of you disagree with that? And it's interesting. I would. I was. I just kept looking at them. They had them raise their hand. I just kept staring at him until everybody raised her hand. Because some right away, right. Others were like, can I disagree with the Bible?
And so the. I got them all to get their hands up. And I said, you're claiming that at least if we're Talking about Exodus 21, 20 and 21, you have a superior moral ethic than the Bible. Is that what you're claiming and they're like, I don't know, they're nervous. And I said, good, because you should.
And that's actually where I started with them in talking about the Bible.
[00:41:07] Speaker A: Yeah, that's good. I want to ask about institutions now. So Dustin referenced Burgess new book. And in the book, as far as I know, Dustin can correct me here, a lot of denominations, nations have flatlined, they've plateaued and non denominational churches are the only ones where we're really seeing growth, at least in the United States. And then mainline churches are struggling, obviously. I, when I walked away from my more evangelical faith and started attending these places which I describe as mausoleums run by matrons. So older women managing these old buildings, they're just brutal.
[00:41:45] Speaker C: But man, that's, it's brutal because it rings true.
[00:41:49] Speaker A: Yeah, I, I, when I was there, I just, I loved elements, but I didn't feel life.
[00:41:55] Speaker C: But you're, you can't. I know exactly what you're describing. Yeah. And you can't imagine it existing 20 years from now. Yeah.
[00:42:03] Speaker A: But is, do you think there's something that mainline can do or do you feel like we just. They're, they're playing the same song. They're one of those bands that have been on tour since the 70s and they're playing that same song over and over again thinking that people eventually come back.
[00:42:20] Speaker C: I'm not one to give advice to other denominations. They're not going to listen to me and I don't know that I know what I'm talking about. But if people are going to be bothered by religion, they want it to maybe be a bit demanding.
And so I have these two, I'll just use one. I have this story I like to tell. I like, I love to read and I love all kinds of good literature. And I've become an evangelist the last two years for John Fosse's Septology.
[00:42:53] Speaker A: It's a fantastic book. I read it a year ago. I think Dustin's currently reading it. Right.
[00:42:57] Speaker C: I've read it three times.
[00:42:58] Speaker B: I tried to read it.
[00:42:59] Speaker C: I love this book.
[00:43:00] Speaker B: I tried to read it during Advent, but I'm gonna, maybe I'll finish it by next Advent.
[00:43:06] Speaker C: Okay. So I don't have to tell you what it is. For those that don't know, it's a 660, 67 page single sentence stream of consciousness through which you learn a man's life story. But that, that in midlife, by the way, if you don't know, septology is basically John Fosse's story. Fundamental difference is Azel in the book is a painter, he's a writer, but that's about it. He's telling his own story.
But he becomes a Christian as an adult.
In John Fosse's case, I think almost.
Maybe in his 50s, certainly late 40s, maybe 50s.
But what does he become?
He does not become a non denominational.
He becomes a Catholic in Norway. There aren't many Catholics in Norway. It's not a Catholic country, but it's.
I think if I. If we just want to make Christianity as palatable and easy and comfortable as possible.
I think eventually people say I don't even. Why do I need this for?
[00:44:18] Speaker A: That's my exact response. That's the response that I had when I was dabbling with Episcopalians and Methodists and things, which was.
I just felt like I'd rather go to a community center and volunteer. I didn't.
Yeah, there wasn't a challenge to me necessarily is what I felt.
But there's something that. There's something aesthetic or something going on there that I still find attachment to. And I hear what you're saying. I think these quiet pietism that John Fossey is like Carl Ola Knauskaard is doing, I relate to that. But I don't know, you know, where to find spaces like that, if that makes sense.
[00:45:03] Speaker C: Yeah, I don't know. But it's why I am fond of irritating people by saying I'm not just spiritual, I'm religious. At least I'm trying to be everybody's spiritual. What that doesn't demand anything of you?
I need some rigor.
I need some religion.
I need some. We want you to fast during this time.
We want you to pray these prayers. You didn't write them, you pray them anyway. Confess this.
And I need some of. I recognize that I need that.
And yeah, I don't know.
I assume a reckoning is coming at some point for the Super Maga aligned Christian world.
I don't. But I don't know.
[00:45:51] Speaker A: Do you think that I'm just trying to think about listeners that are in a place where they don't have a thoughtful pastor like you on offer. Maybe they have one big mega, mega church.
Maybe they've got quiet Episcopalian place. And so in that world is reconstruction something you're doing on your own? You know what I'm saying?
[00:46:16] Speaker C: Yeah. So I'll tell you a little bit of our story.
I think Word of Life may be more unique than I like to admit. I don't want it to be unique, but I think it is a little bit more unique than I want to think.
So our church is growing. We're growing.
And what's interesting is we grow by I mean, however, we grow all kinds of ways. But we do have a fair amount of people that are like, look, I'm done with this extreme right wing MAGA Sunday morning stuff. And so they're drawn to word life. And also people coming from the opposite side saying, I just can't deal with this ultra progressive church that doesn't actually believe anything anymore. And we have them coming from both the left and the right.
So let me, let me say something about online church.
I'm never a fan, I've never a fan of that.
I was actually friends with Eugene Peterson and I would be afraid that he would come haunt me. And with chains.
[00:47:25] Speaker A: Eugene and the Bardo coming to find you.
[00:47:27] Speaker C: Yeah. So we. Our church was streamed online from whenever that was possible. I don't even know when. Somewhere in the 90s, I never thought about it, never paid any attention to it, never cared about it. Maybe thought about it on a snow Sunday or something like that.
Then Covid happened and so that's all you could do for a while.
But then I began to hear more and more stories.
I thought that we. And we during COVID we really ramped up the quality. Just the production values, just the cameras, the look, making it more.
Just more pleasing to the eye and have a dedicated sound mix. I know not everybody can do that, but we did. That was important to us. But I thought it was like. I thought the crisis was Covid.
But then I realized that we were hearing hundreds, I'm not exaggerating, hundreds of stories of people. I live in this small county in Texas and I literally. I can't find a church.
And so this is what we're doing. And I view online churches like being in the icu.
You don't want to necessarily spend your life in the icu, but you know what? If you're really sick and you need the icu, you need the icu, and it's good that it's there.
And we are helping people hold on to their Christian faith. I mean, that's. I don't know if that sounds arrogant, but it's. I just, I hear the stories probably every day in one way or another. They come to me.
And so that. So we're gonna do that.
I understand there is a crisis right now of people being able to find something that's not.
What we've been describing and discussing. Yeah, so this seems to actually matter. And as much as anything, I want to help people hold on to faith. That seems to be what I'm most interested in talking about writing about on a pastoral level. Anyway, I want to do that. I want to help Christians sustain faith when things are just very difficult for people to do that right now.
[00:49:41] Speaker A: Yeah. To close our time out, Brian, we've been concluding with reconstruction recommendations as it pertains to books. We've already mentioned some books. Yeah. If you want to jump into John Fosse, you don't have to jump into septology. There's smaller tomes to. To peruse. But that is a good one. Are there other books you.
[00:50:00] Speaker C: I wrote a book that is not touched on a lot of these themes and a lot of my books, but the book When Everything's on Fire is my definite foray into that, I think. Okay. So I'm going to write a book about deconstruction and for people that are going through that phenomenon. So I'm recommending my own book. Look at me being all humble and everything.
I don't know. I do. I. In fact, I very much enjoy recommending books to people, but I like to do it like I need to know who the person is.
[00:50:33] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:50:33] Speaker C: And where they're at. And so it's hard to pick a generic book and say, read this. My friend Brad Jurczak has written numerous books that I think they're helpful. The un. What its name is.
[00:50:45] Speaker A: His books.
[00:50:46] Speaker C: A more Christ like God, A more Christlike Word. I think that he's got three of them.
A more Christ Like God. I think I wrote the forward for that. I'm pretty sure I did. More.
[00:50:55] Speaker B: More Christ like way. Yeah.
[00:50:57] Speaker C: More Christlike word. Those are really good books.
[00:51:01] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:51:01] Speaker C: Yeah.
They come from a place of Brad's own experience.
So. Dr. Bradley Jerzack in Abbotsford, British Columbia, I recommend his books.
[00:51:11] Speaker A: I found myself in that deconstruction phase reading a lot of literature.
[00:51:17] Speaker C: I do that all the time.
[00:51:18] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:51:19] Speaker C: I'm with you on that.
[00:51:20] Speaker A: Yeah. Are there novels?
[00:51:21] Speaker C: Well, I mean, you understand that I am a Dostoevsky devotee.
[00:51:26] Speaker A: So you lean Dostoevsky over Tolstoy.
[00:51:28] Speaker C: I'm like.
[00:51:29] Speaker A: Because that's often the comparison. Right.
[00:51:32] Speaker C: May be the better writer. Dolstoy. Dostoevsky is by far the more profound religious thinker.
So last year, the first 10, I did a. I did an online.
I didn't know if there'd be interest.
I offered a 10 week online course through the Brothers Care Mazov.
1600 people registered for that.
[00:51:54] Speaker A: That's amazing.
[00:51:55] Speaker C: 1600. And now I'm doing Demons right now.
[00:51:59] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:51:59] Speaker B: I'm on it with you. It's super fun. I hadn't read it yet.
[00:52:02] Speaker C: Know what's so fun about that course is Perry's there with me.
And I've read the book, I think six times now.
Perry's reading it as we go. And so she. She doesn't know how it ends. She doesn't know what's happening. And so that really makes for a good dynamic where I know what's coming up, she doesn't.
And I'm having. I'm actually having more fun with demons than I did with Brothers Karamazov. I think Brothers Karamazov is the greatest novel ever written, but there was pressure for me to get that one right. The pressure on came from myself, but I put pressure on myself. This is the greatest novel ever. I've got to get this right. With Demons, I'm.
Here's the story.
I'll bring out a few things as we go. And so I'm a little more relaxed.
[00:52:51] Speaker A: That's fantastic. Yeah. Lately I've been reading some Iris Murdoch who's been on my list. I've had. I dabble around. But, yeah, there's a lot of great literature to read.
[00:52:59] Speaker C: And I think it's Graham Green. You like Graham Green? Yeah, his book. I like all of his stuff. I always say he's never let me down. Graham Green's never let me down.
[00:53:08] Speaker A: Power in the glory.
[00:53:09] Speaker C: Or is there Power in the Glory? Number one.
But also Monsignor Quixote, a little more obscure one of his. But with the subject matter we're talking about here, I would recommend Graham Green's Monsignor K.
Fantastic.
[00:53:24] Speaker A: Brian. This was a lot of fun. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us today.
[00:53:28] Speaker C: I enjoyed it.
[00:53:30] Speaker B: Thanks, Brian.
