Untangling Christianity Podcast

In this episode John and Gregg discuss feedback from a listener wanting to understand how to continue being part of / partnering with a church where one holds different views from that church’s?  John identifies three questions out of this situation: a) What is the church?  b) What is a Christian’s responsibility to the church? c) How can someone be part of the local church in such cases, and how can this be productive?

Gregg suggests that, at its most basic, the church is a gathering together of those who believe that / are considering whether Jesus Christ is the son of God.  John’s experience is that this notion is actually very problematic, both because its precise definition is very slippery and because Christians use “church attendance” as a way of judging the validity of other’s faith, which John finds alienating.

In good part due to his negative experiences with church John thus would answer question c) in the negative: for him it simply is not possible to part of a local church where one has significant disagreement with the church’s view on a given matter.  Gregg is more optimistic than John, and is so not only because of some of his experiences with church but because he has enough experience and education to be able to navigate the potential difficulties (and disagreements of viewpoints) that he might experience in a church setting.

Gregg notes that Christians need to be aware of why and how much they need to “legitimate” their perspectives, and that this is especially true of ministers or pastors.  For instance, often the only way for a minister to legitimate their view (i.e., about a particular doctrine) to a parishoner is to engage with that person over a period of time.  Trying to do otherwise (and forcing others to “see thing our way”) places the value of biblical truth over loving one’s neighbour, which ends up hurting and alienating people.  For Gregg this is means that Christians must focus on dialogue instead of dispute.

Yet when Gregg suggests that “dialogue,” with respect to this particular listen, could amount to inviting him to instead lead his small group on the issue of dissent, John raises the “fear” that in churches everyone needs to believe the same thing.  Gregg questions whether we do all believe the same thing, and suggests that there are few essentials that one needs to believe in order to be considered Christian.

Gregg comes back to this definition of church and re-orients it: Christian church is essentially a group of people who love God entirely and who, out of that relationship with God, are being informed about how to love themselves rightly, and therefore try to love others rightly.  Thus the Christian church is a group of people for whom loving God entirely and loving oneself rightly and loving one’s neighbour likewise are the top priorities.

The post 66: Church Challenged | Listener Feedback appeared first on Untangling Christianity.

In this episode John and Gregg consider a comment by listener Melinda to episode #35, Love is more than grace.  Melinda makes three points/questions:

John replies that the Bible teacher’s appeal to the ten commandments seems entirely arbitrary, like an “argument from silence” that presumes that this part of Scripture carries more weight than another and that fails to digger deeper to determine if the matter is more complex.  Further, in John’s view if we deny healthy self-love we end up losing ourselves: we have no real value and essentially cease to exist.

Gregg’s agrees that this approach takes the biblical text out of context: the ten commandments make no reference to creation, so should we therefore view creation as unimportant?  Gregg is even more concerned about the blatant contradiction expressed in viewing the ‘as yourself’ as “just a reference point.”  One the one hand the Bible teacher’s example (about not wanting to be harmed) itself amounts to a conclusion about human value derived from reflection upon one’s experience of valuing oneself to different degrees and in different ways, not a mere observation about one’s preferences (such as, “I don’t happen to like being harmed, though other people might”).  On the other hand, Gregg is suspicious that distorted logic often conceals deeper issues: in this case, an improper view of self.  The big problem with such views is that it effectively allows its holders to treat others in any way that they see fit.

Gregg goes further to explain that failing to love ourselves correctly actually undercuts and denies God’s love for us.  So while we are not God’s central concern–that would be God’s kingdom–we are legitimately epicentres of God’s love.  For Gregg this misunderstanding results from creating hierarchies out of what is meant to be the living tension between love and truth, such that failing to love myself is denying the very truth that the Bible, by declaring God’s vast love for humanity, is clearly claiming: human beings are of tremendous value to God (and so if to God, then surely to themselves)!

As such, God is also fully engaged in me being enthusiastically engaged in my own life, for the improvement, diversification, and enjoyment of my life.  For in this way we become fully human so that we may fully mirror Christ, both in our character (which for Christians is to be Christ-like) and in our personalities (which is for me to most uniquely me, which happens best through my love relationship with God).

The post 65: Self Love and the Ten Commandments appeared first on Untangling Christianity.

In this episode John and Gregg discuss Donald Miller’s Sept 25 blog post.  While John usually appreciates Donald’s posts, John is critical of Donald’s view that Jesus valued people who blindly trusted him: that we should trust without reasons to do so (or even against having other reasons not to). Gregg had similar thoughts and left a comment where he suggested two problems that he saw in Miller’s approach.

First, Gregg expressed concern with Donald’s view of the biblical passage he references (John 6), because it seems that for Donald the Bible’s meaning amounts to “how it strikes me” on a given day.  Instead, Gregg argued that Christians should rely on biblical scholarship to help us understand the Bible better.  For Gregg this does not imply that we seek to eliminate faith (because we need faith!) but underscores that there are better and worse ways to express faith / engage faithfully.

John explains his frustration that the blog post seems to fail a basic intelligence test: we are to “follow Jesus” by giving up everything, yet do so without having sufficient reason.  Gregg suggests that the main issue is that Miller’s approach lacks rigor, which involves the dual approach of looking at myself and looking at the material in question, in order to assess the material and yet also properly to determine my own competence at making good assessments.  So rigor always involves acquiring the skills one needs to understand correctly through competently assessing certain situations.

Gregg also considers that Donald’s post confuses “the story” for “the whole story.”  For example, Gregg argues that each gospel presents only part of a picture of Jesus life, and that even the whole Bible depicts God, human beings, and the relationship between the two in a manner that is sufficient for belief, but the depiction is not exhaustive or complete!

Yet where John then wonders whether we can know anything at all, Gregg demurs: the New Testament presents numerous situations where people really do understand Jesus better or worse, such that “following” Jesus means neither disregarding our intellect and experience, nor believing that it’s all about God acting in mysterious and unpredictable ways (so that we must simply “go with it”).  And where John argues that “God is in a different category” than everything else Gregg maintains that we, as human beings, are always in the same category in terms of always using the same faculties and have the same general needs for our evaluations, however they are comprised, to be relevant and persuasive!

The post 64: Applying Rigor appeared first on Untangling Christianity.

In this episode John and Gregg discuss Gregg’s recent lecture at Swiss L’Abri, where Gregg began lecturing on his graduate thesis.  Gregg explains that his thesis concerns a problem within recent, biblical hermeneutics, on the part of several evangelical scholars, and that this problem is twofold.

First, some Christian scholars have preferenced the positive effect of the Holy Spirit over the negative effect of sin and finiteness, such that they then view Christians as being naturally better readers of the Bible than non-Christians.  Second, some Christian scholars have also preferenced the importance of biblical truth over the need (and indeed, command) to love our fellows as ourselves.

Gregg argues in his thesis that there are natural tensions in life and that the preceding represent real tensions for Christians, yet that Christians also should not seek to collapse these tensions into hierarchies (i.e.,  Spirit over sin, truth over love), but should rather seek how the conflict inherent within these tensions can be made productive.

Gregg began by explaining the problem of “false consciousness,” based on the work of Freud and Nietzsche, whose criticisms share much in common with those of the Old Testament prophets).  In this case, Christian false consciousness is a way of protecting ourselves from our practices of ignoring truth and disregarding people while claiming not to do these very things and insulating ourselves from any critique on the matter.

Gregg explained this issue in his presentation by noting that evangelical churches typically teach that biblical truth functions as propositions that are then used to form principles, principles that inform Christian theology and practice.  Gregg argued that, instead, biblical truth and human existence demonstrate off-setting tensions (confidence and humility, suspicion and trust, relationship and distinction, love and truth) that are not meant to be reduced to hierarchies because they offer far more truth when we allow them to remain as tensions.

Even more problematically, where Christians associate biblical truth with propositions that form principles, they typically hold the view that such principles do not contradict each other, and hold this view as an absolute.  So while Gregg agrees about the non-contradictory nature of biblical truth, those who hold such often hold it so strongly that they also do not allow that biblical truths should oppose each other, which is exactly what tensions are: truths that are opposed to one another.  So in a real way, viewing biblical truth as propositions often precludes accepting the notion that biblical truths act in tension with each other!

John resonates deeply with how Gregg went about presenting this information in the lecture.  Particularly, John notes that he came to L’Abri thinking that there was something wrong with himself–some inability on his part to “get” or “live out” Christianity.  But realized that a big part of the issue was that he had taken on ways of thinking (about himself, God, etc.) that did not make sense.

Gregg responds that this seems still to be the case with those who are at L’Abri now, particularly because the church has both a) undermined the credibility of Christianity to non-Christians (by ignoring other, truthful perspectives on humanity and the natural world) and b) tacitly bred mistrust in Christians toward the church (because the church claims to be relevant to human life yet its propositional view of truth is contradicted by the way the life really “works”).

The post 63: Tension Not Principles appeared first on Untangling Christianity.

In this episode John and Gregg discuss Gregg’s view of love and how / to what degree he believes that experiencing God’s love is necessary to embracing Christianity.

Gregg notes that through some of his interaction at Swiss L’Abri he is coming to see several things more clearly.  First, that he needs to do more research on the nature of emotions.  For instance, Gregg finds Margret Nussbaum‘s description helpful.  Nussbaum partially defines emotions as “intelligent responses to the perceptions of value,” such that emotions are “acknowledgements of our neediness and our lack of self-sufficiency.”  Finally then, “emotions are not just the fuel that powers the parts of a reasoning creature, they are parts–highly complex and messy parts–of this creature’s reasoning itself.”

Instead, the Bible demonstrates its truth through how accurately it describes human beings and human life and how living in these ways means, on the whole, that life “goes better” with us as a result (i.e., that this truth can be corroborated through experience).  For example, the biblical texts describe the human ability for self-deception, the possibility of both good and evil in human action, and the need for certain virtues (such as forgiveness and mercy) in order for human relationships to flourish.

John wonders: is there a connection between Gregg’s emphasis on love and truth / truth and love with N. T. Wright’s book Simply Jesus, where Wright tries to present both the teachings about Jesus and the accounts of Jesus action–the understanding and the experience of Jesus.  Gregg agrees: he is unwilling to say that everyone who accepts Christianity must do so in the same way / on the same basis as he has.  However, Gregg notes that there may well be certain people, himself among them, for whom something is broken and needs fixing in order for them to have a viable relationship with God!

So Gregg notes that some people may need new / different experiences of God, but that this must always be accompanied by new / truer understandings of the biblical text and, by extension, God.  John both corroborates this and notes that he has been hearing Gregg pushing back against an excessive emphasis on truth, and also hears Gregg as making some “fine tuning” regarding the interplay between love and truth, truth and love.

The post 62: Love as a Promise appeared first on Untangling Christianity.

In this episode John and Gregg complete their discussion of Darin Hufford’s book The Misunderstood God.  John notes that both he and Gregg decided not to discuss all the chapters, while Gregg notes that the same themes are recurring in different chapters (and under different topics).

John gives the book three out of five stars and summarizes it in two ways.  First, by noting how it provides answers to the question of “what” God is or does (such as God being ‘love’) without offering much regarding “how” one comes to see or experience God in this way.  Second, by noting that the book would be much more credible if Hufford offered some form of substantiation for his views instead of asserting that “this generation” does X or fails to do Y.  Particularly, having biblical references when referring to matters concerning God and Christianity would be helpful.

Gregg agrees with John that the glaring absence of biblical backup is a significant issue.  Given the lack of biblical substantiation Hufford bases much of his argument on personal analogies.  But this misses the point: from a Christian perspective we know God both through the Bible and through our experience of relating to / with God.  Thus analogies are not the basis for our explanations but offer clarification and / or re-interpretation of those explanations.

So Gregg notes that, by failing to engage with truth, the love that Hufford promotes has no “explanatory edge:” it lacks the ability critically to assess and adjudicate between various claims to ‘love,’ in order to determine which are truer and which appear false.  With Hufford’s approach this is simply not possible.  Gregg concludes that ultimately Hufford Hufford and Kyle Idleman make the same mistake (or fail to deliver on the same crucial point): as Christians we need to be able to rightly relate our experience of living in the world with our best understandings of the biblical text.

Finally, Gregg strongly disagrees with Hufford’s view of ‘truth’.  So where Hufford notes (p. 150) that “the truth is already in you.  It’s in little children.  When you hear it, it should be something you already knew in your heart to be true,” and where he embraces the “child test” (if a child intuitively understands it, it’s probably truth; if not it is probably false) as a way to “understand God’s heart,” Gregg notes that we had best hope that life is incredibly simple and that people are basically good.  But life and Christianity show themselves to be complicated and difficult, and human experience (and the biblical text) portray the human heart / mind as apt to making choices that are selfish and untruthful!

The post 61: Concluding The Misunderstood God by Darin Hufford appeared first on Untangling Christianity.

In this episode John and Gregg discuss listener feedback from Evan in Virginia.  Evan appreciated the recent podcast on Love and Biblical Illiteracy while posing several questions.

First, can one’s love of biblical doctrine impact how we love others, whether positively or negatively?  Next, Evan wonders how valuable the church’s tradition are and whether we lose something when ignore them or put them aside?  Finally, he wonders if it’s possible we become so preoccupied with whether something is right or wrong that, as a consequence, we lose something of the relational aspect that should mark a Christian’s engagement with others?

On the first question, John offers a resounding ‘Yes’!  For John this is linked to an excessive emphasis in North American churches on judgement (deciding the rightness and wrongness of things).  For Gregg this point raises the relationship between practice and theory.  Gregg agrees with John’s emphasis on judgement, noting the distinction between boundary-focused churches and centre-focused churches.

Yet as John notes, even where the centre is Christ the outworking of such a focus will depend on how people interpret the Bible and apply such interpretations in a way that is in keeping with the original context.  So John underscores the importance of “doing one’s homework” when it comes to the third question, so that we can be more confident that acting a way that would seem to diminish the relational aspect of Christian practice is really what is called for by the Bible!

In the same regard Gregg notes a dialogue between two biblical scholars, Philip Payne and Richard J. Mouw, on the subject of women teaching in the church.  For Gregg this exchange demonstrates the results of rigor and a rigorous approach to understanding the Bible, where the goal is the best possible resources and the best approach in order to get the best understanding of a given biblical text.

For John, ultimately being critical or, as one listener stated, being “nit picky” is a by-product of needing to clear a space amongst the existing presentations of Christianity in order to be able offer something that is different–both more true and more livable.  Gregg agrees: credibility and humanity are both essential to any presentation  of Christianity.

The post 60: Love of People or Doctrine | Listener Feedback appeared first on Untangling Christianity.

In this episode John and Gregg discuss Chapter 11 of Darin Hufford’s Misunderstood God.  John notes, after having read to this point, that the book does not seem to have any continuity between chapters, which makes it harder to follow.  John also sees interesting connections between this chapter and Episode #33: “God is Not an Idiot.”

Gregg re-read chapters 8 to 10 in considering this chapter, and notes his goal of identifying some of the problematic themes or orientations in order to re-orient towards what seem better formulations or orientations.  So Gregg notes the two issues of Darin globalizing his experience to his readers and also misformulating matters. Also, page 93 seems to be key for Darin as he notes, “imagine my surprise when I discovered that the experience of love is not in receiving it but in giving it.”

John finds this one-sided: surely we also experience (and so understand) love in receiving it!  Gregg’s view is that the Christian’s perspective on loves is necessarily informed by the new testamental description of God: as both sovereign and as Father.  In terms of God’s love for us, as father, this is accompanied by the idea that human love is always responsive to God’s love.  In other words, we know God’s love by receiving it.

Gregg also highlights the need for fuller context in order to decide when, in certain cases, Darin sets things on their heads.  On the one hand Gregg is open to looking at the matter from the other side, but on the other hand, without more context, Gregg argues that we cannot uphold Darin’s frequent claim that this thing was “upside down” to begin with.  In the same way, Gregg focuses on the need for understanding love from within a love relationship, characterized by a rich reciprocity.  As such, self-love is seen as an essential orientation for Christians.

The post 59: Understanding Love By Being Loved | Chap 11 of Misunderstood God appeared first on Untangling Christianity.

In this episode John and Gregg discuss two questions.  First, a podcast John has been listening to raised the issue of how much study and learning one needs in order to know God? Second, John questions whether memorizing scripture holds the potential problem that one may not have the right interpretation of those verses (and so risks misapplying them)? The jumping off place for this second question was Episode #54 about Biblical Illiteracy.

Gregg responds that memorizing is not necessarily understanding (or applying) correctly.  Further, the smaller the section memorized, the greater the chance of misapplying it (because understanding comes, in part, through context) and missing better understandings of a given text.

John is struck by the very notion of the “best understanding” of a biblical passage, which seems rare in churches, instead of aiming for the right understanding.  Also, while Gregg cautions against “going it alone,” for John this idea seems to count against the notion that Christians are supposed to meditate on Scripture so that the Holy Spirit can inform them about its meaning.

For Gregg this amounts to the notion of understanding the Bible “in and through” one’s community: finding those within one’s spheres of interaction who have skills and expertise (such as those with exegetical skills giving us a list of better commentaries).

Also, concerning memorization, Christians need to beware of equating familiarity with understanding.  So being familiar with a text through memorization is not necessarily understanding it correctly but perhaps prompt us to question the text further.  This in turn may help us to engage our imaginations, and curiosity and imagination may together lead us to seek better resources on this text!

Imagination, then, actually offers cautions that keep us from going too far, by allowing us to experiment with various readings without being forced to engage with one or the other beforehand.  For instance, we use our imagination to come up with other options or possibilities about how various biblical notion inter-relate (such “taking up one’s cross” yet Jesus yoke being “easy” and his burden “light”).

Gregg also questions John’s notion that this all seems very “hard”: what expectations does John have about understanding the Bible and where do these expectations come from?   John replies that, from his church background, it should be easy.  Further, from John’s background Christianity makes people’s lives happier or more joyful.  In both cases, Gregg is not convinced.

John and Gregg end by discussing whether the relational aspect of Christianity is prayer and Bible reading (and likely church attendance).  or whether relating with God may include these things but be constituted by something more?

The post 58: What I Get From the Bible is What it Means appeared first on Untangling Christianity.

In this episode John and Gregg discuss Chapter 9 of Darin Hufford’s Misunderstood God.  Gregg comments that he has never had a book that he has liked more and likes less at the same time.  He identifies certain ‘nuggets’ of gold yet finds certain formulations or presentations of the material that seem so incorrect that this shakes Gregg’s trust in the author.

John feels like he’s moved into “skim mode” with this book, looking for what seems positive or thought-provoking.  So he appreciates Darin’s view about Christianity being sin-focused and some things about God being angry and the need for control by fear in churches.

Gregg is interested that John has stopped reading and started skimming, and makes the meta-comment that a book about the ills of Christianity should be able to keep those readers engaged who are interested in this subject, and uses this as a lesson for himself about the podcast.  Is the message too deep or intellectual?  Or is the author globalizing her/his views or misformulating matters?  Either approach risks alienating readers.

So as truth-seekers, we should care that not whose view it is but whether that view is truthful.  Further, rather than imposing our views on listeners we are offering them, which is a far more interactive method of engaging.

Gregg finds particular difficulty with several of Darin Hufford’s formulations in this chapter.  So Gregg cuts back against his view of Kyle Idleman’s Not a Fan and notes that it is valuable that Idleman stated his position at the outset of the book (on page 21 vs. on page 201).  Gregg compares this with Darin’s focus on loving people seems formative of his views, yet Gregg finds pages 93 – 103 to some of the worst pages he has read in some time.

So on page 93 Gregg disagrees radically with several of Darin’s notions, such as “the only way to love is to be the lover.”  What about being loved?  Do we learn nothing about love by being loved?  What does this mean for the Christian’s understanding of God, who always loves us first?!  Further, we are both servants (to one who is truly Sovereign) and sons and daughters (to one who loves us as our true parent / father), versus Darin’s view that we are not servants but sons & daughters.

In short, Gregg sees that Darin is only offering one half of the equation, which is not giving us 50% of the message but is dropping out the other side of the necessary and productive tension in to these concepts are related.   And more generally, Gregg re-emphasizes that truth and love, love and truth stand in flexible yet productive tension both in the Bible’s presentation of human existence and humanity and in our experience of real life!

Also, in terms of formulation Gregg notes that we need to formulate well because, as truth seekers, we should be more concerned with what is true than what is convenient / what one wants to believe.  So formulation is laying the matter out as it appears, on the basis of the best evidence that one has.  This involves both presenting one’s evidence and explaining why one has put the various sources and evidence together in a particular way.  So formulating well corroborates your viewpoint by helping other trust that you are a truth seeker on the basis of what you evidence is and where it comes from.

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