Untangling Christianity Podcast

In this episode John and Gregg discuss Christian worship.  Gregg relates a discussion on worship he recently participated in.  Many of the participants were focused on the problems of hyper-subjectivity (where I equate my perceptions with reality and deem my feelings to be 100% accurate).

Yet we must likewise be careful not to say that “what I like” or “what works for me” is unimportant.  Further, as the notion of worship continued to broaden the discussion moved towards seeing worship as all-encompassing.  Yet Gregg objects: as Christians we are not supposed to be just worshipers of God. Rather, our identity and the kernel of our being is found in rightly relating to God, which is: loving God entirely (and out of that, loving ourselves rightly and loving others likewise).

So where John wonders if we can “worship God by folding our laundry,” Gregg is not sure what this means.  And where some discussion participants equated worship with humbling oneself before God, their view of God was solely as sovereign.  But how is such a notion effected when we consider that God is also parent?

Instead, Gregg defines worship as an intentional and creative expression arising from reflecting on one’s relationship with God, and upon others’ relationship with God (where they have shared some of the content and nature of that relationship with me).

So while being concerned about a hyper-subjective approach to experience, he is likewise concerned when what I think or feel or what “works for me” is minimized or even eliminated.  This fails to consider that one’s senses, intellect, imagination, and experiences are all involved in how we interact with / make sense of / establish commitments with the world around us.

So human being both have the need to be “de-centered” and yet involved and valuable (rather than dissolved).  Ultimately, worship is one example of how my love relationship with God is distinct from what I have with all others, while noting that my love relationship with God is also deeply related to my human love relationships.

The post 46: Defining Worship appeared first on Untangling Christianity.

This week John and Gregg discuss Chapters 4 and 5 from Darin Hufford’s book The Misunderstood God: The Lies Religion Tells About God. While Gregg generally sees the book going in the right direction he expresses concern that Hufford has potentially mis-formulated or not formulated certain aspects of his message. This risks confusing or alienating the audience he’s trying to reach. For example, on page 43, Hufford states his view that our hearts are the centre of God’s attention whereas Gregg’s view is that God seeks our entire selves.

Gregg argues that understandings about God, based on personal experience in the context of Christianity, must be matched with understandings via good exegesis. Yet Hufford barely references a Bible versus, let alone demonstrates any exegetical rigor.  Gregg is concerned that given Hufford’s target audience (those who are miserable and frustrated in their spiritual lives) his approach seems somewhat self-defeating.

John agrees with Gregg that Hufford’s globalizing his experiences to his readers is off-putting. To John, Hufford’s personal examples seem like rants against his own negative church experiences. Without scriptural support for these critiques the examples remain unconvincing.  Gregg suggests that instead of globalizing it’s better to “generalize” from a person’s experiences–highlighting general themes that can apply to everyone, or emphasizing the general effect versus the specific experience.

John asks Gregg to re-frame Hufford’s perspective on jealousy, in Chapter 5, in a way that Gregg believes makes more sense.  Gregg begins by questioning Hufford’s definitions (such as distinguishing between jealousy and power-mongering, fear, selfishness) and a critical distinction between “how” and “why.”  For example, historically Christians have followed Augustine in focusing on the question of “how” God created. Gregg believes that thishow needs to be complimented with why: both the “why” of impetus (from what motivation?) and the “why” of goal (toward what end?).

How did God create? Ex nihilo.  Why did God create? Ex amore.

So where John notes Christians’ claim of their inability to answer the question of “why” as it relates to God, Gregg notes that Christians must have a sense of why God created, without necessarily needing to claim (absolute) certainty.  This is also why some people have such a hard time with God’s love.  But if we understand that love has played a crucial role since the beginning of all things, God’s love is more comprehensible.

The post 45: How and Why | Chap 4-5 of The Misunderstood God by Darin Hufford appeared first on Untangling Christianity.

In this episode John and Gregg discuss what it means to love / be in love with God, and the nature of the “greatest commandment.”  They begin by referencing a previous conversation in Episode 40 about a Christianity Today article by Matthew Lee Anderson that is critical of “radical Christianity” in the style of Francis Chan, David Platt and Kyle Idleman.

Gregg appreciates how Anderson’s more academic perspective compliments Idleman’s more popular focus but disagrees with Anderson’s conclusions.  Particularly, Gregg notes that “embracing the providence of God in our witness to the world” (i.e., the notion that God is overseeing what goes on in the world, to good results) is legitimate yet overemphasized: things don’t always turn out well.

More so, emphasizing God’s providence closely parallels emphasizing God’s sovereignty, where the one focuses on “What God is doing” and the other typically on “Why God can do as God wishes.”  Yet not everything is about God.  So in both cases the human component (one’s choices and their benefits / consequences, the upshot of situations and choices for divine / human relationship) is essentially marginalized.

John next reads from page 61 of Francis Chan’s Crazy Love, where Chan claims that “the greatest good on the earth is God.  Period.  God’s one goal for us is himself.”  From this Chan argues that any “courting, luring, pushing and even threatening” that God may use–including the threat of hell–to make us accept God is justified.  In the same vein Chan asks: “Do you love this God who is everything or do you love everything that he gives you?”

Gregg sees both of these perspectives as misunderstandings of a) who God is and b) the nature of love, which likely result in a distorted picture of what our relationship with God should look like.

So on the one hand Gregg argues that the logical consequence of refusing relationship with God is, simply, not having a relationship with God–the relationship doesn’t happen.  And as God sustains all life, choosing not to be in relationship with God is essentially choosing not to exist.  But being eternally punished is not a logical consequence of such a choice.  Where such would approximate to God commanding: “Love me or I’ll torture you forever,” this is actually a sadistic orientation that inspires fear and duplicity, not trusting relationship.  Gregg explains this as, for human beings, an annihilationist view of hell: hell is more a result than a destination.

On the other hand, to believe that we should love “God who is everything” instead of “everything that God gives us” is a false dichotomy: as human beings we cannot separate the context of the relationship (the events and the back-and-forth of relationship) from the parties involved.  So we both love God for what God does and offers (I love God for the self that I am becoming by being loved by–and in love with–God) and for who God is.  Further, Gregg wonders what examples Francis Chan would offer, from his own experience, of how God has “courted, lured, pushed or threatened” him, and how / why he found these experiences to be helpful to his relationship with God (and thereby, to his other relationships).

In terms of the “command” to love, Gregg agrees that love is a gift and so cannot be commanded.  Instead he explains that  it should be understood as a poetic command–the command of love itself, to the one who is ALREADY in love, toward the beloved.  In other words, both Jesus hearers and those to whom Moses spoke in Deut. 6 (which is the focus of this command in the Old Testament) were Jews who had already experienced God’s guidance, protection, and provision–they had experienced God’s loving care.

Gregg finishes by talking about “poetic feelings” (such as those evoked by watching a poignant film).  Such feelings of love, distress, etc., are not not related to personal or even real circumstances–they are not truly our feelings.  Rather through such things we are reconnected to what matters to us about our existence and also prompted to engage with those important elements in a creative way.

Similarly, while the emotional impact of experiences of God’s love may fade, we continue to be inspired by this love similar to the effect of poetic feelings: through both memory and similar situations (perhaps in our lives, through testimony) we become attuned to new possibilities (new ways to see / engage with ourselves and our world).

The post 44: Defining Love appeared first on Untangling Christianity.

In this episode John and Gregg begin by discussing Gregg’s upcoming trip to Switzerland. Gregg explains that he will be working remotely while he and his family spend the summer at Swiss L’Abri.  L’Abri is a Christian organization where John and Gregg met in 1999.  At the time Gregg was agnostic and John was taking a hard look at what he believed.

John and Gregg go on to discuss the aqedah, the “sacrifice of Isaac” as written in Genesis 22.  John notes that the story is part of his Christian consciousness and is the “gold standard” of trusting God.  John further notes his reservations about Gregg’s perspective on the story.

Specifically, Gregg explains his view along two lines.  First, he notes the importance of understanding God as both sovereign and parent, and how the tension between these perspectives is essential when reading the Bible.  So within the Abraham / Isaac story we need to see how abhorrent a thing it is from a father’s perspective to sacrifice one’s son, and how there are several instances in the Old Testament where God rebukes Israel for (and seems contradictory of) God’s own command to Abraham!

By contrast, John has always understood this account to focus on God’s sovereignty with the idea that God can do whatever God wishes because “God is God” and “God’s ways are not our ways”–the idea that even though God is commanding Abraham to kill his own son, it’s somehow part of God’s bigger plan and must be okay because “God is God and as humans we cannot understand nor question God’s ways because they are beyond us.”

Gregg sees a parallel example with the need to view and relate to God both as sovereign and as parent by considering John Piper’s article How can a sovereign God love? Here Piper, a staunch Calvinist, claims that his faith would not be altered if God condemned his sons, who are ostensibly Christians, to hell.  Gregg demurs: to view God solely as sovereign (and so as “capable” or as “having the right” to condemn whom God chooses, whether by way of sacrifice or hell) is to completely ignore that God is love, and that we are children of God.  It also ignores the larger picture of God’s nature as fleshed out in the biblical texts (for the sake, is it were, of prioritizing the single aspect of “sovereignty” over all others).  But the Bible does not support this.

So Gregg notes that the “call” or “test” of child sacrifice is not a motif–it does not recur anywhere in the Old Testament.  Rather, Gregg speculates that this scenario holds some thematic value related to the founder of a faith that would act both to legitimate Abraham as founder (and so legitimate the Hebrew faith as a faith) and yet to present this faith–and YHWH as its divinity–as distinct from the ancient Near Eastern divinities in important ways.

The post 43: Switzerland, Abraham and Obedience appeared first on Untangling Christianity.

This week John and Gregg discuss Chapters 3 and 4 from Darin Hufford’s book The Misundertstood God: The Lies Religion Tells About God. Chapter 3, “The Hair Trigger God,” asserts that Christians often view God as being impatient and fear that, someday, God will finally get tired of our sin and abandon us.

Neither John nor Gregg can relate to Hufford’s presentation of how fear and the threat of hell is used as a motivator to get Christians to “clean up their act.” Jesus and God aren’t playing “good copy bad cop” with us. Gregg is surprised, however, at agreeing so much with Hufford in some sections and disagreeing so much in others.  Gregg had hoped for more examples to flesh out Hufford’s positions as well as Bible references to support them.

Further, contrary to Hufford, Gregg contends that “God’s sovereignty” is not “the most important thing.”  Instead he argues that is “God as parent” and “God as sovereign” are mutually central and informing, and that both are essential to who God is and to our relationship with God.

Darin’s Chapter 4 considers God’s kindness.  He contends that “the great counterfeit of kindness is manipulation,” where manipulation means threatening people with hell if they don’t follow God.  He further contends that acts of kindness enacted with an ulterior motive are manipulative and that we should not look to get anything from being kind.

John and Gregg both disagree: people are always operating with ulterior motives, even if the motive is hoping that someone will change their lifestyle or understand their value through my act of kindness! In other words, how we act toward others always has an impact on us!  Thus Gregg even argues that we do not love God “for naught,” but for the love of the selves that we are becoming as we are loved by–and in love with–God.

So Gregg notes that being loved affects him positively, and all the more when he is loved by God: he likes the person he is becoming and makes better decisions (and so sleeps better at night), he more easily sees the value in others, etc. Further, for Gregg the reverse of this phenomenon is the problem that many Christians believe things about God and Christianity that, in any other context, they would reject.

Gregg finishes with the specific case that Christians have accepted things about Christianity as being “loving” that, in any other context, they would perceive (or at least question) as being “unloving.” Christians have accepted this inverted understandings because they have also accepted a) that the most basic notion in Christianity is reward or punishment–going to heaven or going to hell–and b) that God’s love is so very different from human love that our own experiences of love (and experiences generally) do not apply to our understandings of God and God’s love.

Yet by failing to allow real life and the real significance of love relationships with family, friends, etc. to inform our understanding of our relationship with God (just as Christians do allow for the reverse), we fail to put our love relationship with God through the proper paces so that it can take on its proper role.  So we learn that tensions (between human and divine love) are not problematic but helpful and necessary.  More so, we need to become those who allow their experiences of God, as God’s love, to inform our understanding of God (as God’s truth, which we understand in the Bible).

The post 42: Sovereignty, Kindness and Interpretation | Chap 3-4 of The Misunderstood God by Darin Hufford appeared first on Untangling Christianity.

This week John and Gregg discuss Chapters 1 and 2 from Darin Hufford’s book titled The Misunderstood God: The Lies Religion Tells About God.

We have mixed feelings about the book. Hufford makes some good observations about what doesn’t work in Christianity which is refreshing and yet also makes sweeping generalizations about how people feel and experience things we couldn’t relate to.

The general focus of Hufford’s presentation is that “we” (he uses that phrase a lot to refer to all Christians) have been lied to by our Christian culture about who God is and how he relates to us. Each chapter takes a look at different misunderstandings about God Hufford perceives.

Hufford suggests that the way we live and experience of God does not match the message Christians proclaim and that Christians live and act like their relationship with God is working when it’s really not.

Hufford asks a large audience if they are miserable in their relationship with God and many people raise their hands. This is a turning point for the way Hufford approaches Christianity.

John sees significance in Hufford’s revelation and re-orientation towards as he puts it “loving people” and how that changed the way he saw them and related to them. Gregg expresses caution around Hufford’s idea that, “you know what the gospel means by loving the people the message is for.”

Gregg suggests a better approach is, “No, I get the gospel message because I have been loved by God not because I’ve fallen in love other people.” Gregg sees the source of this love as coming from God–NOT from loving other people as Hufford states.

John likes Hufford’s observation that he changed his focus from “the message” and turned it instead to “the people.” This does seem like a good change in orientation.

John and Gregg conflicted on Hufford’s dramatic examples and analogies and yet appreciate the value he places on our experience of God and that it’s more than okay to question and examine them in light of who God is supposed to be and that that action is not mistrusting God. Gregg wonders if after bringing down the hammer to make a point, Hufford would be better served to back off a little and nuance some of the finer points.

Next the conversation turns to Christianity not being about “reward and punishment” and Hufford’s observation that it’s strange how fear is used as a tool to motivate Christians into a loving relationship with God.  John mentions reading Love Wins by Rob Bell and refers to parallels he sees in Hufford’s points.

This leads to reflection on how Christians handle tough ideas that don’t make sense by putting them in a “special God category” and classifying them as things that humans can’t understand. It’s possible an idea really doesn’t make sense and what is being espoused is “bad Christianity.”

John reflects on a recent experience of visiting a church and the new perspective he had as a result of not going for a long time–and that not necessarily being a bad thing.

Gregg suggests that when we go to church we aren’t always getting the “truth.” Just because you “hear something at church” doesn’t make it automatically true. Everyone on the inside says, “Look we are doing all the right things” and maybe they aren’t. Gregg believes that if you are pursuing Truth you will find God, even if you leave church or Christianity as you currently know it.

Gregg challenges John to collect the top 10 questions that you can’t ask at church or that would never be answered and believes they would make for an interesting podcast discussion.

We’d love to hear your unanswerable church questions or topics in the comments too. If you’ve read the book leave a comment letting us know if you agree with our observations or have something else to add to the conversation.

The post 41: Christian Insanity | Chap 1-2 of The Misunderstood God by Darin Hufford appeared first on Untangling Christianity.

In this episode John and Gregg discuss an article from Christianity Today titled Here Come the Radicals by Matthew Lee Anderson that examines several books on “radical Christianity” such as Kyle Idleman’s Not A Fan. John resonates with the author’s point that writers such as Idleman promote an intensity as key to whether one is really in right relationship with God. Yet due to what both he and Gregg have seen to be a rather amateur use of Scripture, John finds their credibility to be questionable.

John notes further that these authors focus a great deal on how ‘not to be’, but offer little on how to be rightly toward God (and instead seem to replace belief with commitment). Gregg broadly agrees and notes how this author has reached many of the same conclusions as he and John have. He further emphasizes the difference between belief and understanding (and ultimately trust).

Yet where the author sees an issue with vocabulary, Gregg sees a misunderstanding about the role of personal experience. So the issue is not that Christians have lost the grasp on the “simple language of Scripture,” but more likely that such Christians lack experiences of God / proper expectations of what experiencing God should be like. So for a love relationship to have real impact, we need real experiences of that love! So perhaps Christians are often trying to “fake it” through a relationship that just is not working for them.

The post 40: Informed Trust appeared first on Untangling Christianity.

In this episode John and Gregg discuss Luke 9:23, “taking up your cross” and “following Jesus.”  From this John wonders generally about how we should be using the Bible.  He gives the example of sermons where biblical passages are taken to mean exactly what they meant when they were written (and have essentially the same implications for us as they did for the original audience).  This seems to lack intellectual integrity.

For Gregg, such questions are a question of biblical hermeneutics.  For example, Gregg mentions a “divine discourse” theory of interpretation whereby God, in a certain very real sense, speaks through the Bible.  Yet this perspective embraces the literary characteristics of the text and is aware that these literary standards (for historiography, etc.) are different from what we hold to today (and so we cannot hold them to our 21st century standards).

So the gospels are “rhetorical documents” in the ancient sense of the word–documents meant to convince the reader of certain things.  In this case, the gospels aim to convince the reader that Jesus truly is Messiah and is the son of God.  John sees a stark contrast between this intention of the text (i.e., convincing of who Jesus is) and the orientation of books like Kyle Idleman’s Not a Fan (which seek to convince us of how to act and how much it should be “hurting” when you do it, and that if you don’t act this way then you may not be following God).

Gregg raises that “taking up the cross” occurs nearly identically in three places in the gospels, yet it also occurs in two other places with slightly different contexts.  Gregg argues that we need to understand this notion based on its origins in the Old Testament, as one of these other occurrences demonstrates.  Specifically, God’s people have turned their backs on God.  So returning to the context of the gospels the emphasis is clearly on the enormous reversal that Jesus is requiring in terms of the notion of family (which is belonging and identity) in 1st century Palestine.

John goes on to wonder if we can take a biblical passage can be taken out of context yet bring about good results.  Gregg responds that we need to be careful: we should understand the life in light of the Bible AND understand the Bible in light of life.  The issue for Gregg is that Christians typically insist that we understand life in light of the Bible (and not the reverse) and ignore the truth that the real world in a valid and necessary “informer.”

So Gregg likens the orientation of young earth creationists to that of theologian Rudolph Bultmann: both take certain understandings as “givens” (the first that the earth can only be X years old, the second that miracles are impossible) and foreclose on other possibilities.  So by making truth claims that are beyond their knowledge, each party is guilty of drawing conclusions that value ideology above truth.

The post 39: Using the Bible Well appeared first on Untangling Christianity.

In this episode John and Gregg discuss listener feedback directed to both of them. The feedback to Gregg suggests that those who do not focus on grace are those who have not yet understood the enormity of their sin (on the example of the woman in Luke 7). The feedback sent to John concerns the difference between the older and the younger brother in the parable of the prodigal son, and expressed concern that John remain humble even though he has not had significant moments of acting against his Christian views or “sinfully.”

John clarifies that while he has a hard time seeing “the gravity of his sins and shortcomings,” in no way does he see himself as better than others, if anything he envies those who have had more overt experiences of God, such as the listener engaging with us.

Gregg responds that often he hears responses of gratitude and thankfulness to God’s grace or forgiveness but that the biblical text, in the context of forgiveness of sins Luke 7, presents the matter in much better way: “the one who has been forgiven much loves much.”  In other words, the most existentially fitting response to God, in this context, is to love.

Gregg goes on to question how we view sin.  Specifically, where Christians understand God primarily as sovereign, sin is a list of things that we have done wrong (i.e., ways in which we have not been obedient servants and so merit punishment or God’s disdain).  But where we see God as parent then sin acts or dispositions, conscious or preconscious, commissive or ommissive, which thwart my relationship with God.  Sin in this context does not drive God from me but moves me further from God.

John responds that if the path to God is becoming aware of one’s sin (i.e., realizing “how bad” he is) he has found this to an unworkable path.  Gregg agrees: while there have been times when he needed seriously to consider the impact and negative consequences of his actions, he does believe that Christians are to be preoccupied with “the enormity of their sin” but rather with the enormity of God’s love for them.  When this is is their focus then Christians are oriented rightly to all things (to God, themselves, their fellows, the physical world). So in this context Gregg asks: How do we become preoccupied with God’s love for us?

The post 38: Sin’s Significance appeared first on Untangling Christianity.

In this episode John and Gregg discuss Gregg’s approach to “untangling” Christianity.  John sees it as a major shift in orientation, much like Wayne Jacobsen’s view, that instead of thinking of God as a being who cannot stand our sin (and so had to send his son to die on our behalf) we should see God as one who deeply loves and desires relationship with us.

Gregg instead sees it as fine tuning: Christians are typically trying to “do the right thing” and and to make the relationship with God “work,” but it’s not..  John then makes a link to the discussion from Episode 25–Truth Over Love, about how Gregg views the writing of prominent Christian authors like Kyle Idleman and John Eldredge very differently from how there books are received in North America.

For example, John questions how Not a Fan can have become a “movement” (on Facebook, NAF T-shirts & study series) and be “dedicated to the Lord” by its publishers (in the book’s Epilogue), such that many people would say, “Look at how the Lord has blessed this book: it’s so popular.”  Whereas our perspective is, “Look at this book: it’s a mess and it’s misleading!”

Gregg’s main question concerning these books would be: what would these perspectives look like if truth and love were properly integrated?  Because the Bible is not enough: if it were, then the Holy Spirit would be unnecessary.  John’s hunch is that these writings turn on a simple, “plain text” reading of the Bible and so both lack biblical truth (due to flimsy research and exegesis) and devalue experience (particularly, the experience of God’s love).

For John, Not a Fan is not about pursuing truth but pursuing an agenda: the author’s view of Christianity.  Gregg frames his emphasis on truth as being about truth-seeking.  So Gregg views Eldredge and Idleman’s subject matter as deeply important: truth of ultimate concern.  But Gregg also questions the writing process (the lack of research and exegesis) and so the responsibility of both the authors and the publishers: should Not a Fan have been published?

So writing books like these is, for Gregg, essentially amounts to Christian ministry: speaking out to others, from (and concerning) your relationship with God, on a frequent basis.  Further, where it comes to truth-seeking, these books seem to avoid a critical component of truth: what is true for me?  For Gregg it is to be deeply loved by someone who knows me and loving that one, whom I also know, in return.

So Gregg thinks these authors are in the right ball park, but they’re playing the wrong game: we must integrate love and truth, truth and love, in proper ways.

The post 37: Judging God appeared first on Untangling Christianity.