Theology in the Raw - 821: Deconstruction, Progressive Christianity, and Our Cultural Moment

Episode Date: September 28, 2020

A.J. Swoboda a brilliant thinker, a relational pastor, and possesses an uncanny ability to think critically about the intersection of faith and culture. In this conversation, we talk about a lot of things related to his own journey of deconstruction and reconstruction, progressive vs. conservative Christianity, politics, and our cultural moment. A.J. has a Ph.D. from University of Birmingham (U.K.) and currently serves as Assistant Professor of Biblical Studies and World Christianity at Bushnell University.

Hello, friends. Welcome back to another episode of Theology in the Raw. If you'd like to support the show, you can go to patreon.com forward slash theology in the raw support show for as little as five bucks a month, get access to premium content and become part of the theology in the raw community. As I said in a previous podcast, I don't know when I said this, but it was a while back. I have almost exclusively moved my Q&A time for Theology in the Raw. Theology on the Raw started as primarily a Q&A platform where you would send in your questions and I would do my best to respond to and sometimes even answer those questions. And I do that from time to time on the public podcast, but I have, for various reasons, have moved that part of this podcast to the Patreon-only platform so that

most of my Q&A engagement does happen within the tighter-knit Patreon community. In a sense, it's a lot easier to have those kinds of conversations, field the questions that come in when they're sent in from my Patreon audience. And then not only do I get to respond to the questions, but when I post my Q&A podcast, then various, it allows the questioners or the Patreon community to kind of comment back on that. And we can have an ongoing conversation about these complex topics. So again, that's patreon.com forward slash theology. I'll go check it out. My guest today is AJ Swoboda, who is my favorite Christian writer, no offense to NT Wright and others. Well, actually, I've got a few really

Christian writers that I love, but there's something special about AJ and his writing style, the things he writes about his mind is just, he's, I hate the word balance. The word balance can be overplayed, but he, he doesn't fit into any kind of one box. He's such a good thinker. I love his heart. I love his pastoral sensitivities. I love his mind. And I love that. I can't like predict what AJ is going to say. He's just, he's just, you can't stuff him into some ideological or theological box. And he's just a brilliant, beautiful writer. I mentioned his books. I mentioned a few of his books on the podcast. Again, the one that I love probably the most is A Glorious Dark. So I definitely check

out that book. He's got another book coming out this spring that I can't wait to read. We talk a lot about deconstruction. We talk a lot about various ideologies today from the far right to the far left. We talk about, we dabble a little bit into race, the race conversation. We also talk about what it's like being a Christian leader in a fairly liberal part of the country in Portland, Oregon. He's not there anymore, but he used to minister there. So without further ado, let's welcome to the show for the second time, I think second, maybe third time, episode of Theology in the Raw. I'm here with my good friend A.J. Swoboda. A.J. is Assistant Professor of Bible theology and world Christianity at

Bushnell University. And that's not Bushnell in terms of the Irish whiskey. I was informed that is not where the school got its name from, probably very far from that. A.J., are you, you're in Salem, right? No, I'm in Eugene, Oregon, which is just 60 miles south of Eugene. And we were in Portland for the last 10 years, but now we're in Eugene, which is a big college town. And so you were a pastor for a number of years, professor at George Fox, right? And then now you're at Bushnell. Tell us just a 30-second overview of the last 10 years of your life.

Yeah, well, we just over 10 years ago moved to Portland, planted a church in the heart of the urban core called Theophilus. And we got the church going. And about a year and a half ago, almost two years ago, we transitioned out and handed the church leadership off to the next generation of leaders and pastors, and they're doing awesome. And we now, I'm teaching full-time, and I've been sensing for some time kind of a vocational shift in my own life. And I get to teach and write and serve a lot of students. And I also run a doctor of ministry program at Fuller Seminary on the Holy Spirit and leadership. So I get to teach and I love it. I love teaching. Love it. Do you like it more in pastoring? No, I don't. Neither of them fulfill all of the desires of my heart. I can say that what I'm doing now, I think aligns a lot more with what I'm gifted at, but I am, I am a very bad leader. I'm not in, um, I don't, I find that, that, uh,

it's better for me to not run any organization. And right now I probably have about 500 listeners who are like i want to go to that guy's church no no a leader who says he's a bad leader i want to follow that guy i i i i did the right thing and then the people that are leading the church right now are people who should be leading the church it's's a very, very good thing. And your PhD is from, is it Birmingham University or Manchester? That's right. Yep. In the UK.

Nope. Yep. Birmingham. It's one of the last state schools that has a little theology department. So I did my work in Britain pretty close to the time I think you were there, although we were in different parts of parts of the Island, but, um, yep. So I was a university of Birmingham and a theologian by trade. So PhD in theology. And AJ is, I said this last time I had you on, I'll say it again. Uh,

my favorite Christian author. I think last time I said one of, one of my favorites. Yeah. And I'm going to say back to you again, you need to read more christian authors that's evidence of your lack of reading aj is one of the few christian authors who is an actual writer who happens to be a christian who happens to have a phd but like unlike 95 of other christ Christian people that I read, they would never make it in the broader writing space. And I would include myself in this.

I'm not a writer by trade. I'm a Christian who writes because I have ideas I want to get out there. But you are a master of the art of writing while conveying amazing content. Your book, A Glorious Dark, is a must-read. And that might be a segue into kind of what we want to talk about with deconstruction. A Glorious Dark. I mean, you looked at, for lack of better terms terms and i don't know if you use this term or if it's just me using it but kind of the underbelly of christianity or the underbelly the dark side

of our faith seeing god like hearing from god in the silence seeing god in the absence uh finding joy in the distance the darkness those kind of like mysterious upside down, inside out kind of themes that we often don't talk about. Would that be an accurate way? Or what would be your elevator pitch of a glorious dark? There have actually been a couple of theologians who have used the phrase gray theology, G-R-E-Y, as a way to describe kind of this dimension of theology that deals with the in-betweenness. You know, there's a lot of elements of certainty in the Christian faith. I actually think that there are important elements of certainty. We've gotten so anti-certainty, but I'm certain about the love of God, and I'm not going to invite anybody to sort of live in the tension of whether that's true or not. It's certain. But there are a lot of sides to following Jesus that are

great. A lot of theologians talk about the hiddenness of God, the absconditus deus, right? The side of God that Luther called it the backside of God. It's when Moses wanted to see God, but God showed him his back. It's the side of God that, that you wouldn't expect the gray, the gray side of God as it were. And I, I love, I love digging into those elements of theology that, that, that are the cracks. I just, yeah, those, those are kind of some of the more interesting sides of theology that are the cracks. I just, yeah, those are kind of some of the more interesting sides of theology for me. Now, did you go through a period of deconstruction?

What did that look like? Yeah, yeah. So kind of my story of meeting Jesus when I was 16, I was on fire, went to acquire the fire, really on fire. I was 16, I was on fire, went to acquire the fire, really on fire. I was fully into evangelical culture, started going to a Baptist church, and those years were phenomenal. I mean, I'm grateful for those years. I learned the Bible. It was awesome. And along the way, I went to seminary. And when you go to seminary after having had a conversion experience, you learn a lot of stuff in seminary that you just weren't told early on. I remember having a particular crisis of faith around the nature of Scripture when I was in seminary. I had found a missing verse from the Gospel of John, John 5, 4, which is actually not going to be in most of your Bible translations.

John 5, 4, which is actually not going to be in most of your Bible translations. And I remember reading this verse. I came across this verse and I called in this. It was a radio program. I called in this radio program, this kind of Bible answer radio program, although it wasn't Hank Hanegraaff, but it was a similar program. And I said and I asked the question, what do I do with John 5, 4? And the guy on the air, I could tell he was flipping through the pages of the Bible and he came to it. And he said on the air, he says, well, I don't have an answer for you, but I'm going to send you a little tape.

And this was back in the 90s, early, late 90s, early thousands. And he sent me a tape. Two weeks later, I got a tape in the mail. And on the tape, he said, don't worry about this part of the Bible. Just let it go and keep following Jesus. And what that did to me very early on was it taught me that actually asking real questions about your faith in the Bible was something you were to sweep under the rug. And eventually that led to a pretty big faith crisis. And it actually wasn't until I picked up N.T. Wright's book on scripture that I began to feel like I had permission

to bring my true questions to God and that God could handle them. And by virtue of the right people around me at that moment, seminary, yes, there were almost a deconstruction, but I was able to walk through that. And today follow Jesus with all of my heart. But I happen to believe that we shouldn't just bring the first fruits of our praise to God. We should actually bring the first fruits of our questions as well. And that we need to worship God with our questions. so i'm just like i have as you're talking i got my bible out there's a greek new testament and there is no john 5 4 it goes from john 5 3 to john 5 5 yeah yeah yeah the english i haven't checked in english

translation is it's got to be in there they don't just skip a verse right yeah and the all the niv the one i have uh that i have right here there's a classic, you know, at the bottom manuscripts, early manuscripts. And what likely happened there is something that happens often is that Bible translators and New Testament scholars came to the conclusion that there was a verse that was probably not in the earliest translations, in the earliest manuscripts, and was included in some of our translations, and did the absolute right thing, and put it in a footnote. But at the end of the day, that actually didn't bring any question, to this day, does not bring any question to me of the veracity and goodness of Scripture. But at the time, it messed with what I thought the Bible was, messed with what I thought the Bible was, was a book without human fingerprints. And I've come to believe that scripture, like Jesus, has fingerprints, and that those fingerprints are a signpost that God uses human beings in really powerful ways. But at the moment, right,

I didn't have a whole lot of people around me to talk about it. And today, when a young person has a problem with their faith, what they do is they take it to YouTube. And before you know it, there are rabbit trails away from bringing into question everything that they've been taught, because there are now plenty of voices that will lead us in many directions that aren't towards Jesus. And so at the end of the day, I am seeing young people who are raised in the church, who have been given 18 years of training, who get to college and in one undergrad class with a couple YouTube videos and a few podcast episodes, chuck their faith. And that is a big issue. Is that – gosh, I mean is that different than previous generations or why is it different today? I don't know if it's different.

I mean what I think is different is the speed by which it's happening. We now have the capability to find just about any piece of information we want now at any moment's notice. In fact, in my undergraduate classes, I do this experiment with my students. It terrifies them. I ask my students to go and find scholars, people with PhDs who deny that the Holocaust ever happened. And what they always find is that there are a ton of people with PhDs who don't believe the Holocaust ever happened. And the point being that you can obviously now find anybody who says anything you want to say at any point that you need it.

And so we now have, we are surrounded by professors who have a lot of letters behind their name, but we've lost the wise mothers and fathers who can lead us through stuff. And so we've basically replaced wisdom with information. And what's happening is we are just now being informed out of our faith. Would you say that— Dallas Willard has a line, by the way, in one of his books where he says that the information age will be parched with information but empty of formation. And that's—we now know—we know everything except intimacy with Jesus. And it's a wild world.

I see it in my undergraduate classes every single semester. What do you mean by that? What do you see when you say you see it? Describe to me what you're seeing. Yeah. what's what you're seeing yeah um young young people who come to uh to the undergraduate setting like the school where i teach at which is a christian come to the classroom they all of a sudden i mean these are 18 19 year old kids are all of a sudden, I mean, these are 18, 19 year old kids are all of a sudden in a world

that they were never prepared to live in. I mean, Jonathan Heights talked a lot about this idea of the coddling of the American mind, which he, he argues actually has to do with parenting a little bit that we spend our entire life creating a bubble of safety for our kids. Frank Ferruti is another thinker who talks about we create these security bubbles for kids. And then they come to college. And they come in full encounter with this whole world. They have never been trained to deal with the world of difference, of otherness, of difference. There was, by the way, a really interesting story.

The biodome. The University of Arizona spent billions of dollars to build this biodome out in the desert a number of years ago. And they planted all these trees in the biodome. And what they found was they planted these trees, but they would grow up in this self-enclosed biodome. They would grow up and just fall over. They would grow up and just fall over every time. And they couldn't figure out what it was. And then all of a sudden they figured it out.

What's the one thing the biodome doesn't have? It doesn't have any wind. And so these trees are growing up, but they were never trained to have any opposition. And the roots never had to go down. I'm seeing kids come to college, and because there's been no wind, they just fall down in a minute. There's any question of their faith. That book, The Coddling of the American Mind, is probably one of the top most important books I've read in the last five years, at least. There is this.

Oh, man. Well, it's the whole concept of anti-fragility, right? I mean, and Nassim Tlaib talks about this, and they kind of draw on his work, but that there's several, there's the human, not just human body, but we can start there. I mean, the human body, if you coddle it, it gets weaker, not stronger. When you add resistance, you don't just – like if you go in and lift weights, that doesn't have a neutral effect of, oh, I can prevent this bar from smashing into my chest. It actually gets you stronger. That's what anti-fragility is or the immune system. If all you do is live in a bubble and you go out in the real world you'll catch every disease known to man because you hasn't been and psychologically

even sociologically um just biologically um the the coddling of our human bodies or the human's intellect um has a reverse effect we can maybe mean, the coddling of the intellect, not being exposed to ideas that challenge you, that might even offend you. That's exactly right. And by the way, Preston, there's all of this, there's all these little signposts along the way that God actually created a world of biodiversity, where he created a world where we actually need

different kinds of species to kind of be strong. For example, you will rarely find Jewish people who are allergic to peanuts. And the reason is because when they're kids, they're introduced to peanuts very early on. Another example would be polio. Polio, when polio was the epidemic of a generation, it was almost exclusively the illness of the affluent. Poor people rarely got polio was the epidemic of a generation. It was almost exclusively the illness of the affluent. Poor people rarely got polio. And the reason is poor kids lived in environments where their immune systems had been tested a lot more. So you have all of these different things. We treat youth groups and churches as environments where we are immune. They are the places where we go to find out why we're already right.

But we rarely go to church to be introduced to the difficulties of faith. And there is a power. When I find out about John 5, 4 from Bart Ehrman, it's very different than when I find about John 5, 4 from my pastor. And when my pastor or a leader is willing to introduce me to the tough parts of faith, it develops trust and hope. But when you find out from Bart Ehrman or your first year of theology, religion professor, it's like you've been tricked this whole time. I think we need to introduce to kids the difficulties of the Christian faith earlier. And when we do that, it creates a really, really healthy immune

system. I've often thought, and I don't know, I've said it publicly a little bit, I think, but like, I think one of the most urgent things facing the church today is robust discipleship for youth. And I don't, I guess this is kind of a, does it happen? Should it happen in the youth group? Sure. The youth group, youth groups, I don't know. There's been kind of a, you know, last time I had a conversation with Francis Chan,

it was for this youth – well, I don't get all the details, but we're doing this youth project on sexuality. It's a whole training thing for youth groups. And he asked a question. It was so funny. He looked at me kind of funny and says, yeah, I could do that. But do youth groups exist anymore? Like is that a thing? He's like, like i don't our church network in san francisco like i don't even know of a youth group that you know so i think it might have been an overstatement

because i do know many youth pastors but um i do think there is a um i don't say a mass exodus but i mean i think the population of youth groups i I think anecdotally at least, is much smaller than it was, say, 20 years ago. So I'm not all that to say I'm not saying just youth groups at church, but just some sort of broader, holistic, in-depth, thorough, meaningful, honest, hard hitting, challenging discipleship of Christian youth. That seems to be, from my vantage point, a massive urgency. And not that it hasn't always been there, but again, we do live in a slightly different age in that we have the internet, kids have a phone at 13, they have access to millions of ideas, literally. How are we discipling our youth in a cultural moment that has never existed before? If we only rely on older systems, older methods, I think we're being culturally naive. All right,

go. Well, yeah, I mean, you're hitting, I think you're hitting some nails on the head because the models of youth ministry that we used to integrate largely relied on attempting to get kids in the room. And this is a minimum, please, over exaggeration or over way over characterization of the situation. characterization of the situation, but at least in the youth groups in which I was engaged with as a younger teenager, the draw was this sort of social connection. You come to play video games, have a good time, have fun. And there's nothing wrong with those social dimensions of faith. Those are really important. We need those. The problem is when that becomes the draw, The problem is when that becomes the draw, the social dimensions of church can just be replaced by the social dimensions of college or the social dimensions of your dorm room. There's a scholar at Gonzaga University, Patricia Killen.

She's a sociologist, has written a lot about what she calls the – she doesn't call it the, I call it the Oregon Trail. She calls it the, the Oregon Trail is middle American kids who come from middle America, move to Portland. And within a year or two years, their faith is gone. And they've sort of embraced this progressive secular ideology. Patricia Killen talks about when people move, when they make a massive shift in their geographical centering. They have to create a new social environment. If we leave our hometown and we leave our church youth group and then we go to some new city, we're going to find some social context. But what we end up doing is we end up just going for the social benefits rather than a community that's shaped around the gospel or scripture or faith. And so essentially what's happening is we are socializing kids into a social environment in their youth groups. But then they find a whole new social group in college and just replace it. I think we're social beings.

college and just replace it. I think we're social beings, and for too stinking long, we have neglected the social dynamic of Christianity. And we have created an environment where it is about individual faith, and that is critical. But an individual faith that is not nurtured in a social context will just be replaced by another individual set of beliefs in a new social context. So we just replace our faith with a new set of beliefs in our new social context. Patricia Killen's written a lot of really interesting stuff on this. There used to be a game when I was a kid called Oregon trail and all, everybody would die of dysentery on the way out to Oregon. Um, but now the new Oregon trail is everybody dies of deconstruction.

And what happens is they come out to Oregon. I've seen it a hundred times. The middle American kid, middle Midwest kid comes to Portland and they're Oregon. They're done. Uh, they're, they're, they're done in a year or two. So can we, can we can we linger on that for a second because i mean portland at the time of recording is a big hot spot in the news um it seems that it's you know with the riots and and everything and it's known for being very progressive um what what is it about that environment that is unhelpful or captivates this middle of America kid coming out? I mean, on the surface, you would think it's anti-racist, it's inclusive, it's empathetic, is kind of on the face of maybe a, and let me just say a hyper-progressive

kind of value system. That's on the surface of it, but you've lived there for a while. Can you talk to us about being on the, having a front row seat to where that, where that ultimately leads or? Yeah, no, I mean, to begin uh to stick up for for little portland um the our news media outlets have done a terrific job of portraying one side of the

one side of these protests and i don't live in portland anymore but i'm gonna stick up for it and say that uh the majority of of protesters and folks in the city they're attempting to do really really good work are not violent. And then they're not the ones making it on the, on the TV. But with that said, um, just to stick up a little bit for, well, it really depends on the outlet. Cause if I, if I watch CNN, it's nothing but people, social distancing, mask, singing hymns to Jesus protesting silently.

Then I watched Fox news and the whole city is burning down. Yeah. Yeah. It's almost like I'm looking at two different cities. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, your original question, Preston, was really important. What is it about a city like Portland?

And we can name 100 different cities that are like this. a city like Portland, and we can name a hundred different cities that are like this. Um, what is it like Portland that brings kind of this, this spirit of, um, uh, what Renee Gerard called it unbounded deconstruction, this, this, this world, this liberated world from, uh, from, from religion or whatnot. There is this this when i was in portland there was a i was driving this was just a couple weeks ago i was preaching at a mago day uh church in in portland for their online service and i was driving and there was a a billboard for portland state university and on it was a picture of a young african-american uh female student had kind of hipster glasses on and the the tag of the bumper stick the tag of

the advertisement said question everything okay now when you this is this is portland i'm gonna guess that whoever put this marketing scheme together um that there are limits to what they're asking us to question that they would not want us to question black lives matter that they would not want us to question the concept that love is love, or they wouldn't want us to question a variety of sort of progressive ideals or conservative ideals. questioning everything. That signpost is actually, at the end of the day, the subtext is question tradition, question religion, question the assumptions. And the underlying spirit is that true freedom and true liberation is undoing the systems of tradition that represent largely Christianity, largely elements of faith tradition. And there's almost this thing in the air, it's a kind of gelatin in the air, kind of this, it's really hard to to describe but it is this commitment to freeing ourselves

from the ideas of the past and replacing them with the new ideas and by the way some old ideas need to go i'd be the first to say that we need to do away with some old ideas. But it is as well a faith in the new ideas. And it is an epistemic commitment to rejecting the ways of the past and embracing that which is new. There's a line, I can't remember who it was somewhere. I put it in a book that I wrote at one point. But one of the things that's interesting about a place like Portland is it is entirely okay to be a spiritual person. But the minute you spiritually arrive, there's a problem. So be spiritual, but don't claim to land anywhere because it implies other people could be wrong. So it's this invitation to a means of truth as long as your truth doesn't have anything to say about anybody else's.

Wow. Now, that's a really tricky move to make because any truth claim uh is is there there's this there's this thing going on right now where everybody's saying um that we shouldn't we shouldn't say one culture is better than another that's kind of a thing we're into right now which i think is absolute baloney there are some cultures that are better than others um the culture of the KKK is not a good culture. And in order to call one culture wrong, you have to have some kind of basis with which to call it wrong. And we all do that. The minute somebody says, I hate Trump, they have a basis to a standard by which they're judging him by. The minute you say Black Lives Matter, which Black Lives Matter, you are making a truth claim.

And so what's weird now is we're now living in this tension where we're making truth claims but denying that there's absolute transcendent truth. So we're talking out of our mouth and in our butt at the same time. going to be honest what i love and i may be off topic here but what i love about about the protests and our racial conversation that we're having right now is when you go and stand out and watch people pour their hearts and souls in our streets to make right right we are finally as a culture willing to look something in the face and say that is evil and wrong and I would argue in the next 10 years, 20 years, the idea of absolute truth is going to make a raging comeback. Really? Absolutely. Because you cannot say Black Lives Matter without telling me that there is some truth that applies to all people everywhere.

And I wholeheartedly believe we're going to come raging back to the idea of absolute truth. I don't know if it's going to be connected to the Bible at all, but we're going to come back to the idea of absolute truth. Well, just what you're saying, like when you get to whether it's the far right or far left, obviously the whole idea of absolute truth is a signature idea from the far right or just conservatives in general. But the progressive, I mean, I've said it so so many times i don't want to say it again but like the the the tone the ideology of the far left mirrors the far right i so ironically absolutely um yeah the next time next time you have a progressive that claims that there is no such thing as absolute truth, just ask them about Monsanto. Ask them about climate change.

Ask them about whether black lives matter. And you will really quickly see that they do believe absolute truth is true. They're just not willing to give it that language. But they do. Right, right. It was so funny. There was so funny. There was, um, um, there was a book I, I won't, I've already mentioned it in previous podcasts, but it's, it would be a very far left progressive book that,

um, I've talked about several times. Um, so, I mean, a lot of the same slogans, it's just kind of rehearsing the same narrative, but there's one point in the book where this author, a female author, um, talked about the whole idea of your truth, the phrase your truth, which comes from, you know, progressive circles. But she literally said, it sounded like she was quoting a fundamentalist pastor. She said, I want to respect people's truth, but some people's truths are flat out wrong and they need to be confronted. I wish I mean, if I won't grab it.

I'll be. No, I got it. No, no, no. Hold on. You have it. OK, I'm not going to see if I can find this while you're finding it. You have to read Adam Grant's article in The New York Times a few years ago. The title of the

argument, the title of the article is worth the purchase subscription. The title of the article is being yourself is great so long as you're like Oprah. And the premise of the article is we have created such an idolatry around authenticity that being authentic is just being who you want to be. The problem is the pedophile is authentic. We have now – authenticity has become the end game, and that's a really big problem because Paul Pott was authentic. Hitler was authentic to himself. We need to stop being – stop authentic be like jesus that should be our metric for life stop being authentic so here i'll just i want to hear this i'll just pick it up i mean it's the context uh yeah it's under a subtitle, Speak Your Truth.

Yeah, so I have, you know, she says, but I have observed people not speaking. But have I observed people not speaking their truth? What if your truth is that you are colorblind? Because throughout the book, she says, if you think you're colorblind that's actually a racist assumption and it's actually fundamentally wrong and destructive and so the whole idea of being i'm just colorblind i don't see race she's it's kind of a fundamental evil for her so she says what if that's somebody what if that's somebody's truth that they are colorblind um then she says because no one can actually be colorblind in a racist society. The claim that you are colorblind is not a truth.

It is a false belief. But that's exactly what thousands of fundamentalist pastors say about anybody who says, well, I'm just speaking my truth. They say, well, no, that's just a false belief. Um, yet this guideline can get positioned that positioned that all beliefs as truths and as such, they're equally valid. Given that the goal of anti-racist work is to identify and challenge racism, the misinformation that supports it, all perspectives are not equally valid. Anyway, she goes on, but it's just it was. That's a that's a truth claim to say racism is is worse than anti-racism is a truth claim.

And that's so important for our society to be able to name that, to be able to say that there's good. One of the universities that I'm connected with has been undergoing a bit of a scandal, as it were. One of the students got caught cheating uh on a uh on a test but the the there's a problem is that the student was confronted but the student didn't feel like they were cheating so how how do you how do you confront somebody who doesn't feel like they did something wrong um without some sense of truth claim, without some sense, we can't even catch a cheater and tell it, tell them that they're wrong. I mean, it creates a, that's an administrative problem. And,

but at the end of the day, um, yeah, racism is wrong and, and we're leaning on some pretty big absolutes at that stage. Yeah. Are we going to say if some would say, well, truth white people wanted slavery pre-Civil War, does that mean slavery was not wrong at that moment in history? The minute that you argue that truth is environmental, then you have to be willing to admit that if the whole world thought left-handed people should be killed, that that's morally fine. So at the end of the day, that is what's unique about the Christian, the Bible. There's a guy named Gil Biley who says they didn't stop burning witches because people stopped reading their Bible.

He said people stopped burning witches because people finally started reading their Bibles. And his point is that time and time and time again, scripture has been the thing that has woken people up to evil when everybody in the world believes in that evil. I think of William Wilberforce, who woke up, read his Bible, and he saw that there is a flipping book about the freedom of slaves in the Bible. And he read it, and he spent his life fighting slavery. He woke up every morning addicted to opioids. He couldn't get up without using drugs because it took his whole life and it depressed him. He would go lay down in the slave ships in Britain to feel what it would feel like to be a slave. And he did it because he read his Bible. Time and time again,

the Bible has woken people up to the evils in a world where everybody believes in the evil. And I'm kind of, as a professor of Bible, it's exhausting having to convince people that the Bible still has a voice. It was the Bible. It was the Bible that inspired the abolition movement. It was the Bible that inspired Martin Luther King Jr. It was the Bible that inspired. We could go on time and time again. So anyways.

And of course something good can be misused. I mean the Constitution can be misused. The Bible can be misused. The Koran can be – and that's what – I keep seeing – I'm trying to wrap my mind around this. If something you say or write could be misconstrued by bad people to since, well, the argument goes, you know, the traditional view of marriage has been used to oppress gay people. Or more specifically, people who believe in a traditional view of marriage have been very oppressive towards gay people. And I would agree with that 100 percent. very oppressive towards gay people. And I would agree with that 100%. Not everybody.

I don't know the percentages here, but absolutely too many to name Christians who believe in a traditional view of marriage have been genuinely homophobic and oppressive. There's no debate about that for humans living on earth. Now, is the problem the people? Or is it the text of scripture like is there something intrinsic in that traditional view of marriage that is causing christians you know because that's how the argument goes like this belief is wrong this text is wrong how it's been traditionally

interpreted because it's been misused by people and i I'm like, I just don't, that, that, that anybody can misconstrue, construe something. I mean, any, you know, you can look at the life of Jesus and misconstrue it in a destructive way. Um, one of, one of the last letters, uh, uh, uh, uh, Albert Einstein wrote, uh, one of the last letters he wrote to a friend, he is grieving, openly grieving, because he, one of his ideas had been taken to be used in the wrong way. Do you remember what that idea was? The theory of relativity, what was it used to create? The nuclear bomb. Oh, yeah. And he wrote this letter grieving that his idea had been used to destroy. How do you think, how should we think God feels when his word is used to destroy?

You know, C.S. Lewis' classic line is, the abuse of something doesn't nullify its original use. Just because people are drunkards doesn't mean that wine is bad. Just because, you know, yeah, so that God, I feel bad for God. Like God's got a tough job. He gives us a book and then we run around to use a book about freedom to enslave. No wonder God gets so angered in the Bible. He should get angry. Angry is a sign of his love and his mercy. Absolutely. By the way, and you know what it's like to have one of your books get misused. I've had my books misused. You could write, and you know what it's like to have one of your books get misused. I've had my books misused. You could find articles about people that took my words and twisted my words.

And it hurts. And it makes you want to write really mean things back and twist their words and do stuff. But I'll tell you, when you when God's word isn't twisted, it frees. That's what it does. It frees. That's good. Let's go back to the whole theme of deconstruction. So you kind of hinted, or not hinted, but you mentioned you went through a phase of deconstruction. Can you tease that out a little more? What did that look like? How far did you get to the edge of just denying the faith? What brought you back and what kind of advice would you give to somebody else who's maybe teetering on that edge of like,

I'm not sure if I'm going to stay in this whole Christian thing anymore. Well, there were, there were a couple of stories along the way that kind of opened my eyes to what was happening. Um, uh, I think the main story, uh, for me to two main stories for me that really opened my eyes to what was going on. When I graduated seminary, I started teaching. And what I began to find, this was in the mid-thousands, late thousands, I began to find that my students in the seminary classroom were increasingly coming to the seminary environment, not to learn how to serve the church, but were coming because they were mad at the church, meaning they were coming to get equipped or coming to deal with

the pain from the church. And that's absolutely natural. And in a lot of ways, seminary is really healthy for that. It can be healthy that you go to seminary as a way to process the difficulty of the church. But I began to find increasingly students who were coming to seminary who were coming to find what was wrong with the church, or to find what was wrong with Scripture, or were coming to find the... Not all. I'm just saying there was an increase in that. And I began to notice this kind of deconstruction-y spirit. And then the second story was I went on a mission trip to North Africa. And we went to the nation of Tunisia. And I remember we went on this trip.

There were, in this one city we were in, 13 known Christians of about a million people. And we're this group of Christians coming to Tunisia. And I asked if we could meet with these 13 Christians and the leader in that particular city who knew those Christians, who met once a week by candlelight with a broken guitar and one Bible that they shared in a nation where it's illegal to, to largely be, could be a, be a Christian. Um, they said that we couldn't meet with them. And, and I asked why we couldn't. And they said, um, and this was a big moment for me. They said, because, because we don't want your white European faith to rub off on them. Okay.

And I don't know what it was about that. But something clicked in me where I began to understand that this kind of deconstructed Christianity that we were kind of being fed back here in back here was actually the enemy of the faith of these people in poverty. And I began to see this. I may get you may get letters for this and I may too. letters for this and I may too. Um, but I began to see that a deconstructed Christianity, um, was the enemy of the poor, the enemy, the enemy, the poor, and that the, the, the, the faith of the poor in Tunisia believed in the Jesus of the Bible so much, and their whole life was based on a love of that Jesus. And that my deconstructed version of Christianity was actually more a reflection of wanting a God who looked more like me than the God who actually was. And I began to see that there is an element of deconstructed Christianity that is theological colonialism.

I want to sit on that for a second. Let me put it this way. Let me put it this way. We do not go to the Bible to read about the poor. We go to the Bible to hear from the poor. The Bible was written by poor, marginalized people of color. marginalized people of color. And when I read my Bible and I tell the Bible to say stuff that it doesn't say about sexuality, about truth, about reality, when I tell the poor voices in scripture that they need to shut up and take my Western white ideals. That is theological

colonialism. If I was to go into downtown Portland and start a food cart and claim as a white guy that it was the best Mexican food in Portland, you know what we'd call that? We'd call that cultural appropriation. If I take the Bible and I make it say what I want it to say about sexuality, or I make it say what I want about anything, you know what we call that? We call that having an evolved faith. And to me, to make the Bible say stuff that the poor never said is the ultimate act of colonialism. I think we should let the voices of non-white poor people in the Bible who say things that offend our white sensibilities, they should have the mic and we should listen to them.

And that at the end of the day, white progressivism, shutting down the voices of non-white people who are refugees and silenced over history and marginalized is a big problem. We would call that problematic. Well, that's, gosh, again, I don't want to make this about sexuality, but that often is kind of a tip of the spear in these kind of conversations. And it was fascinating for me. This happened a couple of years ago, a year and a half ago at the United Methodist Church convention about sexuality.

I don't know what it was. It was a big conference. And the one thing I love about the United Methodist Church is that they've done a great job at being a global denomination. They've done, for lack of better terms, missions really well. voice and be their own leaders rather than, you know, keep treating them like, you know, lowly subjects of the faith. And there was a bit of a blowback, right? Because when they had that convention about sexuality, it was the global UMC church, which

happened to have a majority of leaders who were not part of white Western European Christianity. I think 30 some percent were from African, African bishops and people from the global South. And it was, I listened to a little bit of the talks, read some stuff and it was eerie how, from my vantage point, how colonial and I would almost even i i don't use it because the term racist is overused i try to not do that and use it when i'm actually talking about an actual racist belief um but there were some things that bordered on racist kind of statements coming from progressive white westerners who did not like the fact,

they were very angry at the fact that you had African leaders and bishops saying, look, we've been colonized by you people before. We don't need to be recolonized by your Western secular sexual ethic. Yeah, exactly. But it's never couched in, it's never couched in like, and by the way, it's the Africans and the Asians who actually held the Methodist to the traditional view of scripture, which I think, I just, I find that to be such a redemptive story that their voice was actually heard and respected. and respected. But it's couched in, well, in 100 years, you'll see what we think and will change, which is this vision of history that eventually everybody becomes a progressive white person. And that the goal is an evolved white progressive faith. If we actually want the faith of the poor, the faith of the poor is black and not American. It's not white predominantly.

It's predominantly two-thirds world. And if we want to actually honor their voice and what they have to say, they're going to say things that offend all of our European sensibilities. And that's why the church is so important, is that we refuse to believe this baloney that my Facebook newsfeed represents the whole voice of the world. This ethnocentric idolatry that because everybody on my Facebook feed thinks one thing, we must be right. How arrogant. We need the whole church. Yeah. Yeah. Can I read something to you? What's that? This is, um, can I read something to you? This is, this is, um, this is Brian Zond, who Brian's just, it's such an incredible pastor and he's cuckoo on, but, but brilliant. And he,

he, I want to read this to you. This is, I want you to finish that statement, but we'll come back to that. I want to know where you think Brian's cuckoo. I love, I love it. I just, I want to read this to you. It's just, just hear, hear this out. This is, this is Brian's on. Okay. And this, this, this hit, this was, this is the kind of stuff I'm talking about that has caused me to run back to historic Christianity. Brian's on me as a white male can no longer see myself as the persecuted minority pushed to the margins, nor is the Hebrew slaves suffering in Egypt or the conquered Judean deported to Babylon, or even the first century Jew living under Roman occupation. I'm a citizen of a superpower.

I was born among the conquerors. I live in the empire, but I want to read the Bible and think it's talking to me. This is the problem. One of the most remarkable things about the Bible is that in it, we find the narrative told from the perspective of the poor, the oppressed, the enslaved, the conquered, the occupied, the defeated. This is what makes it prophetic. We know that history is written by winners. This is true, except in the case of the Bible. It is the opposite. This is the subversive genius of the Hebrew prophets. They wrote from the bottom-up perspective. Imagine a history of colonial America written by Cherokee Indians and African slaves. That'd be a different way of telling the story. And that is exactly what the Bible does.

It's a story of Egypt told by the slaves, the story of Babylon told by the exiles, the story of Rome told by the occupied. What about those brief moments of history when Israel appeared on top? In those cases, the prophet told Israel stories from the perspective of the peasant poor as a critique of the royal elite. It's almost done. Every story is told from a vantage point, a bias. A bias of the Bible is from the vantage point of the underclass. But what happens if we lose sight of the prophetically subversive vantage point in the Bible? What happens if those on top read themselves into the story, not as imperial Egyptians, Babylonians, and Romans, but as the Israelites. That's when you get the bizarre phenomenon of the elite and entitled using the Bible to endorse their dominance as

God's will. This is Roman Christianity after Constantine, Christendom on crusade, the colonialists seeing America as the promised land and the native inhabitants as Canaanites to be conquered. This is the whole history of European colonialism. This is Jim Crow. This is American prosperity gospel. This is the domestication of scripture. And it is us making the Bible dance a jig for our own appeasement. Oh my gosh, dude. What book's that from?

It's from one of his old archived blog articles. Oh, serious? I don't think it even made it into one of his books.ived blog articles. Oh, serious? I don't think it even made it into one of his books. Oh my gosh, that should be a book. But his point, it's so good. His point is that authentic Christianity has always listened to the prophetic voice of the poor. We have a whole book of them. But now, with our deconstructed faith, we're shutting the poor up.

And it's so important for us to hear that. A minor question, maybe even a pushback. You said something that the Bible is written from people of color. Yeah. So they're my Jews, right? How many white people, middle eastern white people wrote the bible well well it's written by jewish people do you consider jewish people a person of color like is ben shapiro a person of color a poc okay don't don't i i don't know i but but middle eastern

the bible was written by a whole culture of Middle Eastern people who would have had profoundly brown skin. So I don't know. I'll ask somebody. I don't know. And I'm not trying to, it's a genuine question whether Jewish people should be considered POC. Yeah, I don't know. I honestly don't know i don't i don't i honestly don't know i mean obviously they've had a history of oppression globally for millennia and yet in recent history in america

they tend to prosper more than non-jewish people with white skin i've lived in israel before and some jewish people um look like palestinians from my vantage. Some are way whiter than I am. Like the skin color is on a – if we're looking at just pigmentation, it's a pretty broad diversity within Jewish people. I don't know. When we say it wasn't written by white people, I think in a lot of the conversations we're having now about race, white and white culture represents European white culture. And I think in that way, it's fair to say that the Bible is not written by white people. It's written, but not by white culture. It's not a production of white culture.

It's a production. Pete Scazzaro does this awesome talk on all the early church fathers. They were mostly Africans. Tertullian was an African. Augustine was an African. I mean, so much of even the early church were Africans doing faith. So I don't know. We could get into quibbles about the asking, and I'm not, I'm not really sure. I have a thought through that one, but I don't think it's under debate that it's.

I don't know anybody. I don't know anybody who would claim that the Bible is written by European whites. Even there was a stupid statement by, I'm not going to say his name because I said stupid and that's kind of demeaning, but somebody said recently on Twitter that Jesus was white. And I'm like, Oh my gosh, come on. Uh, so yeah, barring a few outliers, I don't know anybody who's saying the Bible is written by, um, European white people. Um, but it, it, it is a real question for me kind of where that,

because we're so hypersensitive to race nowadays, it's, it's, it's raised some other questions in my mind, um, about where those lines are drawn. I find it a little more helpful, I think, to say it's written by people who are the oppressed, who are lower on the socioeconomic status, regardless of the pigmentation in their skin, regardless of whether they were even regardless of whether their race, that wasn't a category back then, but I mean, whether their race was the majority or not the majority. They were the oppressed. They were lower-rung social economic status. Even like, I mean, I don't know Augustine's skin color.

He lived in Africa. Was his family line originally from europe because a lot of roman leaders lived in africa i don't know tertullian i don't know his skin color maybe somebody does but um uh yeah i don't know honestly it's such a minor point i don't even want to want to go i just was curious your thoughts on that um yeah i i just love i i guess I guess maybe maybe I'll conclude with this. I love that the book that I read. I love that the book that I read does not care about the peer review process and that it and that it is it is a book written by by poor refugees who are speaking up and their words are my scripture yeah absolutely i love that i would say the christian faith the christian worldview the christian ethic um is i would go so far as to say it's designed it's it's not designed to be in a position of societal power.

Like when we had that switch in the wake of Augustine or Constantine, all of a sudden now is like a square peg in a round hole. Like you, they tried to take this thing, this, this Christian movement and make it now in a position of power. And it just, it just doesn't,

it's not, it's not, it's putting diesel in a gasoline engine. It's not designed to operate at that level of societal power and privilege really. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I wonder if we push this out even further that we actually need to – we talk about listening to people of color. We talk about listening to people, marginalized people, oppressed people.

Okay, we talk about that. And we also need to talk about reading – is this live? No. No, I'm going to cut that out. I don't edit stuff, so tread lightly. Dude, this is Theology of the Rob. People expect to hear all kinds of outrageous stuff. Okay, I'll put it this way.

Okay, Thomas Oden is one of my favorite theologians, a guy named Thomas Oden. He was at Drew University. And he went through deconstruction like crazy. He was raised in the church and then college went up. And he – full-on deconstruction. And he tells a story of coming back to faith reconstruction. And he says he, he had this epiphany that as an academic, he would only read people who were under 40 years old. He was sort of obsessed with the youth. And he tells a story that when he read

the Nicene Creed, all of a sudden he realized that the faith that he had deconstructed was totally different than the faith he had embraced. And it was a completely different, and he tells this hilarious story about how when he came back to faith, before he came back to faith, he would only read people who were under 40. But after he came back to faith, he would only read people who were over 400. Over 400. Oh, wow. Over 400 years old. And his point was, part of being a Christian is that we don't just listen to the marginalized of today. We listen to the marginalized and oppressed historically,

and that we learn to listen to dead people, and that we learn to listen to the democracy of tradition, the democracy of the dead in the word of G.K. Chesterton. We learn to listen to dead people and that we learn to listen to the democracy of tradition, the democracy of the dead in the word of G.K. Chesterton. We learn to listen to dead and old people as well as everybody who's cool and hip and knows everything now and has a TED talk. I've always been curious with you. We may have talked about this in the past before, but like you have. You have all the ingredients to be a full on far progressive Christian person. I mean, you've got an academic, several academic degrees. You're a very creative person.

I'm going to guess you're an Enneagram for that. I'm a three with a two wing. Oh, messed that up. All right. You're not your kind of traditional conservative person. You're into things like creation care, ecology. I mean, this is all just the ABCs leading to a classic kind of very progressive brand of Christianity. And yet you, I feel like you've teetered on that. And I hate these labels are so dumb, but like you still have some very conservative values when you didn't have to.

What is it? Am I on to something there? Is that, should I be confused or what happened? Yeah. We now live in an environment where I am not permitted to find any political party that can say that the lives of the unborn and the lives of the children at the border matter. There is no political party that will allow me to say that we need to really, really, really care for creation and we need to care for human beings and the economy. There is no political party that I know of that

simultaneously will hold to sexual holiness and biblical values around sexuality and can look gay and lesbian people in the face and speak with dignity to them as people who should have rights and respect and love. And it probably feels like I'm two different people or it can't be because I live in a system that can't allow me to fully embrace God's kingdom. And I think to embrace God's kingdom is to care about the things that God seems to really care about in the Bible. And it will always offend the lines that we divide between what is conservative and liberal. And the truth is, there are things that the Democrats do, their care for the environment, I resonate with deeply. And there are things that I align with,

with the conservatives and their value for the unborn that matters a lot to me. And I think being a Christian now means that you are politically a homeless person, that you're politically exiled. You cannot find a safe place where all of God's values are met. And so, yeah, I feel exiled. And I'm going to guess that most people feel exiled who are trying to follow Jesus right now. Um, but yeah, it's my theology, uh, is getting, uh, uh, my theology is, is becoming way more connected to kind of the historic Orthodox Christian

vision. And my politics is getting way more, uh, bipolar by the day i'm just they're just like multiple personality sort of stuff like from i just there's no connection point at all i just can't do it man i mean i i've been reading a lot of news in the last six months i typically am not a news person i don't follow politics too much although in the wake of Donald Trump, it's kind of you kind of can't not pay attention. But, man, so I try to read a spectrum of opinions across the different political spectrum. It's it's disastrous to your soul as a Christian. Like it's in I think there's even been studies done on this because traditional media outlets are

losing a lot of money and viewership they have to have these clickbaity titles and psychologists know how do you get an effective clickbait well you provoke somebody's anger right you get them angry and then they read more and then they get more angry and it's just so clear that that's what's happening on both sides and it's just i feel even as somebody who's very much aware of that and looking at it from a distance, like I'm an exile living in Babylon, so I'm trying to read the news outlets of Babylon. Even though I am decidedly separated from that,

I can feel my soul getting sucked in. So what about the large number of Christians't aren't even that aware of the danger of becoming too tribal when it comes to politics like i it's it's no wonder that the societal um tensions and polarization and anger and outrage has trickled right down into the church i mean the same issues that are dividing non-christian americans are dividing the church. I mean, the same issues that are dividing non-Christian Americans are dividing the church. I mean, it's not going to end anytime soon. I my hope is that there's this, I mean, my hope is that we will recognize the futility in the ideological extremities and we'll find, call me a weird evangelical,

but my hope is that in the midst of this, we're going to become so utterly frustrated that we have to cling to something deeper and truer, and that is Jesus. And what's crazy to me, I've had three friends or family members in the last three months who have either given their life to Jesus or have begun to ask questions about the Bible who totally wanted nothing to do with faith before COVID and all the racial stuff that we're experiencing. And I think what's going to happen is the frenetic nature of this thing is going to get so bad that the something in the human soul, the imago Dei within us is going to say,

this doesn't work. It can't work. We need something that's eternal and something that is true and good. And I truly believe Jesus is the only hope and not in some sentimentalized way, a radical obedience and discipleship to Jesus, where it's like we hate everything else but Him. That is our only hope. That is our only hope. Can you, we can end with this, because you said offline that you had some thoughts on COVID. We are recording this, gosh, what is it, toward the end of August. So we are still knee deep in COVID. I think this may release in September sometime. But yeah, you said you had some thoughts on COVID. My computer is about to die, so I'm going to duck over and plug it in.

Yeah, I mean, yeah, I guess, you know, when you look at the – how do you think about COVID or a virus like this from a biblical perspective? How do you think about this from like a faith perspective? And it's just striking to me. My friend Matthew Sleeth has written a lot about the Sabbath. We've talked a lot about this. When you look at the 10 commandments, or when you look at the Ten Plagues, forgive me, in the Old Testament when Israel was enslaved in Egypt, and God is attempting to free Israel, there are these Ten Plagues, and there is only one, there is only one plague in which Pharaoh has this sort of confession of Yahweh. He says, he calls it, this must be the finger of God. And there is only one plague where he says,

this must be the finger of God. And it is the plague of gnats, which of all the plagues is the smallest plague, the smallest thing. And I am not saying that this virus is from God in any way, shape or form. But I think things like this, where we are being brought down by the smallest of creatures, has the power to either humble us or drive us mad. has the power to either humble us or drive us mad. I love that as a guy with a PhD, I am non-essential, but the guy stocking the shelves with toilet paper is essential. I love that my self-prescribed importance is being questioned right now as an academic. And I think this is God's, God is finding a really

unique way in the midst of all this. And I do not believe God created this virus, but I believe God is going to find a really creative way to bring us to our knees in humility once again, when we realize that the smallest of viruses has the ability to bring us down. that the smallest of viruses has the ability to bring us down. And the smallest things should humble us and show us our finitude and our brokenness. And we are either going to come out of this thing and go back to the normal, which will be death for us, or we will learn some humility. And if we don't learn humility now, the death of the firstborn is way worse than this. And I hope in our Pharaoh culture, we can learn to be really

humbled by what we've been put into. And again, I'm not saying this is the hand of God. I'm not saying God created the virus. But I do think God wants to use this to break us and humble us because we are a very prideful people. AJ, that's a good word to end on, man. Thank you so much for joining me on the show. For those of you who have not read an AJ Swoboda book, again, A Glorious Dark is probably my favorite, although Dusty Ones is excellent. Your more recent, Subversive Sabbath is incredible. Is that your last one? Was that your most recent one? My last one. And I have a book coming out in the spring called After Doubt, which is about deconstruction.

After Doubt. Amazing. Awesome. Thank you so much, AJ, for being on the show. Appreciate you, brother. Thank you, Preston, for all your hard work. Take care. show. Appreciate you, brother. Thank you, Preston, for all your hard work.