Theology in the Raw - How to Learn from Experts and Enemies: Dr. A.J. Swoboda

Episode Date: May 19, 2025

A.J. Swoboda (Ph.D., Birmingham) is an associate professor of Bible and Theology at Bushnell University and lead mentor for the Doctor of Ministry Program on Spiritual Formation and Soul Care at Friends University. He is the author of many books, including The Gift of Thorns (Zondervan), After Doubt (Brazos), and the recently released: A Teachable Spirit: The Virtue of Learning from Strangers, Enemies, and Absolutely Anyone. He hosts the “Slow Theology” podcast (w/ Dr. Nijay Gupta) and writes the widely read “Low-Level Theologian” Substack. Join the Theology in the Raw community for as little as $5/month to get access to premium content at patreon.com/theologyintheraw Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey friends, welcome back to another episode of Theology and Around. My guest today is my dear friend, Dr. A.J. Swaboda, who is an associate professor of Bible and Theology at Bushnell University and a lead mentor for the Doctor of Ministry program on spiritual formation and soul care at Friends University. He's the author of many books, and he is indeed among my favorite Christian authors. Several of his books include The Gift of Thorns, After Doubt, and the recently released A Teachable Spirit, The Virtue of Learning from Strangers, Enemies, and Absolutely Anyone. He also co-hosts the Slow Theology podcast

with Dr. Vijay Gupta, another frequent theology in The Raw Guest, and also writes the widely read low-level theologian, Substack. We talk all about his latest book, a teachable spirit. How should Christians learn? Who should Christians learn from? And how do we go about sorting through the chaos of all the information that is available to us? So please welcome back yet again to the show. The one and only Dr. AJ Swaboda. My dear friend, AJ Swaboda.

Welcome back for the, do we have a number? Is it at least half a dozen? A number to you Preston is a thousand in my heart. It doesn't matter. I'm always with you, everywhere I go. Yeah, even to the end of the age. I do think this is five or six. I do think it's five or six.

It's up there. It's up there, yeah. You were, I mean, you go back at least six years. Oh geez, bro. Oh geez. Oh gee. I think the first time you had me on was a good eight years ago. And we talked about a Gloria Stark a long time ago

because you were really nice about that book. That's a brilliant book, brilliant book. You called me your favorite Christian author, which you stopped saying about six years ago, so I think you found somebody else. But for a season there, a hot second, I was your favorite, first of all. Yeah, here's the hard thing about that. Is I have a circle of friends who are writers

who maybe have said, you know, I thought I was your favorite. Wait, I'm not as good as AJ. I'm like, no, you're good too. So I'm trying to be a little more diplomatic about that. So, you've told a lot of people that they're your favorite. And we're all just wondering when we're going to get anointed, the true one. I have a small circle of favorite Christian writers of which you are among them. There you go. I that, you have a unique ability to combine

academic precision and depth while writing in an incredibly accessible way. But not just accessible, but I don't want to say flowery, but just an uncanny ability to write in a way where you get lost in the book and you're just, like, you're not working to read, like, the next sentence, the next sentence. It's sucking. Your writing sucks you in to where you feel like you're watching a movie. And that's a really rare kind of book. I mean, those are kind of like New York Times best selling books where they're just like, even this is a 400 page book, but I just can't put it down.

Your books, all your books are like that. Thanks, Preston. Your latest one, A Teachable Spirit, The Virtue of Learning from Strangers, Enemies, and Absolutely Anyone. This seems to be different than your other books. You typically explore theological or Christian themes that I've often said like a glorious dark or the dusty ones, kind of like the, this might be a bad analogy. The gray area. The wandering side. The underbelly of the stuff people think about and feel but don't typically write about or think about. Where did this book come about? What brought this to your heart? Yeah, actually, a comment on just the things I have written. This does lend itself more

towards the more practical theology side more than most of the things that I've written. For example, After Doubt is about how to walk through the doubt and deconstruction experience. Subversive Sabbath is very practical, but this one is actually everything I've ever written birthed more out of my experience in the classroom, of watching students come to university at a major Christian university, coming really terrified to learn in many respects.

Like I think coming, being sent, you know, from Christian homes and Christian churches where higher education and university are almost seen as, you know, the classic language of like slippery slopes towards, you know, heresy and evil and bad and parents that are terrified to send their kids to, you know, there's a, as you know, Preston, there's a huge, what they're calling the academic drop-off in the next couple of years. There's so many students now who are, the graduating classes from high schools

is getting smaller and smaller and smaller. So fewer people are gonna go to college. And I think in Christian settings, that combined with Christians that are afraid of the world of learning often, they come to school like terrified, terrified to explore, you know, learning about areas that maybe they were. Dude, so this is interesting. My class that I teach, one of my favorite classes I teach is called Sexuality, Gender

and the Bible. And it's a three credit 16 week course on just everything scripture has to say about sex. And I asked the students at the beginning of the class, how many of you ever had a Christian parent, pastor, teacher or church that gave you a really healthy version of the sex talk? And now I have yet to have one student say they were adequately taught on the topic of sexuality. And I think a lot of people are environments where they're terrified to talk about these things. So, there's a, in curriculum, by the way, there's three kinds of curriculum.

This was developed by a curriculum development guy years ago, Jacob Eisner was his name. And he says there's three forms of curriculum in a classroom. There's what's called overt curriculum, which is the curriculum that is on the PowerPoint. It's like the stuff you say. There's the implicit curriculum, which is the stuff that's not said, but you still pick up because it's like the culture of the classroom.

But there's a third form of curriculum called null curriculum, which is the stuff that's never taught. And he argues that that is often the stuff that most forms us, is not the stuff that we talk about, it's the stuff we don't talk about. Really? Yep. And I think in a lot of respects,

when we're raised in Christian environments or Christian spaces where, you know, we run away from the hard conversations, we come into the world that no curriculum forms us to be terrified of just learning how to talk, learning how to learn. And so this book is an effort in combating that. I think Christians should be the most teachable people in the world. The whole like fear of learning that you're seeing among more recent college students,

where does that come from? Is this a byproduct of a cultural shift? Did you see this 10 years ago, 15 years ago? or is this a new thing and why? I've always seen, I've been teaching at the undergraduate level for a good 20 years in different environments, either in an adjunct capacity, now in a full-time capacity. And it is a really remarkable difference seeing students in the seminary

or graduate level versus undergrad. And undergrad, they just come in, I call it the double shame of naivete. They come to the class. Okay, let me tell you a story. And actually this story is what connects, where the book came from. So the impetus for this book, A Teachable Spirit,

comes from a story from a number of years ago with my wife. Backstory, I was raised in a home where my dad was very absent. When I was about 12, he moved across the country to another state. As a result of that, as a kid, I never learned how to build stuff. I never learned how to do quote unquote man things. This is about seven years ago, eight years ago. And I'm in the backyard with my wife and we're building my son a tree house. And my wife is the builder in our

family. I'm the thinker. She's the builder. And she says to me, can you go into the garage and get a Phillips head screwdriver? And so I go into the garage and I'm looking through the tool area and I have this overwhelming this emotional experience looking for this tool. Like I just started to cry and I had to sit down. I almost felt like I was having like a midlife crisis sort of moment. I sit down and it dawns on me that I don't know what a Phillips head screwdriver looks like. And I am overcome with complete shame that I am a man who does not know things men are supposed to know.

And so I'm sitting there, do I go back and tell my wife and acknowledge it or do I pretend and I decide to go back and vulnerably tell my wife, I don't know what a Phillips head screwdriver looks like. And that moment for me, she was so kind and loving and has taught me how to build things since, but I'm still horrible at it, but she's taught me some things. But that story for me, I call it the double shame of naivete.

Not only did I not know something, but I was shaming myself for not knowing the thing I was supposed to know. When I see students who come into the class who are Christians and they don't know the Bible, it is a sense of their shame that I don't know the Bible and their shame that I'm supposed to know the Bible. And I think, Preston, we all have places in our life

where we know we are underformed and we don't know something. And that's one part of the shame. The other shame is that we think that we should know it. And what ends up happening is we just build these walls of overconfidence. We build these walls of, I don't need help. We build these walls of, I don't need anybody to show me anything.

I mean, it's a humbling thing, bro, to have your wife teach you what a Phillips head screwdriver is. But you know what it did? It confronted some sexism in my heart. It confronted some attitudes that I had towards what a woman should and should not do in a marriage, all these sorts of things.

And she became my teacher. But I guess what I'm trying to do in this book is I want Christians to stop being afraid, to be hungry learners. We don't need to be afraid of that. And I think we're afraid of it, because if we claim we don't know something, we think that will be interpreted as, well, if you don't know that, or you've been wrong about that, then you're clearly wrong about Jesus. And you're clearly wrong about the gospel. And so we think that our ignorance or our naivete

means we lose our voice. But in a world of arrogance, ideological feuding, and tribalism, I actually think the humble move is to be learners and teachers who are willing to submit ourselves to a process of being formed in places where we have not been. In a world of arrogance, we should be the one group of people who know how to be wrong. I know we blame everything on the internet, but I can imagine that that might play some role. I mean, we live in an age where there's massive information out there. So a lot of people,

they kind of know things., like knowledge is accessible. So we live in a world where we're surrounded with people who give the air of knowing things, you know, you can look some other way really quick. It could share quick facts or whatever. And I would imagine that that could feed into this idea of somebody that might might not know something to feel ashamed because everybody knows everything it seems like, even though it's not true. Yeah.

I mean, how often do we learn something on a podcast and then talk about it with somebody an hour later like it's been something we've been researching for nine years? Yeah. Like we just deeply learned knowledge. No, all we did was we listened to something, we picked it up and I mean, it does feed our arrogance and pride. It certainly can be a powerful way. Another story, this was just a couple years ago,

to your point about the internet and its evilness. I was watching this woman, 25, 30 year old woman who had gotten caught up in this political scheme. She was on the nightly news and she got caught doing something illegal. She didn't hurt anybody but she worked for a candidate and did something she shouldn't do. And she is in front of the court

and she's giving her public statement. And she, this woman is absolutely in full repentance for what she's done. She's 25, 30 years old. I made a big mistake. I'm so sorry, I'm gonna learn from this. And these were not fake tears, they were real tears. And I got so, I was so touched watching this woman

get publicly emotional about her repentance because we never see that in our culture anymore. Public, like public statements of humility and brokenness. I mean, in the ancient world, right, if somebody is caught in sin and they repent, they throw ash on their head and they rip their clothes and they do all this public stuff. And I was watching this woman do it. And that night I got on social media to see, oh, maybe there's this glimmer of hope that there's a woman who's being humble. And for the next hour,

I just watched everybody on the opposite side of the political spectrum just bash this woman, dunk on her, tar and feather her. And the combination of these two things, it's a very revealing combo. Because now, now it's actually a liability to be teachable. It's a liability to be humble. Because if you are, there's just gonna be a litany of YouTube videos dunking on you for your stupidity. And I think what that does to us collectively is anytime we see somebody acknowledge a mistake Because if you are, there's just gonna be a litany of YouTube videos dunking on you for your stupidity.

And I think what that does to us collectively is anytime we see somebody acknowledge a mistake and they get tarred and feather, it just says, well, okay, I'm never gonna be wrong again. So there's a sense of this compounding sense of Americans are really bad at saying three things. We're bad at saying, I'm sorry, I'm wrong, and Worcester sauce. That third one is really hard. We're really bad at that one.'m sorry, I'm wrong. And Worcester sauce.

That third one is really hard. We're really bad at that one. Nobody knows how to say that. I thought you were gonna say, I don't know is the third one. No, no, it's Worcester sauce. Nobody knows how to say it. But it's the second one, I'm wrong. Like that is outside the scope of American liturgy.

We don't, that's not a statement we use. And in the church as well, cause that should be part of our vocabulary in the church. I mean, that's just a basic part of what it means to be a Christian to admit when you're wrong. Yeah. I think there's a collective sense in evangelical culture, of which I'm an evangelical, I'm a charismatic evangelical, but there's a sense in the evangelical Protestant world that each

of us has the responsibility of being Jesus' PR firm. And because we see ourselves as Jesus' PR firm everywhere we go, which we are His representatives, I'm not denying that, but we have believed the idea that being teachable, learning from our mistakes, being humble learners is a sign of weakness rather than a sign of strength. And true strength in the kingdom of God is very different than strength in the empire, as you would say. Absolutely, absolutely, absolutely.

Speak my lingo, actually speaking Jesus' lingo. If you've ever wanted to dive deeper into the ancient languages that the Bible was originally written in, now is the perfect time to start. Whether you're seeking a deeper understanding of scripture, or you're simply curious about the roots of the text, learning biblical Greek and Hebrew can unlock insights you have never imagined. I cannot tell you how much the text was opened up to me when I started to learn the original languages. And look, I understand not everybody's able to do this, okay?

But if you do have the time, then I would highly, highly recommend learning Greek and Hebrew. Kairos Classroom has designed an entirely new curriculum that makes learning these ancient languages accessible and, yes, exciting for anyone, whether you're just getting started or you already have some background in biblical studies. I want you to hear from a Kairos classroom student and fellow theologian or a listener about her recent experience. Hey, my name is Joy and I found Kairos Classroom when I heard about it from Preston at theology in the raw. When I signed up for Kairos Classroom, I was looking

for something affordable, flexible, and fun without sacrificing on quality. I'm six weeks into Greek one and it has absolutely ticked off all the boxes. If digging deeper into the original languages of the Bible is something that intrigues you, I'd really encourage you to visit the Kairos Classroom website and check out if any of their programs

would be a good fit for you. It'll be time well spent. So I wanna encourage you to take the first step in your journey to gain a deeper understanding of scripture by booking a free, free trial lesson with Kairos. Just go to kairosclassroom.com, okay? Kairosclassroom.com.

Click on the book a free trial lesson button and pick a 30 minute time slot that is convenient for you. It's a hundred percent free, no excuses. And it's a great way to meet a teacher and gain a better understanding of how easy, convenient and fun learning with Kairos will be. You've got several, so your book's broken down into really interesting chapters

where you tackle different areas, uh, learning how to learn, learning from experts, learning from strangers, learning from the dead. That gets that. That sounds, uh, yeah, you're not talking about like witchcraft there. I'm, you know, dead authors, um, learning from parents, learning from children, secular culture, learning from enemies. Okay. So there there's two that really stand out to me.

The first one is learning from experts. And here, and you and I are both academics. And we know that experts in any given field disagree with each other. And I don't know if it's because people are kind of like jaded from the whole COVID thing or whatever, but like there's, you know, the science says or experts say, or, you know, I get this all the time, like, well, this expert disagrees with your interpretation of this passage. So what do you think about that? I'm like, that's just every, there's every verse in the Bible has experts that disagree literally on anything in that verse, you know? So how do we navigate that, that tension? How do

we learn from experts while knowing that experts in any field disagree? Which experts should we learn from? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if you're going to say, of all the chapters, by the way, that is the most, I think, practical, it's this chapter on experts because this is us navigating a real world where we're all trying to figure out what is true, what is false. If you're gonna say, we shouldn't listen to experts, I think it would be wise to recognize

that would require that you would cut out two books of the Bible, Luke and Acts, that are both written by a medical expert who's a doctor. And I think what's important to recognize is that we all learn from experts. That's not the question. The question is, which experts do we listen to? And what experts do we listen to about what? There's a really great guy that I quote in

the book that I think every reader should go and read. His name is Roger Kneebone and he's the world's leading expert on what expertise is. Really interesting character. He wrote a book called Experts on understanding what an expert is and what an expert is not. It's a really interesting chapter in the book about the danger of, one of the dangers of the information age has been because we now all have, we all have access to the experts, which is a new phenomenon. You know, in the ancient world or in medieval times or in the enlightenment period,

you had to be a very privileged person to read the experts. Everybody now can read the experts. And Kneebone says one of the problems with that is that because we all read the experts, we have confused ourself with the experts. We think that because we have their knowledge, we are the experts. So we assume because we have their knowledge, we are the experts, right? So we assume because we have expert knowledge that we,

but of course we haven't done the work to arrive at the place. So the difference between an expert and a person who knows expert knowledge is that the experts actually done the work to arrive at their conclusions. Whereas just having the knowledge is you get the goodies at the end.

You haven't done the work, okay, so we all listen to experts, but there's some landmines along the way. So for example, you just mentioned the issue of when somebody says the experts say. That is Alistair McGrath, who's a brilliant theologian at Oxford, he calls that a false unitive or a false singular. It's when you say something as a category

as though it covers everything. It's similarly if somebody says the Bible says. Right, right, right. Well, who says it? Amos? Ezekiel? Paul? Yeah.

Or when somebody says science says, or when somebody says climate scientists say. There is nothing in any of these domains in which there is universal agreement on anything. Right. Absolutely nothing. So the minute you claim, the Bible says, science says, experts say, you are holding up a false unit of a false singular

that does not exist in the real world. I mean, there's literally, I tell my students in one of my classes, and this is absolutely terrifying. I tell them, go look up, go on the internet and find as many people as you can who have PhDs who denied that the Holocaust existed. And they all come back stone cold terrified

at how many Harvard graduate PhDs will deny that the Holocaust existed. And the point is, you can find an expert for anything that you want to say, which has become the new, this is the new problem, is that we're all quoting the experts when we, when they say what we want. Right, right. It's confirmation bias.

Like you, you already have a view that you think is right. And we, you know, who knows where that came from. Maybe you know, the person would say, well, it's from reading the experts or, you know, it's just, it becomes this chicken and egg thing. say, well, it's from reading the experts. It becomes this chicken and egg thing. Like, well, how did you arrive at this position? But once you have the position, then you go find the experts that agree with you. That's exactly right.

It sounds kind of nihilistic. How do we avoid that? It just seems like a dead end. Yeah. So the three things that I recommend, there's a number of recommendations that I give in a world of experts. And there's a lot of experts you can choose from in this world who will all say what you want. But a couple of things that I would recommend.

Number one is when you are listening to experts, number one, always gravitate towards humble experts. And when I say humble experts, what I mean by that is I think a sign that somebody has a right relationship with their knowledge is that they are regularly willing to admit that they've been wrong about some things. If your expert has never been wrong, that is a really good sign that you are listening to somebody who has equated truth with their thinking.

So number one, they're humble. Number two, is this an expert who has done the work? Like have they actually done hard work in this or did they read a blog? Did they watch an interesting thread? Did they watch a YouTube clip? Have they done the work? And I think the third thing that's really important

is that a true expert is somebody who's accountable for their knowledge. That is to say, there are people that critique them and they are willing to receive that critique because they care more about the truth than they do about their thinking and their career. Always be cautious to a people that will use experts and then immediately afterwards

will tell you how you should vote. Because the use of knowledge for partisan aims is often a sign that the use of knowledge is being used for a more personal gain rather than for the service of truthfulness. Right. I often look for when I'm reading, yeah, because you and I read experts for living, especially in biblical studies and theology. Oh, sorry, one more thing. Oh, sorry, sorry, sorry. One more thing. Always, always, always, always look for experts that represent the other side well.

That's it. That's what I was going to say. When you trash the other side, all of a sudden, this is not you seeking the truth. This is that you want to win an argument. I think the best experts will go out of their way. You know who I get this from? Do you remember in 1945, the Nag Hammadi texts were found, which is the collection. It's one of the most extent collections of heretical writings in the early church.

I mean, they were like- Early Gnostic, second century writings. When you take the Nag Hammadi texts and you compare them to the early church fathers, and when they would quote these texts, it was a absolutely unique feature of the early church fathers and mothers, that whenever they would represent the false writings, they would quote them accurately. To me, this is a part of early spiritual, like it is bearing false witness against your neighbor, to bear false witness against somebody you disagree with. You do this very well. You are always seeking to represent the other side well. That is a sign true experts, an expert who really loves truth, sees the other side as a gift

because that other side will actually challenge and strengthen what I'm trying to say. I was gonna say, I mean, you took the words out of my mouth. I was gonna use the phrase, you know, steel man, like find an expert who will steel man the other position, who will argue, represent the opposite case so well that you almost feel like they're defending it, you know? Yep. And just as a method of argumentation, you know, I look for somebody who has not just asserted their

position convincingly, but has represented the best arguments for the other side and shown why those arguments are incorrect, fallible, less superior than these counter arguments that this person's going to offer against maybe these other arguments. So do you find, I mean that- Can I just add a cultural thing? Sure. When you listen to, you'll see this very rarely and it almost never happens, but there will be an occasion where there will be a YouTube video or something of two wildly smart people

who really know their stuff. And they come in to disagree about something. Like I've seen Bill Maher do this a number of times with somebody. So Bill Maher will enter into a conversation with somebody. He really believes what he believes. And the other person really believes what they believe. But because they are entering in

with a deep sense of confidence, they are actually able to be hospitable. I think there's a sense of disagreement. There's a difference between arrogance and confidence and Bill Maher can be prone to arrogance as we all can, but there's a sense in which true teachability is actually only possible if we have deep convictions about things about Jesus, about scripture. Because I have a deep-seated conviction about things scripture says about sexuality and gender, because I have a deep-seated conviction about Jesus

actually being the way, the truth, and the life, because I have a deep-seated conviction about women in ministry, church, and whatnot, because I believe that stuff, I can have really good dialogue with people on the other side without being offended and not taking it too seriously. Because at the end, they're sharpening what I already deeply believe.

So in a way it's ironic. See, there's a difference between godly teachability, which is you knowing something deeply and entering into a sharpening conversation versus being somebody who every room that you go into, you just become that room. You lose yourself and you become that room. There's a big difference between being teachable and being impressionable. I would say impressionability is very dangerous.

If every room we go into, we're remaking ourselves again and again and again. We don't actually have a self. We don't have an identity. We don't have any convictions. Being teachable requires that we enter in with conviction and some knowledge and we've done some work. So, okay, let's go down the list. And so, humility is one characteristic of an expert you should listen to. Representing the other side well. Faithfully. Steelmaning, good faith. They're accountable, meaning they live in an environment where their ideas, I say in

the book, often the sign of a true expert is that they could lose their job if they're wrong. That doesn't mean that we can't be experts in things we don't get paid to do, but it's kind of cool that we live in a world where many scholars are peer reviewed and they are, you should be peer reviewed. Other scholars have freedom to critique what you have to say. I think in a way that, I think in scripture

we would call that fellowship. It's like, or not fellowship, but like correction. You know, that's biblical correction in a way. It's scholars that don't have anybody that holds them accountable that tend to get pretty weird. What is, okay, so what does that hold them accountable? So like a peer review process, or they're in an academic environment where there's diversity of thought, maybe? We're in their scholarly community. Let's just say broadly, their scholarly community, if they say something off, if they mis-side a source, they misrepresent somebody, somebody is going to call that out.

That's correct. Is that okay? That's correct. Whatever that means, whatever the way, it's the internet calling them out or their fellow faculty members at University of Chicago or whatever. I mean, okay. That they should willingly, willingly being open to submitting to critique. And that they're humble enough to not assume

that somebody critiquing their work is critiquing them personally. That they don't see their thinking as representing the whole thing. I mean, there was a book written years ago by Amos Young in which he argues that the peer review process in the end is actually birthed out of the Christian imagination. Because when you look at the book of Acts,

Paul, all the writers in the New Testament are always striving for unity, right? They want unity. Yet the New Testament goes out of their way to say in that search for unity, clearly they did not sidestep confrontation. That confrontation was a built-in part of the early church. If we are seeking unity without confrontation, things get really weird. If we do confrontation but we're never seeking unity, things get very weird as well.

The peer review process is just a microcosm of what should be a community of people that love truth more than they love the self, more than they love one's own ideas. I think, I don't know if I've ever shared this with you, when you read the early church fathers and mothers, often the last book that they would ever write, for example, Augustine, with everything that Augustine ever wrote. And the guy was not, I mean, he gets a bad rap and I think a lot of his stuff is misrepresented. But with everything that he wrote, do you know what the last thing he wrote was?

One of the last things he wrote, and this was very common, is that the last thing that you would write is you would write what were called your retractations. You would write out everything that you were wrong about. One of the last things Augustine wrote was retractations in which he basically fillets himself for all the stuff he was wrong about. How cool is that? I didn't even know that he wrote that.

Oh, yeah. And he, it is, it is visceral. I mean, he is like naming all these things that, I was wrong about that. I thought that, I think this now, don't know. That is, in my humble opinion, that is the goal of Christian learning, is that we spend our life learning, growing, challenging ourselves, being deep thinker, believing that we love God with our heart, mind, soul, and strength, that we spend our life suffering. But the last thing that we say is we say,

but at the end of the day, to God be the glory. And I've been wrong about a bunch of stuff. And at the end of the day, you know who the only know-it-all is? It is the triune God. And being a know-it-all is not a fruit of the Spirit. I think that is the goal of the Christian life, is that we spend our life studying and

learning, but we finish by recognizing, man, I've been wrong a lot. I just thought about this. I think your answer is yes, but would you apply all this stuff about which experts to listen to? Would you apply it to which pastors to submit yourself to, which Christian leaders in a local church context, like should these characteristics be, I mean, is it basically the same list you would give? Like our pastors experts, I mean, in a sense they are. I'm sure that there would be a significant amount of Venn diagram of which many of these things that could overlap. I do think, you know, pastors, sadly, many pastors, and this is not a slight at all to pastors, but many pastors now live in a world

where they feel like they have to be everything for all people. They're an accountant, they're a teacher, they're a counselor, they're a therapist, they're a visionary, you know, they're a groundskeeper, they do it all. And they feel this pressure from the stage to have to be the expert. I wonder if, if the minute we, we, we have to use the pulpit as a, as a means to,

and I've caught myself doing this, like, um, you using experts in a way that really is me just secretly trying to bolster my own authority. Oh, look, he quoted that person. So he must know what he's talking about. I think sometimes we use experts from the pulpit because we're ashamed of our lack of knowledge and we want to bolster our own authority. I know that I've done that. I'm not pointing fingers. I know that I've done that. It's like when somebody quotes Greek from the stage, are you doing this to serve the people, or do you want just want people to know that you know Greek? So, yeah, I mean, I think there's an overlap. And pastors, if you're a pastor listening to this, be released from the ungodly pressure that has been placed upon you to have to be the expert of all things.

Pete That's true. Yeah, they stand in this, in the gap of people looking to them for so many different areas that they might be qualified in one or two or three areas and to be comfortable and competent to live in those areas, to stay in your lane and not wander outside of it and default to other leaders in your church, hopefully that might be able to fill in some of those gaps. Do you think experts need to have academic credentials?

I get this question a lot. Yeah, no, I don't. Case in point, shocking news. Have you ever read FF Bruce? I was just gonna use him as an example. He never got a doctorate. Okay, yeah, I mean, FF Bruce, I mean, his commentary on John

that I have right up here on my shelf, is it John? I think it's John. I use it all the time. I mean, it's fabulous. And he is still, I mean, if you read the academic literature, he's sourced all the time. Yeah, he didn't even have a PhD. And the idea, it's kind of comical that we'd be like, well, he didn't have a PhD. Well, neither did Jesus Christ.

And we all worship this guy. So no, I don't think that somebody needs to have a PhD to be listened to in any, what privilege would it require for us to say that? But at the same time, there are certain things that come along with having done the hard work that should not be afforded

by people that have not done the hard work. And I'd use this as an illustration. There's a reason when you go to medical school, my dad was a doctor, and I've had many when you go to medical school, my dad was a doctor and I've had many friends who go to medical school, they will intentionally medical school make the first semester medical school hell on earth. It's horrible. It's hellier. And they do it for a reason because what they're doing is they are attempting to sift out people that are or are not serious about their work. And I think the good thing about somebody who's done a PhD is at the least you are studying and listening to somebody

who spent five, six, seven years of their life to research something that was read by three people and is published and probably read by 10. And what that speaks to is just the sweat equity that can come with an expert. I don't think it's entirely necessary, but I do think it's helpful. And it depends on the area too, right?

I mean, if I was gonna, if I wanted to consult somebody's opinion on neuroscience, right? Or brain surgery, you know, like I kind of want them to be a brain surgeon and you can't be a brain surgeon unless you get a MD or whatever PhD in that area. There might be other fields like opinions on American foreign policy, you know, like

do you need a PhD in that or do you need 20 years of journalistic experience? And you know, like, again, I would still probably prefer academic credentials in the area, but there's some areas where it might be less crucial as other areas. Would that be fair to say? I don't know, but I was going to say, what I found during COVID, and you experienced this too, was I saw this weird Christian subculture thing happen where Christians almost lock stock and barrel rejected everything the medical community was saying. Many of them were, okay. And in many cases for good reason. I mean skepticism, I mean for example when you look at African American

communities and ways in which the medical community throughout history forced vaccines on whole communities of people, there's righteous reasons for some, you know, for some to be very skeptical of what medical, the medical community is saying. But to me, what happened during COVID, I don't think was largely about that. I actually, I think, this is a wacky, crazy thing I have about this, is that the Protestant imagination, one of the things the Protestant imagination does is it democratizes scripture, which means I no longer need a priest or a vicar or a pastor

to tell me what it means. I can experience it on my own, which you and I would agree can be very beautiful. We want people reading the Bible on their own. That's also how cults start. It's also how cults start. And I think the democratization of reading of scripture in Protestant movements has seeped now

into our understanding of all things. So that now we see, I don't need experts to tell me anything because I have the internet. I don't need somebody to tell me something because I have the ability to learn it for myself. So that almost democratized understanding of knowledge, of reading scripture, of the rejection of the priesthood, the rejection of, you know, papal authority, these sorts of things, has really seeped into our epistemology, our understanding of knowledge. And we sort of think like,

I can individualize all knowledge on my own, which is great when you're Martin Luther critiquing abuses in the church. But it's horrible when it's an 18 year old guy in this basement making decisions about medicine because of a bunch of YouTube videos he watched. This episode is brought to you by Seminary Now. Seminary Now is a subscription based

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Okay, save 30%. The discount code is TITR to save 30%. Go check it out. COVID one's tough for me because there was a suppression of- 100%. ... alternative scientific expert opinions. And then there was lots of lies that came out and all the politicalization of it. So much has come out now where I think it has caused people to lose faith in the quote

unquote scientific community. But then you do have, like you said, other people that weren't sifting through diversity of expert opinions, they're just believing YouTube videos or some narrative that doesn't actually have scientific backing. And so then all that gets jumbled together. And yeah, that's... There was a guy in our church, who's a doctor, who just was telling, I mean, he loves Jesus. This guy loves Jesus, spent medical school, he did his residency, top doc.

And to hear him describe as a follower of Jesus who has spent his life studying medicine, to have people come into his office and say no to everything he's saying because his pastor said something. Said it just was so hard to not have the gifts of knowledge that God had given to him to serve you, be disregarded because of a homily.

So yeah, I would hope that we can inculcate in our lives I would hope that we can inculcate in our lives a simultaneous belief that scripture is true through and through. And I believe that with all my heart, it is the inspired word of God. And I go to it every day to write my view of myself and the world, that we can as a community have a high view of scripture and have a deep understanding that God gives gifts to whoever he wants to give to

in this world on our behalf. I mean, how many times in the Old Testament do you have non-covenental people, non-Jews, non-Christians who are people through whom God teaches his people something profound? King Abimelech has a dream, he's an absolute pagan. You know, the Babylonians teach Israel. The Good Samaritan, you have an outsider who is exemplified as a person of faith.

I think the point is, God is very generous in how he gives his gifts. And very often he gives gifts of knowledge to people that are outside of our community. And we should learn to listen to those gifts. Well, this is a great segue to the other chapter I want to talk about. I just noticed a time and I know we have a cap.

Learning from enemies. Mm. Oh man. I mean, this is not just emotionally difficult, but I guess it could be intellectually questionable. You even use the illustration. I love this where you ask your students, should we read Hitler's Mein Kampf?

Is that an exercise you give in class? And how does that go? What are the responses? Should we read Mein Kampf? I do a whole lecture on the question of should we read our enemies and I bring up Mein Kampf and I show a series of pictures of Mein Kampf being burned, book burning, which if we think cancel culture is anything new, it's been going on for a long time.

We've been burning books for a long time. There's no such thing as new cancel culture. It's just a newer version of it. I asked my students, should we read Mein Kampf, which was Hitler's anti-Semitic rant that he wrote from prison that became the ideological backbone for the Third Reich and the murder, the systematic murder of millions of Jews. Should we read that? And the debate is always really interesting in the classroom because there is always a group of students who will say that to read it, um, opens up the possibility that we will be transformed by it and do what he said. And so there's a side that would say we should burn, get, get rid of,

um, the mind comp, but there's always a couple of students who feel really uncomfortable with that the mind calm. But there's always a couple students who feel really uncomfortable with that and say, well, if you burn the books, if you don't listen to them, don't we give him power because we don't know what he was saying. And I actually, I rarely come down hard on this,

but I actually argue very strongly in class that one of the ways that you defeat bad ideas is you got to know them and you and you've got to get into them because if you don't it's a little bit like an immune system. If your intellectual immune system never has to deal with the bad ideas then you have you're not inoculated against them. You have to know them to be able to defeat them. I don't want my students to read Mein Kampf because I want them to become Hitler youth. I want them to read Mein Kampf because ideas Hitler's,

Hitler's ideas were nothing new and they will pop up again. Right, right. And I want my students to be inoculated against the ideas of a sad, pathetic guy who was projecting his childhood wounds towards the Jews on an entire group of people. And I want those ideas to be exposed. So here's the deal. When I say, one of my endorsers actually said,

I'm really uncomfortable with you saying the idea of learning from your enemies. And I said, I responded to him and I said, you have assumed that learning from somebody means that you agree with them. Right, yeah. To learn from an enemy is not to say, I agree with you. To learn from an enemy is to sit at their feet

and hear what they have to say out of an act of humility. To say that learning is not agreement. You know, who says that? Paul says that. That's good. He's talking about the end times and he says He says in the last days People will be ever

They will be ever learning but never able to acknowledge the truth Even Paul does not commit that learning is the same as knowledge. I think the greatest learners I mean, this is such a lost art in our world. We just cut the other side off. We cut the enemies off. We don't wanna hear what they had to say. And we double down on our own communities. The very fact that Jesus says, pray for your enemies, implies that we think about them. We don't burn them.

They're in our mind. Like we're processing them. We're bearing them to God to love your enemies. I have a hard time imagining that loving your enemy entails, entails canceling them. Now this may be counter-cultural and there's always a person's going, well, what about Hitler? But I would say again, if, if you do not know his ideas, you cannot cancel, you cannot destroy them.

Yeah, I agree. I think I'm definitely on the side of, we should read Mein Kampf. I mean, if you're interested in knowing about Hitler, then read Mein Kampf. If you're like, I don't have any interest in that part of history, then yeah, I'm not gonna say go out of your way to read it.

But if you want to have an informed opinion about what Hitler said and believed, then you have to learn about what he said and believed. To me, that just seems obvious. And also in the age of the internet, especially cancel culture has shown to have a massive reverse effect. When people are canceled, they end up doubling the platform. I mean, who even heard of Andrew Tate until people tried to cancel him? Whoever heard of, I mean, fill in the blank. Is there anybody who has tried to have been canceled that didn't end up getting bigger and stronger and more influential?

So yeah, the whole, I mean, it's just, and I think this is pretty much well established. I think a few years ago, it was, you know, I think it was maybe more debated, but now it's been pretty clear, I think, that trying to just cancel somebody's viewpoints, especially ones you find to be very, very wrong, it seems like if they're that wrong, if they're that terrible, then expose them to the light. Don't try to keep them in darkness because they're just going to wiggle out of the room

and go find another light to be under. I could, so having said that, I could see where somebody would say we should learn from people we disagree with. We should learn about our enemies. But I could see someone saying, but learn from their enemies. Again, I still, I agree with you here, but I could see somebody with that specific direction having some questions about like we should learn about Hitler, but should we learn from? Yeah, well, it depends on the enemy, doesn't it?

Because I bet there's people listening to us today who for a big portion of their life saw Christians as enemies and then they picked up NT Wright and then they picked up CS Lewis and they read an enemy and all of a sudden realized their enemy was right. I guess it depends on which enemy we're talking about, isn't it? Yeah, because some enemies, listen, if you're not a Christian, you need to be reading everything CS Lewis ever wrote. You can see me as an enemy, but he's the kind of enemy you need to be listening to. I'm very practical. I, when I think about reading, when I think about the things I'm reading,

we all have too many things to read. I generally think, I have five categories of people that I read from. Okay, so the first category is what I call neighbors. And a neighbor is somebody who I have to read because they're next to me, it's a responsibility. So like a textbook, I have to do it for work, something like that.

So a neighbor is like somebody I have to read. An acquaintance is somebody who I pick up and I very quickly realized this is not a book I want to read because it's not very good. That's an acquaintance. I pass by, we're not very, you know, we're not super close. There's friends who are people that,

that you read everything that person wrote. And it's like, that is, when I picked up my first NT write book, I was like, that guy's my friend, I'm gonna read everything he wrote. Then there's lovers. And a lover is somebody who you read over and over and over again, the same thing over and over and over again. C.S. Lewis said, you don't really love something

until you've read it multiple times. That's a lover. And then there's enemies. And the enemy is the somebody who says and thinks things that you don't like. I am not saying here you should only read your enemies. But I do think that in your array of things that you read, it is a good practice from time to time to read people that say and think things that you really disagree with.

Because in the end, it should sharpen you, make you deeper, and you can learn something from somebody that's surprising. Yeah, that's good. I love that. I love that, man. That's super helpful. How do we navigate learning in this sea of constant information? It can become so overwhelming with all the podcasts, all the blogs, all the books. Maybe I haven't gotten to this point in the book.

Do you deal with that, just learning in the suffocating sea of information? Yep. Yeah, actually, Nijay Gupta and I have a book coming out under the title, Slow Theology, Eight Practices to Have Resilient Faith in a Chaotic World. I would say this, we need to apply our doctrine and practice of the Sabbath to our thinking. We need to slow down the process of decision-making when it comes to what we think. We need to slow down and practice meditation, the Christian Hebrew Haggai version of meditation, where we chew, we mull, we ask questions,

we ask friends, we get into scripture. I think we make bad decisions when we make dumb, we make dumb decisions when they are fast intellectual decisions. I love that you have taken years to study various topics. And out of that hard work, you have come out with many deeply important works. Had you taken two weeks to study women in church ministry,

the work would have been so dulled. Because the topic deserves, listen, truth deserves, it deserves the long haul. And when we make, if I find myself, I'll put it this way, if I find myself making really fast theological decisions because of emotional reactions, that's a bad sign. Can I close with one quick story? Yes. I know that you have been studying women in church leadership and we're all eager to know where Preston Sprinkle lands on these deeply important questions. So am I. Yeah. And there is a little line in one of my New Testament

classes, I have my students walk through some of the writings of the Romans. The Romans were terrified by these Christians. And they, in many respects, saw them not just as nuisances, but you can tell they see them as a threat. And you ask yourself the question, Rodney Stark at Baylor University says that 75% of the early Christian community was comprised of slaves and women.

Why would the Romans be terrified of a predominantly slave women community? I have my students read Paul's statement, and I brought this up for you today. I had my students read Paul's statement in First Timothy when he says, I want all women to learn in quiet submission. And when we listen to that, I always have some progressive students

whose arms get really quickly crossed and they think Paul's been all sexist and he's putting down the women. But when you read what Paul is saying there, in light of the fact that women were not permitted to learn or get formal education in the first century, all of a sudden you realize Paul is not oppressing women, he's actually liberating women.

And he's handing him a book and he's saying, I want you to learn. I think, Preston, I think that the Roman Empire was terrified because there had never been a community of learners like this early group of Christians. There's nothing more powerful than handing a woman a book in the ancient world because she is all of a sudden now permitted to be taught and to learn.

And I wonder if our moment in time, if we could reconnect to that spiritual genetic makeup of being the world's greatest learning community, I think the missional outcome of that will be unbelievable that our churches are places where you go to learn, not as places where learning stops. And I wonder if we can capture that in a new way, people are going to meet Jesus because of it. AJ, that's a great word to end on. Brother, we got to hang out more. We should do this more than just a yearly podcast conversation. Man, I appreciate you so much. Again, the book is A Teachable Spirit, The Virtue of from strangers, enemies, and absolutely anyone would highly, highly

recommend this book and anything that AJ Swabota touches with pen in hand. So thanks so much for coming back on the podcast, bro. I really appreciate you. I love you, brother. Thanks for all that you do, Preston. We are all so grateful for your hard work. This show is part of the Converge Podcast Network.