Theology in the Raw - S8 Ep898: Jesus, the Bible, and Finding Christ through Deconstruction: Brian Zhand

Episode Date: September 2, 2021

Brian Zahnd is the founder and lead pastor of Word of Life Church, a non-denominational Christian congregation in Saint Joseph, Missouri. Brian and his wife, Peri, founded the church in 1981. Brian is also the author of several books, including, Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God, Water to Wine, A Farewell To Mars, Beauty Will Save the World, and Unconditional?: The Call of Jesus to Radical Forgiveness.In this podcast, we talk about his forthcoming book When Everything’s On Fire: Faith Forged from the Ashes. Brians tells his own story of theological deconstruction and how he had a fresh encounter with Jesus through it all. We then talk quite a bit about the relationship between Jesus and the Bible. Is the Bible the foundation of our faith? Or is Jesus? Or both? And what happens when people equate a fundamentalist view of Scripture and doctrine with Christianity? Typically, you get...a future deconstruction waiting to happen.

To be a Christian is to be an exile, and the Bible has a name for the country we've been exiled to. It's the name Babylon. As exiles living in Babylon, we need to think biblically, Christianly, indeed exilically, not partisanly, through cultural, theological, and political issues. This is why I'm so excited to finally announce that the registration page is open for the first annual Theology in the Raw Conference next year, 2022, March 31st to April 2nd, here in Boise. This is going to be such a unique experience. I want to invite everybody listening to consider either coming out to the conference live here in Boise, or we will be live streaming the conference. At the Theology in the Raw Conference, we will be challenged to think like exiles about things, topics such as race, sexuality, gender, critical

race theory, hell, transgender identities, climate change, creation care, American politics, and what it means to love your Democratic or Republican neighbor as yourself. Different views will be presented. No question is off limits. No political party will be praised and everyone will be challenged to think. And Jesus, Jesus will be upheld as supreme. I do want to encourage you, if you have the funds and the time off and the ability to come out here, the in-person experience is going to be, I think it's going to be remarkable. I mean, we're going to have time for, a lot of time for audience Q&A. No speaker is going to get off the hook here. No speaker can just walk up, give a monologue, then go back to the green room, pop out the back door, jump in

a cab and catch a plane flight home. No, if you're going to be on stage saying things, then the audience is going to have the opportunity to respond. And we're going to have an amazing array of speakers. We have Dr. Derwin Gray, Thabiti Anyubwale, Jackie Hill Perry, John Tyson, Greg Coles, Tony Scarcello, Dr. Sandy Richter, Ed Yuzinski, Ellie Bonilla, Chris Date, Greg Coles, I already said Greg Coles. Preston Sprinkles is going to be there too,

and several others. We're still waiting for some confirmation emails from some invites that I sent out. We're also going to have an after party. You know, sometimes conferences are, you just go from talk to talk, to talk, to talk, and just kind of worn out. And you just want to kind of just hang out and just talk to people and, and maybe even debrief what was talked about, you know, on stage. So Friday night, we're going to have a big old after party. I think the room we got holds about 400 or 500 people. So I would love to max that out depending on how many people come to the conference.

The seating for the conference is limited. The place we booked, I think it – I forget how much it holds, maybe a thousand. So, and maybe we'll fill, maybe we won't fill, I don't know, but it is limited. So if you don't register fairly early, there's a chance you might not be able to make it to the in-person conference. You can always stream it online, but if you really want to come live, I would encourage you to register sooner than later. We do have a pre or an early bird special, which you can read about on the registration website. Okay. So where do you register? Just go to my website, pressandsprinkle.com and something's going to pop up or there's going to be a link to click on or

something. You'll find it. We made it easy to access. So pressandsprinkle.com, Theology Rock Conference, the blurb, the title of the conference is Exiles in Babylon. Don't miss it. If you'd like to support the show, you can go to patreon.com forward slash theology in the raw. Support the show for as little as five bucks a month. And yeah, that's enough for announcements. Let's dive into this wonderful conversation with Brian Zahn. Brian Zahn needs no introduction.

He's the author of several books, including the most recent book, When Everything's on Fire, a book about, well, it's a book about deconstruction, but as he mentions in this episode, he doesn't love that term. That's a popular term we talk about when somebody deconstructs and hopefully reconstructs their faith. So the book is about that, but he doesn't prefer that term. Brian is a pastor, writer, speaker, thinker. He's incredibly bright, very well read. The dude reads Nietzsche for fun on Saturday morning. I don't know when he reads Nietzsche, but he reads it for fun. And this show does get quite philosophical. Brian does a nice tour of various philosophical thinkers. The bulk of our conversation actually has to do with how we understand the relationship

between the Bible and Jesus and our faith and a Christian worldview and how that plays into deconstruction. So without further ado, please welcome back to the show, the one and only Brian Zahn. All right, friends, back with Brian Zahn. Brian, I think this is your second time on the show. Thanks so much for coming back on. I was excited when I reached out and you were able to do it. We've got a lot to talk about.

Yeah, I think it is the second time. And the first time feels like it was in another lifetime. Right? It was pre-2020. It was so long ago. Oh, man. I mean, it was probably only like three or four years ago, but it feels like it was 30 or 40 years ago. I know. I know. Gosh. Who would have thought? So much has happened. My word. There are so many questions. I mean, yeah, church-related, book-related.

I guess most importantly, what music are you listening to these days? You're such a music connoisseur. I love your taste. You know, what I'm going to point people to right now is the new Killers album, Pressure Machine. Dang. No, just trust me on this one. New Killers. It's a concept album kind of set out in some small town in either Utah or Nevada, really speaking to the time we're in.

It's deeply spiritual, even religious at times. So Pressure Machine, The Killers. It's been out, you know, like a week. I've probably listened to it six times. It's going to be a contender for album of the year, for sure. Really? I'm not going to put my Ramones shirt album of the year for sure really and i got my ramon shirt on sometimes i just you know you you find you have this ability to find like

amazing but lesser known or sometimes largely unknown bands right is that is that just spotify searches or i don't know i i have no idea how it happens it just i don't know it just happens the other the other band i'm really into that that's the killers are you know well known uh fontaine's dc they're an irish band oh man i love this band young dc stands for like dub. Yeah, that's what it stands for. Okay. Fontaine, D.C. And I love their stuff. Just listen to one song. Listen to Boys in the Betterland, or it might just be called Betterland.

Start with that song, but then their latest album. I forgot the name of it. Their latest album is great. Yeah. I might add some clips on the show, but I don't know what the copyright stuff on that. I don't want to get taken off the internet. All right, you got a new book out,

When Everything's on Fire, Brian. And it's about deconstruction. And that's a very common thing happening in the church today. And I think 2020 or, well, I think 2016, climaxing in 2020 only exacerbated that. And, you know, when I heard you were writing this book, I was so excited. I'm like, oh, man, he's the right guy to write this. Because I feel like you get the heart of the deconstructor, and yet you're a pastor who cares about reconstructing well.

So can you give us a gist of what the book's about? And then maybe that'll launch us into probably 13 different possible directions we can go in. Yeah, I start off with, you know, it's funny. I've only done maybe two podcasts. This is maybe the third one on the new book. So I don't have my pitch down. Maybe I'll never get it down. What's it about? Okay, here's how the new book. So I don't have my pitch down. Maybe I'll never get it down. What's it about? Okay, here's how the book starts. Other than there's a little prelude where I tell the inspiration for writing the book. But the book really starts, it starts off like this.

Once upon a time, we all believed in God. And then I acknowledge that things have changed, God. And then I acknowledge that things have changed, that something has happened, and it's no longer a given that anyone is going to believe in God. Then I talk about the one who most clearly, probably, foresaw what was coming. And I'm talking about the German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, who I have a very conflicted relationship with. First of all, I like the guy. I do like him. What a great writer, great thinker, profoundly wrong about 25% of the time. And that really counts because when he's wrong, he's really wrong. But I like him, and I'm well-read in Nietzsche. I'm not just somebody that just found a quote on Wikipedia. I've read most of his works, and I've read themsche. I like bantering with him. Nietzsche introduces the phrase

into popular culture, God is dead. Now, he didn't invent that phrase. Hegel was talking about that, and then as a Lutheran pastor's kid, he would have heard that line in a Holy Saturday hymn. So it arrives into popular culture through his book, The Gay Science, or you might think of it as The Joyful Wisdom would be a better translation of that title. And he gives us the parable of the madman. And he says that one day in a little village on a bright sunny morning, a madman arrives in the village carrying a lantern on the bright sunny morning. And he is crying out, where is God? I can't find God. God is absent.

And of course, the villagers gather, and they begin to laugh at the absurdity of a man carrying a lantern on a bright sunny morning saying, where is God? But the madman persists, and he says, don't you sense it? Don't you feel it? Don't you know that God is absent? And he says, I'll tell you what is happening. God is dead. And we have killed him. And they begin to laugh. And he says, oh, I see I've come too soon. And then he smashes the lantern and goes into the churches and sings a requiem for God. lantern and goes into the churches and sings a requiem for God. This is Nietzsche being brilliant,

and he's foreseeing the 20th century. He wrote this in about 18, I think it was 88. He goes mad in 1890, dies in 1900. But he's foreseeing what is coming. When Nietzsche says God is dead, he doesn't mean, he isn't just making some sort of, you know, assertion of atheism. He's making an observation that Western society no longer organizes itself around faith in God, that God has been pushed to the periphery to the extent that God is no longer really an influence in how we live our lives. And then that's why Nietzsche says, oh, I see I've come too soon. Or he has the madman say that. That he was foreseeing that which was going to come. Now, Nietzsche, he was an atheist.

And he thought it was time for Western society to move on without God. But he wasn't like the arrogant and angry new atheists of the Dawkins and Hitchens and Harris and Dennett variety who sort of revel in this, and they're very cavalier. Nietzsche was very nervous. He was very anxious because he was afraid that the alternative would be nihilism. And some people accused Nietzsche of being a nihilist. That was the very thing that he didn't want to be. He absolutely did. I know I'm going on and on, but this is going to set this up.

No, this is good. That's the very thing he didn't want to be. No, this is good. And he thought it was time for humanity to rise up, cast off various shackles, and become light and just stride the world like heroic Greek gods. And chief among the things that needed to be cast aside was what he called slave morality, and this was Christian love. He thought that Christian love was what he called slave morality. It was simply a way for the weak to, through guilt and shame, manipulate the strong. And the strong and the mighty and those that should rule were always being held back because of this thing about having to love your neighbor and maybe treat people with common decency. And he thought this kept the human race pitiful and down and low and weak.

So he hopes for the ubermensch, the overman, but he fears that instead we'll have what he calls the last man. And the last man is an incurious, entertainment-addled – he calls it the last man. It's the failure of humanity to fully develop. And it's brilliant how he sees what he foresees as the last man because it really is the consumer of the 21st century. He says the last man sits and says, we have invented happiness and blinks you know he's his mind has turned to much he has no ambition he's nichey in 1888 is really describing what we would maybe today call the couch potato you know that that just sits in front of the tv with a thousand channels and netflix and and that's it that sounds like a prologue to Huxley almost,

The Brave New World, right? Yeah, exactly. Okay. So in the book, I then said I'd love to have lunch with Nietzsche at a little cafe in Basel, Switzerland. But I said, but it's going to be rough because I've got to get Nietzsche caught up. Cause I got to get, I got to get Nietzsche caught up. I got to tell him what happens with the 20. I got to give him a thumbnail sketch

of the 20th century, which I don't think would surprise him. I think it would depress him, but it wouldn't surprise him. And then you, then you have the, the, the real awkward part of the conversation would be when I got to bring up the Nazis the Nazis, who he wouldn't have endorsed what they did, but they were the one group that took his writing serious enough to try to form a life by it. I mean, the Nazis really did treat Nietzsche's works as their canonical texts, you know, Beyond Good and Even, Genesis of Morals, Antichrist, all of these. And they tried to live it and, you know, it didn't end with the world populated by Greek gods that ended in death camps. So then I switch. I think, well, maybe I don't want to have lunch

with Nietzsche, because I like him, and it would be awkward, but I really wish, and this is a great tragedy in the history of philosophy, that Kierkegaard and Nietzsche never met, probably never knew of each other. I mean Kierkegaard certainly never knew of Nietzsche. It's possible that Nietzsche may have heard of Kierkegaard, but he was mostly largely unknown outside of Denmark at that time. Because Kierkegaard was an example of a philosopher, a Christian thinker, who could be just as polemic about the state churches of Western Europe but still held on to faith. In other words, he was able – if you want to talk about deconstruct, he was able to deconstruct long before it was a thing.

And here's the thing with deconstruct. It's suddenly become very in vogue. You hear it all the time. It's the become very in vogue. You hear it all the time. It's the word now. This comes to us from Jacques Derrida, another philosopher, French philosopher, 20th century French philosopher, where he applies it to texts. He says a text never arrives at a final meaning. There's always something lurking behind the text. Some claim often a bid for power, and so he's deconstructing the text.

What is really behind the text here? But it becomes sort of an unending project. You can deconstruct a text forever. Somehow, you know, post-evangelical Christians picked up that term. I don't know who introduced it, and it became the term to use for either rethinking the faith or eventually maybe abandoning the faith. I'm not a fan of that term. I mean, I understand the term philosophically from Derrida. I don't think it's the best way to think about it. I mean, we're grasping for metaphors here, and I think there's just a whole lot of better metaphors. Can you suggest? What are some better terms that you prefer?

Well, I mean, I have my own history with this. I mean, I won't tell the whole story. Go for it. No, I mean, it's been tell the whole story. I think, you know... Go for it. No, I mean, it's been four years since you're on last, so if people that don't know your stories... Here's my story, and as quick as I can tell it. I encountered Jesus in a dramatic way when I was a teenager. It was one of those, you know, Damascus Road kind of things. And overnight, I go from being the high school Zeppelin freak to the

high school Jesus freak. Not that I don't still like Zeppelin, I do. But it was such a good thing. Everybody called me Fry back then. I mean, teachers, friends, I was known as Fry. And it was like news in the high school. Fry is like this Jesus freak. Everybody knew. And after a few weeks, and I was still, you know, this wasn't a fad. This wasn't going away. People would come up, and they'd say, Fry, I can't believe what's happened to you. And I'd say, I know, right?

Crazy, isn't it? But it's happened. And by the time I was 17, I was leading a ministry. Now, this is in the 70s. This is during the Jesus movement. Preston, you're too young to have experienced that, but you've probably heard of it. I've read about it in the history books, yeah. There you go. There you go.

And at the center of the Jesus movement, which was kind of a parallel counterculture movement to the – like you have the hippies who knew what they were against, but they couldn't find a better messiah than the Beatles. And then parallel to that were these kids that were finding Jesus. And at the center of it, other than Jesus, was music. It was a music-driven thing. And so what I was leading was, it was called the Catacombs. And we met in the, first of all, we met in the basement of a dive bar on 3rd Street here in St. Joseph. And that's why we called it the Catacombs, because it was subterranean. And we also felt ourselves to be a little bit subversive, and we were. And so I'm leading this ministry that's mostly a music venue. I'm like booking the various – because there was a lot of music at that time and traveling bands and singing about Jesus, rock and roll and Jesus. There's a group of people that form around it, and it becomes a de facto church that turns into Word of Life Church in 1981 officially, which meaning this November our church will be 40 years old.

I've been pastoring for 40 years. But in reality, I was doing the work of a pastor by the time I was 17, 18, 19 I've been a pastor longer than I've been an adult think about that that should be a I'm not recommending it, I'm just telling you the story, it's what happened it's not a pattern to follow

but it's what happened well okay and so we officially become a church in 1981 from the catacombs toward life but it's the happened. Yeah. Well, okay. And so, you know, we officially become a church in 1981 from the catacombs toward life, but it's the same people and all. Um, and we were small, you know, we were small, we were under a hundred for seven years. And in many ways, I guess maybe way under a hundred, but then, then in the nineties, late 80s and into the 90s, the church just began to grow in an absurd fashion, and it grew to thousands. And to this day, I can't tell you exactly why that happened. But part of the journey is start off as Jesus movement.

That just kind of led into – you didn't try to make it happen. That led you into the charismatic movement, which I describe as good until it wasn't. That leads you into word of faith, religious right. There's not a decision made. I mean, we were a non-denominational church, but that doesn't mean that we weren't connected to a very pronounced movement. We all kind of – we knew of each other and we're – it's the big charismatic movement in America. And the church is getting big and big and big and everything is great. We've built a huge building and we have lots of people and a big budget and all of that is happening. And then I hit 40, 41, 42, and I began to feel this deep unease.

Everything's great. By the metrics that Americans like to measure success, it's like DZ, just sit back, enjoy the ride. But I couldn't. So you see, Preston, I just got hurled into this thing. I mean, I encountered Jesus, and before I know it, people ask me, how do you plan a church? I said, I have no idea. I've never done it. I mean, it just happened. So no training, no formal training, So no training, no formal training, just doing – so I had a lot of experience pastorally. Yeah. But theologically, I just was a hodgepodge of what I'd picked up along the way and hadn't given a lot of attention to it.

And so I began to feel uneasy, and I didn't know where to go. And so I started reading. I started reading. I had always read some, but I started reading very intensely. I started reading three things. I thought, well, I'm just going to back up. I'm going to go. I'm going to start the guys that are writing right after that. And so I start with whoever, Polycarp and then Irenaeus, and I start reading Patristics. And then I started reading philosophy, which I'd always kind of been interested in. But you may not know this, Preston, but most charismatic pastors don't read a lot of philosophy. They're not reading Nietzsche on Saturday night to prepare for their sermon? So I was reading it like on the sly, you know, so that no one would know.

But so I was reading it like on the sly, you know, so that no one would know. But so I'm reading. I go all the way back to the Greeks, you know, Plato and Aristotle, and it's kind of worked my way up. And then I just thought, OK, I need to get caught up on just the canon of Western literature, just the novels and the important books. And so I'm reading all of this. And I reach a crisis point at the beginning. This is a crazy story, so just bear with me. Keep going. In 2004, you can think – have you ever had the experience of you're thinking something and you won't admit you're thinking it?

It's there. You won't even admit to yourself that that thought is there, but it's there. And this was the fall of 2003. I was 45, and I thought, well, I have a choice. And I wasn't this was lurking. I wasn't trying to think this, but this was there. I have a choice. Just take it easy, coast, take a lot of vacations, enjoy the rest of whatever, or I can go for it. The problem is I didn't know what go or it were. I didn't know how to even go about it. So I began that year, 2004, with fasting and prayer for 22 days. I didn't do anything other than sleep at night, go to church, pray in our prayer chapel all day, like 12 hours, preach when I was supposed to

come back home. I didn't go anywhere. I found out I could drive back and forth between my house and the church for 22 days on one tank of gas. I mean I didn't go – I didn't do anything else but I got down to 130 pounds. Oh my gosh. This is crazy stuff. Don't anybody ever do this. But I did. I couldn't do it again. I wouldn't do it again, but I did it then.

OK, I'm going to speed this up. That seemed to just catapult me into a different place, and I was ready to do whatever. But I was shockingly, stunningly, embarrassingly ignorant of the good stuff. And I prayed one day, and I was frustrated because I was reading. Yeah, I'm reading patristics. I'm reading philosophy, but I don't know the good stuff. I know the charismatic stuff. I've given up reading that.

I don't need to read it. I know what it says. Just tell me the author and let me look at the back of the book. I'll tell you what it says. And I was done with that. And I prayed one day. You see, you're in my house. I prayed and I said, God, show me what to read.

Maybe two minutes later, my wife walks in the room. She has no idea what I prayed. She just walks up to me and hands me a book and says, here, I think you should read this. I was like, ooh, that was spooky. And it gets even more spooky. Perry had not read this book. And neither of us know how it ended up in our house. I didn't buy it. She didn't buy it. Somehow she was she just saw it laying around in our house. Looks at this book. Sam Brown might like this. And she took it to me. And the book because everyone said, what was the book? The book was The Divine Conspiracy by Dallas Willard. I said, what was the book? The book was The Divine Conspiracy by Dallas Willard. And that was just like a just a door being kicked open in my mind.

And I mean, within the first three, four pages, I knew, oh, this is what I've been looking for. I found it. And, you know, how you ask me, well, how do you find this music? I don't know. One thing leads to another. Same thing with theology. And so I went on this binge. I can be obsessive about things. And I went on this binge for about four years, probably, where I read an astounding amount. Again, it's something that I couldn't do again. You talk about reading six hours a night of theology. And so I start with Willard, very soon found N.T. Wright.

And then I would just read all their stuff. I started with all of his big books at the time, New Testament, The People of God, Jesus and the Victory of God, The Resurrection of the Son of God. Those were the only ones that were out at that point. And all of his other stuff. And then I found Walter Brueggemann, started reading him. Then I find Stanley Hauerwas. Then I start reading a bunch of Karl Barth, didn't read all of dogmatics. That would take another four years. Yeah. I have some friends that have read all of it. Yeah. Wow. But so I'm doing some friends that have read all of it. Yeah. Wow. Me too. Yeah.

But so I'm doing this. I'm reading all of this. And of course you know. And never was it work. It was always like I struck gold and couldn't pull it out of the ground fast enough. It was like where have you been all my life? Of course that begins to change me. It changes me a lot. It changes how I think about God and how I speak about God. And as a pastor, that's a lot of what we do. And so it

changes my preaching. I remember in August of 2004 announcing to our church that I'm packing my bags and moving on from the charismatic movement. Well, you know, I said it with enough rhetorical skill that everybody applauded, you know, until I actually did it. And then when I really actually began to change and my eschatology changed and my allegiance to, you know, religious nationalism was completely not only abandoned, but I began to critique it. And you know about that. That resulted in us over a several year period losing a thousand people.

That was really hard. Out of how many? Like how many were at your church at that time? Like two and a half thousand. Oh, so that was a hard. Out of how many, like how many were at your church at that time? Like two and a half thousand. Oh, so that was a big hit. Yeah. Well,

yeah, it was huge and it hurt. Yeah. It was very painful. you know, I'm in town of 70,000 people. So if you lose a thousand, what does it mean?

It means you see them everywhere you go. Yeah. And, um, you know, they were leaving saying things that they would say, you know, Brian's, he's gone liberal. I didn't think that at all. That doesn't feel like what I'm doing here. They'd say he's emergent. And at the time I sincerely had, I don't even know what that is. I don't even know what that is. I don't think I'm that. I don't even know what that is. I don't even know what that is. I don't think I'm that.

I don't know. Maybe I am. I don't know what it is. Or they would say he's backslidden. And I thought, no, I'm pretty sure that's not what's happened here because I've never been more passionate about Jesus. I feel like I'm like front-sliding or something. I don't know. It's not backsliding.

I'm making progress here. But the people who were leaving, I mean, you just have to know these are people that, you know, maybe I had led to the Lord, baptized, married, baptized their kids, married their kids. You know, these are people that we've done life with. And so it was this time at which there were deep conflicting emotions simultaneously. On the one hand, Perry and I were in one sense more joyful about our Christian faith than we've ever been. We were really finding what we'd actually been looking for all of our lives. I mean we found Jesus, but now we needed to find a Christianity worthy of Jesus. And so that was very joyful, but then we're also experiencing the deep pain of loss.

For those that are watching, listening to this, I do want them to know that pain lasted for over 10 years, but it's gone now. I'm not just putting a brain face. I can tell you that we're okay. We're healed. We can show you the scars, but they don't hurt anymore. Brett, real quick, was it primarily your movement away from kind of a more Christian nationalist way of thinking that was the

primary thing that drove them away, or were there various factors? There were various factors, but that was by far the biggest. I began to change. One of the things I changed was I moved away from what I began to call heaven and hell minimalism. Okay. In other words, that the gospel was just really about, you know, afterlife placement, you know, where you go when you die sort of thing. where you go when you die sort of thing.

And so I began to move away from that kind of presentation of the gospel. And then, you know, but I think most people could, I think most people would have handled that all right. My eschatology got completely, you know, you know, N.T. Wright came in and down, which it needed to be torn down. That was a big one. Just maybe then we began to be much more ecumenical, began to pay attention to the whole wider body of Christ, began to employ some aspects of liturgy. You know, and some people, but those

things I think most people would have been as all right. Okay. But it's, it's the moved away from seeing the United States of America and the church of Jesus Christ as having, as capable of a nice, easy. Right. When I began to see, when I began to see the kingdom of God, I understood that it was of necessity, by its very nature, a critique of the empires of this world. And began to preach that way, and that was for many. And, of course, in our, and it was not as bad then as it is now. In our very vitriolic, partisan, divided world, all they can see – they just say, oh, so he's not a Republican. All right, this must be a Democrat.

And that wasn't what happened but that's how they process that okay let me try to get this so that was even though the term wasn't around that was my deconstruction except i would never have thought of it as that i mean i tell the story in a book it's kind of a memoir of sorts called water to wine that's a good metaphor because that's how i felt yeah i mean uh i'm gonna grab that this is water to wine um i'm not i'm not pushing the book i'm just oh no it's fine this is how the book begins. I was halfway to 90, midway through life, and I'd reached a full-blown crisis. And that was, but it was never a crisis about Jesus. That can happen to people, but it didn't with me. I just thought I needed a Christianity that was worthy of Jesus. It was just thin,

it was weak. And I've told you the story of what happened. And so it was like I was at the party, you know, and they have no wine. And so the party is going to be over. And but Jesus shows up and turns the water to wine. Or here's a maybe even another way of thinking about it. even another way of thinking about it. When we realize that something's wrong with how we believe, I think we need to, I mean, that happens. And I think most people that are in the process of, I'll use the term deconstruction, didn't choose it.

It's just, it happened. They began to see something conflicting. They could no longer, in good faith, hold on to certain aspects of their faith. Well, it's like, let's imagine that in a, I don't know, in a monastery in Russia, they find an 800-year-old icon. It's very precious, very valuable. But over the centuries, it's become covered with grime and soot and all of that sort of thing, patina of filth and grime and smoke. of filth and grime and smoke. And so let's say it's an icon of Christ so that it has really obscured the image of Christ. All right, so what do you do? Well, then you restore it, and you give it to somebody that has skill, and they have brushes and mild solvents and things like that. They don't have dynamite and a sledgehammer.

That's not how we're going to go about this. I mean when we're talking about our faith, I think we should recognize this is something very precious. And let's be careful. Let's approach this with tenderness. You said something I would love to just tease out just a little bit, deconstructing in relation to Jesus versus deconstructing in relation to Christianity. Do you see when people are going through this, like those are kind of two different brands of deconstruction,

and sometimes they're overlapping, or sometimes they're intertwined where it's hard for them to kind of unravel the two? Are they really deconstructing with their faith in the Jesus of the New Testament, or are they deconstructing with a modern Western American brand of Christianity? If you have the wrong foundation for your faith, and this gets complicated here, you can risk losing Jesus entirely. Right. This is a bit of a result of the rise of empiricism. So you have a lot of philosophy here today. here today. So you have Rene Descartes, who as much as anyone could be considered the founder or the beginning, founder wouldn't be the right word, marking the beginning of the Enlightenment.

And he says, well, he says, what am I going to build on? Because you can doubt everything. What am I going to build on? Because you can doubt everything. And so he just sat around and he thought, what can't I doubt? And he thought that if you reach the point where you can't doubt that, then that becomes your foundation. And he said, I can doubt, I can doubt. But he says, oh, I realize I'm thinking in the process of doubting everything I can think of. I doubt everything, but I am thinking. Cogito ergo sum.

I think, therefore I am. And this becomes its foundation. And it's a flawed foundation in a lot of ways. Even philosophically, it's flawed. But theologically – and interesting, Descartes was – part of his project in this was he wanted to prove the existence of God. And then he thinks he does it. It's not very persuasive. I don't know that it's ever converted anybody.

But he thought he could start with a foundation that everyone agrees on, and then we start building from there. Look, that is a prescription. That is filled with trap doors that drop into atheism. The only foundation for faith is Jesus and our encounter with him. But now very post-enlightenment, here we are 21st century for crying out loud, most of us are embarrassed to say, I believe because Jesus has been revealed to my heart. We think we have to all agree on some empirical foundation and then prove Jesus from there. And that leads to the pop apologetics that I think are worthless. Or you're going to have people trying to find Noah's Ark on Mount Ararat or rusting chariots below the Red Sea because we've got to prove.

And so the Bible then becomes their foundation. You can't, that's not your foundation. Jesus is. The scriptures have its role, but it's not the foundation. Because then, especially in the Protestant world, you feel like you've got to fight every battle on every front. And for many, it becomes, well, you know, the universe is only 6,000 years old, so you've got to fight that battle. And evolution is a lie of the devil, and you've got to fight that battle. But then what can happen is you get overwhelmed by the evidence. You know, the universe is not 6,000 years old. It's 13.8 billion give or take 0.04%.

That's just the way it is. Okay, then I abandon my faith. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's just another side of fundamentalism. Yeah. And so you have the phenomenon of people in a matter of weeks because they found a podcast going from a fundamentalist Christian to a fundamentalist non-believer when there's a little bit of arrogance there as if the church hasn't been wrestling with these problems for a long time. I'm not quite done with Descartes.

Along with Descartes, you need another intellectual equal and contemporary, and I'm talking about Blaise Pascal, who is certainly one of the great mathematical minds in history, known as the father of the modern computer. He certainly has no problem with logic and empirical thought, but he gives us the phrase, the heart has its reasons, of which reason knows nothing. And he had his own dramatic encounter with God that he called the night of fire. And he wrote about it, and he sewed it into the lining of his clothing, this testament of his encounter with the living God as revealed in Christ. He became a very ardent Christian and a great mathematician. with it, or like logical positivism, is that everything that can be known in the phenomenon of being can be ascertained through the five physical senses and the amplification of them. Well, that's, who says? Who says? Whatever God is, God is not an object out there to be found. Like, you know, oh, there we found him.

He's left of Neptune. I see him in my telescope. That's not how you're going to find God. God is encountered by, we have various terms we use. But the one I probably use the most is heart. But we've been shamed into thinking we can't rely upon our heart. We can't trust our heart. But come on. Look, the heart is where we experience love. Now, a hardcore logical positivist will say, no, that's just the result of evolutionary development and care for the young and pair bonding and chemical reactions.

Really? I don't believe that. And in fact, I didn't know this was going to be so philosophical today. But see, you have the masters masters of suspicion these are these three influential philosophers that as we enter the 20th century nietzsche marx and freud they're called the masters of suspect because they were all suspicious of certain claims but basically they're suspicious of the same thing that is the the reality of love. The reality of love. That is that there can be true, yeah, true altruistic love.

Nietzsche is going to go, no, it's all about power, and that's just slave morale. It's a way for the weak to manipulate the strong. Marx is going to say, yeah, it's all about money, and Freud is going to say it's all about sex. That's oversimplifying, of course, but I think that they don't believe that there is the phenomenon of pure, altruistic, co-suffering, lay down your life, love. I think most people do believe that, though. Most people believe it because they experience it. They know. Yeah, that's not just – there's no logical explanation for the phenomenon of pure lay down your life for another love. And it's that same organ, if you want to use that term, that knows of the reality of love that also is capable of encountering God.

And it's how Jesus makes himself known to us. And the foundation we build upon is Jesus, not something else that we're all going to agree. Okay, we all agree that empiricism will give you an iPhone 12, and it's great. I'm all for it. But it's not going to be the way you're going to find and experience God. So when we're talking about deconstruction, what happens is everybody that bothers to posit ideas about God is doing theology, right? I mean, theology is just how we think and what we say about God. And so we all, in one way or another, end up with a theological house. And it's not, I mean, some of it we inherit. We just got it from our parents or the tradition that we happen to arrive in. Some of it we build ourselves. Some of it may have been done wisely and intentionally. A lot of it just happens. And so what happened with me around 20 years ago, I began to realize that my theological house was,

I was embarrassed by it. I didn't want to have company over it. It was unworthy of the king who I wanted to dwell with me in that mansion. And so I had to go on this massive remodeling project. That's better than deconstruction, remodeling. And everybody knows to remodel a house while living in it is difficult. And you know it's going to take you longer than you think. It's going to cost you more than you think. It's going to cost you more than you think. But you have no choice. But my theological house isn't a one-room bungalow. It's a sprawling mansion, all kinds of different rooms. And some rooms, like for example, I would

say my Christology, I think it was largely untouched. I think it's better appointed now. I think I understand it better. But it wasn't changed. Other rooms were changed and adjusted. And then the eschatological wing of my theological house, we did bring in the sledgehammers and we took it right down. I mean we brought in a wrecking ball. We took it right down to the foundation. Was it like dispensational, like live forever in heaven? Okay, yeah.

All that stuff. And see, that was one of the deep flaws of the Jesus movement. There were a lot of things that were good, but its eschatology was terrible, terrible. And so, you know, so there was some deconstruction, if you want to use that term for me. But it wasn't everything. It wasn't the whole faith. I think that's what people need to understand. I mean, maybe you can rethink hell. Maybe you can rethink whatever without saying, it doesn't all have to be so tied together that it's all or nothing. Well, and Brian, you've touched on a few times. I just want to kind of point it out because I think it's important for our audience to hear is that – and I've thought about this for a while early on, especially since both of us were raised in similar environments. Mine was more of an anti-charismatic version of your background, kind of MacArthur and so on. But when conservative, not even conservative, let's just

say hyper-conservative evangelical, that kind of way of thinking, when that becomes equated with biblical truth, then when you start to poke around at age of the earth or, you know, the moon, the sun standing still in Joshua or, you know, different, you know, ancient cosmology and, and you just start poking around a little bit. And once when those, when those, when those laces are tied so tight and you start to kind of unravel that the whole thing sometimes can burst this scene. This is, this is my challenge to people who are very conservative. I'm like, I'm not saying change your view. You want to believe the earth is young?

That's totally fine. There's arguments there. There's great people, smart people who believe that. My caution is please don't equate that with this is the biblical truth. Anything else is heresy. Because you're going to be inevitably driving people, not just outside of that view, but outside of the faith. I've talked to so many people that are scientifically minded that they would have ran away from Christianity had they

not encountered the possibility that the Bible could embrace a more old earth view. For instance, I mean, this is just one example. But that's my – I rarely meet people that deconstruct from Christianity or Jesus that weren't raised in this kind of hyper-conservative environment. I don't know what the percentage is. I think that's always the case. That what they're doing is they're deconstructing from fundamentalism. But if they don't understand how to do it, if they become unaware of other expressions and traditions of Christian faith, they can think, I mean, it's weird. People react, they react to

Christian fundamentalism, but stay a fundamentalist about about it as if it's the only legitimate version or expression of Christian faith. Yeah, yeah. That's the – yeah. We had this phenomenon here in our city maybe, I don't know, four or five years ago where a pastor of a Calvary chapel – you know what those are like. Yeah. And he caught up on the Sunday. I tell the story in the book. He got up the Sunday after Easter.

You know, Calvary Chapel, Sunday after Easter, and announces to his congregation that he's an atheist and that he's been an atheist for a year and a half. And that his advice is they should all just move on try to love one another but you know let go of this fairy tale oh wow it's like it was it was you know the worst sunday after easter i know i know i know every you know everyone understands that the sunday after easter can be a letdown. I wonder how many pastors would feel that after that. Yeah, and he came and met with me after that, I mean that week. I didn't ask to meet with him, but I think some people talked him into it or something. But we had a conversation, but we talked for a few hours, but it became very clear to me.

His name was Jim. I said, Jim, you're just going from one fundamentalism to another in a giant leap of faith. And I tried to say – but it was these very things. He began to have scientific problems, but he thought that a certain version of fundamentalism was the totality of the Christian. So I would say to people – one of the things I would say is it's highly unlikely that you have come up against a question that is troubling your faith, that the church hasn't been thinking about for centuries and dealing with. Maybe not in your narrow tradition, denomination, church experience, but that's not the whole of the church. And I would like to say, I would like to help you find resources and

different ways of thinking about this. It doesn't have to be this catastrophe. But it isn't all, I mean, we've touched several times on scientific issues. I mean, I just tell people, I tell my congregation all the time, I know of no major peer-reviewed scientific theory that is any threat to my Christian faith at all. So it's not a problem. So I can watch PBS documentaries and not become an atheist. But that's because you have a more nuanced, one might even say healthy view of Scripture and its relation to science and all that. I think that's at the heart of it. It's biblicism is the problem. And we have this

bad habit of conflating Christianity and the Bible into the same thing, and they're not the same thing. It's a Protestant problem. Catholics and Orthodox generally don't have this problem. It came about because 500 years ago there was a divorce. It had to happen. I'm talking about the Reformation. I'm not saying I'm against the Reformation. I mean the Renaissance Catholic Church was deeply corrupt, and something had to happen. Something was going to happen one way or another.

But we could also think of it as a divorce. And, of course, in a divorce when there's kids, you know, there's all these custody disputes and all of that. Well, those of us that ended up with Protestant dad, there's Catholic mom and Protestant dad. In the divorce settlement, basically the only thing Protestant dad got was the Bible. Catholic mom got most of the emails. And Protestant dad gets the Bible. And good on Protestant dad. He made great use of the Bible. But in the Protestant world, often the Bible is made to bear more weight than it can handle. And it can't be everything. And more fundamentalist

expressions, Christianity and the Bible become the same. They're not the same thing. And so we all know this. This is a great example. Everybody knows this. And this is almost happening, but everybody knows that the Bible does not give a clear denunciation of slavery as a social ill in either testament. slavery as a social ill in either testament you know i mean in the new testament it's there three times you know slaves obey your masters with fear and trembling there's just no vision of abolition and so this becomes a and these kind of things then become a problem for people they say well

how can i belong to a faith that doesn't even know that slavery is wrong well okay here's the thing doesn't even know that slavery is wrong. Well, okay, here's the thing. Christianity is the living tree rooted in the soil of Scripture. You can't separate them, but they're not the same thing, okay? I'm looking at this giant sycamore tree in my backyard, big tree, over 200 years old, and it's rooted in the soil. And it has to be. It must be. It won't live. It won't thrive unless it's in the soil.

But the soil and the tree are two different things. And Christianity, though it's rooted in the soil, it must be, is capable of producing things that aren't in the Bible,ire limbs and bowels of abolition over time. Now, that's going to be fraught with debate and difficulty and all that, but when you make the Bible the same thing as the Christian faith and approach it with the idea that it almost needs to be elevated to the state of the divine so that it has to be infallible, perfect. Well, then you find yourself like Don Quixote, you know, doing battles with windmills and losing. Yeah. And that can be a way of – so deconstruction is positive if we say okay we're going to make corrections we're going

to we're and i think most people don't just wake up one morning and say i hear all the cool kids are doing this now i guess i'm gonna have to do it i think there is almost always a legitimate crisis. My book is designed, I wrote it from a pastor's heart to help people go through that more carefully with maybe some wisdom and holding on to Jesus. I want to go back to everything about the Bible and Christianity, because I want to make sure there's not misunderstanding. Because, yeah, you're dealing with really sensitive questions here. And even in my own mind, I've been trying to sort out kind of everything you're saying here in my own heart. I'm not quite sure I can articulate it correctly. you're saying here in my own heart, I'm not quite sure I can articulate it correctly, but the relationship between the Bible and Christianity, I like the soil metaphor,

but people would even go farther to say like, you know, the Bible is our foundation. And I hear you saying, no, Jesus is the foundation. But the pushback that I think people would have, and even I have kind of, I wouldn't say pushback because I'm just, I'm kind of thinking out loud, but like, how do we know Jesus is the foundation? Well, if we didn't have the Bible, you wouldn't even say that. If you didn't have John 1 and Colossians 1. And so the relationship does seem kind of complicated because everything, it's almost like everything you're saying about the priority of Jesus, you learn from the Bible or even like if you had another experience with Jesus or if there was a, the ending of slavery,

I mean, did not people go back to kind of some things in scripture and say, wait a minute, you know, you look at Philemon, you look at first Corinthians seven, other passages like, okay,

they didn't call for outright manumission or any slavery, but there was, he kind of, Paul kind of gutted slavery from the inside out without calling an end to the institution, which would have been impossible. I completely agree. But when the debate was its most fierce in America, most Christian abolitionists didn't make appeals to scripture because they really felt like it wasn't. Oh, they didn't make appeals to scripture because they really felt like oh they didn't okay so so so they were abolitionists were obviously very christian but they didn't necessarily go to

the southern christians had more ammunition if you're going to use the bible that way okay now they're i you all agree they're misusing it but um so here's here's how it works for me. So let's have an imaginary scenario here. Let's say I'm kind of a fundamentalist sort and I'm working at the canning factory. I'm just making this stuff up as I go here. factory. I'm just making this stuff up as I go here. And I'm at lunch one day, and there's a guy that likes to, you know, pick fights with the Christians. And, you know, we're having this conversation, and he says, why do you believe that? And I said, well, the Bible says, the Bible says. He says, the Bible? Why do you believe the Bible? You know, that's just a dumb old book, you know,

it's just filled with wives' tales. There's, you know, so many versions, you know, how people say stuff. And then, then all of a sudden, okay, I'm thrown into, why do I, why do I believe the Bible? And so I go and I buy a bunch of Josh McDowell books and other books. And, and I, and I, and I read and I read and I read and I, and I kind of, you know, come up with some of my arguments. And six weeks later I go back and I tell, I'll tell you why I believe the Bible. And I give my apologetic arguments that I've cribbed from these books. That kind of stuff happens all the time. The problem is it's very disingenuous.

Let me tell you the truth. I do receive the witness of Scripture, but it's a three-step process. It happens more like this. Why do I believe in Jesus? Because I've encountered him. I cannot prove it to you, and it cannot be disproven. I can bear witness to it. I can say, I can use biblical language, I can say God was pleased to reveal his son to me and I know by revelation this is the foundation, by revelation, flesh and blood has not made this known to you, but my father and him, by revelation I know that Jesus is

the Christ, the son of the living God, but this revelation is not unmediated. It comes to me through the faithful witness of the church down through the centuries. So I did have an encounter with Jesus November 9th, 1974. But the church was involved. The church was proclaiming this gospel message to me. So then I go, oh, okay, so there's the church. Since the church brings me the message of Jesus, now I have regard for the church. And then the church comes on and says, hey, BZ, we have a canonical text. It's called the Bible.

And that's how the Bible comes into my life as authoritative. But it's Jesus, church, Bible. It comes to bear witness, further witness and clarification to your encounter with Christ, but it's your encounter with Christ that is the foundation from which even the Bible enters your story, is that? And then you have to have the church. So this is another Protestant problem. I'm a Protestant, at least by default. I mean, I'm not Orthodox or Catholic, so I must be. But because the Protestant world often does not like to talk about the church in such high terms, they have a problem of accounting for how the Bible came to be. And we end up almost acting like Mormons, that it just sort of floated down out of heaven and there it is.

And no. Are the scriptures – we're off on a different subject, and there it is. And no. Are the scriptures, we're off on a different subject, but this is fine, I'll talk about it. No, this is important. Are the scriptures authoritative over the church, sort of, but only because the church gave that authority to the scriptures. I mean, we said, OK, we're going to have – these 27 books are going to be in our canonical Christian text. And there's – we had to work it out over time. But it wasn't men in smoke-filled back rooms saying you know, saying let's, you know, make sure we get it right. It just happened more organically. These were the texts that were being read in the churches.

And they were reading Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John in the churches. They weren't reading the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Mary and the Gospel of Barnabas. These were later Gospels. Everybody knew they were later. And so now let's stick with these first century witnesses and then Paul's writings and then a few others. Hebrews had a hard time because who wrote it? We don't know. That made them nervous, but it got in. And Revelation had a hard time just because it's Revelation, but it got in. And then the Old Testament is simply – we didn't canonize it.

Jewish faith canonizes this as our canonical text. And we say, okay, well, this is the giant prequel to how we get to Jesus. So we put those books at the beginning. These 39 books at the beginning. And so the church has to always engage with Scripture. It can't, if it unchanged itself from Scripture, and some, you know, very progressive liberal denominations essentially do so, and give them, you know, they have about a generation to live after that. And pretty soon there's no more life. They are the tree uprooted from the soil of Scripture.

And I had an experience. I don't know who's no more life. They are the tree uprooted from the soil of Scripture. And I had an experience. I don't know who's listening to this. I don't think probably these two worlds will never cross. But I had an experience where I was speaking in another state at a – this was right before COVID, so it's not that long ago. And I was invited to speak at a UCC church, which, you know, this is – no, it was a Unitarian church. Oh, wow. Was it? Yeah, it was way out there.

UCC is – what does that stand for again? United Church of Christ. Oh, United Church. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. But this was a – I can't – it was one of these extreme denominations. And they had invited me to speak because of some of my experience in Palestine. And I'd spoken at – some of them had heard me speak at Christ at the checkpoint, and so I was there for that. I was the keynote speaker.

And I was sitting there right before I spoke. And I was I don't I never get nervous to speak, but I was nervous. I said, why am I so nervous? I'm thinking, well, because these people don't know that I'm all really super Jesusy and Bible and that's who I am. And I'm afraid they won't like me. I thought, well, what do I care? And so I just, I got up and I just shook that off and I just gave my delivery, but I just put in lots of scripture and lots of Jesus. And you could see the people kind of come to life. And then they came up to me. I don't know how many people came up to me and says, you know, we've heard more scripture and more Jesus in that one presentation tonight than we've heard in a year. And that church probably won't survive another generation if it doesn't get back to scripture, get back to Jesus. If it just tries to be a progressive social movement, well, then people

go, well, I got other things I can do on Sunday morning. I don't need to give significant amounts of money to it to sustain it. I can just get on Twitter and rail about this or that. So I'm not a biblicist. Meaning biblical literalist, right? Is that what you mean? When you say Biblicist, it's like this hyper-literal? I think you can be a Biblicist even without being a biblical literalist.

I describe a Biblicist as someone who approaches the Bible as a flat text. Okay. the Bible as a flat text okay where every verse carries the same I mean because because because people make this say it's it's inspired and infallible and inerrant then that has to be true of every verse and I think that I think it's untenable position actually I think it's something people I think it's an untenable position, actually. I think it's something people, I think it's an empty signifier to say, I believe the Bible. You just have to say it and you're in the club. You don't have to read it. You don't have to wrestle with it. You don't have to grapple with it. You just have to say it. But then some people begin to have some problems with it. So is the Bible inspired? Of course it's inspired. I mean, of course it is. And it is our

Is the Bible inspired? Of course it's inspired. I mean, of course it is. And it is our authoritative, canonical text. Is it inerrant? No, it doesn't make that claim itself. It depends on what people mean by in them you have life, but it is they which bear witness of me. And the scripture is inerrant in its mission to bring us to Jesus, who is the object of our faith. So infallible, even that word I have questions about, but I prefer, I rarely use the term inerrant unless I need, it's a certain context where I know what I mean by that. But infallible is always my preferred – or inspired is the best one because that's the actual biblical term. I use that for sure. Yeah. Inerrant, I mean, without mistake.

I mean, it just depends on what you mean. But I'll have some atheists say to me, the Bible's full of contradictions. Of course it is. I know more than you do. Of course. I mean, was the transfiguration six days or eight days after Peter's confession? It depends on who you're talking to. And you cannot harmonize perfectly the account of the resurrection.

Because so much is – if you take – here's Matthew, here's Mark, here's Luke, here's John. Try to come up with a perfect harmonization of the – you can't do it. But it doesn't matter. What happened is Jesus was raised from the dead. Whether Mary was there alone, or there were three women, or four women, or all of these sorts of things, the gospel writers aren't journalists. They are theologians. I mean, they have self-conscious, deliberate theological intentions. I mean, for example, John places the cleansing of the temple at the beginning of his gospel.

The synoptics are all, it's that final week, because once Jesus did that, the deal was done. I mean, they were going to do something to this man that interrupts that system. John isn't interested in doing journalism or being a historian. He places it in chapter two because he wants to juxtaposition turning water into wine at Cana of Galilee with making a whip and, you know, pronouncing judgment on the temple. He wants to put those two. There's an artistic move there and a theological move. So but then you have people say, well, OK, so there must have been two cleanses. There are two cleansings of the temple.

There's one. And John just puts it at a different place because he has a different agenda. There's one, and John just puts it in a different place because he has a different agenda. So, or for example, in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Gethsemane, Jesus is in agony, right? And he's very human, and he's, you know, Luke has him sweating blood, and all of them have, You know, Luke has him sweating blood and all of them has my soul is grieved unto death and he's groaning, he's praying, he's John. There's none of that. John, it's who are you looking for? Jesus, I am. And they all fall down. Those are two very different tellings, and I'm completely not troubled by it, because John wants us to see that this one who is fully human is also fully God, and he's presenting him in a different light, and that's why Jesus in John talks different than in Mark.

I have zero problem with that. Some real hardcore progressives have a problem with that and hardcore fundamentals. I don't have any problem with it. I say John is communicating to us what we need to hear Jesus say. us what we need to hear Jesus say. And John has had more time. Matthew, Mark, and Luke more or less are in a hurry to get the message. John's a little more, let's, I'm going to work on this. I know we've gone a long time. Let me tell one last story because I think it'll pull it back. I met a woman when I was speaking who my host said, we want you to meet this woman because she's losing her faith. And so the four of us go out to dinner. And she tells me about she's been listening to this podcast.

And now she's full of doubts. And she says, well, why does Jesus have to be God? I said, what do you mean? She said, why does Jesus have to be? Can't he just be, you know, it was a – I said, well, what Jesus do you mean? She said, well, you know, Jesus. I said, no, you tell me what Jesus – well, you know, Jesus, Jesus of Nazareth, you know, preached in Galilee, got crucified by the Romans. I said, okay, so how do you know those things about him?

Well, you know, it's in the Gospels. All right. Do you think that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John believed that Jesus was God? She said, or were they just foisting a ruse upon us she said no they believe so they believed that Jesus was gone these people that that lived the same time maybe were eyewitnesses we don't know for sure but certainly were contemporaries. They believed that Jesus was God.

But you, 2,000 years later, know better because what? You listen to podcasts. It wasn't Theology in Iran, was it, that caused her to... I'm not going to say what it was. It wasn't, but I'm not going to say what it was. I don't want to be like that. Yeah. It wasn't, but I'm not going to say what it was. I don't want to be like that. But at some point, you have – I've made a decision that – I've made a leap to faith.

That's actually Kierkegaard's phrase. You've got to jump over Lessing's ditch of the historical distance. See, this is the problem also with the quest for the historical Christ. I like historical Jesus scholarship. As much as I can understand Jesus of Nazareth in his own context and time, that's helpful to me. But understand that Jesus is inaccessible to us. You and I will never meet Jesus walking in sandals on the dusty hills of Galilee. That's inaccessible to us. But that same Jesus who walked those roads and was crucified and raised now fills all things everywhere with himself, Paul says, and we all have simultaneous access to that risen Christ.

I think sometimes obsessing over the historical Jesus is a way to keep a safe distance between us and Jesus. It's a way to keep the lion behind the cage. I tell people, if you want to encounter Jesus, start reading the Gospels on your knees. And after each chapter, just sit there and just let—that's how Jesus comes out of the cage, and Aslan, or Jesus, is right there, and you feel his breath upon you, but that may change your life. Faith is not necessarily—this is also a modern problem—faith is not primarily convincing ourselves to think a certain way. Faith, according to the New Testament and Jesus and the apostles, is how we live our life.

Jesus says, if anyone is willing to do my teaching, he will know whether I am sent from the Father. And so it's not a matter of, I mean, go live the Sermon on the Mount, and your faith will revive. Sitting around alone in your room, up inside your head, your faith may die. Go live what Jesus taught, and it will thrive. Faith may die. Go live what Jesus taught and it will thrive. Wow. Man, Brian, I've taken you over a lot of time you gave me. So thanks for, man, I've got so many questions.

Do I have time for one more? Well, everything you're saying, and you mentioned Bart earlier, it sounds just... Oh, yeah. There's a lot of Bart in that. Very Bartian. And people mistake... Here's what I don't... So some people mistake Bart, and I did this early on, as kind of like dismissing or downplaying the authority of the Bible.

I've never read a theologian who is more deeply and profoundly exegetical as Barth. He's got these 20-page extended small print footnotes that he embeds in the body of the text doing exegesis, exegesis. That was his famous line, right? When he was getting exiled or whatever, exegesis, exegesis. exiled or whatever, exegesis, exegesis, exegesis. But it was because of his deep love for scripture that led him to not divinize the Bible. And that's how he maintained its proper authority. And it sounds like that's very much what you're doing here by saying the Bible is not our

foundation in the sense in which it's typically said that way. You're actually elevating the Bible to its proper place as a signpost pointing to Jesus. I still do wrestle with, I still do wrestle with even the rationality that's required to even get there. And I know I brought that up earlier. So I don't know. I'm still kind of working through the relationship between the proper place of rationality, empiricism versus kind of existentialism and having this, for lack of a better term, subjective encounter with Jesus. Because even if you said I had an encounter with Jesus, I would say, tell me about that. And if you describe something that blatantly contradicted the Jesus we know in Scripture,

I would say, I'm not sure if that's valid. You know, I encountered Jesus and he told me to go kill somebody and fight in a war, you know, and wave the flag or something. I'm like, I don't know if that's the Jesus. But if you said, well, that's the encounter I had, I'm going to say, I don't know if that's valid because it doesn't match Scripture. So it seems like my ultimate authority even there is still Scripture. And that's what I wrestle with.

Part of the Cartesian problem in that cogito ergo sum is all singular. I think, therefore I am. And yet Descartes is using language to form his thoughts, and language is the gift of a community. He didn't invent Latin. It was given to him. And so I don't get to tell myself I'm a Christian. The church tells me, Brian, you're a Christian. See, this is another Protestant problem. Protestants are always having to convince themselves that they're saved, and

some of them become neurotic about it. It's not your job to tell yourself whether you're saved or not. The church says, you belong to us. You're one of us. But if you get loony tunes, the church will say, no, no, sit down, be quiet, you're wrong. So, I want to read this. This is a quote from Barth that's in When Everything's on Fire. I've got a cheapy advanced reader copy here. This is not me, this is Barth. Those who thought Christology out and expressed it did not intend to say, we have met a hero or a sage or a saint for the adequate description of whom we, in our highest rapture, are left with only provisional terms such as the word of God or God's son. But here too, preceding all experiences and possible raptures, knowledge of the divinity of Jesus Christ was the beginning

of the way. Even if the New Testament writers also find Jesus heroic or saintly in Jesus, heroic or saintly traits or the characteristics of a sage, yet that does not mean that we can go on to say that this was the line along which is sought to be distinctive in the original thinking found in Jesus or what is said about him. On the contrary, on the contrary, all that, so far as it traces, so far as it, so far as traces of it are found in the New Testament, it is nothing but the stammering, inadequate expression of their initial and basic awareness. We have met God, and we have heard his word. That is the original and ultimate fact, that the word of God comes to us, and then we have to express it. Now, I don't know of a theologian that grappled more seriously

with the New Testament text than Karl Barth. Some people want to dismiss him as liberal. That's who he was. He was deconstructing liberalism. That's what he was. He was angry about it and passionate. He was like a German

fundamentalist in the early 20th century. That's how he would have been. That's the wrong term. The whole fundamentalist in the early 20th century. I mean, that's how he would have been. That's the wrong term, but I mean, he was yeah, the whole Barth is a liberal is not right. The German liberal Protestant line until World War I, and he saw how

inadequate it was in resisting the rise of German nationalism in the name of Christ. And that's when he produces his commentary on Romans. The first edition. That was like a bomb. Oh, man.

I've only read bits and pieces, but man, that's a lightning rod. It's a beautiful piece of work. Brian, I got to go. I got another guest waiting for me. Thank you so much for... I got to go get a COVID test and see if I'm going to stop him. Have fun with that. So the book, again, is When Everything's on Fire. I would highly recommend people check it out. And also, you got tons of other books out. Is it bryanzahn.com,

where people can find you and all your books are listed there? Yeah. All right, man. Just Google me. I got a weird name and no one else has it. And you'll find me. It's easy. You'll find other stuff. You'll find YouTube saying I'm a heretic. I'm not. I'm not.

I'm not. Yeah, I think that's the first thing that pops up with me too when you Google my name. All right. Take care, Brian. All right. Good talking with you.