Theology in the Raw - S9 Ep925: Power and Privilege in Paul, Mark, and White Evangelicalism: Dr. Tim Gombis

Episode Date: December 6, 2021

Okay, so if you’re easily offended (and white), then you might want to change the channel. Dr. Tim Gombis is a no-holds-barred honest scholar, who’s not afraid to go to the hard places and challenge the status quo. And that’s exactly what we do in this episode. We discuss the undiscussables; say the quiet things out loud, and push over sacred cows as we seek to get to know Jesus all over again. This episode is a mix of exegetical exploration and cultural analysis (or critique).  Tim is a long-time friend, a fellow biblical scholar with a Ph.D. in New Testament from St. Andrews University in Scotland, and an all around great dude. He’s written tons of books including the Story of God Commentary on Mark and the recently released Power in Weakness. He’s been a professor of Bible and Theology at Cedarville University and Grand Rapids Theological Seminary, and he currently hosts the Faith Improvised podcast.  Theology in the Raw Conference - Exiles in Babylon At the Theology in the Raw conference, we will be challenged to think like exiles about 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. Everyone will be challenged to think. And Jesus will be upheld as supreme. Support Preston Support Preston by going to patreon.com Venmo: @Preston-Sprinkle-1 Connect with Preston Twitter | @PrestonSprinkle Instagram | @preston.sprinkle Youtube | Preston Sprinkle Check out Dr. Sprinkle’s website prestonsprinkle.com Stay Up to Date with the Podcast Twitter | @RawTheology Instagram | @TheologyintheRaw If you enjoy the podcast, be sure to leave a review.

Hello, friends. Welcome back to another episode of Theology in the Raw. If you would 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, get access to premium content like Q&A podcasts and blogs and so on and so forth. Also, if you have not signed up yet for the Theology in the Raw conference next spring, then you want to do so. A-S-A-P, space is filling up. You can go to pressandsprinkle.com for all the info on that. My guest today is my longtime and very good friend, Dr. Tim Gombis. Tim and I met shortly after he graduated from seminary. We both went to the same seminary at different times, and then we both ended up in Scotland doing PhDs at different universities in Scotland,

and then ended up at Cedarville University, finally, as colleagues. And he has just been a great friend over the years. He's an amazing scholar. He has a PhD in New Testament from St. Andrews University, has written a lot of books, including The Story of God, Commentary on Mark, and the recently released Power in Weakness, which is the subject of much of our conversation. He's been a professor at Cedarville University and also at Grand Rapids Theological Seminary. So this is a long, long overdue conversation. Please welcome to the show for the first time, the one and only Dr. Tim Gompis. Hi, friends. Welcome back to another episode of Theology in Raw. I'm here with, I think, one of my oldest or long-term friends that I've ever had on the podcast.

I mean, we go back to – let's see. I graduated – you graduated seminary in – 2000. Oh, 2000? Yeah. So I didn't know you. I remember seeing you walk the stage at graduation. Oh, really?

And for some reason, your name stood out. And then when I started exploring doing a PhD in Paul Grisanti, our Old Testament prof, he says, do you know Tim Gombos? Like, well, I know the name. He's like, yeah, he's at St. Andrews studying Paul. You should reach out to him. And that's when I emailed you. I don't even know if you know this.

I emailed you and just said, hey, I'm into this Paul thing. I don't know what to do. I think I might want to do a phd over in scotland somewhere what should i do do you probably don't remember what your response you said probably go grab you were uh cleaning pools at the time dude that was my best job that's a bit all downhill from there that was my favorite job you said we'll go read nt writes what saint paul really said and go from there send me an email when you're done i was like who's nt right like i've already read you know john mcarthur on paul

i've read you know you know i've even expanded my horizons and read like piper and others yeah that's the extent of my life you're digging deep yeah yeah um and you're like nt right like who's this guy i i never i'll never forget going to a coffee shop Saturday morning in Newhall, California, and spent about four hours reading that book. And my life, I don't want to be overly dramatic. I can easily say this, my academic trajectory was forever changed. Oh, wow. Because everything he says is so scholarly, but he made it so exciting and adventurous. Yeah, compelling. I'm dealing with these familiar categories like God's faithfulness and righteousness

in ways I've never even thought about before. Totally. And I'm like, how come we're not reading this in seminary? How come my mind was forever blown? I mean, it was crazy. Anyway, long intro. Yeah, there are reasons why we weren't reading in seminary. Everything had to be tidy and, like, tight and, like, all the edges rubbed off and everything

had to fit into nice neat categories. He had already written, like, three of his huge books, I think, or two maybe. Yeah. Yeah, the resurrection book hadn't come out. He'd written Jesus and the Victory of God, written several books on Paul, and i'd never even heard of him sorry i got cats jumping all over my anyway that was 2002 um the two the first two big ones i think at that point i think that book came out in 97 yeah what st paul really said and then um yeah so that was 2000. Then in 2002, did you and Chris come over? That was, yeah.

So I think it was 2000 and either 2002, 2003, we went and toured Scotland. I visited Aberdeen, St. Andrews, stayed with you and Sarah and the family. Yeah. And I think that was the first time we saw each other in person, never hung out. That's right. Dude, that was almost 20 years ago. Look at us.

Crazy. Great hair. That's crazy. I know. Falling apart. Yeah. Okay, so let's, for people that don't know who you are,

just give us a quick snapshot who you are, where you grew up. Tell us about your academic journey and where you are now. Well, the high point of my life was 2007 when we won the intramural softball championship i it's so this is the stupidest thing in the world how much that means to me like i i'm like that was such a great yeah when we won it was like that was so great

oh my gosh yeah i uh what's to say i'm from Chicago, grew up in the Chicago suburbs. Um, uh, wanted to be a lawyer back in the eighties or before I went to college, uh, switched tracks and started studying philosophy and then theology, uh, went to seminary. Did you go to Liberty? Yeah, I was at, went to Liberty University, studied political science, but minored in philosophy and theology. And by the time I got done, I couldn't care less about political science. I wanted to go to seminary.

I just had so many questions I wanted to pursue. And yeah, I graduated with an MDiv in 97 and then took a few years to do a THM. And by then, I think being at that seminary and being at that church, big church, a lot of power and money and a mega church, just was like, something's wrong here. Something's wrong here with the way we're thinking. Something's wrong here with the way that this place really functions like a corporation and was ready for something different but didn't know what that was yet. So in 2000, we left the States and moved to St. Andrews where we lived for four years

while I did my PhD on Ephesians. And that was, those were some of the best times of our lives because they were so transformative. I mean, just being in a very different kind of a community, an academic community, and being around Christians from other parts of the world. Can you describe that different academic community? Because I mean, I experienced the same thing coming out of the same background, but for people that don't know what you mean. Yeah. Well, having grown up in an environment that was oriented by safety, learning all the

answers and finding out how to live a life where you have all these guaranteed outcomes, live a certain way, read scripture in a certain way, go about having a certain kind of spirituality, everything will work out in your marriage, with your kids, you know. It's basically the American dream, you know, with Bible verses and Jesus attached. And things did not work out that way for us. We had trouble. We had some pain. We had lost a number of pregnancies, and we have three healthy children.

And then also, sort of academically or ideologically, I took seriously everything that was said at our church and at the seminary about how, you know, go at this text and whatever you come up with, that's where you go with it and you draw your theological conclusions after doing your exegesis. Well, I did that and differed with my supervisor and was like, no, you're wrong because I think this. And even if I could show him from the text a better way of thinking, it didn't matter. He was the man. So I started to see that there's other stuff at work here. There are other ideologies. There are other rules that I've obviously broken that I didn't know about.

And I'm a very loyal person. I'm like, I wanted to do what was right here, but it didn't work. So we just were ready for something different and didn't know what that exactly would look like. But I knew I wanted to do biblical studies, PhD. So started in on that. Hold on. These cats are, this is the afternoon lively. They want to, they want to climb all over everything. They, um, um, so that, that environment at St. Andrews at the time was a really, really rich, um, theological studies, um, group of people, and then biblical studies group of people and then biblical studies group of people. And Christians from all over the world, from different places in North America, some from very different traditions than what

I was used to, and all seeking to be faithfully Christian. And all my categories were sort of upset and was introduced to just richer ways of thinking. It took me a while to get my head around. And so that was four years of that. And our closest friends at the time all had real trouble. One guy went through liver failure. He had to have a liver transplant. And that was guy went through liver failure. He had, he had a, have a liver transplant and, you know, that was a crisis for their family. Another couple had a stillborn child,

you know, we all rallied, um, to support and love them. Uh, we had lost some pregnancies and we felt the love of the community. Um, and so we formed rich friendships and it wasn't, it wasn't all academic or ideological. It was practical, relational, communal. And, um, when we came back to the States in 2004, you know, we were, we had had contact with something richer and deeper and profounder. And, um, so yeah, that was transformative for, for how I read scripture and how I thought about God and how I thought about being Christian in the world. And, um, so yeah, I taught, uh, for seven years at Cedarville university in Ohio. And then for the last 10 years, I taught at Grand Rapids theological seminary. Um, and yeah, so we still live here in Grand Rapids.

Written several books. Your recent one is Power and Weakness, Paul's Transformed Vision for Ministry, which I really want to get to. Well, and I don't want to go back and dig, but you're, I don't know if you want to even talk about it, but your THM thesis. Do you want to talk about the THM thesis? Anything you want, man. Okay, so I remember hearing about your experience writing your THM thesis on Paul, Paul and the Law. your experience kind of illustrated kind of a bigger problem slash issue in maybe evangelicalism or kind of quote unquote biblical Christianity. Do you want to unpack that a little bit? I thought it was just, it really helped me. I mean, it was kind of disturbing, but it was also like

helped me kind of see some stuff going on and me wanting to not do that, to be faithful to the scriptures and yet not think that if I add up all the exegetical things, spit out the right answer, then it's just more messy than that. Yeah, totally. So what was your experience like writing your thesis? Yeah. So when I started seminary in 94, I was in a Bible study that was a bunch of like Reformed people, Reformed Lutherans. I mean, I don't think they really knew what they were doing necessarily, except that they had had this kind of hard law gospel contrast sort of thing. And it just never sat right with me. I could, you know, because I think when I had really gotten turned on about being a Christian in my college years, I just read Deuteronomy over and over and over.

And it just was like – it just screamed love. It was just about love of neighbor, love of God, creative love. And I could not get my head around how the law could have been a bad thing. not get my head around how the law could have been a bad thing. And Psalm 19, Psalm 119 had meant so much to me as a young Christian person. So I always had wanted to go to work on that, like, how do I put that together biblically, theologically? And so one passage that I just could never reconcile or get my head around was Galatians 3, 10 to 14. Like, how does that work? I know you've done work on this.

We probably don't think the same way about it, which is fine. I hate the law. I hate the law. I'm anti-Nomi. So, yeah, I just – I had offered a different interpretation of it, an interpretation of that passage that I thought was satisfying. I thought it was hermeneutically solid and resonated with the whole argument of the letter. You had scholarly backing too. It's not like you came up with some far-fetched interpretation.

It was kind of like this. No. Within scholarship, it was – I don't want to say mainstream, but it was one of the kind of main things that scholars what's an available reading right and then also um there's like that passage there's there's either quote unquote a kind of a typical you know traditional interpretation sort of but even there there's like there's it's a passage where there's just a ton of disagreement, as you know. So it's like, all right, what I'm going to do is take seriously each of the controlling interpretive key there is going to be the Old Testament quotes in their original context. And then whatever Paul's statements are, they're just going to be based off of that.

are, they're just going to be based off of that. And well, right or wrong, that's just using a method that I was taught by my supervisor, but found out that because I disagreed with him and the president of the seminary took a different view of this very, very difficult passage that it was ruled out that I would get failed. So I was like, what is the deal? Like, I thought, like, wait a minute, I did everything you said. Like, I'm using all the interpretive methods that you showed me. I followed everything that you've told me to do. You know, the pastor of the church, the president of the seminary, John MacArthur, had said for years, you know, my number one goal when I read the passage is to get myself out of the text. So I'm like, I take you seriously, Dr. John. You don't matter when it comes to

reading the Bible. Do you know what I mean? Like what you say, what matters is, you know, reading the text well. So, but I found out that's not at all the case. Like there are unwritten rules. Like, you know, when it comes, when push comes to shove, whatever Pastor John says is what is. And began to see that in this, you know, you could have a doctrinal statement of an organization, but what really matters is what powerful people have to say. You know, the person that runs the organization or whatever, that's what matters. That it's actually not this kind of egalitarian, you know, we're all brothers and sisters in Christ and whatever. From whatever quarter, if there's a challenging Bible reading that we haven't considered, like, we'll take it on board because what matters is God's word above everything. Well, I found out that's not how it goes, you know. word above everything well i found out that's not how it goes you know um the powerful people uh what is that one disney film it's the golden rule the one with the gold makes the rules

what's that did jeff far say that see this yeah see raising kids in the kids in the 90s watching Disney films. So you had to rewrite it? Yeah, that was very – Did you have to rewrite it? Or like you said, well, I want to graduate. I've done all this work. Yeah, so what I said was this is my final academic exercise. I very well may not be right in the interpretation that I'm offering. I haven't found anybody else

that says what I've said here. So I'm just going to complete the academic exercise as I'm assigned and do it in a way that will pass. I just want to get through. Because what matters is it's an assignment. I'm just going to take it as that. So yeah, that's what I did. And later went back to work on that passage. It may have been about seven or eight years later and published my interpretation in New Testament Studies, which I'm far happier that it came out in that venue rather than sat in the basement of a library somewhere in Southern California. Just so people know the gist, and then we can move on to your new book, but there's a lot of contrasts in that passage,

typically around law gospel themes, law of faith, law of spirit. And there's an interesting use of the Old Testament there too. So you have two main things going on. Is Paul saying faith is against law? Or are they correlated in ways that don't seem as visible at first glance? But if you look at the original context of the Old Testament quotations, maybe he's kind of doing something there. So there's a lot of intersecting exegetical questions that you have to wrestle with. But that's the basic gist is, are these

categories, law, faith, law, gospel, law, spirit, Deuteronomy and Leviticus and Habakkuk, are they being, is there more correlation or more discontinuity here? And within that, I think, I mean, I would look at my dissertation, but 10, 12 different interpretive approaches. It's not like just like one or two or three or five. There's like so many different takes on this passage. It is, I think one, I think it was James Dunn said it's like one of the most, if not the most complex passages in all of Paul. So anyway, so just, I mean, and all of Paul. So anyway, so just, I mean, that just adds to your story that to think there's one hands down clear cut, if you don't take this view, you're not being biblical interpretation is just, I mean, it's exegetically, I think irresponsible, if not naive, really.

Yeah. And it shows up how any interpretive community can sort of throw around that language. Like you're not being biblical or you are being biblical or you've got to be biblical. All that means is what we've agreed to say, the Bible says. You know, I mean, it's just that kind of language can be exploited. Yeah, it was a very interesting. In fact, that whole experience the last couple years there is what led me to investigate the powers and authorities for my dissertation on Ephesians. There's something – something happens in like sort of a large – when a church gets big and becomes an organization and becomes this institution, it's almost like these other rules unintentionally sort of take over and like social dynamics take over so that a community that wants to do good ends up fostering injustice or ends up chewing people up or ends up bringing about situations that are painful. I mean, I saw staff pastors being mistreated there. There was a lot of bad things that I had seen. And I just thought, something's messed up here. So anyway,

when I did my dissertation on Ephesians and looking at the powers and authorities, there are some theorists, people like Marva Dawn, that will talk a lot about institutional life and about how, in Marva Dawn's book, Powers, Weakness, and the Tabernacling of God, she talks about how churches can become powers and end up fostering oppression rather than human flourishing, which is really interesting. But that's when I started to see it. Like something's messed up here. What is it? Something that's more structural, something that's not – it's like in the air it's a mindset it's an ideology

it's it's right i mean it's it's kind of like i mean not we're not gonna two white guys are gonna get into race conversation but that i mean when we talk about like structural systemic racism and a lot of white people i think just don't have a category for like what is that wait no i'm against racists like well yeah me, well, yeah, me too. We all are, but there at least very well could be, biblically, there's these categories of more broader structural themes that are related to people but not reduced to individuals. Yeah, that's right. There are probably better categories for talking about structural

and systemic evils than merely individual acts of sin. I mean, this is, all the prophets talk about this sort of stuff, John the Baptist, Jesus. I mean, Jesus in Mark has all these kind of broad brushes whenever he confronts any group of people, because like you can talk about corporate behaviors and the way that uh you know they typically act and the injustice they typically carry out but for jews of you know paul's era and jesus's era they had language to talk about all this and it was the powers and authorities these these sort of um hostile cosmic powers that foster oppression and that work at the structural or systemic level to bring about forms of life that degrade humanity and that exploit and that oppress. So yeah, unfortunately, you know, white evangelicalism is very uncomfortable with all of that. But it's because we don't know our Bibles as well as we should

so that we can't analyze the slippery and insidious character of sin that exists at the structural and systemic level and the individual level. Sure. It's not an either or. No, totally. Yeah, it's both and. It's all over the place. I'm not a Revelation guy, scholar, but it seems to be all over the place in Revelation. Like when John says to the church,

come out of her, like her being Babylon. He's not saying like geographically move outside of the Roman Empire. He's saying come out of the way of, the Babylonian way of life, right? The system. And even there in that context, I think it's the economic system.

It's built on injustice and don't participate in that system, which is... Really threatening. It's very uncomfortable as a privileged, very comfortable middle-class person to read the New Testament, especially Revelation. Well, I mean, Mark's gospel is terrifying as a person who has a comfortable life. It really is upsetting because Jesus is doing many of the very same things here. I mean, his destination is Jerusalem, and he's going to face all of the systemic and structural injustices fostered by the temple leadership. Because the temple has become, in Mark anyway, I know New Testament writers do different things with the temple, but in Mark, the temple has become this God abandoned place that's fostering oppression. And like the widow that gives her last penny there is used ambiguously by Mark. She's a model of sacrificial giving,

but she's also someone who's exploited. She has nothing left, and she's given it to these people who have everything. So it's really – anyway. You've always been a fan of Mark. As a Paul guy, I've always heard you talk about Mark probably more than Paul. What do you like about Mark, the gospel of Mark?

When I was in St. Andrews, I had a friend. My gospel's education in seminary was really awful. It – I'm going to get this cat. This cat. How many cats do you have? I haven't seen a single cat. These two twin boys.

They're lurking right behind my computer here. When I was in St. Andrews, I had a friend who had done Mark, and I just had no clue about how to handle the Gospels because in seminary it was like all you do with the Gospels is take pericope by pericope and establish its historical reliability. And they're like, well, why would I do this? This is boring. I hate this.

But he introduced me to a literary way of reading the Gospels. And we worked through Mark a bunch. And it was so compelling and revolutionary to me. It just blew my mind. And then I guess it was maybe 10 years ago, I got invited to do the Mark volume for the Story of God commentary series that took me a lot longer than I thought it would. But that was like my gospel's education that I never had. I wanted to just read a ton on narrative, read a ton on how the gospel at work.

And so, yeah, I spent about seven years in Mark and I just couldn't get enough of it. It was so thrilling, but it is utterly... It tore me up. It really just eviscerated me. What's happening there is really frightening. With Jesus basically highlighting how the disciples are completely negatively portrayed in Mark. They get everything wrong. And of course, the Pharisees and Sadducees are completely unjust. I mean, everybody gets it wrong except for all of these social outsiders. The Syrophoenician woman, the woman who's got the hemorrhage, the demon-possessed man, like they're all the ones who are getting Jesus, who run to him and fall down. You know, they see, they run to him and fall down, or they hear, they run to him and fall down. The disciples never see, they never hear, and they never respond well to Jesus, and neither does anybody else that you think should. And I'm just sitting here doing this

study thinking like, well, I'm a Bible scholar, and I teach the Bible, study the text all day long. I'm a Bible scholar and I teach the Bible, study the text all day long. You know, where do I map myself in the gospel of Mark? And it's like, I'm a Pharisee. I'm not even a disciple. They're the Bible scholars of the first century. They're the ones who are passionate about God's holiness. And I'm just like, man, this is just frightening.

And what Jesus has to say about money there, yeah, what he has to say about what matters in being a disciple is just, it's a scary kind of a gospel to read. And when I was doing that study, all I could do is turn and look at my inherited evangelical culture and just think, we are exactly what Mark is written against. This is frightening. So anyway, it's a challenge. Mark is really a challenge. And it's really – I think it's really life-giving. And it's mysterious. It's sort of ambiguous.

There's no answers. It ends on a downer of a note. The last sentence is, the women did not go tell the disciples because they were afraid. You don't take the longer ending of Mark? Oh, no, nobody does. Really?

So 16.7, yeah. Is it verse 7, verse 8, or whatever? It's like they were afraid, so that's how Mark ended his gospel? That's the end. It's like lamentations almost. Oh, totally. And it's really, I think that what it's designed to do is leave audiences upset and unsettled. Like Jonah. It's like a Jonah, right? Yeah. Yeah.

And just sort of say, wait a minute, let's go back to the beginning. Because at the very end, the message that the young man wants the women to deliver to Peter and the disciples is, go back to Galilee where he's going to meet you. And so there's this indication that it's like, all right, if we started this whole thing over again, this whole gospel went wrong. It's like the gospel went wrong, basically, is the title of Mark. What if we started this over in Galilee again?

How should it go right? How should the disciples have responded? What does Jesus expect from the Pharisees or the Sadducees? Or, you know, what should the disciples have done in Gethsemane? That's a question I always had. I mean, they were supposed to pray and watch so that they didn't fall into temptation, which they didn't do. They fell into temptation. But what were they supposed to do? Like knowing that when Peter tries to violently defend Jesus, that is the embodiment of his falling asleep. Like he didn't watch him pray, he gave in to temptation, he fell asleep, which for him, that was acting out in

violence. Because the gospel in Mark, the word is the gospel of the cross, that the kingdom is shaped thoroughly by the cross. I mean, Jesus is raised up. He ascends his throne, which is the cross. So if it's this nonviolent gospel of cruciformity, then what would it look like for Peter to have been awake and alert in Gethsemane, you know, and for the rest of the disciples? Which I don't know, it's kind of interesting. I think that would be a great discussion to have for audiences of Mark's gospel. I mean, that kind of ties in.

It's a good segue to your more recent book because a lot of what you're saying, it sounds like, I haven't read your latest book, but is that kind of the foundation of Paul's ministry, his power and weakness? I mean, because this power and weakness seems to be a consistent theme in Paul, which I imagine is probably the main thread of your book. Give us a snapshot of your book and then how that – I think Paul's vision for ministry can be both prophetically critical of and formative of how we should do ministry today. Yeah. So I was awakened to this when I was doing my doctoral work on Ephesians because in Ephesians 2, Paul lists the triumphs of God in Christ. God triumphs over Satan and the powers of evil by pulling people out of death and giving them life. And then the second half of the chapter, God triumphs over the powers who have fostered ethnic hostility.

Talk about fruitful material to talk about race. The powers authorities were at work in creating ethnic hostility and God has made the two one in Christ, united them together. And that the triumph of God is then embodied in chapter three by Paul working out his ministry while in prison. Paul working out his ministry while in prison. So he occupies this unbelievably privileged position while also occupying a socially shameful one. And that's by design. If you are the emissary of a cross-shaped Messiah, your life has to look cross-shaped. So something wrong if you are a representative of a cross-shaped Messiah and your life looks like power and prestige and privilege. Something's off there. That's Paul's whole thing in 2 Corinthians with the super apostles. So, over the last 10 or so years teaching people in ministry or headed for ministry, just talking about cruciformity and how that works out in ministry in a seminary classroom,

this book started to take shape. And so what I do is I compare Paul's pre-conversion ministry mode with his post-conversion ministry mode, because Paul would have seen himself before his conversion as ministering on behalf of the one true God. And what he was trying to do was to accomplish God's purposes, bringing about resurrection life on earth for Israel through coercion, through power, through the cultivation of a social persona marked by prestige and accomplishment and impressive credentials, like he talks about in Philippians 3. He talks about actual violence and verbal violence. He talks in Galatians 1 about how he was advancing beyond his contemporaries in zeal. And so it's like, I think there's a lot of fruitful material there, uh, for reflecting on ministry dynamics, you know, characterized by, um, all, all of the realities

that we find in the present evil age, um, you know, power, prestige, uh, self-advancement, self-protection, um, you knowprotection, platform building, credential accumulation. I mean, yeah, there's all kinds of ways in which American ideologies have overtaken and swallowed up and reconfigured pastoral ministry. And, I mean, companies selling products and conferences will advertise in ways that exploit ministers' insecurities. You know, I mean, being in pastoral ministry is so difficult. It is so difficult, filled know, this is going to basically make you feel really equipped to handle all the ministry pressures you're going to be facing, all that kind of stuff. And you can prey on pastoral anxieties all day long and make a lot

of money, which people are doing. Anyway, I talk about Paul's pre-conversion ministry mode and then his – I sort of imagine – people have done this over the generations. Stan Porter wrote a book on this, which I don't know if anybody else could have gotten a whole book out of it. But just the question, did Paul ever meet Jesus during his earthly ministry? And if you imagine that Paul knew anything about Jesus, certainly when Jesus died, his opinion about Jesus was that he was a sinner and that God had cursed him because he's hung on a tree. And so Paul goes about serving the God of Israel by trying to stamp out the Jesus movement because the more the Jesus movement grows, the greater the number of sinners in Israel and the less likely the God of Israel is going to redeem Israel or rescue them

from the repression. And so, Jesus is the sinner and everybody attached to him are sinners. So when he sees Jesus exalted to the right hand of the heavenly throne and resurrected and exalted and vindicated by God, it's hard to even imagine the revolutions that would have – that Paul would have gone through in his mind. Like this person is a cursed sinner and God has vindicated him. And resurrection has actually happened to this one person, whereas I thought it was going to work out nationwide with Israel and creation-wide. So if God vindicates and pours out resurrection on this person whose life was shaped by the cross, that has to radically reshape Paul's ministry style. His ministry has to be shaped by the cross, and he has to himself become a sinner. Not to go out and start sinning, but that's his self-identity now. I am the one who's far from God. I'm the one who's an outsider and God has welcomed me. So that changes the way

that you minister. You're not the one who has all the and God has welcomed me. So that changes the way that you minister. You're not the one who has all the answers or all the power or all the, you know, you're not the one that has God and you dole him out. You are standing alongside others as we are all together welcomed by God in Christ. It's fascinating. We often think of like Paul's conversion. And I think that in Paulul's circles that's debated whether that's even the right language you know um but we often think like he's this like like when we when we say conversion it's like yeah my neighbor was a pagan and was an atheist and he got converted to jesus and now he's religious you know and and yeah so when we talk about paul's conversion we

almost have that kind of way of thinking, but it's almost like he's, you can almost put him in the context of like a believer who like meets Jesus and realizes his whole religious worldview was wrong. Yeah, totally. It'd be like an evangelical meeting Jesus and then Jesus saying, wait, you think my Bible, you think the Bible's inerrant? You think I'm God, like Trinity? What the heck? It would almost be like, what, what, my whole religious existence was wrong. My religious existence, not my pagan existence or something.

Yeah, it's not all about power. It's not all about the culture war. It's not all about pulling the levers of the Republican Party. It's not about that at all. Yeah, for sure. It only took you 40 minutes to get there, Tim, but I'm glad you did. This is it. I mean, this is the evangelicalism that I was raised in, that we've got to fight for America, fight the culture wars. We've got to win.

We've got to keep Senate Bay and all that kind of stuff. I think that there can hardly be a more exact representation of Paul's way of thinking as a Pharisee, as a pre-converted Pharisee. He never stops being a Pharisee. But I like that term conversion in the way like Richard Hayes uses it, a conversion of the imagination. Oh, right. So it's like this, a complete revolution of thought and a whole new way of seeing and a whole new way of understanding myself and my place in God's world and my place among God's people. So Paul, after his conversion, it's complete. His ministry is shaped by humility,

So Paul, after his conversion, his ministry is shaped by humility, shaped by self-giving love, shaped by he reconsiders his mission of credential accumulation in Philippians 3 and sees that as crap and wants to now cultivate a mode of life characterized by identity with Christ's sufferings, identification with his sufferings, and to be like him in his death. So instead of looking like a well-polished public speaker, he wants to look as much like a rotting corpse on a tree as possible. That's his aim now. So, I mean, if you start thinking about all of these passages and about Galatians 4, where he is,

passages and about, you know, Galatians 4, where he is, he's probably arrived in Galatia, you know, in his first visit there. He says that, you know, my appearance put you to the test. So he probably was just beaten up before his arrival there and probably had like, you know, looked horrible. So it's like, this is his ministry mode. And how does all of that challenge our well-polished, evangelical, American, celebrified way of doing all of this? meditate on that. And admittedly, it's like, I need to say this, the book is written from the perspective of a white man. Because evangelical Christianity and American Christianity has centered white men. And so the way that we need to be shaped by the cross, I think, is to see ourself as de-centered and so that we can then come alongside of all the people that have been on the margins the whole time. Because the word of the cross, in my opinion, to women, to people of color, the word of the cross is not going to be necessarily a word of self-sacrifice or giving up privilege because they've had privileges taken away for generations or for a long time.

And so the word of the cross, I think, in many ways is an invitation to the center so that all of us are meeting as siblings and co-citizens and partners, and there are no hierarchies. So anyway, I realize that the book is written from that perspective. Of course, I wrote it. I'm an unapologetic white man. As you look around at evangelicalism, and I mean, gosh, you study this from a textual standpoint. You've experienced it from being in evangelicalism for 30 plus years, different spaces and churches and institutions. And are you, like, when you look at the state of evangelicalism now, do you see it as like

moving in a good direction or a bad direction? And I don't even know how to answer that myself because I see, like everything you're saying, I hear more and more people saying the same thing. So I'm like, oh, that's hopeful. And yet we still keep seeing just stuff happening. And it's like, well, is it worse? Is it better? Has it always been like that?

Now we have social media, so now we know everybody's little whatever issue went down. I don't know. It's hard to – do you have any thoughts on that? Are you hopeful? Yeah, I do. No, not at all. 100% no. You're not hopeful? No. No. the gospel of mark cured me of that um uh so especially in in um jesus's

conversation with peter like peter um when jesus says who do you say that I am? You are the Christ, you know, good evangelical. I have you in my heart. You're the Christ, son of the living God. Good job, Peter. Here's where this goes. I'm going to Jerusalem to die, going to the nation's capital to die. We're not going there to put somebody else on a cross, like on January 6th, we want to, you know, hang Mike Pence or whoever. cross, like on January 6th, we want to hang Mike Pence or whoever. It's like, no, we're going to die. That's how God accomplishes his victory. And Peter rebukes him. And then Jesus says, if anybody is ashamed of me and my words, like my identity as headed to the cross and my words about we are all going to the cross to die. If anybody is ashamed of that and wants a different agenda, an agenda of power or an agenda of prestige or an agenda of influence or impact or whatever, then my heavenly father will not own you on that future day. And so to my mind, evangelicalism is a movement all oriented around power and prestige and money

and influence and impact and wanting to have cultural influence and is not oriented on service and self-giving love. And I think that that works itself out on so many levels. And to my mind, I think it is an apostate ideology and it's apostate movement. And I have always wondered, where did it go wrong? So 25 years ago, this got me into just reading everything I get my hands on on evangelical history. And it's like, back in the teens and 20s, it's worth going to read Matthew Avery Sutton's book, American Apocalypse, which I think has now replaced George Marsden's fundamentalism in American culture as sort of the go-to history of evangelicalism. What's it called? American Apocalypse. And he talks about – he looks at American evangelicalism through the lens of kind of prophecy, futurism.

And he's got chapters in there about – evangelicalism wasn't anything before the beginning of the 20th century. And in the first couple of decades, all these denominational leaders got together and were starting to build platforms and doing prophecy conferences together and that sort of thing. And then they started building these social networks and what eventually became evangelicalism. And they're building these networks and organizations and black denominational leaders asked to join. And they were told, no, like, do your own thing. You're not part of this at all. Over the next decade or two, there were debates among these denominational or among these new evangelical leaders, there were debates about whether to, you know, to build cultural influence, whether to include the KKK in these developing networks. Now, they ended up saying no,

but it's like there was no debate about including black churches and black denominations. That was clear. But there was debate about including the KKK. This is 100 years ago, so this is still during segregation. This is in the teens and 20s. Okay. So it's like, just from our lens of thinking about Paul and thinking about what Paul says to Peter in Galatians 2, about Peter wanting to segregate himself from Gentile Christians in Antioch.

And Paul says, I confronted him to his face because he stood condemned. So Peter is standing in the place of condemnation because of his segregation of a Christian community. He later says that he, even Barnabas, was led astray. I mean, talk about Old Testament apostasy language. He was led astray into hypocrisy. And shoot, there's one other phrase that's used. This is all judgment language. it's like evangelical culture was created from the beginning to be a white culture and a non-black culture. So like over the decades, it's purposefully been woven and created and cultivated as an all white middle-class culture. So when we ask questions now about why do evangelical institutions face such difficulty like integrating or, you know, with diversity initiatives? Well, it's because the rules that we don't talk about, and we sort of have been buried, but are very real, the structure was purposefully white. And the reason

I'm saying all that is to say, if it's the case that for Paul in his letters, pretty much every letter is oriented around the importance of unity and how it is like, say, 1 Corinthians 3, 16 and 17, that the church is the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit. And if anybody destroys the church, God will destroy that person. Like, disunity and division for Paul are not like unfortunate. They're damnable. So you have a movement built on something damnable. And yes, you've got a ton of Jesus in there, but like, that's the very character of like syncretism in the Old Testament, idolatry. So it's like, okay, go back to the 10s and 20s. The roots of it are rotten. But then go back to Protestantism in America. It's like Protestantism and Christianity in America were not participating, like Jamar Tisby's book, they weren't complicit in racism. They were the drivers of African slavery. And I mean, it's like, so

do I have hope for evangelicalism or whatever? As a culture, to me, it's apostate. I hope that as many evangelicals as possible can sort of open their eyes to these sorts of things and see that being Christian is not having the right mental arrangements. It's not having the right mental furniture. It's about cultivating lives and communities of service and hospitality and looking out for the marginalized and fostering communities that look utterly different from the world and characterized by unity and love and mutual rejoicing and you know lamenting with those who are lamenting but yeah no and i'm with you on all that i it's hard it's hard to measure like are we progressing or regressing because i even you know even something like um divided by faith that book that came out in 2000 whatever yeah i forgot the

statistics something like i mean don't fact check me on this but something like 92 percent of churches something like that would have more than 80 percent of one dominating ethnicity you know so so multi-ethnic churches were just not happening um but since then i think it's's increased like doubled or something. I think there's like now like twice the number of multi-ethnic churches. Now, is it integration? Is it assimilation? Is it multi-ethnic groups being assimilated into a white dominated culture or is it genuine integration? Do you have people of color leading, not just following? And so there's more intricate questions that need to be had. But it does, I don't know, it seems that I do see positive movement in that direction. It does seem to me, and this is anecdotal, but like a much more profound awareness of a thing called white evangelicalism and how that can be problematic. Like, whereas 20 years ago when no one even, I don't know,

like we didn't even have the conversation. So I don't know, like it could a case be made that things are progressing in, or even like the, the popular, I mean, the popularity of the rise and fall of Mars Hill, you know, where so many people are like,

that's that kind of model is wrong like this is problematic let's let's not do this again and it's still happening obviously probably maybe that's power and platform might still be the majority but it's i don't know is it wrong to say like there is a greater awareness and at least a desire to kind of change that or i think i'm just thinking out loud anecdotally yeah i don't know change that? I don't know. I'm just thinking out loud anecdotally. I don't know. Maybe it's – I don't know.

The questions I have when it comes to all that are like if you say something like, isn't it changing for us or aren't we changing? Aren't we getting better? I always think about who's the we? If I'm part of an evangelical church here, which so many of them are non-denominational, what do I have in common with some evangelical church in Wisconsin? I mean, are we part of the same thing? What unites us?

The fact that at the church we get the same catalogs for, you know, evangelical products? Like, it's really evangelicalism. Kristen Dume makes this point in her book, which I thought was brilliant. It's a marketing demographic is all it is. There's nothing else that unites it except a bunch of friendships of leaders that have kind of shared platforms and constituencies so that they can have mail sent out and solicitations for money. You wouldn't have common belief as some kind of glue that holds the thing together? I'm not sure what that is really. Like, so what is evangelical theology? Like ever since when evangelicalism started to coalesce, and this is what all the leaders of Fuller were

writing books about, what is evangelicalism? What is evangelical theology? And is it everybody who believes in inerrancy? And so once that was kind of settled down in the 70s and 80s, they had conferences that argued about what that even meant for 10 years. movement that has detached itself from historic Christianity and historic orthodoxy and has kind of united itself around something cerebral and not something practical, not a way of life characterized by service. And I think that evangelicalism needs to be that way. It needs to be cerebral and intellectual so that it overlooks and does not notice its social injustices. I mean, that's what the kingdom of God is all about in the Gospels. You've got people that disagree.

I mean, Jesus builds a team of disciples of people who ideologically don't see anything the same way. team of disciples of people who ideologically don't see anything the same way. Um, but they, he builds a way of life characterized by service and welcome, you know, to the least of these that, that they're supposed to share in. So, um, that's one of my questions is what actually unites evangelicals and, and does it matter? Um, but then also i feel like yeah i think there are a lot of people that are seeing that there's a lot wrong yeah so you know it's like that that's good it's like hey hey y'all there are idols we're in this these temples that are laced with idols and it's like well i mean you know half the people want to fight to not do anything about it and half the people are like oh let's do something about it so it's So I feel like that's kind of where we're stuck

is like the syncretistic way of life. Yeah. I think I will always have a very skewed anecdotal perspective on whatever this thing of evangelicalism is because I travel a lot, speak at a lot of churches and stuff, but that's confirmation. The people that are inviting me in hear me talk like this.

So I'm experiencing churches that are – they may be big churches, small churches, whatever. But they're super humble leaders. They're hyper generous. They're serving the poor. That's great. They're built into the mission the church is reaching to marginalize and stuff but that's so i could have a jaded perspective that like oh wow this is like the bulk of evangelicalism but people remind me like well you're you have a very small niche or niche that isn't the norm um because by definition if

they're inviting you in then they're probably wanting something a little bit not that. I don't know. Yeah, totally. I was just at a couple huge, well, yeah, pretty big mega churches that were charismatic. And of course, they kick in worship service. But man, talking to all the leaders, I mean, these are just some of the most humble,

Christ-like, servant, people-oriented, doing amazing. This one church was doing more in the community than all the NGOs combined in terms of caring for the poor and reaching out to the marginalized. Yeah, that's fantastic. Even during the BLM riots and stuff, they were stepping in in really great, great ways. Sorry, BLM protests. I know saying riots is – whatever. I don't want to touch on it. But yeah, I mean during the last couple of years with all the upheaval, they just created great space. Anyway, so it's hard because there's – I wonder.

There's exceptions to the norm. I think there are. I typically experience the exceptions. And so my viewpoint sometimes can be clouded. And I don't know if I've ever experienced – like I get emails almost every day from people that experience like serious spiritual abuse. And they would describe like their pastoral leadership or whatever. I'm like i literally have never

firsthand experienced that and i people tell me like how their pastor acts or whatever what happened and they're like i'm like that that's so sorry like that's i've been spared from a lot of that or i've been ignorant to it maybe it has maybe i'm just too busy reading books and I don't see what's going on. Oh yeah. Well, I would, I wonder because I, um, I know some churches locally that have a real desire to have a different way of, of being. Yeah. And, um, I've, um, talked with their staffs, talked with their pastors. I mean, it's really exciting, you know, for me. It's like, I go visit, we do, um, do like maybe two Sundays, you know, pop back out. It's not my church, but I, I'm at part of a different church. Um, but I, my questions are, all right,

what does it look like? What does that actually look like if I were there for two years? What, what I, and, and how are they actually doing consistently? And then what's their reputation among other churches in town? Are they partners? Are they paternalistic? I don't know. I mean, I'm not trying to intentionally be cynical. I just think it's easy to sort of pop in different places and see the passion. They want to know. Yeah. But do, I don't know, sometimes I wonder if America has robbed us of the perseverance to actually

think we want to do this. And what we're thinking is a 60 year project. Like we're thinking a multi-generation involvement in the city. You know what I mean? What does that look like? Man. Instead of like, we're just going to. Well, I also think, you know, the so-called,

what Dan White Jr. calls the church industrial complex, you know. Yeah. Even some well-intentioned churches and leaders could still just have this system that, I don't want to say prevents, but stifles real radical power weakness kind of change to where there still is this system of churchness that, man, you got a sermon to prepare, you got weddings to do, you got meetings all day long and all week long, and you have to make budget, which means you got a sermon to prepare. You got weddings to do. You got meetings all day long and all week long. And you have to make budget, which means you got to figure out.

You just five wealthy families just left. And there's just a system that. Those three or four big givers want your time. And they don't want you to talk about this one issue. Right, right. So you know that if you talk about that one issue, you know that giving is going to go down. I mean, all this stuff comes into play. It's really hard.

Yeah, yeah. But I feel like, yeah, there are isolated incidences around this country where people are being genuinely church completely, completely, totally. But when I think about what evangelicalism is as a culture, I think as a culture, it's an apostate culture. But this or that church can be a faithful body of people. Like as an ideology, as sort of a translocal way of being, it's actually been created by marketers and by people wanting to sell something and to increase in their social power. That was the goal from the beginning in the 10s and 20s. So it's like all of those are anti-cross. That's just not how it works. So if you're going to actually be a faithful community,

I think you have to sort of recognize the ideologies and idolatries inherent in evangelicalism and leave those behind to be truly Christian. Which could – can you name – I mean you kind of touched on – so platform building, power control, I mean money. Or can you get really concrete on what are some of the – what are the pillars of an – what are the pillars of the evangelical apostate culture, in your opinion? The evangelical industrial complex? Well, I think, first of all, it would be whiteness, I would say, because that was intentional from the beginning. And all that goes along with whiteness. I do want to, because I know that is a controversial way of naming a concept. I don't think the concept is controversial. It is what it is, but maybe... Like what is it?

Yeah, it is calling that whiteness helpful. I often think of... I think we all know what that is like whiteness and white evangelicalism but then when somebody is an individual who's not white who's part of that is what does that leave them rather than an independent an independent thinker of with individual agency now they're like well they're not really a person of color or they're like, well, they're not really a person of color or they're actually – then we start down a weird road of paternalism. The way I think about it, I think it's really important to name. And what I mean is just the lens that was sort of – that kind of came over the world as Willie Jennings tells the story in the Christian imagination like like in the, you know, 14th century, uh, with the colonial project where, uh, over the next several hundred years, the European male was seen as the center of civilization, the highest point of civilization.

And everybody with darker skin progressively down to people who were black Africans, was increasingly less than in value to the white European. So that way of seeing and that ideology and its social practices and the arrangement of things in places and cities and towns, that's a whole reality that has to be named. Sure. Not that white people are wrong or whatever. Um, but, uh, and this is where the powers and authorities are very helpful. Yeah. Uh, there's, there's been a, there's been a structural reality that we have inherited. No one currently living like voted for it. Like it's, it's not our fault. Like we chose it. It's like, it's been given to us and our lives have been situated according to it. So it's like – and that has an ideological structural component to it.

That hasn't been dismantled? Because like what was going on 100 years ago? Like with people saying, no, black people, you're not invited. KKK, let's talk about – there's not a single listener on the podcast that's like oh yeah that's awesome like you know like nobody today sure 99 of people today would think that's appalling um right and that's that's the ball that's always a pushback but i what i hear you and i had willie on last month and you know we talked about this and it but well i don't want to put your words in your mouth but here's what i hear you saying let Let me get your feedback. That it's so built into the system and that system hasn't been completely dismantled to where even if individuals wouldn't agree with that 100 years ago, they'd be appalled. There's still stuff in the system that is hard to recognize and it needs to be completely dismantled.

Yeah. It's hard for white people to recognize. Yeah. I'm serious. We don't see it. Totally. It doesn't, we kind of go with the flow of it. But people who are other, they feel it and they sense it and they know it. hundred years of evangelicalism being white, the way that evangelicals did theology was completely intellectual and cognitive and abstract, completely. So that, and here's how we've ended up with churches that abuse. We can have churches, I mean, think about how evangelical it is to say this. Yes, fill in the blank here. Ex-popular white male figure is a jerk, uses denunciatory language that would be unchristlike, has abusive patterns of leadership, is pugilistic in ways that violate everything Paulul says in the pastorals but he's got solid

theology so it's like yeah do you know what i'm saying like that the way that evangelical theology has been done over the last hundred years has been entirely divorced from social practice of of love and justice and kindness and you and truth speaking and generosity. So that is a result of whiteness. People had to cultivate a theology coming out of slavery. You had to have a theology that allowed you to be Orthodox and faithfully Christian and be freed to not love your neighbor. You can enslave your neighbor and still be a faithful Christian. So you had to, Americans had to come up with a theology that allowed for that. And that theology has kind of come home to roost in evangelical, the evangelical ideological structure. Yeah. Is that, I guess my, and it is a genuine question, like, do white evangelical men have the

corner market on abusing power? And here's, I don't know, like I, and not that that's not a common human problem, but maybe it's just built into the white evangelical system more than, is it? I mean, I don't know. I would have to ask my dozen or so black brothers and sisters and say, do black dominating churches black dominant churches not struggle with this nearly as much as white churches the the quest for a platform for power for not serving the lowly whoever that is social hierarchy and all these things um i don't know yeah in many ways i'm not the one to even answer that i don't know it Yeah, in many ways. I'm not the one to even answer that. I don't know. Well, competition, destructive competition and the desire to have ascendancy over others and all of that, that's a human problem. It's just that in evangelical culture, who are all the power players?

Who are the presidents of institutions? Who are the megachurch pastors? church pastors. The whole culture has been created for the last hundred years to center white men and for them to sort of gravitate toward power. So that didn't say conservative evangelical churches, or look at conservative evangelical seminaries and colleges. Who make up the faculty? Who make up the administration? Who make up the leadership in parachurch organizations? Who tends to make up the leadership and who are the the power players and so my big question though is why because we went we've been on the other side of hiring and i'll never forget like being at cedarville and wanted to hire somebody where we're looking around and we're basically

all white and we're like right can we please and this is conservative white evangelical we were like yeah can we please hire somebody of color and i feel like that would have been if there was an equal person that could assign the doctoral statement have the degree and everything if there was a person of color and a white person i feel like we would have gone with the person of color even if they're both equal or is that me being totally naive i just yes, in this sense. So here are the questions at a school where, um, there were 20 Bible faculty and they were all white men except for one woman. Yeah. Um, what people of color want to apply to be at that school? That's one question at a school where there are 3000 undergraduate students and there are nine students of color, is that space in which people of color feel comfortable?

Do they want to be there? And then also, think about the reasons that we gave. Why we don't get any applicants from people of color. Okay, let's look at our doctrinal statements. Right, right. Yeah, yeah. okay let's look at our doctrinal statements right right yeah yeah and um compare that to the doctrinal statement of most uh historic black churches that have an ethos because they were sort of excluded from evangelicalism white evangelicals tend to look at black christians who are orthodox as non-evangelicals even even though they have an ethos and a way of being

Christian that is thoroughly resonant with evangelicalism. But they vote a Democrat. Or something. Okay. So-and-so votes Democrat. But that's not... That's a low blow. That's not a... No one would not get hired on paper. That would come up, though.

Something like that would come up. So how would you... Hold on. This is really important. Look at come up, though. Something like that would come up. So how would you... Hold on. This is really important. Look at the doctrinal statement. What is not in doctrinal statements of historic black churches if they have doctrinal statements? Because it's important for white evangelicals to have doctrinal

statements because we want to split off and form our own little thing. But what we find in our doctrinal statements is inerrancy because we fight over the cognitive. We don't get passionate over practice. We get in fights over cognition. And we have rapture because we got to get out of here.

When things get bad and black people start coming into our neighborhoods, we got to get the hell out of here. Jesus, get us the hell off this planet. Whole neighborhood's going to hell. Do you know what I'm saying? Yeah, no, I get it. I mean, all of that, that theology is a theology of the white middle class. So you're saying that –

That's why you don't find that theology in historic black churches. So we had a difficulty hiring anybody because that's just not black theology in America, which is oriented around liberation and love and service and community building. And justice. There's no... Just... There's very... In our doctrinal statement, here are non-negotiables. There's nothing or little to nothing about justice. You mentioned justice. That's suspicious for white evangelicals. So you're saying that if you go back to the roots of that doctrinal statement, that era was more closely tied to the 100 years ago foundation where it was more explicitly forming a white movement. And so the original theological foundation is much more closely linked to that. foundation is much more closely linked to that. Yes, that was the cultural birth of it,

and the theology flowed from it. The theology basically reinforced it. Theology and culture go together. They're mutually reinforcing. So yeah, you cannot have a place for justice. Why? Because we don't want that. We don't want to talk about all that. Whereas black churches want to talk about the systems of injustice that affect their communities. So I'm just saying that these are some of the elements of whiteness. Right. It's a way – it's not a person. It's a corporate – it's from the powers and authorities. It's an ideology that has affected us all. It's the way we see the world.

There are definite differences between how evangelical theology is done and how black theology is done. And we faced this in the seminary. We faced it at a place like Cedarville where we taught, where theology was categories. Theology was here are the facts. Here are all the facts because this is all cognition. Whereas that's simply not how black theology is done. I remember reading James Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree. It's a profound, profound book.

And yeah, it's just, for lack of a better, I mean, it's just a different, like that, those categories and just the way of going about doing theology, it's just, it's methodologically different and yet it's still very sound theology. Well, some people don't, you know, I thought it was brilliant.

Yeah. Well, those are the questions. What is sound theology? What is sound theology? I mean, yeah, they're like, you know, going back to the black theology done 100 years ago was inseparable from lynchings in the South because that was a...

Totally. It was such a visible replication of the cross of Christ. That's right. And it was hard to even read the Gospels without thinking of lynchings, whereas that category, obviously, we don't even – what's a lynching? We don't have – that's not a category, a symbol that we are latching onto as kind of a source of theological reflection. Yeah. as kind of a source of theological reflection. Yeah.

But see, this is, so anyway, back to the question about evangelicals needing to awaken to whiteness, we just haven't examined it. We just haven't, we haven't listened well enough to black Christians and to just to black people, to anybody who's non-white, to see who we are. Like our racialized culture has raced white people. And so the question is like, well, how has it?

Like what has it done to us? Dante Stewart's brand new book is amazing along this line. He mentions MacArthur and Piper. He's a young black man, beautiful writer, who was raised in a black Pentecostal tradition in South Carolina, I believe. Went to Clemson University to play football. When he was there, he got gravitated into a white evangelical fellowship. He and his wife, after they graduated, went to a white evangelical church and learned white theology and all that kind of stuff and um

was was stunned when he started to see videos of you know over the last seven years or 10 years or so you know with the advent of smartphones everybody's watching these videos of young black men being gunned down and he's traumatized and he goes into his white church and nobody even says a word about it yeah yeah and it's like like what i mean the dissonance and so he he um had a revolution in his thinking where he went back and rediscovered um his own love for his own Christian tradition and how he had come to sort of how, how whiteness had worked on him. It made him despise his own upbringing. Like black Pentecostals, like the, like the church I grew up in, um,

don't do serious theology. John Piper does serious theology. John MacArthur does serious theology. So he wants to read all this stuff. Um, and he feels good learning it and he feels good getting the accolades that he's being accepted in this culture. But he realized he's actually, he wasn't, he wasn't, he didn't belong there because what broke his heart and traumatized him didn't break their hearts and traumatize them. So I mean, so just take that. All right, let's pull that apart. What's beneath that? Why is that the case? And that's Willie Jennings' question at the beginning of Christian imagination. How come we don't know each other? How come we don't belong to each other? There's something

wrong with it. Well, stuff was done way back that created this situation. What is that? I think that would be... That's a conversation we need to have it's been 402 years since we have not had that conversation the current culture has been created over 402 years and so this needs to be a long conversation that we need to have

I am still more hopeful because it seems like more than ever there are people talking about this and at least in my world this is not again this is my confirmation bias Because it seems like more than ever, there are people talking about this. And at least in my world, this is not this. Again, this is my confirmation bias, probably a little niche. But in my world, it's a lot of white Christians clamoring to read Tisby and have this discussion and be the bridge. and Be the Bridge and even the amount of people that read Kendi and even D'Angelo and others. And again, right now it's maybe a lot of rethinking

and that's obviously not nearly enough, but it's a beginning. It's good. Yeah, it's good that we want to have this conversation. Yeah, totally. Um, it's good. Yeah. It's good that we want to have this conversation. Yeah, totally. Yeah. Um, I'm, I'm always wondering, um, I mean, as a, as a very emotional, you know, 50 year old white man, I'm like, yeah, this is great. Love this. I love that. I love getting at it. I always want to know what, what, when black women listen in on these conversations, what do they think? Yeah.

What, you know, what is their reaction? Yeah. Um, because they've been, um, you know, black people in America have been sold promises for a long time, especially by interested white people. Yeah. And, and have been, have been sort of, um, uh, disappointed to say the least. So so it's like who who gets to say what's promising yeah yeah no that's good i'm not trying to be a persistent downer i would just rather i i you know what mark's gospel has just messed up my head too much it's just like no but that's just obliterating everything that would be a good i said that

even that's a very white thing to say, what I said. We're having a discussion. There's books being sold. Yeah. This is great. There's still – in my town, tremendous economic growth, big white churches, some of them really interested in talking about race until you show up and talk about race. But this is really exciting and promising. And Grand Rapids, you know this well, is a beautiful town, great place to live, great restaurants, breweries, et cetera.

And so I look out on the church scene. I'm like, yeah, there's people that are really getting it. You know, Grand Rapids, Michigan is still one of the most difficult cities to live in for black families. And one of the cities in the country that has one of the most persistent problems of black childhood hunger. Wow. So it's like there are a lot of white churches really pumped. But it's like, how is that changing those structural realities and those realities on the ground for hungry children? There's more white money in that city than any other white Christian money in Grand Rapids.

Oh, totally. Anywhere else. Yeah. And so get back to it. What are the elements of evangelical culture that are problematic? Money, power, influence, prestige. And it's like I think we want to share platforms, but do we want to share power? We want to share our pulpits, but do we want to share power?

And that's where things get a little bit dicey and and will we sacrifice our social standing and our power to advocate say citywide yeah um for for for concrete justice those are i think that's where all this comes down and i'm saying this because i'm i'm trying to figure it out i'm trying to how do i be involved you know because it's like i can teach this in the classroom and get excited but then the questions come back to me well what does this look like hey man i gotta go um dude it's been so fun it's always so funny to keep this is yeah it's so good and the fact that you are white saying all this i think is more almost more helpful um you know i'm just at square i feel like i'm at square one. Yeah.

No, we all are. I mean, it's... Trying to learn. Yeah, yeah. Your book, Power and Weakness, Paul's Transformed Vision for Ministry is available where books are sold.

People often... Sometimes I'll get emails, hey, where can I buy your book? Like... How do you live in the modern world? Where can you buy my book in google punch in amazon um yeah so check out the book and also you mentioned you mentioned your commentary on mark um the story of god commentary on mark uh dude this commentary i didn't realize 600 plus pages

this is a beast yeah it was really big print most of it was in crayon no it yeah it was um yeah well it took me a long time yeah about four years that's the deadline but um yeah it was a blast that was that really just rocked me tremendously and i hope to try to represent some of mark's challenging content yeah uh because it really is it's unsettling so good tim love you bro um wish you man always a good time wish you could hang out more than once a year when i'm out in grand rapids but uh next time i'm out there let's grab another pint and shoot the breeze cool man it'd be awesome all right take care Thank you.