Theology in the Raw - S9 Ep932: The Church, Intellectual Honesty, Nonviolence, and Rene Girard: Jeremy Duncan

Episode Date: December 30, 2021

Jeremy is the founding pastor of Commons Church in Calgary, BC--a rather unique church that prioritizes intellectual honesty and the centrality of Jesus above tight-knit doctrinal statements. I found Jeremy on Twitter and was fascinated by his ecclesiology, so I invited him to come talk about it on the show. We ended up talking quite a bit about belonging, sexual ethics, polyamory, LGBTQ inclusion, and how the philosophy/theology of Rene Girard informs and shapes much of the ecclesiological vision of Commons.  Find out more about Jeremy here: https://www.jeremyduncan.ca Learn more about Commons Church here: https://www.commons.church 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'd like to support the show, you can go to patreon.com forward slash theology in the raw, or you can leave a review on your favorite podcast application, or you can share, spread the word about Theology in the Raw. That would be super helpful as well. Also, please sign up if you're wanting to attend the Theology in the Raw Exiles in Babylon conference, March 31st to April 2nd. Space is filling up. It's less than goodness, almost, well, just about three months away. So if you want to attend the conference live, then sign up sooner than later at PrestonSprinkle.com.

You can also attend the conference virtually, in which case you don't need to sign up soon because there's no limit on how many people can view it online. So all the info is at PrestonSprinkle.com. My guest today is Pastor Jeremy Duncan, who is the founding pastor and lead pastor of the Commons Church in Calgary, BC. And yeah, I met Jeremy just briefly on Twitter. Somebody reached out to me and said, hey, whenever I hear you talk about church, you describe a kind of church that sounds kind of like Jeremy Duncan's church that he pastors at. So I looked it up and said, hey, let's have a conversation. And that's what led to this podcast. So I had no agenda, no prior

knowledge of Jeremy before this conversation. So it was just kind of a free-flowing, raw conversation. And it was super fascinating. So please welcome to the show, the one and only pastor, Jeremy Duncan. All right. Hey, friends, I'm here with a pastor and future author. Well, you're a blogger already, but you're writing a book, if I can mention that. Jeremy Duncan. Jeremy, thanks so much for being on Theology to Raw. No worries. Thanks for having me here. So this is a really, I guess, a super raw conversation because somebody who listens to my podcast, and from time to time, I talk about church and church structure, and do we really need to do things this way? What if we did it this way? Just

kind of exploring maybe different ways of doing church that would foster discipleship maybe more effectively. And somebody said, well, you should talk to Jeremy because he's kind of doing a lot of the stuff that sounds like you would like to see done. So that's the entirety of the background of this conversation. So why don't you just start? Give us a little background of who you are. And then we'd love to hear about your kind of ecclesiological formation. Like what has gone into your idea of what church is and then maybe what led to the church that you're currently pastoring at.

Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, pack the whole story in here quickly here. So my name's Jeremy. I'm in Calgary right now in Canada. That's on sort of the west side of the country. I grew up on the other side of the country near Toronto. And probably like a lot of Canadians, I was sort of, you know, nominally Christian, our family. We didn't really go to church particularly regularly as a kid, but, you know, Christmas, Easter, all that kind of stuff, pretty familiar with it. And then late in high school, I had a friend that invited me to church. I wasn't, we had been friends for a long time. I didn't know he was into church, but he invited me to his church. I went't, we had been friends for a long time. I didn't know he was into church, but he invited me to his church. I went to his youth group. I got really connected there.

Took a year off after high school and volunteered at the church and then was encouraged to do Bible college. So I did my undergrad. I got hired straight out of there at a church in Toronto, worked for a couple of years and it was good. Like it was a good, healthy community. Nothing really bad happened. But during that period, I just started to realize maybe this isn't really the gig that I want it to be. So there was some transition there, and I left ministry, started my own business. I did some web design and graphic design, that kind of stuff in Toronto there. And then this church in Calgary offered me a job, or at least the opportunity to

interview for one. And my wife and I at the time, we were living in Toronto. We didn't have any kids. I had a theology degree. And we thought, sure, let's give it a shot. Let's go to Calgary and try it out. Worst case scenario, we go to Calgary, we experience that side of the country for a year, and it doesn't work out. No big deal. So we went out, I ended up working there for 10 years. It was, in the Canadian context, it was a megachurch. It was one of the biggest churches in Canada at the time. But during my time there, we imploded. Lead pastor had some moral failings. And it was very much that sort of megachurch celebrity culture. And so when the lead pastor fell, that was the decline of a lot of things. I got thrown into a lot of roles that were above my

pay grade and experience level. I talked good. So I got thrown into the teaching pastor role in an interim basis for a few years in my late 20s. And I got to be the teaching pastor at a church that went from about 3,000 down to 1,000. And so that was my first experience with a lot of those things. But I stayed there for 10 years, built up a lot of good relationships and credibility. And then eventually when the time came that I wanted to plant a church, they had hired a new pastor and they were setting up for a new vision. The church was incredibly gracious to me in terms of helping me, you know, form my ideas and plant a new church. And so that's what I did at Commons. Planted Commons in 2014 with a, you know, a pretty solid group of about 40 people that came with me from the previous church.

At the time there, I was doing a lot of young adult stuff. So a lot of us were in our 20s. By 2014, I was in my 30s. You know, like young adults, Sunday night church was getting tough because we were all having kids and stuff. So that kind of group came and planted Commons. And then it just really took off. So within a year, we were at two services, two years, we went to three, then we went to four. Then we planted a second parish in another neighborhood. And things really grew until we hit COVID. And then everything, you know, went crazy again. And we're trying to figure out what church is going to look like after that. So that's sort of the story. But the things that

shaped Commons and the vision there came out of, I think, pastoring in a large mega church environment, learning a lot of the things that they were doing well, and then seeing a lot of how quickly that could all implode with one bad mistake and wanting to maybe guard against that or do some things differently in terms of structure and how we thought about church as well. So Commons is sort of this, I think it's kind of an interesting marriage of some of the brilliant, strategic and welcoming and ways that mega churches have learned how to, you know, create a space that's, you know, attractive to people people and yet at the same time push away from some of the structural implications, I think, of what that has looked like in my experience anyway.

Wow. So yeah, what are some key values that you did? And I would imagine, like you said, some of the values that went in were kind of both drawn from positive things you saw in the megachurch and also some things you saw lacking. So what are some key values that went in? Kind of the non-negotiables. Like here's what we're going to be about when you planted God. Right. So when I came out to Calgary, the first thing I started was also seminary.

So I did my master's. I did an MA in theological studies. So my roots are in the Pentecostal tradition. Okay. So again, here's another marriage that Pentecostal tradition. So again, here's another marriage, Pentecostal tradition. And then I went and did seminary and leaned more into academic stuff. My writing is about nonviolence and René Girard. And so I have this marriage of like a bit of Pentecostal, but a lot of academic work, which those don't always go together very well. And so

our first value of Commons has always been intellectually honest, which is about pulling those pieces together. We're in an urban environment. We're right in the core of Calgary. So most of our community is pretty highly educated. Calgary is already a young, educated city. And we're right in the middle of that. We're like two kilometers away from the University of Calgary, which has 40,000 students right near us. So that's a big one for us.

Our second one is spiritually passionate, which was like, okay, how do I hold that with the things that initially draw me into that Pentecostal experience and that encounter with spirit as well? So trying to keep that. And the third one was Jesus at the center. And for us, of course, every church wants Jesus at the center. I mean, we're all Christian church. I get it. But for us, that's specifically a particular lens on our theology that we're quite upfront with this idea that I love the Bible and I study the Bible. And my teaching is we tend to teach through books. We tend to be really grounded in that. But we're quite clear here that we don't worship the Bible. We worship Jesus. And Jesus is always the lens through which we're interpreting everything that we read and everything that we come to. So those are the three main things. It's intellectually honest, spiritually passionate, Jesus at the center. And we're always trying to keep that sort of in front of our community and inform that and really shape the community that way. Yeah. I would imagine most

churches or pastors or Christians listening would say, oh yeah, yeah, those are my values too, whatever. The first one though, intellectually honest, I would love to unpack that a bit more. What does that look like? And I guess maybe the pros and, like what would it look like for a church not to be intellectually honest? And in contrast, what does it look like in your experience and opinion for a church to actually be intellectually honest? This is the thing, right? Any values, mission statements, visions, any of these things that churches put together, they're always so interchangeable because we always say nice things. The question is, yeah, how do they get lived out? How do you enflesh them in some kind of shape of community and stuff? And that's the real trick of it. And then I appreciate, you know, your comment there because I don't want to, I don't want any of our values to be read as

a counterpoint to any other community. Like I'm not, I'm not trying to say other churches in the city aren't intellectually honest. Um, but I know what that means for me and I know what that means for our community. So one thing would be, you know, and again, everybody's going to have their, their different pieces when they come to this, but, um, one would be like, we're going to take the scriptures as, at least as we read them, on their terms. So I actually don't think things like inerrant and infallible and some of this language that is very modern language that we've applied to the scriptures is a particularly intellectually honest way to treat a book that came to us through community, gathering stories and holding them up against each other. And sometimes wanting contrasting ideas to sit in tension with each other. You know, I think of the book of Jonah and the book of Nahum, both being in the scriptures beside each other. One book saying God loves Assyrians and one book saying, you know, God hates Assyrians essentially, you know, and the community

feeling, oh, both of those say something important. We need to hold on to that together, right? So having the honesty to be able to sort of acknowledge the tensions of those things, having the honesty to acknowledge that a lot of the time, you know, when it comes to translation, first of all, I mean, I've done Greek through undergrad and graduate, but I don't speak the ancient form of Greek that these people were reading and speaking and talking to each other in. And the best scholars today will acknowledge that some things we just don't understand and we don't know. We have guesses about these things. So a lot of what it comes down to in intellectual honesty for us is being able to admit the limits of our capacity to really understand what's happening in the text and how we wrestle with that.

And how that doesn't need to challenge ultimately our faith in the text and how we wrestle with that and how that doesn't need to challenge ultimately our faith in the story of Jesus. But we need to hold it with a lot of humility, with open hands to be able to say, okay, we're struggling and we're wrestling right now. And then on the other side is how do we bring that into conversation with sort of our modern context, you know, where we have people you know, people in Calgary that are, you know, wrestling with all kinds of things. You know, in Canada, we have questions about, you know, assisted death, and we have questions about abortion, and we have questions about politics, and all of these questions that really have no direct comparison or parallel in the

scriptures. So how do we be honest about, okay, where are the scriptures pointing us, but how do we bring ourselves and the spirit and our wisdom and our wrestling to bear, you know, in these types of conversations today? And honestly, I mean, this is not a very satisfying answer, but intellectually honest for us comes down a lot of the time to admitting the limits of what we can say in absolute terms. We have this trust in Jesus. Jesus is Lord. That's the center of our faith.

A lot of the rest of it is pretty gray and pretty up in the air and pretty in flux as we continue to wrestle with each other about it. So that's a lot of what we mean there. And then if you ever listen to our sermons, which I'm not suggesting anybody bother doing, but they're going to tend to be pretty rooted in a lot of context, a lot of translation, a lot of the issues that are going on. So we speak at a fairly high level. And that's a reflection of the type of community that lives in the type of neighborhoods that we inhabit. But we're trying to speak at a level that is shaped by our community and by our audience. I would imagine you probably attract a decent number of seekers, maybe doubters, maybe de-churched or people that... Well, yeah. I mean, that kind of vibe that you're describing, for some, that's an acquired taste. And yet for others, it could be an oasis within a spiritual journey, a certain kind of spiritual journey. But I would imagine there's certain people that would have a really hard time with that kind of environment. Not just Enneagram 8s, but...

Which I am. Um, so not just Enneagram eights, but which I am. So yeah, I am. So, and so is Bobby. Who's also, she's our, one of our teaching pastors as well. She's also an Enneagram eight. So there's lots of excitement around here sometimes. That's interesting. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Um, okay. So what you're saying here, I think is an important part of how we've formed sort of an identity around Commons. One of the sort of predominant narrative that we hear from people is that we are, people are giving Christianity one last chance at Commons. So this sort of, you know, a conversation around deconstruction that's all over Twitter right now. I mean, all of a sudden, that's all over Twitter right now. I mean, all of a sudden that's the buzzword and stuff. That's the story that we've lived for seven years at Commons is people who are saying, I know that Jesus is important to me. I've grown up with this story. I want to hold onto it, but I can't do it the way that I've done it my whole life anymore.

Like it just doesn't feel real to me. And I don't want to the way that I've done it my whole life anymore. Like it just doesn't feel real to me. Um, and I don't want to let go of it completely, but I need somewhere where I can talk about these things openly and honestly. That's sort of the, the dominant narrative that we hear over and over again. We're sort of like the last stop for people before they give up on Christianity. And it's one more chance for them to talk openly about this. You know, one more chance for them to find a community that's, that's open to LGBTQ. One more chance for them to find a community that's open to LGBTQ. One more chance to find a community that loves Jesus and loves the Bible, but also doesn't elevate that over the lived experience of what it means to be a Christian in the world. And that, surprisingly, has connected with two groups.

It's that one that's on their way out, but willing to give it one more shot? And I think what we were surprised, we knew that was our audience. We knew that's who we wanted to reach. What we've been surprised by is the number of people who have essentially no Christian roots who have found this a compelling way for them to explore Christianity.

Because another story that we hear, probably not as dominant, but another that we hear, probably not as dominant, but another one we hear from people a lot is, I don't, I'm not a Christian. I don't necessarily believe in Christianity, but I want to know what Christians believe and why they believe it and how they've come to these beliefs. And what they found is they go to churches and they hear, I don't mean this disparagingly, but they hear a very sort of light or simple or motivational type of talk. And they're like, well, that's fine. But if I don't already believe that, that's not meaningful to me. Like I want to hear, give me some of the development of where Christians came from and how we got here.

I may or may not buy into that in the end. And maybe I'll, you know, I'll leave not agreeing with it or believing it, but at least I'll have learned something about Christianity. And so that's the other group that we've been a bit surprised by is those people who are coming in saying, okay, I'm not here to be a Christian, but I'm here to learn where Christianity comes from. And those people have ended up sort of sticking around and becoming part of community, sometimes making faith commitments, but not always. Sometimes just feeling like, oh, this is a good community for me to explore my own journey as a human being and add this part to the conversation. And we're quite comfortable with that. If I'm going to take a biblical metaphor here, Jesus talks about being born again.

We often think of being born again as like leaving one set of presuppositions behind and agreeing to another set. If I take him just at his word, and that is a metaphor, to me that means I've closed in a whole bunch of ideas. Born again is, okay, I'm open to the whole world again. So when you're born again, you haven't decided anything yet. You're just starting over again. Your eyes are open. You're willing to consider lots of things. And that's kind of something that I think we've done well with God's grace at Commons is creating a room for people to open their eyes all over again, consider something for the second time. Sometimes that may lead them to saying, okay, Jesus is Lord. I'm going to move down that direction. Sometimes it's just the crack that opens and who knows where that goes down the road. What are some unforeseen or maybe foreseen,

but just what are some challenges with having an ecclesiology the way you're describing it? Right. So one of the things is we don't have a statement of faith. If you go to our website, you know, if you look for beliefs or something like that, what you're going to get is the creeds, the Christian creeds, and I've seen creed, the apostles creed, those are the ones that we use predominantly. But our bias has always been, look, Christianity is you're being invited into a story, and that story has some boundaries to it. That story has a shape to it. Uh, the story has a shape to it. Uh, but if you come to the place where you say, okay, this story that historically has been the Christian story, um, that works for me, then that works for us. So we're not looking for a particular formulation

of atonement. We're not looking for a particular position on LGBTQ or the Bible or any of that. Um, and that can be like, you know, I think you use that language, like an oasis for people who are like, I want to try this again. That can also be very disconcerting for a lot of people who you have been in Christianity and have felt the safety of those sort of, like a bounded set idea of community. And so often, and we knew it was going to be that. I think what was unforeseen at times was because we talk a little different and our language is a little, you know, just unique.

And let's be honest here. Once Commons started growing and we started adding services and stuff, a crowd attracts a crowd. So people would come from other communities or something and they would check Commons out. And they would love it for months because it was unique and it was different and exciting. There's people around. And then we would have this thing where three months in or six months in, somebody would listen to a sermon and they would say, oh, you can't say that. Like, that's not Christianity. And then we would have to have a conversation about, oh, we've always been saying that. It's just, you know, this, we said it this way, this time, one day, and that

sort of twigged something for you and set you off. So we realized we had to do some work on the front end when people were coming into Commons to say, hey, look, we're glad to have you here. on the front end when people were coming into Commons to say, hey, look, we're glad to have you here. But there is, when we say intellectually honest, when we say Jesus at the center, this is what we mean by this and have sort of a conversation like we're having now. Because one, it was not fun to have these conversations with people six months in where they're like, oh, I don't believe that, or you can't say that. But also it wasn't fair to people either. Like, like they had invested six months of their life here and now they were realizing it wasn't quite what they thought it was. So, you know, we started a little thing that we would call, um, first steps and, you know, that, that helps people get up to speed. And we explain some of these things about

what we believe and, and what you're free to believe and what also you're not going to be able to impose on other people. Um, because that, that was sort of an unforeseen thing was Christians whose Christianity was working for them also being attracted to what we did and then being put at unease about it. And some of those people worked through it and stuck with us and some moved on to other places. But yeah, we wanted to find ways to front load a little bit of the tension for people. Yeah, because when there's not clarity up front, there can be confusion and more difficulty down the road, which is of better terms, fewer boundaries, fewer black and whites. Even if people that maybe have a more specific doctrinal viewpoint or whatever,

they're still welcome, right? But that's not going to be the kind of requirement for people to belong. Do you have like a formal membership or like what's the – Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Because I have – Yeah. So – Sorry. Well, i was just gonna yeah i traditionally it's called membership or you know member non-member i've tried to avoid

that language i like family guest i think it's closer to the biblical paradigm where you have you know the the the christian family people who are brothers and sisters in jesus right and even that can be a very diverse, messy family, like families are, but then, and then there's guests. And when you come as a guest, you get served by the family. It's not like, Oh, you're when I think non-member it's like, Oh, so you're, you just sit over there and, you know, check things out. Whereas if you're a guest, you get served with a meal and, and drink and foot washing or whatever you know like you're you're you're um the family serving the guests um but there is that line between family like when we have guests in our home all the time you know it's like as much as they're you know guests every

week they'll come over they're still a guest until they say hey can i be part of your family and then but then that's kind of a different it's like well yeah but there are certain rules of the the household or whatever that that we believe are good and beautiful and pure. So anyway, I'm rambling. So do you have that kind of – some kind of line between member, non-member, family, guest or whatever? So first of all, I like that language. I'm going to make a note here and review it because we do have membership. And actually specifically in our membership,

I was looking for our booklet somewhere, but we have this line. I'll mess it up here specifically, but it's like we front load it by saying, look, we're all members of community the moment we walk in the door and choose to participate. But as a functional level of governance in Canada for a charity, we also have a membership. We're trying to explain all of that to people,

like you just said, but we just haven't settled on better language for it. But our membership course is part of that. Again, we call it First Steps, but it's a four-week course that you take. It starts with all the front-loading stuff. The last one is where we talk about membership and what it looks like at Commons and what that entails. And then after that, you have the option of doing like a little form that's in the back of the booklet and submitting that to become a member of the community. You don't have to, though. First Steps is not necessarily a membership class, but it leads to all that. It outlines how everything works. And even from a governance perspective, like, like we are a charity and we,

we take money and we have to steward that well. So how do you know that that's being done and how to report on that? We want everyone to know all of that upfront. And that is, um, you know, some of what I was talking about at the beginning, because the church that I worked at prior to commons did not have a public membership. Um, they were set up where the trustees were the only official members of the organization. And when somebody left the board, the board would appoint a new person to the board. And they were designed that way to give a lot of freedom to the leadership and to the pastor. However, when there was a problem, I saw the real flaws of that because the community had no real ownership of the decision-making process.

And so initially, right from the beginning, we wanted a system that was going to say, hey, look, if you're here, we want you to have a say in how we spend and how we hire and how we shape this community and what it looks like. So we have made membership a sort of foundational idea of our ecclesiology of what it means to be a church community. Uh, we've also tried to lower the boundary or the barrier to becoming a member, but at the same time, I'm helping people understand like you can do this and we want you to be a member, but there's also, there's also commitment to that. And there's something on the other side of it as well. Um, so like to get into the technicalities of it in our system, you take the course and then once you do that, you can become a member that gets approved by the board and then you become a voting member. And then every year you have to activate your membership, which is just as simple as like, there's a little form, you fill that out once a year, and then you're on the voting list for that

year. Um, because it's a larger community, if after five years of inactivity, then you get dropped from the membership role. But at any point, you know, so if you forget one year, it's not a big deal. You know, that happens. You may even forget two or three a year in a row if you just happen to not be around at the membership time of year. But after five years of inactivity, you sort of get dropped from the role. Now, pastorally, of course, we're reaching out to people and we're connecting with people and we're doing those things. But that's a way for us to make sure you don't just become a member and then disappear. Like every year you reactivate your membership and all you do is basically raise your hand and you say, hey, I'm still here. I'm still contributing, all that kind of stuff.

And then you help us by electing new board members and yada, yada, yada. Do you have a requirement for belief, like the creeds, or is it anything beyond that? Yeah, so we say, the language that we use, again, over and over is, there is no litmus test at Commons beyond a belief that Jesus is Lord. So whatever that means to you, for us, the language we would use to explain that is the creeds. We're actually a pretty liturgical church. Like we recite the creeds together. We do reading responses in the community, all that type of thing. But ultimately what we say to people is there's no litmus test beyond, you know, professing Jesus as Lord. So the specifics of that, what you believe on this or that topic is not going to prevent you from becoming a member. It's more a commitment to Jesus and the

way that you're going to carry that in community, right? A commitment to the people around you. So for example, you know, for a hot button one, there's LGBTQ. As a community, we say, look, I don't really care what you believe about this. I care about how you live in community with the people near you. And everyone in our community is going to be treated equally, which means as a minister, I do perform, you know, LGBTQ weddings. Our community will do that because we're going to treat that family as equal to any other family. But as a member, you don't have to have a particular belief around that. You just have to be willing to share communion with that family, to have them in your home, to sit with them, to be in community with them. Because again, I'm not that convinced our beliefs are nearly as important as the way that we live them out

in community. I think sometimes in Christianity, we have that a little bit backwards. I think, I don't think our beliefs inform our actions as much as our actions inform our beliefs. No, no. Yeah. That's been, I think, psychologically pretty proven over the last 10, 20 years with a lot of stuff in cognitive research. I'm curious. So with, I mean, and not really necessarily LGBT in particular,

but is there any kind of sexual ethic standard? Like if a polyamorous couple came in, they would be welcome to membership or somebody who's having an ongoing affair or open relationship. I mean, is there any kind of sexual ethic that a member would have to embrace? So we do actually talk about that within the framework of LGBTQ inclusion. We don't have like a list of things like this is out of bounds and this is in, but we do talk about the biblical narrative pointing us towards a constellation of ideas within our sexual ethic. And so we talk about, you know, procreation and partnership and monogamy

and fidelity. And so we say like all of these things is what the scriptural narrative is orienting us towards. In any particular relationship, we may be moving towards some of those and be falling short of others. And so the question is, how on a whole are we deciding this is healthy and good and pointing towards the heart of the scripture? So on an individual basis, we are having conversations with people about what does that look like? If you're in an open, you're having an affair and that's open right now, that to me feels like you're moving away from fidelity and monogamy as the core piece. If you are in a situation where, look, there's a marriage that has broken down and it's irreconcilable and that's acknowledged by both parties and there's a movement towards

something and you're in another relationship and it's messy right now, we would probably say, okay, like we get that, but how are we moving to something that's healthier here right now? So we don't have a list of this is in, this is out, but we do have these sort of core ideas that we call a constellation of sexual ethics. So procreation, partnership, monogamy, fidelity. So polyamory would be sort of outside of the bounds of that. And we recognize there's tension with all of these things, right? Like it's much easier when it's, hey, it's a man and a woman and that's it, because that just settles it on a lot of things. But the complexity of how relationships are forming now, how we're

understanding sexual ethics today are hard. And we're wading into the mess of it with all of it. Because in a church like Commons, polyamory is not a theoretical conversation. I wish that was as simple as a statement on our website. That's a conversation that I've had before with people in community. And so how do we honor that person and love them, but also acknowledge, hey, this is where we're moving as a community. I'm curious, what would be the logic of saying polyamory? I'm just thinking out loud here, would be moving away from fidelity. Because it's consensual. It could be very faithful.

It could be more faithful than even a monogamous or what would be the yeah like two people rather than three you know um so what would be the in your mind like the moral logic of saying polyamory is moving away from the center so this this would go uh essentially right back to the idea of around, well, we would call it intellectually honest, but how we read the scriptures is that what we're not looking for is like a verse. We're looking for a narrative trajectory that informs us about what it means to be human and what it means to be moving towards the heart of God. Because I think from a polyamory perspective, I think you could argue that there's a lot of polyamory. Obviously, that language doesn't line up properly with what we would see in some of the scriptures because I think polyamory does have qualities that are much more faithful than the

polygamy we see in different expressions of the scripture. Uh, but certainly that there is, there is room for that. Um, however, I think when you see the trajectory from Genesis, uh, through some of the history where you see different sexual ethics forming and shaping through the era of the Kings and the nationhood, but then back into the Christian era, it seems to me like, um, like that movement towards, uh, polygamy away from monogamy was a function of, you know, societal creep and the function needing to essentially make as many babies as possible to have a functional pre-modern society. And then the movement back into the Christian era, moving back towards this idea of monogamy again. And so that's one where I would say, okay, the biblical narrative on the whole is pointing me towards this idea that this deep, intimate connection with another human being is part of that core narrative. But again, we're very much into subjective readings of where is the narrative taking us rather than here's my verse that's going to tell me this is okay and this is not. Right, right. No, no, it's helpful. Yeah, polyamory is a tricky one. I mean, for various reasons. It is. It all depends on what

you see as kind of the fundamental, well, just the foundations of what is upon which you build a sexual ethic, I guess. If it's consent and lack of harm, then it's hard to, I think, consistently argue for duality, especially when you have themes of Trinity and you do have plural marriages that, you know, like I think the narrative shape, it seems fairly clear that it seems to be departing away from God's creational design. And yet you do have that weird passage. I never know what to do with 2 Corinthians 12 or 10, when God's kind of talking to David. Because after David slept with Bathsheba and God's like, look at all the things I've done for you.

I blessed you with this kingdom. I blessed you with this. Look at all the wives I blessed you with. And then you'd go and do this to me. It's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Are you listing all the wives as one of your blessings? I think that's a part

that's probably the ancient context. I don't know. I don't have a great... People ask me about that verse all the time. I'm like, I don't have a great answer. Yeah. And I mean, yeah, for me, what I would say is I think, I think scripture, scripture breathes a lot better for me when it's understood as this, you know, partnership between the human and the divine, uh, where, where God is speaking through cultural norms and narratives. And the blessing of God is

not some objective expression of God's ideal. The blessing of God is the blessing that's experienced by us within our cultural context and moment, right? I think there are blessings that I experience and I recognize them as such because of the way that I've been shaped and formed by the society that I've grown up in. And God says, oh, okay, that's good. Jeremy, I'm glad that you experienced that way because I love you. But that might not ultimately be the fullest, truest expression of how I will know myself and God in eternity, right? So blessing to me is always sort of how you experience things, not necessarily the pure objective expression of God. And so when I'm able to read

a passage like that as, oh, how is David experiencing that? And how is God honoring David's experience and wanting to find the good in David experience, but not necessarily a reflection of God's character other than God's goodness, then I'm able to make more sense of that larger scriptural narrative. Because it gets really tough if you're going to try to line up every verse with each other. I mean, frankly, I just don't think it works particularly well. And this is what I'm acknowledging in terms of a sexual ethic at Commons is we recognize that this is hard and this is why we're in conversation with people. And this is why we're willing to listen and learn because, you know, you can make this arguments for or against homosexuality and

different things. Like procreation is one of the things I see is, I think that's a core idea of human sexuality. But, you know, my wife and I were married for more than a decade before we found out we couldn't have kids. Now we've got two adopted kids. They're wonderful. We've grown our family in different ways. And that's been an incredible blessing to us. Would I say that the fact that Rachel and I can't have biological kids is part of God's design for human sexuality? I can't have biological kids is part of God's design for human sexuality. No, like I wouldn't make an argument for that because out of my life, but I would recognize God's blessing in adoption and the way that we formed these things and shape these things. So in one sense, I don't have a problem acknowledging that my sexual experience does

not reflect the full countenance of what human sexuality can be or would be sort of in the mind of God. And yet there's this graciousness, this condescension of God that says, oh, but there is good there. There's good for you, David. There's good for you, Jeremy. You know, how do we honor that? And that gets really hard. And it, again, not getting too hung up on sexuality, but it invites us into the complexity of what it means to be community with each other. Wrestling with all these things and trying to honor each other's stories and bless each other without saying, here's the line. And I can't move beyond that. Yeah, I don't want to get too caught in the weeds of sexuality because that's not what you had me on.

But I do have one more question about procreation. And I know my audience really wants me to probably dive into the LGBT stuff. I'm going to leave that alone. That's why I had you on. But the procreation piece, I remember I read that on your website. That was a little like, oh, I usually see that on either Catholic type ecclesial context or maybe even some more far, not far right, but more conservative reform. Can you unpack how you have thought through procreation as kind of an, and I'm using that very broadly,

not that every relationship must result in that, but you obviously have this idea of procreation as somehow integral to our understanding of sexual ethics. Can you unpack that a little bit? Because personally, I've been really rethinking a lot of this. It's a genuine question. No, and I think you're totally right. I think that's part of what we're trying to acknowledge is, of course, procreation is part of sex. I mean, that's part of being a, you know, an animal on this world. Every animal has to be able to procreate to continue the species along. And that happens through, you know, our sexuality. What we're trying to say with that is, yes, let's acknowledge that, but let's also acknowledge that as human beings who have transcended purely, you know,

just the propagation of the species, we have also added all kinds of things into that. Connection with each other, intimacy with each other, pleasure with each other, all of these things that go along with that. Now, you know, why do we get so much pleasure out of sexuality? Well, because of procreation, because that's built into our evolution that drives us to continue the species, right? So even when you acknowledge sexuality and sexual ethics as having transcended just procreation in the human species, the reason for that is because of the evolution of the human species that has driven us to want to procreate. Like that's why we have intimacy. That's why our brain releases oxytocin when we have sex. That's why we enjoy it so much. So for us, it's sort of acknowledging, um, all of this is intertwined together. And when you try to get so, and again, left and right are not the right

terms for this at all, but when you try to go so far to the left to separate, you know, the biological function of why we enjoy sexuality from, you know, those higher level drives. I think you're not being honest about what it means to be, you know, an animal at some level, like an evolved species. And at the same time, when you try to reduce everything down to just those things, you're not acknowledging the complexity of what it means to be human now at this stage of the story. So when we say that, we're not trying to, yeah, go back to some rigid Catholic understanding of human sexuality that the highest purpose is procreation. We're trying to acknowledge that as an evolved species, we move from there and then we add these layers of complexity on top of it. But it is just from a natural law perspective.

And this is something where secular evolutionary biologists who don't have a dog in any kind of ethical fight have an easy... They can talk about this much more freely because they just say yeah it just seems so obvious that there's so much about the sexual dimorphism of homo sapiens that is structured around procreation all the way down to different bone structures and external internal anatomy that the things that separate male from female at its most basic level is somehow related to procreation.

Even the different hormone levels are related to procreation. I mean, there's so much that is pointing to this. It's not an essential – I'm going to be really trying to care for my language here. But I'm also thinking out loud. I'm not going to go back and edit this. So just forgive me. But like so much of our just image of God bearing it, like the central structure of how God has created humanity

is pointing towards this potential, if I can say it like that. Not that the purpose of every relationship must result in that, but at the same time, that's pretty big. The basic things that separate male from female, the most basic way of structuring humanity is somehow connected with our procreative potential. That has to mean something, right? Yeah. And I think that's where we have this. There's no point denying that. But the thing is, you don't need to either because you can acknowledge like, so my dog has the same procreative wiring built in. That's part of what it means to be alive. Everything, everything. Evolution has wired that into everything. So there's no point in pretending that doesn't exist. At the same time, we can acknowledge that being human, there is something somewhere along the way that transcended just those, those biological wirings. So the way that we speak, the way we think about ourselves, the fact that we have language, all of these now have created new imperatives on top of those,

those hardwired ones. So, so to pretend that we don't have the biological wiring is a mistake. To pretend that we are only our biological wiring, I think, is to deny the image of God, that creative element that is now layered on top of us that allows us to take those biological urges and transform them in all kinds of different ways. People who experience their gender in different ways in their biology, people who experience their sexuality in different ways. People who experience their gender in different ways in their biology, people who experience their sexuality in different ways. That is also too part of what it means to be human. The biological wiring is part of what it means to be alive, to be an evolved thing in the world. To transcend that, to add layers on top of that is part of this unique expression of the creative God, the image of God that's in us right now.

And that's what I think we're wrestling with today is recognizing, oh, there's layers to this story. There's layers to what it means to be human. I'm not just this ball of biological urges. I'm also this, I don't like the duality of body spirits. I'm not trying to say that, but I'm saying this consciousness, this ability to transcend that is also part of what it means to be human. Yeah. You can't reduce what it means to be human to just simply our biological state. It's like, right. It's, it's more than that, but it's not less than that is, you know, um, yeah, it's a hard tension, right? You know, cause there's certain people that you can go off the rails in both directions where you kind of deny or significantly downplay the bodilyness of our existence, which I think would be problematic on so many levels. And yet we don't – if you just are a strict materialist and reduce us simply to – that's wrong too.

How do you balance – and this is kind of woven throughout a lot of what I hear you saying. How do you balance, and this is kind of woven throughout a lot of what I hear you saying, just that the tension between, and I don't, again, I'm trying to find the best wording here, but kind of the tension between the subjective reality of interpreting the Bible, interpreting the faith, interpreting the faith, interpreting the story, identifying pieces that resonate with you and me and other people, that can fall into a pretty subjective arena.

And yet the other extreme, again, is, no, here's the exegetical method. If you just do this, do this, do this, add up the meaning of the words, look up the lexicon, boom, bada bing, bada boom, spit out the right answer. Here's where you should land. That was more the environment I was brought up in. Like, no, if you just interpret the Bible correctly, you know,

using a Francis Bacon method of, you know, reading a text or whatever, then you will arrive at the right answer. If you don't arrive at the right answer, which is here's – by the way, for your sake, we have the list of right answers right here. So if you don't line up on this, you didn't, you know, so I, I see problems to both views because I think you and I probably shared the same conviction on nonviolence that that's the way of Christ. Um, but that's, you know, somebody else could say, well, no, like I don't see that in the story. I do see militaristic action as a more beautiful way to address evil and stuff.

And it's like, if you do emphasize the more subjective nature of resonating with the biblical story, then you kind of leave yourself open to all kinds. I don't know. Then how do you end up saying, no, nonviolence is the more beautiful way that resonates with the creation of people. It's like, well, that's just, you resonate with that, but I don't. You know, like, I don't know. It's such a hard question. Yeah, so I think, you know,

and this is, I think very much, this is the heart of what, when we talk about ecclesiology and how we shape community, I think you're very right. Like LGBTQ for us, and I think the reason it has not been the tension point or the breaking point for our

church like it has been for others, is because of what you're talking about. This is a way of being at commons. So LGBTQ is not the hot button issue. It's an expression of how we've chosen to be together in community. We're going to be together around a narrative that shapes us and forms us and draws us together, that's going to leave all kinds of subjectivity and tension. And if this is going to be the community that resonates with you, you're going to find a way to say, okay, I'm okay with that. In fact, not only am I okay with that, I find beauty in that. And therefore, this hasn't torn us apart. We haven't had the fallout over this piece. Another example would be baptism. If you come and you say, hey, I resonate with this

idea that, you know, Jesus leaves the one to find the 99, and I'm going to trust that God is going to bring my child back to me, then we will baptize your child, you know, as an infant, right? And we will say, yeah, of course, of course we join you in that story. And if you come and you say to us, I really identify with this idea of taking up my cross, and I want to raise my child in a way that someday they're going to choose to be baptized. And we will say, yes, of course, we'll dedicate your child with you and we'll have families stand together. We'll talk about the difference in those two symbols and what they mean and how we're expressing them, what the belief is behind that. But again, that's a core reflection of the way we've chosen to be community rather than an argument about baptism or rather than an argument about LGBTQ. So nonviolence, same thing. The expression is, what do we believe

is at the center of what it means to be a Christian? And I'm sure you read, but I've done a lot of work with René Girard. That's how I come to my views on nonviolence, is this idea of imitation and scapegoating. But the core idea that what it means to be human is to form communities around outsiders. That's really how we decide who our group is. It's not what we share with the people around us it's what we share against someone on the outside and that this is what we've been doing throughout all of human you know evolution and the story and everything that's how we became the dominant species in the world is by building stories around who's not us you know and the joke

i use here in canada all the time is I'm from Toronto, right? So you got Calgary Flames fans here where I'm from, and you got Toronto Maple Leafs fans where I was from, and they're going to hate each other unless you bring up the Edmonton Oilers, right? And then all of a sudden, Flames fans and Leafs fans are on the same side because we all hate the Oilers, right? As soon as you can give someone an enemy, that's the power, and it's so pervasive that we don't see it happening all the time. What we talk about a lot at Commons, and really this is to the heart of how we form communities, is by saying to people over and over again, the Christ story teaches us a different way to be human and a different way to form community.

And we're going to refuse, as hard as that is, over and over again to define ourselves by who's not us. So, you know, we use centered set language. That's helpful sometimes for some people, for others it's not. But this idea that what is drawing us to the center, that's what we're going to share together. And that's how we're going to be community together. Do you share Jesus? Do I share Jesus? Yes. Our instinct is to say, okay, but how do you share Jesus? What does that mean to you? Right? And we keep refusing that story and saying, no, what we share is more important than what we don't. And that's always going to draw us into the center. Another metaphor we use a lot is, you know, gravity. So we'll say if Christ is our sun,

you know, holding, and we're all planets orbiting around that, you and I should be able to be on opposite sides of the sun and trust that we're being drawn in and we're orbiting around the same story of Jesus and yet find ourselves on completely opposite sides of any particular issue, you know, because we're on opposite sides of our orbit. If you and I meet each other as strangers on the bus and we're on opposite sides, we have nothing drawing us together. And so immediately we define ourselves by what's apart. Christ offers us the option to flip that whole story around, to stop being community because we're not pagans or we're not Muslims or we're not this, we're not sinners, but to share our community around the fact that, no, we are orbiting Jesus. We are being drawn to the center. That's our source of gravity.

And it's hard because constantly our instinct is, okay, but what's different? And we just keep teaching our community to come back to the center of what do we share? That's what it means to be Christian. The rest will find its work its way out. And it's going to be tense along the way. Is it largely, I mean, are you talking mainly about like just kind of a posture of belief? And I mean, because there are obviously, you know, once you say Jesus is Lord, every other potential Lord is not. Like there's intrinsically, I don't say divisive, because that's not, that's exactly what you're saying we're trying not to do. But there's intrinsic differences that separate. If you are calling Jesus as Lord, you're also saying no to a lot of other things. And yet there's very different

postures in which you hold that belief. Is that kind of more what you're hitting on? Well, I mean, yes, yes and no. So yes. So the criticisms of Girard sometimes is that it's a very subjective expression of the gospel. I acknowledge that. I understand those criticisms. However, I think when you really get into Girard, as I have in my graduate thesis and some of the stuff I've written, but also in terms of how we hold that here at Commons, of the stuff I've written, but also, you know, in terms of how we hold that here at Commons, what we're saying is the sin of humanity, all of our sin is bound up in the way that we scapegoat each other. The way that we sacrifice, right? That something must die for us to be forgiven, for something to be, something must be driven away for us to be a community. Someone must be

expelled for us to be together. That is sin. Everything else is an expression of that. My greed is an expression of that because I need to know that I'm here and I have more than you. Lust can be an expression of that because I need to know what's mine and I need to know what I control and other things. So it perverts our love. It perverts our wealth. It perverts our love, it perverts our wealth, it perverts

everything. When we are freed from that, when we say Christ is Lord, what we are saying is, I am not going to play that game anymore. I'm not going to define myself by who I push away. I'm not going to define myself by who I scapegoat. I'm not going to define myself by who I sacrifice. So there absolutely is a posture, but I would argue that is the gospel posture, is I am no longer going to use any violence against anyone who I see as an outsider. Now, can you be outside of that story? Yes, because you can refuse to drop your arms and you can refuse to stop seeing scapegoats. But if you are going to follow the way of Christ, you are going to stop seeing enemies of people. You're going to stop making enemies of people. And that's going to

shape a particular community around that. So it is a posture, but I would argue that's what salvation is. Salvation is having your eyes open to all of the ways that you imitate violence around you all the time. Once you let go of that, there's implications for how you're going to hold Jesus as Lord, right? But every time somebody else wants you to say they're the enemy, you're going to say, no. Oh, my watch is talking to me. Every time somebody wants you to pick an enemy, you're going to say, no, Jesus is Lord. And Jesus tells me that's not the way of the cross. That's not the way of truth. Can you back, because you've mentioned Gerard a few times, for my audience that doesn't know anything about about him can you just maybe take a step back

who is renee gerard and you've kind of already been doing it but can you maybe even on a more basic level unpack kind of the heart of gerard's theology for lack of better terms yeah so gerard's a fascinating thinker uh he's he's who I've spent most of my time with, theologically. Never met him. He passed away last decade. One of the notoriously difficult things about Gerard is getting into Gerard. So I'll acknowledge that for people. Most of his books are collections of essays and interviews and stuff. And so he doesn't present things in a particularly clear systematic way. So it can be hard. If people are looking for a good resource, I would suggest the Girard Reader by James Williams. That's the best sort of collected

way to work through his ideas. But here's a basic one. What he would say is humans are essentially shaped by, he calls it mimesis because he's a theologian and anthropologist and wants a fancy way to say it. So he uses a Greek word, but he just means imitation. That I don't really know how to want anything in the world. I don't know how to be a human other than imitating the people around me. I learned to speak by imitating. I learned to walk by imitating. I become human by imitating. But so do I desire things by imitating. Like I see you enjoying something and I'm like, I want that enjoyment. So I'm just going to imitate you. You really like coffee and you seem to enjoy it. I want to enjoy something. I want coffee now.

But all of our desires are sort of triangulated because they're not really for the thing, they're for the thing that we see in a person, right? Because that's how we become humans, how we learn everything. Unfortunately, that puts us into conflict with each other because as long as there's enough coffee to go around, it's fine. But if there's not, now I want to fight you because I want that coffee. And he says, this is what breaks down human relationships over and over again. And at some point, we spontaneously invented the idea of a scapegoat. So groups of people could take all of their frustration with each other, all of the tension that's built up by all of this conflict and all of this imitation, and we could point it at one person, maybe someone who offended someone, maybe someone who is not like us,

maybe someone who did something wrong. But we release all that tension by scapegoating that person. That could be violently. That could be just you ostracize them, you know, whatever. But together, all of our tensions are relieved and we cohere as a community around that idea. We're not like them. He says that's what religion is. Religion is a way of systematizing that idea. We're not like them. He says, that's what religion is. Religion is a way of systematizing

that process. So as humans, it's not good for us to keep, you know, sacrificing people or scapegoating people. So let's, let's, let's put a ritual to it. Let's, let's scapegoat a goat and let's, let's remind ourselves that we're not like them and we'll cast a goat out every year. And that will remind us we're a unique community different from them. And so Girard, you know, spends his time exploring all these different religions, the Vedic religions and Hindu and all these things and seeing the same thing happening over and over again. That's what religions are doing. They're giving us a way to say we're not them. And eventually he's French. so eventually he's like, well, I'm going to have to deal with Christianity sooner or later. He's an atheist slash agnostic at this point.

And he comes to the Christian story, and he says, oh, it's just like all the other stories. They scapegoat Jesus, and they do it. But as he researches it, and he looks into it, and he gets involved in the story, what he sees is a story where, no, this is God becoming our scapegoat for us to open our eyes to it. So God allows God's self to be the one that we push away and we expel and we say, you're not like us. The main reason we do that to Jesus is because Jesus keeps saying things like, look, who's without first sin or who's without sin? You cast the first stone. He's essentially saying, stop pushing people away. And that's threatening to us because you're breaking down our walls. You're threatening our barriers that make us feel comfortable. So we scapegoat him. But the big difference for Gerard

is every other scapegoat, everyone we scapegoat. So after 9-11, we scapegoat Muslims, right? Because that makes us feel safe. But we can also point to Muslims who did terrible things, and we can justify that, right? It's not fair that we scapegoat our Muslim neighbor. It's not right or good, but we can justify it because, oh, but look at what that one did over there. With Christ, what he would say is his language is because he owes no debt to violence. In Christian language, because he lives a sinless life. owes no debt to violence. In Christian language, because he lives a sinless life, when we finally crucify him, and he would say the narrative is built in such a way that nobody bears ultimate responsibility for the crucifixion, but everybody bears a hand in it. Nobody gets

off free. The disciples abandon. The religious leaders, the political leaders, like, like the story is built in a way to say, we all have a hand in this man's death. But at that moment, just before he dies, he turns, he says, you know, father, forgive him. They don't know what they do. They don't know what they're doing here. They don't understand what's driving them here. And because he forgives us at that moment, we have no recourse to defend our actions. We have no option to say, oh, he deserved it. We have no option to say, oh, because of this. And in that point, if we see the cross clearly, it's like our eyes are opened up. We see scapegoating for what it is.

This is really important for Girard. If you know you're scapegoating someone, it has no power over you, right? If you and I know that, hey, you know, we've got a bit of tension because we disagree on one thing, but we still like each other. And then we can point to another person who we both disagree with, and we can say how they're a bad person, you know, then we feel good about ourselves. But if we know we're just doing that to relieve the tension, it doesn't work. Scapegoating only works when it's

hidden from us. You have to believe that the scapegoat really deserves it. And when Christ opens our eyes, now we are saved because we're freed from the power of sin, the power of scapegoating. But also, now we begin this process of sanctification where we start to see it all around us all the time. And this is the lifelong process now of becoming a Christian and becoming shaped in the way of Christ, where you have to begin to constantly look for all the ways that you perpetrate violence against your neighbor, you perpetrate violence against other nations,

you do all these militaristic things, and you slowly begin to let all of that go. That's what we're trying to shape community around, is this idea that we've now been saved, we've been set free from this idea of needing a scapegoat, but now we have so much work ahead of us in being able to see it, to dismantle that, to walk in a new way in the world, to believe that we can be loved even if somebody else is loved, right? Like that's a big thing for us as humans. I can't know that I'm loved unless I know that somebody else isn't, right? And slowly letting go of all that becomes really important.

So some of that is Girard and some of the ways is that how I've built on that in terms of my own personal theology and community. But that's a pretty decent breakdown in what he's talking about. That's fascinating, dude. So he had this idea of scapegoating as kind of the core of his thinking before he kind of went to or came to Christianity and saw Christianity as kind of like, for lack of better terms, it's the solution or the key that kind of unlocks the overturns. he is strictly critiquing religious systems of scapegoating, dealing with all kinds of different religious systems in the world. It's not until later till he finally sort of realizes, okay, I'm going to have to deal with Christianity. And he gets into Christianity and converts. He converts to Catholicism.

I mean, sort of reconverts or re, you know, cause he grew up in France and stuff, but comes to Christianity and sees, sees in Christianity the subversion of the idea of sacrifice. So he would say, and I would agree, the cross is not the end of sacrifice because it's a big enough sacrifice to cover all sin. The cross is the end of sacrifice because the cross unveils all of our sacrificing for what it's always been. So this is God saying to you, look, I have used sacrifice to contain your violence

and to move you in good directions. You know, all through the Old Testament, through all these things, this is still God. This is still God present in the narrative, moving us forward, but moving us to the point where God would ultimately disarm all of that. So Christ becomes sin for us, literally. He becomes a scapegoat, a sacrifice. He becomes that for us. And in that, our eyes are opened up. And then there's all kinds of implications for how we live coming out of that. Did he and Jacques Ellul hang out? Similar era, they're both French, they're both, end up being Christian, both nonviolent. end up being Christian, both non-violent?

So I don't know that they hung out, but I know Gerard interacts with Alul's writing. I don't know that Alul, I've never read Alul specifically talking about Gerard. Lots of overlap in their ideas, and I've seen, I have read Gerard speaking about Alul, but I don't know if they ever hung out together or anything, which would have been a fascinating conversation to be on the wall of. So I'm pretty familiar with Allul. I've read most of his works,

but I haven't dealt with Allul academically the way I have with Girard. Okay, okay. Well, it sounds like Girard is a lot more difficult to get your arms around academically because he's not linear in his kind of presentation. Yeah, he's a fascinating thinker. Again, obviously my convictions are deeply informed, but I think as someone who is committed to nonviolence as the way of Jesus,

what I really think is that in the next generation and the next era of Christianity, in the next generation and the next era of Christianity, what we need is a more, a thoroughly nonviolent imagination of the cross. I think that's the one piece that has still eluded us. And I think that's what Gerard, I don't know that he does it completely for us, but I think he moves us in that direction of saying, okay, what does it mean for us to have a thoroughly nonviolent God, you know, that is not using the violence of the cross to get to God's aims, but is actually undoing violence through absorbing our violence on the cross? I think that's a really important piece because pastorally, 10 years ago, pastorally, I would hear questions about, ah, what do we do with the violent God of the Old Testament, right? Like that was a question you would hear.

wow, what do we do with the violent God of the Old Testament, right? Like, that was a question you would hear. Some of that was, you know, Christian hegemony built into people's ideas. They would assume, okay, it must be the Jewish part that's bad and the Christian part that's good, which is not a helpful way to think about it at all. But, you know, at a pastoral level, that's the question you would hear. Now, more and more, the question that I hear is, what do we do with the violence of the cross? People want to believe in a nonviolence of Jesus. They want to believe in a God that's thoroughly nonviolent. But their question is, but what about the cross? You know, to go back,

you know, decades to Nakashimi Brock, who's saying like, like this, this formulation, penal substitution on the cross looks like cosmic child abuse. It doesn't look like a good story. It looks like God who wants to forgive, but has to be violent in order to forgive. And I think we're going to need, just at a pastoral level of people in the pews, I think we're going to need better ways to talk about this to help people see the goodness of God expressed in the Jesus story. And I think Gerard points us down that direction. I think we have a lot of work to do on it as well. But I think nonviolence is going to be very important, particularly as the violence that Christianity has done to the world comes more and more to the front, right? Like we're

acknowledging that more, you know? I'm in Canada, my daughter's indigenous. The violence that Christianity has done to indigenous peoples is no longer something that we can just say, oh, that was some bad apples. No, that was built into our theology. The doctrine of discovery that we thought was part of our theology enabled us, you know, it pushed us towards that violence. So we need to undo all of these things, not just the past violence, but we need to undo it all in our concept of God. And I think that's going to be more and more important for us. Wow. That's a lot to chew on, man. Yeah.

I mean, I have not gotten into Gerard at all. I got a good friend of mine who loves him. So it's more just through dialogue and with him. Um, but you've, you've unpacked his ideas better and more clear than, than I think I've ever experienced. Um, and just, you know, for me as a, you know, my primary area is biblical studies. So I'm constantly looking at like biblical theology and the movement of scripture and that's, you know, I got to a nonviolent position through the kind of trajectory of scripture, but that, I mean, Gerard, the way you're summarizing Gerard, that,

that it's almost like a different, more complex, yet more central angle to the very shape of the story of redemption. Right. So imagine, think, take that lens of Gerard and now think about the prophets, right?

So you have the Torah era shaping this sacrificial system to contain that scapegoating. And then you have the prophets coming along and saying, guys, that's great. I'm glad we have these rituals, but you know, that's not really the point, right? Like that's meant to shape you and form you towards justice and care and stop scapegoating, right? That's supposed to lead you toward the outsider, the foreigner, the widow. Like it's all there once you kind of see it and you unpack it and you see these themes

and you can see it slowly building throughout human history. And then ultimately in Christ being completely undone for us. Now, I think what's tragic is the way is that then the cross sometimes has been used to scapegoat all over again. And I think that is what breaks the heart of the divine is when we use a story that was meant to dismantle this to continue to push people away again. And back to ecclesiology in church, this is why we're wading into a

particular way of being with each other, even though it's really, really hard. And even though there's a lot of tension that comes up because we have a core conviction about what it means to keep Jesus at the center. And again, I've unpacked a lot of theology here, but that's what I mean when I say Jesus at the center. Jesus undoes all of our instincts about what it means to be human and what it means to be community, which then has implications on how we baptize and how we do marriages and blah, blah, blah. And sometimes there are difficult theological conversations, but we're always defaulting back to,

I refuse to have a scapegoat. I refuse to push someone outside community. Jeremy, you've given us a lot to think about. I've taken you over the time that I asked you to commit to. So tell us really quick, where can people find you? I'm on your website now. So I guess jeremyduncan.ca is your personal website, right? And then the church, what's the church's website? The church is commons.church.

Commons. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So we're doing that. And I, you know, I, yeah, there's not much on my personal website yet. I just sent it out. I have a book coming out with Herald Press next year called The Upside Down Apocalypse, where I'm writing about a nonviolent interpretation of Revelation. So a lot of these themes, you know, will find their way in there. But trying to marry some of the biblical studies around context and imagery and metaphor with a particular nonviolent theological lens. So that's my side project right now that I'm working on as well. And that's, you know, it's pre-order, blah, blah, blah. It's on Amazon.

Yeah. Yada, yada. Cool. Well, thanks so much for sharing your time and, uh, for the dialogue,

man. I, I, I still got a lot of questions and stuff, but, uh, yeah, you've given us enough to think about for,

for a few weeks at least. No, no worries, man. It was a great time. Happy to start with, with no agenda, knowing not knowing where this conversation would go

and end up on one of my separate books. We're all good. That's how conversations should be, right? Just like without, I mean, what kind of normal conversation do you have a pre-planned agenda? Unless you're in some sort of confrontation or whatever. It's totally true.

All right, man. Hey, have a great day. Thanks. You too, man. thanks you too man