Life After Leaven w/ Tamice Spencer-Helms
As a follow up to her debut book, Faith Unleavened: The Wilderness Between Trayvon Martin & George Floyd, Tamice Spencer-Helms is joined by folx from all walks of life and society to talk about picking up the shattered fragments of a faith we used to know. Life After Leaven is a podcast for those seeking to heal from the damage caused by toxic Christianity and rebuild something new and life giving in its place.
Life After Leaven w/ Tamice Spencer-Helms
The Dance of Doubt and Wisdom in Spiritual Evolution with Pete Enns & Jared Byas
Have you ever wrestled with the tension between faith and doubt, or grappled with the unsettling notion of uncertainty in your spiritual journey? Pete Enns and Jared Byas of the Bible for Normal People podcast join us for a birthday season conversation that dives into these very waters. As they share their insights from "The Sin of Certainty" and a generous approach to scripture interpretation, we peel back the layers of traditional evangelical thought, challenging the status quo and illuminating the value of diverse perspectives in our collective quest for truth.
The conversation takes a deeply personal turn as I reflect on my own evolution from a knowledge-centric pastor to one who embraces the interplay of truth and love. The episode sheds light on the ways in which personal instinct and experience are too often sidelined in theological circles, making a case for the importance of honoring our humanity as we engage with our faith. We address the necessity of dialogue across differing viewpoints within Christianity, a call to expand our theological horizons and embrace the richness that comes from varied understandings of the divine.
As we probe into the contextual theology and evolving Christian thought, the session becomes an exploration of the dynamic realms of faith and reality. The historical Jesus, the ever-expanding universe, and the potential of consciousness after death are all part of the tapestry we examine, inviting listeners to join in a celebration of curiosity and open-mindedness. This episode isn't just another theological discussion; it's an invitation to journey from a place of knowing to a profound state of wisdom, alongside guests who inspire us to persist in our exploration of these deep and meaningful topics.
Life After Leaven is sponsored by Sub:Culture Incorporated, a 501c3 committed to eradicating cultural, social, spiritual, financial, and academic barriers for Black College Students. If you are interested in giving a tax deductible donation toward our work with black college students, you can do that here. Thank you for helping us ensure temporary roadblocks don't become permanent dead ends for students with marginalized identities. You can follow us on Instagram: @subc_incorporated, Facebook: facebook.com/subcultureinco, and Twitter: @subcultureinco1.
Our episodes are written and produced by Tamice Namae Speaks LLC.
Don’t miss out on what Tamice has planned next! Follow her on Instagram and Twitter, or subscribe to her Patreon page.
What's up everybody, welcome to another episode of Life After Levin. I'm your host, tamise Spencer Helms, and we are in the special birthday season and if you've read Faith on Levin then you know about the chapter called the Naughty List, where I talk about the fact that there were some white men on that list, a few white men, but some white men on the Naughty List that helped me get free and learn to thank for myself. And I have two of them on the podcast today, pete Inns and Jared Byas, and they are the hosts of Bible for Normal People podcast, which I know you've heard me talk about, but today we're going to get to talk to them directly. So welcome, gentlemen, welcome to the show.
Speaker 2:Thanks for having us.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I'm actually going to just jump in because I think this conversation is going to be rich. I came to find Pete first I can't exactly remember what year it was, but I had left kind of was dealing with evangelicalism in the sense that it was failing me left and right, especially as I tried to navigate Trayvon Martin's death and then Black Lives Matter movement, and I found this book called the Sin of Certainty, and what stood out to me about it was that I had just been journaling and thinking about the fact that the ways that I had thought about God and the Bible and everything was very us and them, and there were questions I hadn't had answered. There was so much dissonance when I was reading the Bible that I think that that book really came at a perfect time, because what it did is it gave me wiggle room, breathing room to begin to reengage, and so I'd love to have us talk about some of the ways that you have framed the Bible from. You know, the Bible tells me. So I went backwards, right, so I got all the books after I read the Sin of Certainty. So I'd love to have you talk through some of the motifs in those books. But before we do.
Speaker 1:That. Jared's book came out not too long ago as well, which really taught me about having a generous I want to say orthodoxy, but a generous epistemology, so to speak, where, like the ways that people know are all valid and the ways that people approach scripture is really important that the context that they're in plays a role in the ways that they read and interpret the scripture. And just the way that you wrote about that, jared, it was so easy to read, and I've done seminary, I got master's degrees and this was the first book. Both of your books, both of your writing styles are very, very easy to read, which is why I wanted to have you on the show. I think people will really glean from you. So talk to us a little bit about some of the inspiration behind your books. I'll start with you, pete, and then we'll talk a little bit about the inception of Bible for Normal People.
Speaker 3:Well, I think all my books are born out of my own need to think through things, and I've had good challenges in my life, intellectually, epistemologically, to think through the nature of scripture, and a lot of that began in seminary, but then in earnest in graduate school, doing a PhD, and I just wanted to be true, you know, I wanted to have authenticity, I didn't want to play a game, and history is what history is and it has to be interpreted.
Speaker 3:But there are certain things that are just really not questioned by most people who study scripture or do theology, and I just wanted to come to terms with those things and think about how, when your Bible changes, what does it mean to even talk about God and to me that's really where it goes at the end of the day like the whole issue of God and the world and how are those two things related? Will the Bible present certain models for that, some of which are probably helpful and others of which may not be as helpful? And we have this Christian faith that's tied to the scriptural tradition, and so we always have the hermeneutical problem. We always have the problem of having to deal with this stuff, and the church has known this since forever. You know, this is not a new thought. That came up from people like us who are just weird, but it's been intensified in the past few hundred years with, I think, scientific advances and also just an increased understanding of history.
Speaker 1:Thank you, Jared. Talk about your book and kind of what led you to writing that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think what led me to writing it was recognizing. I mean two things. One, I wanted to write a book about truth, but it just so happens that if you want to write a book about truth, but through the lens of how the Bible frames truth and then the history of the Christian tradition, I ended up writing a book about love, because it turns out that within that tradition those things are not as opposed as it seems, and so a big thing for me was hearing this phrase over and over tell the truth in love. I'm just telling the truth in love and how that's been used as a stick to hurt people and so it's a misuse of Paul in Ephesians. And so it's really my to Pete's point. It's my wrestling with that phrase and saying, okay, what do we actually mean when we say telling the truth in love, and how do we use that and how do we misuse that? And looking at truth and love in the Bible.
Speaker 2:But even more personally, I think for me what it came down to was growing up in a Christian tradition that really elevated the intellect over all else. The best Christian is the smartest Christian. The best Christian is the one who knows everything. It worked for me because I was a smart guy. I knew how to think good thoughts in terms of, I knew how to put the pieces together, I knew how to, you know, rehearse what I've learned and to spit it back out to everybody and it was applauded and lauded.
Speaker 2:And I got to be promoted and I got to be at the front and I got to teach everybody and I became a pastor and all of that. And, looking back, as I've gotten older, it was devoid of character. It wasn't the people and then, as I reflected, mostly women in my churches who loved. Well, they were not the ones that were applauded and lauded. It was me who happened to be smart and could, you know, regurgitate a bunch of facts and there's seen something very anemic and thin about that that didn't jive with what I knew of the biblical texts, but also of the Christian tradition and what I knew about Christianity.
Speaker 1:I think about that a lot because I remember so. I was introduced to evangelicalism when I was 17. I met why Jesus in hell it was a play about, hell is one of those hell houses and immediately knew that it was important for me to grasp concepts. More than anything else, I needed to grasp these concepts, and I'm wondering about that as a person of color who comes into evangelicalism. That's one of the things that, initially, you start to appreciate right, I have to be honest about that. You're like well, they're really deep and they really know scripture. And these evangelicals like they go Line upon line, and it's not the certain type of preaching style I'm used to.
Speaker 1:And over time, though, what I started to realize especially, you know, in 2012, when everything kind of hit the fan was that the concepts themselves were not a very helpful container. They really did not help me navigate being a black person right in this country, and so when sort of this way of knowing and being in the world and this way of knowing and being in Christ, so to speak, began to be in conflict with each other, it really, for a lot of us, was extremely devastating, and I know there were a couple of articles that came out about black people leaving the church because of those types of things. So I'm wondering were you? When you think about ways of knowing Pete? I want to ask you this we think about ways of knowing. What do you think is the most helpful way for us to help people have that first step, that first giving them the permission to begin to say, like, if it feels wrong, if it seems kind of odd, that it's okay to go with that thought, is that question making sense?
Speaker 1:Yeah, how would you encourage somebody in that makes tons of sense.
Speaker 3:Actually, you know, I think one thing that evangelicals are taught from the crib is to not trust your instincts, not trust your heart, but to always question that. The problem is that you're you're asked to question that on the basis of a theological system which is, first of all, rather abstract and also, you know, it turns out rather limited in focus. You know, I think there are, there are wonderful things about what we might call classic theism or, you know, classic theology. There's a lot of stuff that was talked about, but it was still somewhat restricted in its perspective because of who was doing the thinking, especially over the past 500 years in Europe and then coming to to the further, to the West. So I think our humanity is important and no, no one human perspective should be elevated over other human perspectives.
Speaker 3:We have to talk to each other and that's where I would start with people. I mean, I have had to learn, believe it or not, I've had to learn to listen to that voice inside of me that says this just isn't right, and that's something that usually kick starts a deconstruction process. You know the term for today, but it's true, it's something that you just know inside this. This doesn't sit right with my experience. And you say, well, who cares about your experience? Well, that's told by people who have a theological system which is rooted in their experience, just like everybody else's. Right, I think just normalizing that is hopeful for people, just to say, okay, let's just relax, you get to have your thoughts and feelings. Sometimes they can be augmented or shifted in conversation with other people. Right, I mean might have and there's nothing wrong with that. But but to dishonor our humanity is, I think, a big problem and it's something of a staple, I think, and at least the evangelical that I've been aware of.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I've been noticing that a little bit. I love to have you speak on that journey because I've noticed that one of the things I've been watching a lot of cult documentaries and one of the things that goes across the board and this feels real familiar. I mean, it's really just this whole idea of right like abdicating your agency. You're like sort of outsourcing intuition and leadership and there isn't much. I've been thinking a lot about conjure and how, how do we pull truth from the inside? But for so many of us, jared, this question's for you, so many of us who grew up in evangelicalism, yeah, we're taught we have a sin nature, that our heart is deceitfully wicked. Can you help us think about a way to frame the scripture differently?
Speaker 1:I know that for most of us, if we were evangelical, the Bible was very important and scripture is the word of God. It is the truth of God that was given to us. And so for folks who are kind of feeling that thing that Pete is talking about, that movement, that jostling can be really hard. But I found in my own process like I've actually fallen more in love with scripture as I've let the scripture breathe. Can you talk to us? What does it mean to let scripture breathe. How can we reframe truth in that way and still kind of keep our love for the scriptures?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think one thing that comes to mind is thinking about the scripture as having a relationship with the text, and a lot of us grew up as you said. It's a very authoritarian relationship. The scripture is over me and I am to be subject to it at all costs. And so, when you talk about reframing, what would it look like to think about it as a relationship between equals, where we honor ourselves, as Pete's talking about, where we honor our own intuitions and our feelings and experiences and community, and we bring that to the text not to be scrutinized, to be picked through and be told that it's wrong, but as valid in its own right. And then we have the scripture and we can bring that to the table as well, and then we can be in conversation with the two and in some of those ways, we say this is really valuable, given my experience and how I think about things, and I can really learn a lot from this and can grow from this and other ways in which this is harmful for how I. This is not something that I need to take with me, and so, to see it as a relationship and I also say that to say it's okay to struggle with it just like you would in any relationship. It's not to be. We don't wanna be abused in our relationship with the text, and for that to happen there can't be this power dynamic where it is over us to tell us the pure, unadulterated truth, because usually the reality of it is that most often I think of the Wizard of Oz, where you sort of pull the curtain, oh, and there's just typically a white man who's actually doing the talking.
Speaker 2:Behind the quote Bible right, there's always an interpretive lens. So even when we have that authoritative approach, the Bible itself doesn't say anything. It is our interpretive lens that does the talking. And if we aren't careful we can actually just obliterate our own experience and our own sense of self and our own sense of right and wrong, not because God said it, but because I heard a couple of preachers or read a couple of commentaries that told me this is what the Bible says, and so we can start to see the Bible as a conversation partner. And then we actually might start to see that the Bible itself models this for us, that it doesn't have a univical meaning kind of one voice approach. It doesn't just say the one thing.
Speaker 2:So when people ask us, what does the Bible have to say about? Often, the answer is well, it depends on where you look right. Well, it says this here and it says that there, and there's a multiplicity of voices. The Bible itself models this conversation for us if we have eyes to see. But sometimes it's hard to have eyes to see when you are trained from being a small child to think my agency doesn't matter, my perspective doesn't matter, my feelings and intuitions about the world and how it operates doesn't matter. I just have to listen, to quote the text, which, again, isn't usually listening to the text. It's listening to those authority figures in your life.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, absolutely. I was thinking about this phrase that you use, pete, and one of your books I can't remember which one it was that I learned and I started using and throwing around Like I knew what I was talking about and I didn't, so I'm gonna have you explain. Monolatry and the idea that so here's how I synthesized it and how it was helpful for me was this idea that here is a group of people who are basically figuring it out as they go. They are taking what they know so far about God and writing it down and it grows and it changes. And it was so helpful to think about how Israel's even monotheism kind of evolved over time. So can you talk to us about monolatry and like how maybe involving that kind of a concept in the ways that we do faith might be helpful.
Speaker 3:Yeah, sure, I mean. Monolatry means and we're dealing here with the Hebrew Bible, right? So this is something that's more relevant there. By the time we get to the New Testament, things have changed a bit. But monolatry means you worship only one God. That's a mono, one lottery. That's a Greek root meaning worship. So you worship only one God, but you recognize the existence of other gods, and the ancient Israelites were absolutely monolatrous. They were not monotheists in the later sense of the term, I think in later Judaism that happens but early on they were products of their culture as much as anything else.
Speaker 3:And the point was Yahweh is worthy of worship. Don't worship other gods. That's why God gets jealous. If you worship other gods, what's there to be jealous about if they're not there? Now I happen to think that no other gods exist. I think there's one creator of the multiverse, that's me. But the ancient Israelites didn't think that, and that's fine.
Speaker 3:See, this is because they're thinking contextually, as we all do. I mean, how can you not do that, right? So this is to me an object lesson for understanding how the Bible itself is a, a theological tradition, and all theology is rooted in our experience, our context, our location, all those kinds of things. And so I read texts that are monoliths, like Psalm 95, you know, for Yahweh is a great God, a great King above all gods. Why? Well, in his hands are the deep places of the earth. He created the mountains, he created the seas. That's what makes him so great.
Speaker 3:The other ones are there, but don't worship them. What a waste of time. That is right. So this is contextual theology. They're thinking about Yahweh in the context of their own time and place in the history of humanity, and it's okay to leave that behind and to think differently about God. And you know, part of that is the whole Jesus thing, you know, comes into place here and how our own understanding of the nature of God as a people of faith, going back roughly 3,000 years now, how that's always on the move, it's always changing, it's always adapting, it's always adjusting. That is the history of Christian thought, right? So it starts in the Bible with a topic no less important than what is God like?
Speaker 2:Yeah, Is there one or are there many? Well, and maybe can I just put a cherry on the top of that, because I think what you said there, pete, is actually very important for people to understand, Because when you mentioned earlier how to reframe our Bible, like Pete just gave a really important way to reframe the Bible, which is I was always taught the Bible is the rock. It is the unadulterated, word-for-word, literal word of God. And then theology and the Christian tradition is everybody's interpretation of this, but what Pete's saying is no, this is an example of that other thing. They are not of a different kind. And when you read the Bible as a library, a theological tradition, library that evolves over time and how it thinks about God, you start to this binary between the quote literal, inerrant word of God and all of our musings and traditions about that. That binary starts to break down.
Speaker 1:Yes, absolutely. Oh my gosh, I love, I just love the idea of thinking about that. These are people figuring it out. And when I started reading the Old Testament that way, it really helped with some of the problematic stuff it was like, well, maybe they did think God told them to do that. I mean it just took so much pressure off of some of the stories and it humanized a lot of the stories from me, because it's like, yeah, I'm trying to figure God out too, like I think we all are.
Speaker 3:It's so helpful. One quick story to me, can I just?
Speaker 1:add something. Yes, absolutely please.
Speaker 3:Thanks for that. I remember a student at Eastern years ago really wanted nothing to do with faith. I mean, she grew up in a house that you know. Whatever I'm done, I'm here but whatever.
Speaker 3:But what turned her back on to thinking seriously about Christian faith is the humanized version of the Bible, when and specifically it was the Gospels. It was like wait a minute, they're actually adults, thinking through stuff and saying things. They want to say right, and that's like. That's not helpful if you have a literalistic view of the Bible and it's authority in your life. But it's wonderfully freeing when you see that as a pattern of the life of faith, thinking through things and articulating as best as you can and never thinking you've got it all right, even saying God is love. What does that mean? I mean, what do you mean by God? What do you mean by love? What do you mean by is? That's a difficult concept but you can say it. But say here's how I understand, how it works right, and that to me is very, very freeing.
Speaker 3:But it doesn't sit well with certain models, certain iterations of the Christian faith where the Bible, like Jared says, has been this rock, this foundation and all these little things that we think are just diversions from that. We got to get back to the real thing. Well, the real thing is already doing it for us, it's already showing us and I find that just I mean, the older I get, I'm just so happy about it. It's just, it's freeing. It's like I don't have to be right about everything.
Speaker 3:In fact, I know that I'm not right about most things I talk about. I'm fine with that, except for this, what we're talking about now. I know I'm right about that, but apart from that, I'm willing to have some way. But it's freeing to not have to know the mind of God. Yeah, it just is. And just experience, live and and experience gone in different ways, not simply in reading the Bible or thinking theologically, but just being a human being and existing and experiencing things. That's, you know. I hope that's where it's at. I hope that's the right path to go, because that's where I am.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, you mean both, now that I'm over the hill. Have you? Have you done a much work, jared? Have you done much work around historical Jesus? The reason I asked is because he brought up the Gospels and another. There's only like seven white men on my naughty list and there was another white man on that list, john Dominic crossing, who I love Right. Have you all done much thinking about historical Jesus? If so, like how does it play into your reading of the Gospels? This was not on the questions, I just have it. Well.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, I think you know my area is definitely not as much in the New Testament, but I do think it's. It's funny. You know, pete and I just did an episode for the Bible for normal people where we talk about Some of the birth narratives. It was a Christmas episode and we talked about some of the birth narratives of Jesus and what we realized even just in, I think how we felt about it going in was this sense that yeah, it's all fine and good to talk about all this diversity and Context and genre and literature of the Bible in the Hebrew Bible, like the Old Testament, that's fine.
Speaker 2:But once you start messing with people's picture of Jesus, it's almost like we have this innate, like, yeah, we get that for all the but, but Jesus is different, right, and it's like, okay, it's, it's time that we kind of rip that band-aid off and start talking more openly about how know this is. This is the same in the New Testament. This is the same in our, in the Gospels as it relates to the picture that we have of Jesus. And again to Hebrew, to Pete's point earlier that the problems are or not the problems, but the way we see it in the context and the history is different because it's a different time and it's a different place than the Hebrew Bible. But the idea that we are getting some Video recording of Jesus and how Jesus actually acted and talked and that's what we get presented in the Gospels as though it's a history textbook that's a hundred percent accurate it's not. It's not that that's wrong, because there's things that are the New Testament is not lying to us. It's that once we put it in that framework, we maybe are already thinking about it in a way that the New Testament wouldn't think about it. It's already imposing modern categories Onto the text and I think that's an important thing to recognize, because sometimes we can put our modern categories and say it's with either this or it's that and it's like we'll put the ancient eyes on it.
Speaker 2:They're not thinking in categories of this or that. There are other categories you know, for instance, thinking about how do you hold up people of Priority and importance and stature in the ancient world, how do you write about them Right, how do you acknowledge and tip your hat to the influence that they have in the world and how do you make sure you're writing a character that is, you know, worth our admiration, if you know that about how things are written in in the world of the New Testament, you're gonna see that influence and how the gospel writers are talking about Jesus right, so that when Luke is writing his birth narrative, you're going to see how that's Recognizable in the ancient world around people like a Caesar. And so those are the kind of things that we, we can. I guess what I'm trying to say, too, is we have to go back not just in, look at the ancient context, but also the categories of thought in the ancient world.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so enough. What about you, pete?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think the whole historical Jesus business is almost like a dirty little secret. That it's, it's, it's a real issue, it's a real, it's a real problem. By problem I mean an academic, historical thing to think about, right, but the, the, the portraits that we have of Jesus, or they differ. Well, they're essentially the same. Yeah, okay, fine, but they're really different too. You know, I don't really understand how that, how that counters the other part of it. Right, and Something you know, jared, we read Luke Timothy Johnson's book, right, the, the real Jesus, right, I think it's any of it. But he, he talks a lot about historical Jesus stuff and he says, bottom line, he says it's really impossible to understand, to know who the historical Jesus was. What we have is we have four portraits of Jesus that speak to their faith in Jesus and he says that is in and of itself a historical topic of study. Yeah, that's about as far back as we can go. We have, we have their beliefs and they're interacting with each other. You know, mark is the earliest a. Matthew and Luke are definitely taking mark and changing mark, or adding or taking things away or putting things differently, because they're portraying Jesus differently, once again, for their context for their audience, right, I it's.
Speaker 3:Again, we talked about how Jesus, god, is sort of a fluid concept in the Old Testament. Right, jesus? It can be a pretty fluid concept too historically in the New Testament and and coming to terms with that sparks theological conversations that I think are very, very important. Not avoiding it, not bringing in the old apologetic machinery and saying, well, the Bible, the Gospels, are reliable historically. Yeah, depends on what you mean by reliable or historical, but fine, but the thing is the character of them.
Speaker 3:There's diversity in the tellings of Jesus and to seize that theologically and spiritually, to seize that to say this is what we have, how do I live now in light of that? And there's not an easy answer to that, and sometimes people want easy answers, but I think the life of faith is not easy answers. I think ultimately it comes down to just kicking back and saying this is the journey that I'm on and I have to believe that God is around me and in me and through me, and it's all good. I'm trying not to hurt people, I'm just trying to understand and understand about Jesus and the Bible in the world that I occupy, the one that I live in now, and that can be really scary if you have the threat of hell hanging over you and the threat of like if you're not right, god's going to look down with you and smack you a little bit. But once you take that away, this life of faith and grappling with the Bible is life-giving.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely, absolutely so. On my show when something hits me, I just kind of let it hang for a second because it's so true. I mean I really have started reading the Gospels like I'm at a museum, you know, like I'm observing art and doing it that way. It's actually. It brings up completely different things and I've ever felt for Jesus or about Jesus, even when I identified as an evangelical Christian. Just to just admire someone else's work and poetry is just a way that I've been kind of working through that. Let's talk about Bible for Normal people before we like lay in the plane. So you start this podcast about eight years ago. Is that right? Eight years ago?
Speaker 3:Something like that. What?
Speaker 1:year are we in 20.
Speaker 2:Yes, we're about to start season eight. Yep, okay cool.
Speaker 1:So Bible for Normal people is a podcast that I love, but I'm not sure people on the show on my show know about it, so could you just tell us a little bit about it, kind of what your hope for the podcast is and who you're reaching with it?
Speaker 3:Well, it's the only God ordained podcast on the internet.
Speaker 1:I knew you were going to say that.
Speaker 2:That's the main thing to know about it.
Speaker 3:So what else do you need to know at that point? I mean, come on.
Speaker 2:But the I mean the mission of what we do is to bring the best and biblical scholarship to everyday people.
Speaker 2:And the impetus was, you know, early on and through our careers and for me, even as a pretty evangelical kid, and then going to seminary, like the things we were taught in seminary weren't being taught in churches, they weren't being taught in the Christian lifeway stores, you know where I was taught that all the good Christian books were the insights and the scholarship and the depth and the profundity of biblical critical scholarship was not making its way to everyday people.
Speaker 2:And so I mean, in the tides we're turning where again, like the story Pete told about the girl in at Eastern, I had those profound moments of like I'm kind of done with faith, if this is what it looks like. And to have these ahas in seminary where it's like one ah-ha after the other, it didn't turn me away from the Bible. It was like finally I can re-engage this in a way that makes sense to me. And so that's our hope for people is that they have been taught their whole life. Well, this is what the Bible is and this is what you're supposed to do with it and to recognize there's a whole rich theological tradition that answers those two questions very differently and in very diverse ways of what is the Bible and what do we do with it?
Speaker 3:And so we have people.
Speaker 3:I mean just a piggyback on that Jared, we have people on and our style is like here's a platform you know, and you know we engage, but it's more what's your passion and how might your corner of the universe that you're dealing with? How might that affect people who are listening, who are looking for fresh ways, fresh paradigms, fresh ways of thinking about things? They don't want to like? Not be religious Most of them they still are interested in having some vital connection probably many of them with their Christian faith, but it's just this kind of change. So they're looking for ideas, you know they're looking for ways to think. That's really what we're trying to do also to bring that to them and say here's another way of thinking about things. And a comment we get quite often is from people saying I never knew people thought like that and it's like, well, yeah, a lot of people have thought like that for a very long time, right? So it's just breaking out of the bubble a little bit.
Speaker 1:Like I said, I've been watching a lot of cult documentaries and they talk about how the way to kind of get out is education. So I just thank you all for making Christianity for people who are very serious about it, who are deep. I was doing the least trouble thing For me. Finding your podcast, finding your works, did so much. In a way, it kind of validated me. It validated some of the questions I was asking, things that bothered me, but also, let me keep that sort of fervor that I had as an evangelical when I would read the scripture and I just, I just am so thankful for you both for what you've put out into the world and for the ways that you're helping people engage on a deeper level. My last question for you is what's perplexing you? Like, what are you? What's intriguing you right now? Like, what are you kind of like thinking about? I really want to know that.
Speaker 3:Perplexing or intriguing. Those are two very different things.
Speaker 1:But I mean for me. I think, like for me it's intriguing when something perplexes me.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I got you All right. Yeah, I don't know. For me I guess it's probably a few things, but it really just comes down to the nature of reality and what is real? Are we a mass of chemicals or are we spiritual beings? Is there consciousness after death, things like that? What does it mean to talk about God in an essentially infinite universe? Where is this God anyway? Stuff like that, those don't paralyze me. Those questions, that's what I'm thinking about. I think the quickest way of putting it is what is God To me? That's a very basic question that I think, as finite human beings, it's not a bad idea to revisit that question every once in a while and to be in a spiritual community where you can actually do that.
Speaker 1:That was good Thamesy's, but mine has been kind of psilocybin born. I'm thinking a lot about consciousness, a lot man why don't you try it on that? Google. It's great. It really does help you frame and I don't know, don't knock it until you try it.
Speaker 3:That's what I say, I'm not knocking it, If you know you know,
Speaker 2:I think mine is more. I'm intrigued by this massive shift that's happening in, I think, our consciousness in the West away from atomistic, newtonian, clear and distinct identities and entities way of thinking about who we are, into kind of complex system theories and moving away from an idea of being into the idea of becoming and relationality and that things are in process. Things are not things, things are processes, things are relationality. So it just really deconstructs a lot of the frameworks that I grew up with and it's helping me to think outside the box of just who we are. When I say I like our identities and how we show up together and what I always assumed it meant to be an individual and how those are just breaking down both from.
Speaker 2:you know, for me it's on the kind of quantum mechanics and complex systems side of the science of it but then on the philosophy side of it as well, and how those are quickly merging into a way of thinking about the world, I think, very different than we've had the last four or 500 years in the West Absolutely.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. Shout out to Phyllis Tickle. She was right about that 500 years thing, that's right. Thank you all for being on the show. I just I adore what you've put in the world, so thank you for being heroes to me and for helping me stay in the game. Thanks for being on the show.
Speaker 3:Thank you to me. Thank you so much For staying with you. Thank you.