Episode 60 - Rob Bell and the Bible

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[Music] uh i went on relevant once after that i co-hosted it sometimes and they it was after you'd been on and so of course it's relevant they got all this uh you know love wins evangelical anger crowd and cameron on the podcast goes for those of you who get so like mad about rob but you love science mike and the liturgists those guys would be atheist bloggers [Laughter] [Music] we're speaking with author and speaker rob bell about the release of his new book what is the bible [Music] i went i was a worship leader at a big church in michigan right down the street from rob's church in michigan and i would go and sneak over because i my soul was draining and i didn't believe at all in what i was doing anymore i go over there and be like maybe christianity can be something else would go to their church and listen to rob i was like oh and i got in trouble for going over there that was some life for us at the time and then yeah the night that i met mike that mike and i met was that a rob when you're speaking tours for what do we talk about we talk about god oh yeah i remember that and uh you you brought me into the room there you had there's like a group of people that have been at your your two-day thing mike had his big beach experience and crazy mystical experience at your two-day thing you brought me and said mike what does what's happening in the brain when michael here gets up in front of a large group of people and sings songs and people like lift their hands to a mythical construct in the sky and get all worked up and friendships were immediately formed i put a ball on a t i said mike do you have a bath nearby so yeah we would lit the liturgists for sure with the nihilist podcast well we wouldn't have met that's true wow yeah we'd be separate we might have met like at a free thinkers conference like sam harris introduced or maybe you know maybe maybe uh richard rohr would have stepped in and i don't know i didn't like that i needed that rob alley oop to even get to roar you know what i mean somebody has to go it's okay to think this stuff is ridiculous that's fine it's fine calm down calm down it's okay so thank you rob thank you for i'm sure everybody my pleasure listening to this would say thank you rob just came out of the book congrats thank you oh man how's it been received so far it's astonishing i've heard it's like book 10 and i'm it's never this kind of love and and it's the bible yeah it's 2017. yeah like i just finished this bookstore tour and i'd be like it's the it's the bible my friend has a tesla with a trunk in the front and the back the other day he gets an email in the morning that tesla has fixed his brakes while he slept in the night through his home wifi that's 2017 syria might be using chemical weapons the president is still campaigning and i put out a book about the bible so i found myself interviewing interviewers like this is the bible why are you so interested in this even though i have my own reasons but what i keep coming back to is that our culture is more and more all treble no bass so it's that thing when someone tells you you heard about such and such and normally the news cycle was two weeks then it got to be like 24 hours but now you're with some people and they're like you didn't hear the thing and you're like i guess i didn't and you feel left out like you're behind and then you know yeah that buzzfeed posted it at 9 00 a.m and it's 2 37 p.m crazy so the whole thing is speeding up youtube views instagram followers like and i think that's all doubling back on itself because when you then read a rant that's 5 000 years old and you realize that's my rant right now that's my question that's my confusion that's my joy when you engage with something that people have resonated with for thousands of years that's like a base note and you actually are desperate for these and otherwise it's all this sliding down the surface of things it's treble it's blips it squeaks it's this high end i think that's what's happening is the immediacy of this world that we are there's a new billboard down the street from my house amazon has a new billboard because they're delivering things within an hour in l.a and it says from zero to happy in one hour and actually i would argue capitalism is not a plateau democracy mixed with capitalism mixed with technology is not a plateau it actually has an ark it takes you somewhere it's like taking us somewhere from zero to happy in one hour amazon isn't even pretending right that's not even like that's just saying we make crap and get it to you like it's i think it's actually this system it's a suicide machine but it's a system it's those matrix movies became cliches and cliches become cliches for a reason because they were true right yeah right and this thing is actually killing the planet it's killing people it's killing joy and life and when you realize that people have been wary of systems and challenging these sorts of things for thousands of years you're now swimming in a different stream the bible to me is a collection of divinely inspired stories that point me towards the christ my relationship with the bible is rather complicated i've never been able to read it with the right lens it's complicated good but complicated complicated it's complicated it feels confusing and i end up feeling beat up but i'm trying to see it through new eyes to me the bible is a fascinating and beautiful collection of different people's essays on the topic of god i believe the bible is full of truth but not necessarily full of fact but the broad scope of it is one of redemption and love i have more hurtful emotions towards the bible than i do positive emotions disgust and regret spiritual nourishment i'll wrestle with jesus in the gospels hoping it wears me down like water on stone aged wrinkled marked used i think the bible tells us more the story of who and why than it does of how and what contemplated tear-soaked kissed deeply deeply loved my bible and me the bible is hard it's too big i don't know where to start with it i can't navigate my way around it i don't like what it says about women i don't believe a lot of the stories that it tells at the center of it though is jesus and he is amazing so i'm curious at your sort of back story with why the bible stayed interesting to you um i i know some of your young story but it seems like we all came from a world that like the bible mattered because it was god speaking to humanity and that's the revelation that you need for truth and then you start asking questions and seeing things in different ways and for a lot of people you're like oh the bible's not what i thought it was and you move on and you seem like in ways you've moved on but in ways it's still incredibly important for you what about your story kept you interested well i tell in the book about one of my first sermons this guy came up afterwards and he's like you missed it i was like i missed what he's like you missed that whole thing you did that whole passage about jesus but he says you realize jesus was jewish which i was like no he was a christian i mean i knew he was jewish but was still like what he just goes into this thing about jesus was a jewish rabbi so he's having a last supper with his disciples that would have been a passover seder there would have been four cups so when he raises the cup which of the four cups does he raise because if you knew which of the four cops that would help understand the story and when he says the poor will always be with you that's a reference you realize that's a reference and there's actually that line where he says that's a romance you know what ramez is and what about triple taxation you know what mikvah is because that relates to the he just just starts going off and he's like you're missing it and so this guy's name is richard he started drop i was probably 25. he started dropping these articles off at my office like these photocopied articles by people i'd never heard of about the bible that this was written by real people in real places at real times so lots of people told flood stories and their general estimate in the galilee at the time of jesus is that people were taxed about 90 so people cannot afford to hold on to their family lands they literally don't have enough food which is the feeding of 5000 that's why people are following this itinerant mystic revolutionary rabbi because they're hungry why are they hungry like no one ever i never heard somebody say why are they so hungry oh because of this thing that was happening with the temple and the herodians and the romans so all this stuff just came to life and then that took me into oh this jesus tradition that i sort of grew up around it's almost like spirituality exists about six inches off the ground we're kind of passing through here the real action is somewhere else but when i dove into the jesus world and spirituality was a a dimension of the material and we could even obviously take that apart a thousand ways but it's like oh no it was about sweat soil and sex and surfing i added that part but it was it was about this world and tikkun olam the healing of this world and olaba olam ava life in the age to come you know what i mean it all it like went it like a picture like sinking down into oh this is and that the bible was about politics and economics and how culture gets created and power and violence but the bible is actually about the things that everybody's talking about now so i think that sort of for me then the bible was no longer irrelevant the first line of the gospel of mark is a ferociously political claim so when people do that like sometimes you'll hear um fancy pants christian pastors be like no we don't get into the political we just talk about the heart it's very well then you probably should avoid reading this book because when mark says this is the gospel that's a loaded military propaganda term of the romans of jesus christ he's the christ are you kidding me the messiah that was oh my word so loaded and subversive and dangerous and that was making claims about everything do what i mean so when i begin to realize that this jesus tradition was actually really big and really wide and a lot of the things that i was like why would i go with this when people over here are talking about this oh that's present in this tradition so i think just realizing that the jesus tradition was so much bigger and wider from the opening pages of the bible it's assumed that human beings have a proper relationship with the soil like that's an assumption and it's assumed that if human beings were to not have a proper relationship with the soil then your culture your economics your everything would fall apart so like the exile which is one of the major stories of the bible these people jerusalem is conquered these people are hauled away and in exile they're trying to make sense of why did our culture get completely destroyed and we get hauled away like this and the prophet jeremiah says oh it's because you didn't let the land lie fallow one of the prophets in explaining the total devastation of the nation says this happened to you because leviticus you know what i mean leviticus says farm the land for six years let it rest for a seventh this is sustainable farming practices you know what i mean so ideas that in 2017 people consider very progressive sustainability proper relationship with the soil are actually not even named at some level they're so assumed in the book of leviticus which is seen as primitive and barbaric so i just kept noticing that people would want to reject their christian heritage in favor of what appeared to be new and enlightened and progressive ideas that were actually fully present in their own tradition they just weren't aware of it it seems fascinating to me like i guess the normative american protestant way of approaching the bible god wrote the bible through assistance to us right who's us well right now americans living in the 21st century or when i was growing up at the 20th and that you would think that would cause the bible to seem very relatable and very immediate but the funny thing is that lens if you really wrestle with the bible's text creates a distance and so when you're in that perspective and someone says no these are stories written by people assembled by people you could someone argue what it means to be inspired by god you know god played a role or not depending on where you are but somehow when you acknowledge that historical perspective that ability to relate to how we treat the soil brings the bible closer not further away and i get so frustrated there's this coded language in the church about a high view or a low view of scripture and i hear this historical perspective often characterized as a low view of scripture but you know talking to you talking to pete ins when i was struggling with what the bible meant at all how it related to god if it related to god if it related to faith it elevated my view of these stories it made them alive it made them relatable it made them harder to read i have to go grab another book and learn about this time in history to really unpack this i might have to ask someone about language but once you get there the i have it i i personally this is weird for me to say because i was real anti-bible for a few years but i haven't found another collection of resources so relatable and applicable to so many situations and certainly not that are so old you got there honestly um uh i have a when people use the word inerrancy about the bible i have a higher view of the bible i would not demean or degrade the bible by using a word like inerrancy right yeah um and you are completely correct and also your opening line about a way of describing the bible that god wrote it for the number of assumptions in that understanding of the bible and this is what's so important for people to understand the number of assumptions in that that are brand new ideas more shaped by modern philosophy than by how people have actually read the bible or even when people talk about it's the word of god i don't question it it's the word of god well where did you get this phrase word of god well the bible says it's the word of god okay if that's your litmus test for a sacred book pretty much every sacred book says the word of god so that's a little bit dodgy but what's more interesting is that word of god was an actual hebrew phrase and in the ancient hebrew understanding words create new worlds it's like that person who told you in middle school that you're good at something and you you held onto it for years because they they filled your imagination with what might be possible or somebody tells you doesn't have to be this way or somebody tells words have this power and for thousands of years people have acknowledged that words have a creative power so in the hebrew consciousness when the divine creates of course the divine would speak it so and one of the central things about the bible is it keeps insisting that all of creation is a word of god some people say dual do you believe it's the word of god well what's funny is what the word of god says that the whole thing is a word of god and that the word of god is a phrase that people use to try and give language to the sense of the unfolding expanding nature of the universe and the redeeming liberating power that seems to continue to flow through people and time and places so some of these phrases that even that people use as like a litmus test or buzzword for what your view of the bible is those phrases came about they're much more powerful and evocative than they're even given they're turned into like buzzwords and just their balls are chopped off you think about the phrase son of god son of god was referred to the caesars or caesar octavius was a son of god and the way that he was the son of god is who believed he had divine power and he went around flattening and destroying and crucifying anybody who resisted so the phrase son of god was a figure of speech used to describe a particular way of creating the world which is to destroy your enemies that's how we make peace so jesus as the son of god was a political dangerous you're saying there's a better way to make the world not through coercive military violence but through sacrificial love so jesus the son of god versus caesar's the son of god who do you believe is the center of god who do you believe is making a better world so when people do as i'm sure you've had the like well do you believe he's a literal son of god as a litmus test of whether or not you're in the club you're like hold on you just took an incredibly powerful phrase that describes a whole way of being in the world related to a dominant question in the first century you chopped off all of its richness you literalized it thinking that's a higher form of truth and then you turn it into a buzzword that makes me in or out of your tribe i will not let you do that okay the example that is coming into my brain is let's say this piano i told you guys some story i said this actually beethoven played on this piano this was beethoven's piano you'd be like wow this is an important piano i got a little little goosebumps just thinking about that but then the way i hear you talking now it's almost like no you understand like literally beethoven at some point it's like oh oh oh he didn't play you know what i mean like like it's made of beethoven it's all made of the same stuff and beethoven played what is beethoven what you know i mean it's like deconstructed it it's become this whole and they can still see it through that lens now and be like wow that's that like beethoven's atoms are part of this somehow and and the very essence that gave rise to beethoven and music and is-ness gives rise to this piano and i can see i can see that but beethoven played it getting there oh like going from god wrote this here's this flaming book floating in this sky basically to like oh but it's people that wrote it oh but but that's amazing you know like is there not was there any sort of dip of oh oh yeah when i started uh realizing oh [Music] you start with what it is and you just keep going into the center of what it is and you get in my experience i got there oh now i see what we mean by inspiration i ended up at a much higher view of it but i got there honestly and that's the thing is if you go into there are four different resurrection accounts and they don't quite line up so you can see that as a sign of untrustworthiness and lots of people say see a totally human book written by people trying to cover something up or fabricate something or you can go into the heart of those little differences you can think about four different authors writing to four different audiences and you come out the other side and you say that does something to me and and you actually find yourself playing a different game and you have a whole different set of questions and for a lot of people the humanity sounds like it's lowering it but it's raising it because if you go into the humanity you discover some called a spectral presence and every person who says why doesn't it condemn slavery i would simply respond why do you something within you believes that we shouldn't have slaves for most of human history up until about 200 years ago everybody assumed that slavery was in the natural order of things and then about 200 years ago roughly people decided that this was a horrific barbaric thing and we shouldn't do it it should be outlawed forever so every person who condemns the bible for it doesn't speak against slavery hold on you do so what is happening in human history that we have moved from slavery is okay to slavery is wrong what is that evolution enlightenment waking up ethics whatever you want to call that what's fueling that what's powering that your very condemnation of that affirms for me something's happening and we aren't just a random collection of cells and that's where things get really interesting now beethoven may have played that and the story might be he was kind of built in 19 something but it looks like a 1983 yeah but i mean i would just say sometimes sometimes the power of a story is uh i mean there's a rock in the holy land that they believe abraham would have walked on there's a there may have been a man named why not who actually walked on this rock i mean sometimes you are in a place and you just that's powerful not in like a really mystical esoteric fuzzy sense but in a this is the liberty bell it meant something to people for hundreds of years this is the you know what i mean yeah it's good anchor for your imagination anytime you're in a place that a historical place i feel like absolutely [Music] if you like the liturgist podcast but wish it came out more often i've got great news for you we have a second podcast called the liturgist conversations that comes out every two weeks quite consistently available to people who subscribe to our program on patreon for at least one dollar a month if you'd like to go further in spiritual practice we have another tier on patreon that lets you get weekly meditations that are designed and guided by people who contribute to the work of the liturgists and we also have a patron only get together events in real physical space it not only allows us to continue to produce the liturgist podcast but you get additional resources for practice and for community by joining us if you'd like to learn more go to the liturgist.com podcast and just click on the donate now button in the upper right hand corner there's different ways of reading the bible which were i'm guessing eight to twelve percent of the listeners right now that's a that's a big idea that's still a big idea yeah but let's just go ahead and and assume we can all agree there are different ways to read the bible even if some of you would think there's only one correct way there's still lots of way the bible is is read in the the the context of the day of jesus the way of reading the scriptures there wasn't a bible yet but the different scriptures oral tradition written tradition involved uh reading reflecting debating discussing turning the gem turning yeah right like all this this intense and then in the you see that in the new testament still in the new testament to me and and i think many scholars agree that you see a bit of a debate about what is this way what is it what's a bit of a debate it's the whole thing's a debate i'm trying to i'm trying to solve and play it for this got it got it yeah but so and then we get to today and we've talked about that normative view today so this morning i went to breakfast down the street and i was walking back it's a beautiful la morning aren't they haul it was oh if you're from tallahassee they're even more beautiful and i'm walking back and i like i like east l.a people a lot very open and this woman walks up to me beaming absolutely beaming big smile and she said be blessed it's like oh wow what a beautiful moment for them what happened to you michael no you live here does not happen to you this guy shows up first morning well but there was more to come story's not quite done yeah so she hands me these papers which i assume are are uh you know right for the house of intuition or something around i was like maybe i'll go check out the house of intuition today and then i see this beautiful little booklet titled witchcraft necromancer wizards familiar spirits sorcery by the way i don't know if there's a there's a thriving necromancy scene in los angeles are those positive or are those stated in possibilities i'm not sure at first all right by the design it's ambiguous design takes you in a bunch differently so when i open this pamphlet there's nothing but scripture there's no copy there's nothing look at how he's turning it into this but exodus 22 18. he did it like a magic trick at a kid's birthday party you just were the entertainment at the eighth grade all-nighter and then if you open it i think in most multiverses i'm a popular high school teacher i'm convinced exodus 22 18 thou shalt not suffer a witch to live i think that puts the cover in a very clear light leviticus 19 26 you shall not eat anything with blood neither shall ye use enchantment nor observe times practice divination regard not them that have familiar spirits neither seek after wizards to be defiled by them i am the lord your god basically bible in this translation that's amazing in this translation it's the harry potter translation don't remember jesus going to hogwarts uh so how in the world did we get from a jewish faith to a new testament faith which was about wrestling with the very nature of what this is publicly i mean my gosh the the the conflict between peter and paul is very jewish and his total harm total continuity with the earlier story yeah and the jerusalem council like this is all exactly how those people understood how you work things out so you don't think they would have passed out witchcraft brochures what i'm saying is how did we get to a view of the bible like this where we can take single verses and think if you hand it to a pamphlet this is self-evident that your life is wrong yeah um of all the wizards walking around the wizards walking around well it's always funny to me when it like when it says like don't have sex with animals generally there's only a prohibition because it's an issue [Laughter] so i'm always struck with just as a general rule oh my as a general rule any prohibition you could just read parentheses apparently somebody somewhere this is an issue so when you see a pamphlet right there's no sign in here that says don't bang your head on the wall right because this is not a problem so as a general rule when i'm approached by somebody who's solving a problem my first question is i'm interested that this person is living in a world where it's like somebody's got to stand up against necromancy so like when you you think i mean we're all different we all of our causes and that's totally fantastic but somebody somewhere was like i'll tell you what enough of that i'm taking it to the streets they saw that pepsi ad with the jenner girl and was like that's it that's my thing enough of that oh my god oh wow that's interesting you think about something like the ten commandments which have which mostly make the news now as somebody somewhere is trying to hang them in a public place but it's interesting if you think about the ten commandments in terms of oh wait these people were slaves and they have been liberated from slavery and they're now in the wilderness which is code for a place that hasn't been co-opted by any entity or system government political economic wilderness is a place where you meet the divine to this day you go to the desert it's an uh it's a place that hasn't already been owned by somebody um which is where it's the place where people have met the divine because there's less in the way so you think about the ten commandments then is these people were slaves and now they need to learn how to not be slaves so you think about every person who's been in a dysfunctional relationship just a couple of your listeners you're in a toxic relationship then you got out of it and you got into a healthier relationship and you're having these experiences like wow when i tell them the truth they tell me the truth and there's this thing called trust it's like you're learning or somebody works in an office environment where there's all these rivalries and bitterness and all this history going back and then they leave that psychotic workplace and they go to a new job and they come home and they tell their partner like it's so weird like when the people in sales say they're gonna do something they actually do it you know it's that thing that happens when you're learning how to be in a healthy work environment again and essentially this happens to us all the time where we have to learn how to be human again because of a previous experience that totally knocked our compass off up wasn't up and down wasn't down so ten commandments in some ways are here's how to be human here's how to be a human being not a human doing so in egypt your worth and value comes from how many bricks you produce so the first and ten commandments you shall have no other gods in egypt the gods were okay with this relationship where some people own other people the gods are fine with this and in egypt then as a slave the question of a slave is are the gods okay with this arrangement in egypt the answer was yeah they sanctioned it so this god which was a brand new idea in human history isn't okay with this enslavement so this is the god of the oppressed the god of the underdog this god can hear the cry brand new idea these people are brought out and they're taught to be human so what's the first command you shall have no other gods which is grace grace grace at your powerlessness when you were at your end when you had no more strength or power you were liberated from this oppression so even you think about something like the ten commandments it's if you read it these stories real people in real time and real places found this helpful moving inspiring confrontive convicting it becomes a completely different discussion now we're talking about oh if you read it in terms of people learning how to be human again you've just did it happen did it not what's literals you're now just left behind those questions because you're talking about oh the power of this is it's teaching it's like framing new neural pathways [Music] you talk a lot about like how it relates to humanity and how we can become more human with it and see our humanity played out within it how does the bible relate to what you would think of when you say a word like divine right because people have been using this word god for a long time i would begin with god as a word that people use to try to name ultimate reality so if you think about religions in terms of naming systems i think it's much more helpful people have been trying to name that of what you can't conceive of anything bigger i've been trying to name the ground of being have been trying to name the thing that's behind the thing behind the thing even the fact that i just used three or four different ways to describe what people have even been trying to describe is how you should probably think about the word god and even within the bible lots of different words have been used for god so the first name for god in the bible elohim is a plural word that's just fascinating i am in hebrew as a pluralist like ies or s in english like let us make man in our own image right so right away you have an understanding of god as some sort of community of oneness then you have the greeks had this idea of a theos small th like the gods the pantheons um zeus hermes et cetera so when paul is trying to name god he takes their idea of a chaos and capitalizes it so that's he's essentially takes and makes a capital t you have this idea of gods that's a big move absolutely and the reason why it's so interesting is because in exodus um they're told that god's name is yahweh this will be my name forever so this would be my name from generation to generation some paul finds himself in lystra which is a greek city and he wants to talk about god but if he says yahweh they'll be like who they don't know moses the prophets they don't know torah they don't know kosher they don't know david they don't know any of this so what does he do he says well they do have this idea of gods so what i'm going to do is i'm going to capitalize their concept so i'm here to talk to you about the theos this is very clever on the fly and it's also interesting that jerusalem he keeps going back to headquarters he keeps going back to denominational headquarters and there's um some questions about what he's doing it's almost like what are you people doing out there changing the name of god um yeah and it's almost like paul's going you almost feel like sometimes he's going you know come join me yeah because obviously in your jerusalem world where everybody knows moses everybody knows torah everybody eats kosher everybody observes sabbath you can stay in your little language system because all of you have agreed upon the concepts and terms come with me out to lystra where the city bowed down to worship me because they thought i was a god returning to them and then you try to talk which is i think a lot of the tension a lot of people have is i am in a world where the naming system that you take to be assumptive nobody knows what in the world you're talking about nobody knows and actually i mean a lot of my work for 25 years has been in the area of language and naming and when people say you're not using the right words and i would just respond because i'm being true to the tradition the tradition is not to repeat the same words over and over again the tradition is to read your world and do everything you can to put this in language these people might understand that's actually their tradition or you think about how many people will go to a church service this sunday and they'll sing nothing but the blood can wash away what could wash away my sins nothing but the blood is there any situation in your life in which blood has washed something clean i mean i bet the necromancer [Laughter] blood is what you need to get washed out of something yes so at some point in a blood guilt culture 2000 years ago when your neighbor jeff was offering goats on a saturday morning blood guilt language was really helpful jefferson don't be a band name now right geoffrey we don't now live in a blood guild culture so songs about blood guilt that's fine it's i have no problem it's just don't wonder then it's alien man don't wonder if people don't understand it i always wonder if paul would say thanks for the props but the idea wasn't that you would just keep repeating my images and metaphors that i was just trying in my time and place to describe this as profound if you see like the the blood thing in the same lines as the capitalization of theos like he came in and spoke their language and their customs and their imagery that's that's amazing it makes it so much more beautiful right and these these ideas that for many people in the spirit in the well especially in the jesus tradition and certain swaths of the jewish tradition that are like basic assumptions like yeah of course oh no that was a a radical risky interesting thing that person was doing at that time in trying to give expression and when you take that and just make it like yeah of course the washing away the blood of a go oh wait wait no that came out of a place where that meant something very specific and that was radical brand new thinking at that time yeah the tradition isn't just endlessly repeating which is an interesting concept when you talk about the bible specifically i you know as a worship leader i grew up in writing worship songs and there was always like this impetus to make sure enough scripture was in the song right right right right and and what i've seen even now when we are part of christian environments where there's a lot of christian music happening whatever the more buzz phrase scripture christianese talk that the person from the stage can use it creates this sort of immediate safety and social bonding on perhaps part of the crowd but it shuts down any sort of critical or much thoughtful engagement with what's being said i mean i remember there's a huge christian ban that i just was at this thing and they're playing and getting up and saying like how many know jesus can never be shaken everyone's and i was like yes what does that mean right right right tribal affiliation yeah the world is changing the world is scary the world is frightening the plate tectonics are shifting but here in this space right now we are going to free you from having to wrestle with any of that and we are going to repeat slogans and phrases that will trigger different reactions in your brain that will make you feel like for a few brief moments there's a safe island of calm and security yeah so how does the bible how do you interact with the bible in a way that doesn't it doesn't self-defeat where it doesn't just become a set of cliches and safe safety this is this is god's word so i can be you know like for some people it feels like it can actually be a way of shutting down thought absolutely and what's interesting is people oftentimes it is if i can just quote some bible verses then it's like then we'll all go ah we'll relax because we're safe yeah so uh just pick any book romans we'll just quote some books in romans about how i'm not ashamed of the gospel whatever well what's interesting is romans is in some ways a compelling argument about inclusivity because in romans if you trace the ark it just moves wider and wider and wider and wider and romans ends with ends with paul in rome now rome was the ends of the earth it ends with him in a rented house in rome and he's talking to whoever is interested about the kingdom of god so even if you follow the trajectory of the book of romans it is about interaction with the broad spectrum of humanity around the depth of being and around what is this idea of the divine and what does a world look like that's been ordered by the divine so you just take any book that somebody would use you know what i mean you hear them quote you hear that person shout it from the stage everybody goes oh good be still and know that i am god you're right okay be still let's talk about stillness let's talk about silence let's talk about i mean you just go one inch into this book and you are you are going to find something disruptive something electric something oh how about the uh rejoice and again i say rejoice yeah there you go that's almost like a something crocheted on a pillow of a cliche this is a dude who's been beaten multiple assassination attempts shipwrecked hungry he's had lots of people want him dead and he's in chains he's in prison rejoice and again i say rejoice so you can see that as a a denial of the difficulty of life you can see that as a blind naive hey everything's going to be fine or you can read it i think you ought to read it which is this is a man who has been to the worst depths of human suffering and he pushed through he's had a dark night of the soul he left the village for the hero's journey and now when he says rejoice it's got some stuff to it it's got some weight to it it's got some gravitas he's saying i'm in prison i have almost died lots of times he even earlier basically says sometimes i just want to leave it's so hard but here's the thing you do have this moment and even in chains in prison with your back against the wall you can decide to swim in the stream of joy now that's just something interesting and oftentimes what you're talking about is that like jesus stuff is let's all get together and if we just shout some phrases that we all are comfortable with we can keep our pain at bay we don't have to talk about how much right now much of us think it's all probably made up you know what i mean yeah we can just say this stuff we'll all feel good and we can spend another day avoiding what's actually going on inside each of us because if we open that door that's [Music] terrifying [Music] yeah so like it's genuinely the transition for me out of that thought space which i spent the vast majority of my life in yeah and was frankly it seemed like a very happy place i didn't realize it was all treble right if you've never heard bass it's it seems fine it seems fine and the transition the first time you hear a bass note is not necessarily joyous it's terrifying right right it's really truly terrifying and i um as part of re-engaging faith and re-engaging the bible it took a couple years of being a mess of a person absolutely it took uh i mean some of my dear friends i would call them and talk about the same thing over and over stuck in these loops yeah and it's a very difficult transition so i and i think some people intuitively know that so right why wouldn't you read the bible with your commentary in your sunday school class and say the same phrases and enjoy the social identity if i go into this for many people this will have implications for my family for marriage there i remember i was the pastor of a mega church which now i see that word that sounds like it sounds like like a disease or a transformer character like a mega church it's just a funny phrase that's such an odd phrase but um i remember realizing oh this doesn't this whole framework of how we know things doesn't work for me anymore and i have to follow it i have to i have to pursue this line of inquiry otherwise i'm going to be just spouting things that i don't don't know what i'm talking about and i remember kristin and i talking i mean just very straightforward conversations i have to keep going and follow this wherever it goes and if that means then i lose it all we had a running joke from spinal tap about selling shoes i could always sell shoes you look like a size 11. um we were like well well then maybe i'll just go sell shoes but i would have my integrity i'd have my soul because i noticed a number of pastors this was in my late 20s early 30s who it wasn't working but they got like this some massive paycheck and benefits and they were like and they would say things to me like dude i love your book i could never say anything to somebody i mean they would come i would say they come at night nicodemus style i'm sure you've had this happen to you guys countless times so but i remember distinctly going back to what you were saying oh if i follow where this is taking me it could lead to all sorts of places i don't know where it's going to lead but i will be alive but i'm alive and yeah and i i understand for some people if i go there i don't know where that might take me and something within me knows there's all this truth just behind that door but if i crack that door open the amount of things that may get disrupted that really matter to me which you guys know about it's important for me i actually say that because it's important for me to remember that because otherwise i don't know about you all but i'm like what's the problem let's go right come on come on come on come on come on yeah and i compress years and years and years of the path to come on what's your problem but actually it's a long slow unfolding and people need to be given the space well and on the other like flip side of that a lot of my atheist friends and the show has a lot of atheist listeners hi friends they'd say you know what we like what you're about we don't really understand the bible thing why you care so much about it i've i've certainly had a lot of skeptical friends who like why do you why you hold this book with reverence at all i mean so it's an interesting historical artifact there's lots of those but i think that's precisely what we're talking about for for literally millions of people tens of millions of people the way they understand this book directly impacts their relationships with friends and family yeah and the most fundamental ways they process reality yes it it couldn't be more significant right right even just sociologically yeah yeah even if you don't put any stock in what i mean yeah yeah absolutely does that make you like it though personally my ex that's part of what makes it so interesting to you because you like the bible a lot i'm a huge fan four stars on amazon it's a great great it's a great thing i read it every day i'm not embarrassed about that anymore i'm back to a daily daily bible guy this lectio divina thing why did nobody ever tell me about this you don't have to obsessively try to get to the end and memorize it and you don't have to treat it like you can just take a little bit and savor today and see how this might relate to me right oh right that's great one of your answers is very mystical and a lot of people approach it like an owner's manual which is the worst metaphor ever have you ever read an owner's manual for anything a terrible metaphor but but one of the problems for like i love roomie and i love roomies big red book and for the past couple years i've read a page in big red book every day because it does it opens me up in some way but a lot of people approach the bible with this incredibly narrow modern linear logical set of filters and then go i don't know why i what because there's parts of your life and soul that don't fit on a spreadsheet and there is no algorithm for well hold on let's not get crazy the jesus story about the forgiving father and the son wanders off and goes on throws a party and the older brother won't join and the god character the father character says to the older brother who will join the party who's like all this time i did all this for you and the father has this great line you are always with me and everything i have is yours like why does mike find the bible interesting because you take that phrase you are always with me everything i have is yours and you think of all the lines jesus could put on a god character that's the line he puts on you are always with me then they they have new images of jupiter it's like a jupiter could speak you are always with me everything i have is like that's the richness oh yeah we're now another category i read it in this it's the american thing who am i in the story clearly the hero clearly the protagonist you're american you're always the protagonist right but in that story of such richness i was talking to a friend of mine as a bishop in the methodist church and he was talking to me about that story of my life and he turned the gym for me a little bit because he started talking about the older brother absolutely and the older brothers experience the older brothers feeling like i'm faithful i'm serving why is he the star of the party and when the dad pulls him aside what's the problem and he says he said everything i have is yours to the older brother right and i thought about all my wonderful friends in the evangelical church and in the baptist church who think i'm nutty now and how much anger and resentment i had towards them over how they processed my journey and my experience but to place them in that story as the older brother who never left the farm right it it created such a profound moment of insight that led to forgiveness yeah led to healing yeah because there's such de i i mean i'm a huge harry potter fan i love david foster wallace there is great literature in the world but there's something about this particular collection that has a truly exceptional depth yeah and that might be the best way to talk about the bible when someone's like why like maybe the most honest and maybe the most intelligent way to talk about bible be like i don't know it's done something to me for a long time now these stories do something to me and when we were talking about inspiration what do you mean by this i mean but um maybe in 2017 the way the new language the words you might use to to try to get out words people have used about the bible for a while it does something to us it it's done something to me it opened me up i tried that with the subtitle the book it actually has transformed the way i think and feel about everything it actually has done that in some sort of slow marinating sort of way i just think about creation i think about nature and environment i think about myself and i think about my anger and rage and all the stuff that boils within i just think about it all differently because of this collection of books it actually did something um stratton and i hi stratton i'm stratton and i've often talked about the book title is what is the bible and my answer so i mean what is the bible my answer would be what does it do my answer is actually a question it does something if you read it this way it does something to you and maybe not uh it's interesting how many people need to set it down for a long time so i've been doing this bookstore tour in which i do a whole bit on some of the but i totally care by the way that's how much i'll do a whole thing on the need some some of you just probably need to put it down for a while and that's totally normal it's like a toxin and just let it flush itself out and maybe it'll never flush out but it's just funny to be doing a book about the bible and telling people you know what you probably and some probably you should only read books about the bible for a while it took me like 30 months bible detox sure yeah yeah yeah i feel like i'm pretty i don't feel toxic with it you're just new i feel kind of like man the three amigos was a great movie i really enjoyed watching it right i occasionally like watching it now not very often though yeah right yeah you're just like uh yeah that's so good you're like it's fine it's fine yeah you can do i gotta deep into it and i get really great stuff out of it sure i imagine you can i could say with right you know what i mean i'm sure if i got the box set i'd be like wow these guys are really good read the scholars about it on their music yeah and actually sorry that is like totally normal you know what i mean yeah i get that yeah a friend of mine read the bible he's like man your book it's so good and i really don't care [Music] he's a pr he's a priest and where he's at is he's just been talking about the bible for so long he like needs a whole number of reasons why he probably just needs just needs a reboot just needs a like i seem to go have a life outside of this life i've been having because i've been doing this for a long i don't know but um there's lots of really valid reasons why and i just loved it that he felt free because that is just i was like i totally get why you should most likely probably shouldn't you right now need space [Music] for me the bible is the foundation of all christian orthodoxy and has carried this faith movement since its advent my relationship with the bible is one of pain discomfort and disbelief i've really actually come to love the bible as soon as i was able to let go of trying to figure it out if we don't know our history we're condemned to repeat it and i think that's the greatest purpose of the bible since deconstruction began for me i've had to put the bible down it seems like i need an advanced degree in theology to be able to read the bible without abusing it it's one of genial frustration adoration and straining paradox it's an untamed line in the worst way sometimes i tend to think of it as a book of clues regarding god's character i now i kind of see it as another book and i deconstruct it and yeah it's really hard to know what truth is for me interestingly enough the most inspiration i get is when i actually see it echoed in other sources that i i'm reading a lot of sufi mystic poetry these days and when i see something that i also saw but now i can see it through this other lens and through this other like and it calls up something or when i hear somebody like ram das talk about christ and something he says and that that does still spark something in me like i just had that same i just uh re-read christopher the mill and when ram das talks about christ consciousness every time it was doing something to me yeah it was like like like a tuning fork yeah oh yeah that i love that note yeah i had the same thing well it calls out the underlying reality that was underneath the the myth and culture of my relationship to it seeing it from a different culture speak of it in a different way with a slightly different metaphor in different language you can see the commonality and feel like you're connected to what it's actually getting yes yeah and i have so many friends wise friends open-minded friends who if you identify in some way with this very broad tradition we call christianity and if you say sufi or ramadas or buddha or the dao or you use other metaphors they get very nervous they get very anxious they're fine in an interfaith context i'm not talking about we need to convert them but that's what they talk about it's fun to go have a feel very worldly and have dinner but then return to our space but like i wouldn't be able to read the bible today if i hadn't read a lot of alan watts and listen to a lot of ram das do you know what i mean yeah that's how i got back because i needed someone that a spoken language differently enough from what i was jaded and cynical about yes and two could offer me a different perspective on an approach toward the divine and i i worry that one thing we do with the bible is we elevate it we make it a stand-in for god's self for the divine and then we become obsessed with defining the borders of what is acceptable in a move towards the divine and if if if this idea of a cosmic christ has any merit that there is this part of god that is always inviting the creation towards reconciliation then surely anything that helps people move towards peace and growth and health must be of christ you know what absolutely and and i think for a lot of people listening that's a really easy step to take and i think for other people that's a little frightening because it feels like a demotion of something that they hold special but i i i just wanted to reference that because if we some people get nervous to say ram das but i think i think christ is in all those things which is in itself to the skeptic in my brain a ridiculous statement well like if paul went if paul had gone to india instead would he have corrected and i i don't want to read i don't know i'm sincerely asking because i don't want to throw my postmodern deconstructed lens into the thing a long time ago black record you already did we're just discussing shades and gradients but anyway um but he comes across brahman shiva vishnu trinity does he say no that's father son holy spirit or does he say wow you can see correct yeah yes all things are yours yeah oh yeah people have been trying to name reality for thousands of years why in the world would even be remotely shocking that people would have stumbled upon the same truths and then they would have named it through the filter and texture and colors and shapes of their particular world that is the yeah like you should just start there and then it should completely never shock a person that these people over here are talking about something that's helpful or interesting or insightful like that if there's anything the new testament the biblical writers are bringing up again and again it's oh look over there cyrus lord says is my messiah cyrus was a pagan military king who is called my messiah by the lord so over and over and again whenever it gets narrow it always gets wide and whatever it gets particular you're always reminded of universals we're told that stories about abram and a new tribe and from this new tribe is going to come a savior chapter 12 of genesis right away chapter 14 melchizedek shows up and he's a priest of what melchizedek he's blac what who some crazy uncle shows up who has a direct line so the story at the moment when it's most this is a particular story about a particular tribe two chapters later it subverts the particularity with some guy who shows up who he's the one doing the blessing so anytime someone does that like oh i'm kind of suspicious of that i go oh you're sort of missing the fundamental arc of the bible which is to affirm it wherever it shows up always widens the scope it's never threatened never threatened all things are yours they can't see me happy dancing internally i'm sorry about it that's your happy dance i'm not a dancer [Music] where are you at personally with language about god is there any thing that you would say like when you talk about ultimate reality for you what are the helpful metaphors and language right now that you would sort of speak of your your relationship with ultimate reality uh the image that comes back to mind again and again is music that you hear you just want to open up the windows and open up the door and you want to hear it more you want to hear the fullness of it and then you start to move to it and then you're like want to invite others to hear it and then move with you and pretty soon you're all dancing generally images come to mind i also there's a question there's a big bang 13.8 billion years ago 13.7 13.9 well next year we'll have another number maybe mike can tell us more on that but particles to atoms to molecules to cells to systems to more complicated systems to animals to humans and then 13 billion years in to the history of the universe as far as we know it or at least this universe we should probably add you have consciousness the ability to stand outside of oneself or to reflect on the whole thing what is that to see that unfolding even the number 13 which to me is just so weird why at this point in the story and then you have over the past 100 years a mapping of stages of growth and consciousness which has never happened archaic magical mythical i mean you even have for the first time people identifying that there are specific six to eight stages all the way to integral and super integral stages of growth that human beings go through consistently like how is this happening and how are we now knowing what we're knowing which no one ever talked about until just the past little bit and that to me to talk about god i begin with what do we know we know that this thing has been unfolding and growing in depth complexity and unity that somewhere in the story 13 billion years in somehow it developed the ability to reflect upon itself you are the universe observing itself or alan watts you are something the universe is doing in the same way that a wave is something the ocean is doing dinosaurs weren't writing poetry or rocks were not saying i just want my life to matter this is all new so what is happening where is this going why is it unfolding the way that it is unfolding and to me i begin with to talk about god in the modern world if you don't start there people generally whatever but that is the question to me that sits at the heart of the whole thing i mean let's go back to slavery women's rights let's go back to human trafficking why do you think human trafficking is wrong people use human trafficking all the time they still do why do you think it's wrong what has happened in the unfolding of the universe that you look at that and think it's wrong and should be left behind and in the same breath think about how we treated women and then eventually women got to vote and now people are talking about a woman being president so we all say thank god we've made so much progress but you can't affirm the progress without affirming we still have a long way to go so what is it that you constantly place yourself on a spectrum of thank god we aren't stuck back there but we still have a long ways to go what is that movement and to me if you start there now you i would call that something i would call that something i would name that and it doesn't now then surprise me the people have been trying to name that for thousands of years and that when you use the word god you're entering into a long tradition of human beings trying to name how can somebody know god oh you love that and we're talking to you we're gonna save [Laughter] the word no to me means personal experience so when i look at my life it just keeps getting more it's almost like a camera lens that was real narrow and then it just kept backing up and you just kept seeing more and more and more and more that's how i think about it when i look at my life my consistent enduring experiences of that which i previously wasn't aware of and then it went from 2d to 3d then it went from black and white to color just when i thought i knew all of a sudden i realized i didn't know a thing and then when i thought i knew that thing it got even better so i go back to my own what do you call that that's been my experience it's a lot of discussion about god a lot of debates a lot of believers versus not really to me it's just it's just clanging symbols it's not interesting and oftentimes to me the debate sounds like people who haven't aren't talking honestly about their own interior experiences a lot of it just sounds like personal stuff projected onto the divine your god you shape your god and then your god shapes you a lot of the discussion to me is like no that's about how your parents died when you were young no that's about that girl who dumped you but honestly a lot of the time it just sounds like clanging or it just sounds like cartesian philosophy from about 400 years ago you're just arguing you just attached god or your rejection of god to something a philosopher said in france 300 years ago i mean a lot i mean obviously honestly to me most of the discussion is just really boring because no one's talking about the actual interior thing that is happening inside of you and why you cling to this or don't cling to this or believe that or don't believe them whatever or the incessant need for certainty or the insistence that no certainty can be known all that to me is like it's all personal [Music] the book is what is the bible the author is rob bell it's available everywhere books are sold if you'd like more information visit rob bell.com rob thanks for joining us today it's i'm so happy you know what i am i'm proud of you guys because both of you you went through stuff and you've chosen to take all of that and create a new world doesn't surprise me that people resonate on such a large scale i'm happy to know you and i'm really you just are doing something so great and you could have been bitter and cynical and just become one more person who's like but instead you're like let's make something bizarre let's hang some flags you know what i'm saying let's wear some beads let's do some events yes you know what i'm saying like you went the other direction and i mean i know all the time people thank you but there's obviously been cost because there always is but you all were willing to pay it because of the joy and that's just awesome so i'm here to say thanks keep going it means a lot thank you little science mike misting there [Music] we love to hear your impressions comments and questions related to this episode visit podcast to find the comments section for this episode or you can reach out to us on social media on twitter we're at the liturgists and on facebook we're at facebook.com the liturgists music for this episode was provided by gunger and tyler chester and we'd like to thank madison chandler cory pig and greg nordin for their contributions to the program i science mike and michael gunger have been your hosts thanks for listening everyone [Music] [Applause] [Music]