Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Welcome. You're listening to the Collective Table, where we celebrate the intersections of Jesus, justice and joy. Presented by the Oceanside Sanctuary Church, this monthly episode brings you inside our live book club conversations with today's most thought provoking authors of progressive Christian theology diving deeper into their work and asking the questions that move us forward.
So we're grateful you're here. Let's get started.
[00:00:27] Speaker B: All right, well, let's go ahead and jump in.
Welcome to David W. Congdon to our book club for the Oceanside Sanctuary and the Collective Table podcast. We are very excited to have this opportunity to have a live conversation with David.
I'm particularly excited to have David Congdon join us. One of my favorite things about having a book club in this sort of format is is I get to reach out to the authors that I appreciate the most. And David is certainly one of those.
So maybe just by way of a bit of introduction, I'll just share that. David W. Congdon is a senior editor at the University of Kansas Press and a lecturer in religious studies at the University of Kansas. His work explores the intersection of critical historical research, systematic theology, cultural studies, and political theory. And you got a decent dose of all of that in this book. It's a bit unique in that respect, I think. In addition to this publication, who is a true Christian, David is also the author of the Mission of Demythologizing, Rudolph Bultman's Dialectical Theology, Rudolph Bultman A Companion to His Theology, the God who Saves A Dogmatic Sketch, and the editor of Varieties of Christian Exploring Three Views. And of course, I know there are more, but this is the bio that you put on your own web page. David, so welcome. Thank you for joining us.
[00:01:57] Speaker C: Yeah, thank you so much for having me and welcoming to be part of this. Appreciate it.
[00:02:02] Speaker B: Well, so on a personal note, I will also share that David's book the Mission of Demythologizing was a catalyst for me when I read it a few years ago. And it is probably partially responsible for me pursuing PhD research on women's religious disaffiliation as an expression of decolonial praxis.
And so I have David to thank for my student loan debt. So thanks for that, David. I appreciate that.
[00:02:31] Speaker C: But you must be one of the few who've actually read the book. I really appreciate that. Thank you.
[00:02:36] Speaker B: That's certainly not true because. Because when I said hello to Dr. Kim, Christine Kim, for you at Fuller, she said, oh yeah, he's the one that wrote that book about Boltman.
And so very good.
She said to say hello back. She seemed to, she seemed to appreciate your work as well.
I'd like to start with an excerpt actually from this book. Who is a true Christian? And this is from the introduction, which is great because, you know, really great introductions give you a kind of a roadmap to everything that's in the book. And I really love that that's true for this book in particular.
But I kind of keyed in on this passage and so if you don't mind, I just want to share this excerpts with you guys. This is from page 15 in the introduction. David writes this. The biggest problem with theological definitions of evangelicalism, as well as Christianity more generally, or any other religious community, is the way they render the religion or movement under consideration essentially benign or inherently good.
No Christian claims to believe a doctrine that is intrinsically and self evidently harmful. And therefore any reference to toxic Christian behavior must be, quote, fake Christianity, a departure from the goodness that characterizes quote, real religion.
The reflexive association of the Christian with good only serves to reinforce what Chrissy Stroop calls Christian supremacism, which views Christianity as morally superior and perpetuates Christian privilege the way white supremacism views white people as superior and perpetuates white privilege.
Given the way all text based religions involve competing interpretations and often contradictory claims, Stroop rightly argues that, quote, there is no such thing as a singular, timeless, pure form of any religion.
And thus we must accept that there are a wide variety of Christian communities with the competing theological claims.
There is no Christianity, there are only Christianities.
And David, I pulled that quote because I think this distinction between, you know, Christianity and Christianity is in the plural, is a very effective way of introducing people to something that's sort of at the essence of your book, which is this notion that there is a singular expression of really any given faith, but in our case, Christianity, as opposed to a tradition that is constantly duplicating itself, branching off from itself, responding to culture, transgressing itself, mutating and changing forms, right? Becoming whatever it is in any given local context. And I think it's such a, such a great phrase, right? To move from Christianity to Christianity is to illustrate that in a very succinct way. So my question for you is how make that shift from understanding like Christianity versus Christianity is better help a group of people, like at our church, the Oceanside Sanctuary, which takes some of these things seriously, how might that shift help us better live into the faith that we proclaim? If that makes sense or seems a little paradoxical.
[00:06:05] Speaker C: Yeah, well, thank you so much for that question. And I mean, it is at the heart of what I wanted to explore in this book. I mean, I, I, I began this project by reflecting on the situation around 2016 through 2020, when, you know, in that first Trump presidency, there was a lot of debates on social media at that time regarding, you know, who is, or a real Christian.
And you had these claims being lobbed back and forth on, on all sides along the partisan divide.
And, and so, I mean, that, that prompted me to explore a question that had already been wrestling with for quite some time. And if you read my first book, in some ways this is at the heart of that book too, and in its own way.
And I suppose there's a few different things I want people to take away from with that idea. I mean, one is simply just to just grapple with the fact that Christianity has always been plural.
That's not a new phenomenon. That's, it's always been that way from the very beginning.
I mean, as the old saying goes, the, the winners get to tell the story. And that is what happened with Christianity.
A certain group of Christians got the ear of the emperor and convinced him to side with them over against their opponents. And the rest of human history in that sense has been written from that, from their perspective. And so, so you have a lot of different groups who were sort of written out of the story. They were written out as they were heretics or, or quite literally killed for being part of the opposing, opposing views on Christianity. So there's one sense in which I just want people to just realize that our story, we have a very complex and complicated family tree, religious family tree.
And so there's a certain ethical concern I have about this, that we need to take stock of some of the figures in our past that we've ignored and tried to write out of our story. But there's a, but there's an ethical side to the present too. It's not just the people in the past who were sort of written out, but it's also the people in the present who are currently being written out of our story, who are being ostracized or being pushed out of the storyline, out of our communities.
And that's also personal for me.
The other reason for writing this book was that I was fired from a Christian organization in 2016 for one of my previous books, which they deemed to be heretical. Specifically, it was viewed as being in conflict with their statement of faith.
And, and that that launched me on that process of thinking through just what Is the purpose of a statement of faith or a creed or a confession? In that sense, what. What work does it do?
What power, interest does it serve?
Who gets to decide how that statement of faith is used and applied in a particular case?
When is it ignored, and for what purposes, and when is it activated and. And then deployed and against whom?
So there are questions of power that I think are crucial, I think, for us to. To wrestle with. And, and that's. And I. And so I'm writing this book in the context, and certainly now we're reading this book and thinking about it in the context of a situation in which questions of diversity and complexity are currently being pushed out of the view. Right? We have DEI being suppressed at universities or museums, being forced to only portray a certain narrative about who we are, who the people is, what the nation is, what our communities are.
And so I think there's a lot of reasons for that complexity. And diversity is scary.
It's threatening to certain structures of power and belonging. And, and so I think one simple thing, thing to take away from this, I hope, is that Christians can become more comfortable with those unsettling dimensions of diversity and complexity that maybe as humans, we're often want to sort of suppress those and get. And silence those different storylines.
I'm hoping that maybe churches like your own and other churches can cultivate a healthy embracing of that unsettling nature of our diversity and complexity in our stories and.
And maybe wrestle with that together.
[00:11:02] Speaker B: So, yeah, I imagine lots of people would consider unsettling to be a pretty useful way of describing our church at times. But so. So maybe that does work. I appreciate you touching on two things in your response, and you covered a lot of ground and anticipated one of my other questions, which is, you know, what's your own story? You know, how do you intersect with this? And I know that there's more that you could tell there, but it's helpful to know that your own foray into is that diverged from what was considered normative in a, you know, completely unironically Protestant organization got you fired. Right. And so it's understandable that you would bring to this an examination of how it is that we can make space for people to have divergent perspectives, divergent opinions, divergent conclusions, even.
So thank you for that. But you did touch on two things that I think are helpful. One was you talked about this as being a story about power, right? And how power is exercised, how those who are viewed as a threat are erased or sidelined or. Or violence is committed against Them. And I was reminded of several years ago, there's a popular Christian author. I mean, he's not super popular, but he writes popular books. Richard Beck, I'm sure you're familiar with him, and his tradition is Churches of Christ. Right? And what's really interesting about that, of course, is Richard Beck represents a relatively, you know, open and progressive viewpoint relative to the Churches of Christ tradition. But I remember one time I was reading his blog and there were a bunch of comments on his blog. I can't remember what the subject of the blog was, but in the blog, this was probably about 15 years ago, somebody jumped in and talked about how the solution to whatever problem Richard Beck was writing about was to return to the creeds, which was, of course, a notion that in the past 20 to 25 years has really gained a lot of popularity.
And I just loved Richard's response. He wrote back and said, hey, listen, I'm Churches of Christ.
That's not where we're coming from.
He said, people were killed over the creeds. We'd rather not romanticize them.
And I thought that was such a very powerful way of exposing that this is about power, that when people are choosing who gets to be a part of the orthodox or normative or really what it boils down to is sort of human category, the category that deserves dignity and respect, then you're excluding a whole nother group of people that you can justify violence against.
And you've illustrated how we see that already in our political circumstances today. The second thing you touched on that, I think, leading to my next question, was that the tradition has always been diverse, right? The tradition has always had a kind of multiplicity of not just ethnicities, but theological perspectives until, you know, into the third and fourth centuries, when it sort of gained a position of power.
And on that note, it occurs to me that we see that same multiplicity in Scripture, but we've erased that, too, right? That we have tried to sort of flatten out or iron out the divergences and differences that exist in the text itself.
And so I wonder if you might just speak to that a little bit. Right. So the Bible is very typically presented as a sort of singular, authoritative text that reinforces who's in and who's out, what's right, what's wrong, who's orthodox, who's a heretic.
But what role, if any, do you see Scripture playing in a polydox community where differences of opinion are not just tolerated, but welcomed as a strength in the community? What role does Scripture play in those communities? In your view?
[00:14:56] Speaker C: I mean, yeah, that's a, it's a question that I wrestle with a lot. I grew up in evangelical home where the Bible was incredibly important. I mean, I grew up where we had to recite Bible verses from memory before we could eat dinner. You know, that was the home context within which I was raised. So, and you know, it's not just even that, but just the Bible has been central to a lot of the battles and wars over identity and, and religious affiliation. So it's, it's an important question. I mean, I, growing up just to share another personal story from my own life. I, you know, I was taught that if we gave an inch on things like a literal seven day creation, pretty soon you must eventually abandoned all faith in Christ. You must. The whole thing will fall to pieces if you, if you give an inch, you'll, you'll lose a mile, you know, and that Slipp slope argument was a fear tactic designed to insulate us from any critical thinking about anything.
But there's a sense in which, you know, in retrospect, now I want to say that that slippery slope was correct in the, in that we can't pick and choose what to think critically about.
It's easy to say that a passage like Genesis 1 is best read metaphorically as a work of poetry, but it's much harder to realize that some of our most treasured passages in the New Testament meant something quite different to the communities in the first and second centuries than we might want them to mean today for us.
So how we treat the Bible is in some ways a window into how we treat everything else.
The Bible is an incredibly diverse collection of texts that was not written for us. And you know, and, and I, I would, I want to say, and I, I'm, I do say this in some of my other work, but you know, there, there Christianity until after the Bible as we have, it was written already written. And so the, you know, the authors of those texts about Christ saw themselves as bringing Gentiles into the Jewish faith as they understood it. And so in a really, in a very real sense, like we are reading ancient texts that belong to a different religious community and we've claimed them as our own when they in some ways really aren't.
And what do we do with that?
And I think the first thing I want to say is that we need to hold the Bible with a much looser grip.
And you know, every single one of us is negotiating with a text and making decisions about what to prioritize, what to ignore, making choices about how to interpret certain passages and phrases in a way that makes sense to us today.
We don't have access to a pure Bible in any sense. So just acknowledging that reality and being open about it, I think can help lower the temperature when it comes to who is biblical, who is not biblical in that sense, and rethinking that, the role that kind of text plays in that sense. So I want to disentangle the text from questions of who is right, who.
[00:18:06] Speaker B: Is wrong.
[00:18:08] Speaker C: Who is in, who is out, that. That kind of use of the text to serve as a.
As a sort of an arbiter, a judge of our boundaries.
But. But I do want to say that the Bible can certainly be a liberating resource for us today, and that's absolutely the case.
But I want to say that that liberating power doesn't come from the Bible in itself, but rather comes from the dialogue that we are having with the Bible.
And it's not just the Bible, but that dialogue is happening with other texts, is happening with other things around us in our culture and society.
It's that dialogue between us and the text that can be liberating and, and realizing that can acknowledge that we have agency in this.
You know, you can, we can, we can turn the Bible into a terrifying text and. But we can also turn it into a text that liberates and speaks something meaningful and life giving.
[00:19:10] Speaker B: Yeah. Thank you for that. I appreciate you touching on the Bible as something that we can have a dialogue with. And maybe I would sort of also point out that one of the ways that scripture in the text can facilitate that, if we have eyes to see it, is that it itself is a dialogue.
Right. It models exactly what you're describing. It's a dialogue between its authors, its interlocutors, its editors. And also by virtue of being that kind of discourse, it's also a discourse with its own culture, its own time, its own place, its own political circumstances and so forth. And I think if we see it that way, we read it as a dialogue and a discourse that oftentimes includes disagreement and tension and, you know, thesis and antithesis and all of that, then it liberates us to engage in that same dialogue with it.
At least that's. Maybe that's what I tell all these people.
[00:20:08] Speaker C: So you.
[00:20:09] Speaker B: So it'd be great if you said that's true.
[00:20:11] Speaker C: I think that's exactly right.
You nailed it.
[00:20:15] Speaker B: Yeah. Thank you, Jay. Would it be okay if I sort of offered up because we're talking about the text and about Scripture? Would it be okay if I offered up just a condensed version of your question because I think it's very fitting here. Are you good with that?
[00:20:30] Speaker D: I am clear. I actually.
David, I read your. I read the wrong bar book. I read the God who Saves.
[00:20:39] Speaker C: Oh, wow.
[00:20:40] Speaker D: I ordered it on Amazon and just a, just a jumped into it and I read it and I thought that that's what we were talking about. So it was a great.
[00:20:52] Speaker B: Jay, I'm just, I'm only laughing. I'm only laughing because that is a very, very challenging text.
[00:20:59] Speaker D: Well, it was. It took me a while, honestly to get through it and I'm really actually super excited because when, you know, Pastor Jason started reading his, his little intro, I went, this isn't what I read. This sounds completely different than what I read, so I will order.
[00:21:18] Speaker C: That was the book that got me fired.
[00:21:19] Speaker D: Read that as well. But in all honesty, I did read the wrong book, so go ahead.
[00:21:26] Speaker B: Yeah, well, nothing will get you fired from an evangelical institution faster than saying that people don't go to hell, so.
Well, well, Jay's question essentially. I mean, and you could ask it, Jay, if you would like to. Even though it's about another book, I mean, would you like to sort of couch it to David? I'm sure he'd be happy to answer the question. It's a great question.
[00:21:49] Speaker D: Well, okay, so let me actually pull it up so I can actually read because I actually was, I was fairly thoughtful in trying to answer, in trying to give something that actually.
[00:22:02] Speaker C: You know.
[00:22:02] Speaker D: Was, was fairly critical.
So you know, in, in terms of.
Was there a specific question? I, I did two was do you care which one was the first or second one?
[00:22:15] Speaker B: Pick the one that you think fits best with where we've gone so far.
[00:22:18] Speaker D: Yeah, it was really interesting to me your take on some of these different theories and different philosophies and different theologies. Really my first question was, you know, given that the New Testament gospels emphasize the unique objective events of Christ's historical life and death, the bodily resurrection as central to salvation, how do you reconcile this with the demetaphysical approach that rejects the substantial metaphysical Christ and interprets the salvation as an unconscious universal co. Crucifixion that can occur in non religious experiences.
So essentially you have on one context this very biblical historical definition of Christ and salvation compared to this more metaphysical objective version of what, what, what, you know, the concept of salvation is. And I'd love to hear your, your, your answer.
[00:23:30] Speaker C: Well, clearly you read that book and I really appreciate you.
That's that, that's really great.
Well, I'm going to answer that question the way I might answer it now as opposed to how I would have answered it, you know, eight years ago or so when, when I wrote that book or, you know, more now. But I, you know, so in some ways this dovetails very nicely with the question that from before that Jason asked about the Bible regarding how, you know, if these texts. So I guess, I guess what I want to start by saying, I don't think there is a very clear, like, single vision of salvation or what it means to be part of this redeemed community in the Bible. In the New Testament, there are lots of different ideas and concepts that we see in there.
And, and certainly in the New Testament, there is a lot of, of discussion about the role that Christ plays. And I, I try to pick up on that in my own way of thinking about it.
But I think the thing I want to emphasize, and I'm sorry about my connection here, but the thing I want to emphasize is the way that the thought world of the first century, first and second centuries is just so radically other than our own.
Let me just illustrate this by just talking about the resurrection for a moment, because this is, of course, the central event in the New Testament, but what exactly was that event? And apologies for my video here, but I will.
[00:25:14] Speaker B: You're good. We can hear you.
[00:25:15] Speaker C: Okay. Hope you can hear me. All right. All right.
What was that event? Well, the. If you take the Apostle Paul's writings, for instance.
Paul talks about this resurrection as being something in which it's no longer a body of flesh and blood, but a body of pneuma of spirit. It's a spiritual body.
And that, that. Then he goes on to talk about how, you know, this, this pneuma is the same pneuma that we. This, this is the Greek word here for spirit. This pneuma is infused in us through faith. It's what we receive in baptism.
So there's a whole, there's a whole metaphysical structure here. And, and I think something that New Testament scholars talk about a lot more now recently is how that, that body of the resurrection, the, the spiritual body that was understood, pneuma back then was understood to be a material substance. It wasn't a spirit like an invisible, ghostly thing. It was an actual material thing. It was the ether. It was the stuff that stars were made out of. It's the thing that angels are understood to be composed of.
So pneuma was this substance in the ancient world, and resurrection was a replacement of our flesh and Blood body with a starry astral, you know, pneumatic body, you know, now whatever we make of that, the point is it's a very different thought world than our own. You know, it requires a different way of thinking about the cosmos. You know, this is a cosmos that is in which the starry hosts are actual angelic creatures. They are not just balls of gas, you know, billions and trillions of light years away. You know, there's a lot of things going on in this cosmos. And so I think what I want to do is just highlight just how, how much that thought world is different from our thought world.
That doesn't mean we have to reject it, but I do think it means that if we're going to move from a Bible, from the biblical text to our own context, we're not just traveling 2000 years, we're traveling different, different universes, literally different universes. The way that we, we see ourselves in relationship to the world, to the cosmos, to, to other people is just different. It's just different than how we, how people saw themselves in that ancient Mediterranean culture.
And the, to move from that culture to our own requires more than simply translating a language from one language to another language. It requires translating from a completely different, like not just culture, but entirely different way of seeing the world from one to another. How do we do that? How does that happen?
And, and so I think one thing that we have to do is, is, is try to figure out what were the animating values driving their way of conceiving Christ's significance to them, to themselves.
And do, can we, can we apply or think about those values to, in our context without simply requiring us to adopt their entire world and their entire way of seeing the universe and the cosmos and everything. So that's a way of framing the question, but is to say that I feel liberated to be more playful and a little more free with respect to the Bible in that sense that because there's no way I can't inhabit a first century Mediterranean world, we just, we just can't. And no amount of biblical literalism will actually get us into that world. There is a, there's a chasm there that is unbridgeable by language and by doctrine.
So, so we have to figure out other ways. How do we develop a continuity between then and now?
I'm not sure if there ever will be actual continuity. And that's one thing I'm doing in this new book of mine is really pressing us to think about how much are we invested in this idea that we are continuous with the first century church.
I'm not sure if we are continuous with the first century church or if we even could be.
And I don't think that's a problem. I think it's okay. I think it's okay for us not to be in direct continuity with the first century Christians.
And, and then the question is, what amount of discontinuity is something we can, we can work within? You know, is there a ma. Is there a discontinuity at the point at which we no longer identify with their faith?
Possibly, but we have to, we need. I want us to wrestle with that problem.
Yeah, I'm.
[00:30:28] Speaker D: If I could just add it. I'm curious though, how you get from that. I agree with everything you just said.
[00:30:34] Speaker C: Okay.
You want to know the specifics of my.
[00:30:37] Speaker D: How do you get, how do you get to co. Crucifixion?
[00:30:39] Speaker C: Okay.
[00:30:40] Speaker D: Though from, from that point, like where, what happened to get to that point.
[00:30:46] Speaker C: That idea is just, that's actually just taken straight from Paul and from Galatians 2, where Paul talks about how I, I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. I've been crucified with Christ. You know, so that, that statement comes from Galatians.
And I, I picked up on that idea from some other scholars, Michael Gorman and others. I draw on some of their work. But what I, what I, what I love about that passage in Galatians is that it, it's a very personal, very existential message in which, in which faith is understood to be a sense of identifying oneself with the crucified Jesus, but in a way that's inherently metaphorical in nature.
Now I want to clarify that in the years since I wrote that book.
So in my newer book on the universalism book that was mentioned before, the Varieties of Christian Universalism, I, I wrote a chapter in that book that sort of corrects some of my stuff in the God who Saves book on this point. Because one of the things that I did between that book coming out in 2016 and, and more more recently is I came to understand better how Paul would have understood the, the co. Crucifixion material, which is why just a moment ago, I framed it in terms of the idea of the, of the pneuma and the infusion of Christ's spirit. Because I think for, I think for Paul, being co. Crucified, being crucified with Christ is very literal for him. It's literal in the sense that when, when we receive baptism for Paul, we are literally infused with the material substance, the pneuma of Christ's resurrected body.
And that in a sense quite literally makes us like part, like the crucified Christ now resides in me.
So, so I think for, I think for the Apostle Paul, he meant that literally that the crucified Christ actually a piece of, of Christ gets infused into my body. One of the things that another scholar talks about is that it.
In the ancient world, they thought of the oral and the nasal cavity is where Christ would enter into you. You would kind of breathe in, literally breathe in the spirit of Christ and it would become part of your body.
So that's what baptism was. When you get baptized, that spirit entered into your cavities.
So, so I think Paul meant Galatians very literally.
I don't think we can take it literally today.
I don't think we, we. I don't, I don't. At least not for me. At least that passage, I cannot read that passage in a literal way, but I think it has.
Is generative of other metaphorical readings that can convey a similar sense of identification without requiring that whole cosmic metaphysics that we see in the Apostle Paul. So, so, so to me, that passage has that ability to be read multiple ways. And so I, so I use that in that book to give me a point of contact between the ancient texts and my own understanding of what faith might mean today.
Sorry, that's a tangent for the rest of you. I hope you're not fun, but.
[00:34:26] Speaker B: No, no, it's, it's, it's a good thing that we're recording this. I think the, I think the key takeaway here is not only is the 21st century church not entirely continuous with the 1st century church, but that the David Congdon who wrote the God who Saves is not entirely continuous with the David Congdon who wrote Varieties or edited Varieties of Christian universalism.
And I mean that jokingly, but also like there is an important, I think, thing to be explored there, which is that we are always changing and so is our community, and so is our society, and so is our culture, and so is the text, frankly. Right. And so is our theology. And I think one of the things I appreciate about this conversation is how that discussion of continuity raises questions about how discontinuity is not something to be ashamed of, but it can be generative. Right. Like those changes are.
I mean, to use like just straight biblical language, it. You could argue that that is what is meant by the move of the Spirit. Right. The Spirit goes where the Spirit wants to go. You can't predict where it's going. Right. I mean, that is the transgression, the discontinuity, the mutation of the faith in ways that we couldn't have predicted. And so it's a good thing that David is not the same person he was when he wrote, you know, the God who saves. I mean, it's not always a good thing, but it probably is a good thing. Yeah.
[00:35:52] Speaker C: You ask.
[00:35:53] Speaker B: Yeah, it depends on who you ask. Exactly.
[00:35:55] Speaker C: Yes.
[00:35:57] Speaker B: So maybe. And this is going to seem like we're shifting gears, but it's not totally shifting gears. Actually, I think Brenda sent me a couple of questions to ask. And, Brenda, would it be okay if I prevailed upon you maybe just to ask your first question about drawing lines?
I think, like, this conversation about the discontinuity between the ancient world, especially the ancient near east and ours does also speak to this issue of, like, who's in, who's out, and why that matters to us. So maybe however you want to ask it.
[00:36:32] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:36:32] Speaker E: I mean, my own observation, and frankly, including myself, where we seem really eager to draw lines about who's in as a Christian, who's out.
And I don't like to think I spent a lot of time there, but I do find myself pointing out in my. In myself because I try to resist it on social media or with family.
Well, that behavior or that belief puts you, you know, way off the reservation. So we all do it. And I don't know why we're so eager to do it.
[00:37:10] Speaker C: Yeah. Why we get.
[00:37:12] Speaker B: So why do you think we're eager to do it, David?
[00:37:16] Speaker C: Me?
[00:37:17] Speaker B: No, no, I'm asking.
[00:37:18] Speaker E: Oh, you're back at the whole group. You're asking the whole group because.
[00:37:21] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah.
Well, I mean, so this is. I mean, this is a great question, and I. I'm glad to have a chance to talk about it because, I mean, this is something that.
Around the time that I was writing this book, I was teaching a doctor. Doctor of Ministry cohort on the topic of identity.
And in some ways, I wrote this book for my doctoral students to. To read and discuss in their. In their class. And I.
Part of what I came to understand is it struck me just how many of the religious and political conflicts are ultimately conflicts over whether somebody or something belongs to our chosen identity.
And that's a relatively recent development.
The concept of identity as we use it today is not even a century old, but it's largely replaced all of the previous categories as the key way in which to evaluate who belongs and who doesn't belong.
If we think about this in terms of what we now call cultural identity, Used to be fundamentally a matter of more public and institutionalized markers of belonging. Things like citizenship, membership, you know, caste systems, public rituals, oaths, confessions, things that really clearly identified where, you know, where somebody belonged, either in a social hierarchy or in a public, you know, different public spaces.
It was a much more institutionalized framework. And we live in a time in which those institutions and public markers have lost their meaning or have crumbled, largely been dissolved into the oblivion of the Internet and contemporary culture.
And, and what that means is that identity has become something both deeply private and also something that is publicly vexing and contested.
And so almost every battle is now a battle over identity, because that's, you know, it's this. It's a. Of amorphous, constantly shifting, inherently flexible, inherently undefined, you know, space of.
Of contestation. And, and so we all recognize that identity is something that we construct, but that's precisely what makes identity so threatening and unsettling. And so I. So I think we just. I think we live in a historical moment in which the. These issues have now become so prominent, and we're constantly trying to. We're constantly waging battles over identity markers and boundary markers in a way that it just wasn't as much of a case before. People just knew this is where you belonged in the social system. You had your place, you had your location, and that it might have been very unjust, no question about it. A lot of injustice in that situation.
But it was a fairly rigid, stable social hierarchy and status, and all the rest was pretty, pretty clearly. And you can see this in older, traditional societies. You know, you can still feel the remnants of the class hierarchy. In Great Britain, for example, you can still see caste. In India, right? Those things are deeply embedded and still so institutionalized that, you know, we. Even Internet culture hasn't gotten rid of it. But I think American society is somewhat unique because we're such a modern enlightenment, post enlightenment society.
We didn't have a lot of those deeply embedded institutions that went back thousands of years or even centuries.
And so I think we are, as a society, inherently more prone to this vexing, convoluted contestation over identity.
As those institutions dissolved and crumbled away, we're now in a situation where we're always constantly trying to figure out, are you. Are you with me or are you with somebody else? You know, are you on my side or on somebody else's side?
And we don't know where those sides are anymore, you know, and those sides are. Are inherently up in the air.
And that creates a Lot of problems for a lot of people.
Yeah.
[00:41:45] Speaker E: I think, where. I appreciate your answer because it creates more thoughts, I think.
I mean, doesn't it always, though, typically boil down to, you know, are you going. Where are you going after you die?
Sort of what people get really obsessed with, which is why the Bible becomes this idol in a way of.
We go. We go exactly with what the Bible says, which, which, of course, that always leaves you floundering because it's like, well, where do we start with that? But the point is that that's. That when people cling to, this is what I adhere to, and that keeps me safe.
[00:42:27] Speaker C: I mean, we're definitely going back to my previous work, because I think that's. That is okay. I, you know, my early work was all about that question of salvation. You know, what happened, you know, who is saved, who is not saved?
Which is a very theological question. And I think it's a good question to explore and wrestle with. I, you know, that's what I did in my earlier work, but I. One of the things I did in this book was I realized, like that theological question, it's not. It has to also be addressed in terms of the social and political question, which is, are you in my community or outside of my community, do you belong with. With our. With our faith tradition? Or are you. Are you or you not? You don't belong anymore. You have to be pushed out or. Or you. You never belonged.
Those two questions are. Are not the same, but they're, of course, not unrelated. You know, so certainly the more that you view that a community views itself as, you know, God's chosen vehicle of salvation on earth, then if you belong to the community, then inherently you are saved in. In the beyond.
And if you don't belong, then you are condemned to, you know, whatever might be.
But.
So I think it's. I think you're right. You're absolutely right to see that connection.
Thank you. Yeah.
[00:43:51] Speaker B: Well, and it, you know, I think you, Brenda, really touched on an important point in your question about, you know, doesn't it really boil down to whether or not people think they're going to heaven or going to hell? I think that really powerfully illustrates that there's a lot at stake in the question of whether or not you have the right identity.
And it poses the question in a metaphysical way. But I guess I would point out that there's an awful lot at stake materially, imminently, here and now in the answer to the question, do you belong or don't you belong?
To questions of Identity are wrapped up in, you know, like, legacies of colonialism which used the tools of, you know, patriarchy and race and gender and sexuality to demarcate who literally was acceptable and who was not acceptable. Or in the case of gender, you know, you, colonial powers moved into indigenous communities which were relatively egalitarian, oftentimes, and then educated them that actually men were supposed to be in charge.
And what that effectively did was divide the indigenous community in half, one against the other, which made them much easier to conquer.
And so, like, there are very real material consequences even today, or if, if you are deemed to be on the wrong side of questions of identity.
And this, I think, is a nice segue to Rich's question. I know Rich is driving, so I don't want to, you know, ask him to jump in here, But Rich did want to sort of bring his question to the table, David, and that was, you know, could you speak more to the relationship between what you call Christian supremacy and white supremacy? Use that illustration even in the excerpt that I read on page 15, where you, you know, directly use them as an example. But there's a sense there in which your book explores how there's actually a dependency between the two. And Rich is wondering if you could unpack that a bit.
[00:45:55] Speaker C: Yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm glad for that question.
It's one of the things I had to wrestle with was I, you know, there are.
There's certainly a lot to be, to be explored and has been explored by many, many other people who are more qualified than I am on the role that race has played in the formation of Christianity, especially Christian supremacy.
I, you know, there are a number of scholars, I name it in the introduction regarding, you know, the role that anti Semitism and anti Judaism played in the creation of modern racism. That whole story has been told, and I, and I, I think that's a. An important, crucial part of all this. Part of what I wanted to do was isolate the idea of orthodoxy as being a related but conceptually distinct element in this whole puzzle and a few different reasons for doing so. I mean, I think, I don't want to say that it's completely independent because clearly it's not. You know, issues of race and white supremacy are certainly woven throughout, But I think it's complicated because, of course, race as a modern category really only arises in the late Middle ages into the early modern period.
So. But orthodoxy is a much older concept.
You do have anti Judaism, of course, in the ancient world. Certainly you see that in the second century, third Centuries there with Christianity kind of mobilizing itself against the Jewish people.
But, but it's a complicated story to know, like to what extent that, how, how tied that in that is with the story I'm telling. Because you do have debates over Orthodoxy within Jewish communities in that time. Like Orthodoxy is in some ways the older dispute. It's, it's original. It precedes Christianity entirely.
In some ways, you might say it precedes religion entirely.
But I, so I, I, I don't know how much I want to get into the, the, the side that white supremacy plays in this story insofar as it connects to my narrative. But it's certainly interwoven.
I think the way to think about it though, is that these are all manifestations of efforts to monopolize power and to. Oops, my light just went out.
[00:48:26] Speaker B: Sorry.
[00:48:28] Speaker C: Oh, I lost my light. Okay, we can still see it.
[00:48:31] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:48:31] Speaker C: Okay.
Monopolize power and to exercise what I call magisterial authority.
Magisterial authority is a term that just describes the way that whenever you have an orthodoxy of some kind, a structure of power there, it requires somebody in control, in authority to arbitrarily determine who gets to be in, who gets in, who gets pushed out.
And that can be done along racial lines, as it certainly has been and was, but it can be done along other lines as well. And part of what I explore is, is it can be done along doctrinal, theological lines, religious lines.
You still have a exercise of authority that is arbitrary and rooted in a power that is determining who gets to be called one of us.
[00:49:30] Speaker B: And so maybe related to, you know, the conversation we've kind of like been weaving in and out of which, you know, centers around identity for a congregation like ours. Right. Like we're, we're, we sort of identify as a progressive Christian church. We're part of a denomination. But most people would be surprised to know that, you know, even in our church, I think oftentimes people don't realize that.
But that denomination is not historically non creedal. It's the Christian church. Disciples of Christianity.
And most of our congregants are not all, but I would say a substantial majority of them are what you would call, you know, exvangelicals, or if it's not evangelicalism that they have sort of distanced themselves from, it may be, you know, Catholicism, which is an old story, or Mormonism or some expression of high control kind of authoritarian religion. And one of the things I've noticed is as people navigate into a space like ours, usually they're trying to figure out if they can still be Christian in good conscience. Right. If that as they navigate into a space like ours, they really love that we're kind of liberating, non doctrinal sort of non creedal, maybe polydox kind of community.
But they also experience that as very destabilizing because they've lost their moorings around identity if, if their boundaries aren't clearly and strongly authoritatively dictated by, you know, how the man on the stage, typically the man on the stage interprets the text or a list of creeds or you know, the doctrines that you sign to when you take the newcomers class, whatever it might be, right. The way you vote. You know, we all, in this church, we all vote the same way.
If it's not those things, then how do you see polydox communities forming a stable sense of identity that provides people liberation on the one hand, but on the other hand a sense of the security that kind of bounded identity gives them.
[00:51:36] Speaker C: Yeah, so.
So for Jay, you know, who hasn't read this book? You know, I do, I, I broach this idea of polydoxy in the conclusion of my, of this new book which, you know, I, I do probably need to write a whole book on polydoxy since I, I didn't give it.
[00:51:55] Speaker B: Are you going to reverse your. This to two books from now?
[00:51:58] Speaker C: No, I'm not going to reverse my opinion, but I am maybe regretting how much. I mean most of the questions I get are about polydoxy, which is a term that comes from a Jewish philosopher of religion, Alvin Ry, and whose book really, just really shaped my thinking and influenced me.
But so I, what I, I admit that the idea of polydoxy is, can be confounding and a bit unsettling for a lot of people.
I would say the core of it, at the heart of it is I guess two main ideas. One is it's an, it's a call to abandon having doctrinal statements or creeds that tell people what they must think in order to be part of, of their community.
So it's a rejection pretend to think or. Right, Exactly. So it's a rejection of thought control or, or attempted thought control on that level, allowing for a space of freedom to, to really explore and to think, to figure out what one thinks about something.
But that, that's one aspect. The other aspect is that whatever community does want to gather around it should be based around consent.
Right? It should be based around mutual consent and mutual dialogue.
It doesn't simply come from authoritarian, arbitrary authority, who's determining, dictating what a community must believe in order to be part of their inner circle.
So those are the kind of the core elements of it. I think the details are going to look differently for different people.
Alvin Rines himself really only provides kind of like a architectural scaffolding for what a polydox community might do. He really just provides the institutional structure for it.
And he does say in his book that even though he himself is a reformed Jewish thinker, this could apply to Christian communities or really any religious communities. It doesn't have to be specifically Jewish or Christian or anything.
And I think that's right.
But I think that means that concretely what a community might look like on the ground is going to look very differently from one to the next.
And so I don't want to sort of determine in advance what that will look like for each community.
But, but it definitely doesn't mean that polydoxy doesn't require that any community abandon having an ethics or a spirituality or shared mission.
I think the key idea that I want people to take away from is that people can and do work together, even though they think and believe differently.
Right. That's the, that's the core idea here.
A lot of Christianity assumes that we first have to come to a unified belief system and then our mission and our ethics and our spirituality will follow from that.
And I think that's the, that's, that's the wrong way to go about it.
And, and so much of Christianity has been so focused on just shoring up, making sure we all believe exactly the same thing.
Right. And, and then, and then we can work together. The problem with that, when there's a number, a lot of problems with that, but I think the biggest problem with that is it assumes that homogeneity is the, is the condition for a shared work and shared mission.
Right. That's, that's the, that's the assumption. We have to be homogeneous first. Then we can work together.
This only breeds, it breeds a society in a culture that is inherently incapable of thinking about pluralism and plurality, indifference. We can't. We, we, we are allergic to that because we assume that once there are different beliefs, different ideas in the picture, we can no longer work together. That, that's, that's impossible.
And we need to get beyond that. We have to learn how to work together in our differences and not to worry about homogeneity at the level of belief.
[00:56:24] Speaker B: Yeah. Thank you for, for characterizing that as homogeneity as that. Like that starting point. It Occurs to me that for a lot of Christian communities, certainly communities I've been a part of in the past, that whether they would state it this way or not, what they really mean by salvation is kind of like the acceptance of homogeneity as the telos of their life. Right. Like they're, they're moving, like their conversion is really a conversion to just becoming like everybody else in the community.
And so I think you, you characterize that very helpfully. I'm going to ask you last question. I'm just going to skip one of the questions because we're going to run out of time if we try to tackle two more.
But for this one, I'm going to ask you to look into your crystal ball a little bit. I know that that's your favorite thing to do, but, you know, given the state of the world that we live in, how much hope do you have for the cultivation of these kinds of communities that express divergence and diversity and multiplicity as generative and helpful and creative expressions of faith, as opposed to imperialistic power or, you know, colonial power or homogeneity? How hopeful are you these days about communities like that sprouting and growing and taking root? And you know, what, what are you seeing that might be giving you some hope?
[00:57:50] Speaker C: It's really hard to talk about hope these days. I think for a lot of us.
You know, this book came out in, you know, April of 2024, before the last presidential election. A lot it was written, you know, things, contexts have changed in that sense.
I, I let me just say first a couple things about the crystal ball thing, and then, yeah, we'll go from there. But I do think that as dire and disturbing as our situation is these days, and that's not just politically, but really across the board and many other facets of life, too, but we are going to be confronted with a situation where we do have to learn how to work together across a lot of really stark differences.
And, you know, I, it's, I suppose I'm, I'm somewhat hopeful, very modestly hopeful that the crisis that we're in will force practices of learning how to build coalitions and communities that are resilient and able to forge a shared sense of mission across multiple different identity markers and belief systems and the rest. So that's one thing. We're going to have to figure that out. Right?
That's a necessity to get through all this.
That being said, I mean, we are living in a moment in which the, the things that I'm worried about are being Amplified by, with imperial power.
And, and you know, we're, we're seeing a lot of this, a certain narrative about the world and about ourselves that is, is going to, is going to be, what I'm trying to articulate is going to be very much at odds with the general powers and power structures of our society for quite some time. I think for the indefinite future.
I think that means that local communities, local churches in fact, probably will have to be in some ways incubators for a pluralistic way of living together.
Because we're not going to get that right now at a broad societal level in the way that I think we need.
We need broad, democratic, pluralistic institutions to cultivate a healthy way of living in the midst of diversity. Right. That's what we need. We're not going to have that from our current federal government, from most state governments and from a lot of other institutions. So without those institutional supports for, or learning how to live in the midst of complexity and diversity, I do think one of our last refuges for that are going to be small church communities that are committed to learning how to cultivate practices of living together in differences and cultivating coalitions and alliances across differences. So the more that we can do inter religious work together, that's going to be crucial, you know, the more we can, you know, cross ideological boundaries and figure out how to work together to solve local community problems. Like these are all very important ways that we can practice a kind of life that, that I'm, I'm, I use the word polydoxy to, to talk about, but how it's working out in practice, I mean, I mean, clearly this community is an example of that. So I commend you all for that. I, you know, my parents go to a church up in Portland that is very much like your own and, and I've spoken there a few times and really admire their, what they're doing. This Cascade Church in Portland, have your.
[01:02:09] Speaker B: Parents come through a shift in their own practice?
[01:02:12] Speaker C: Okay, absolutely. Yep. Wow.
They absolutely did. You know, that's a whole nother story for sure.
[01:02:19] Speaker B: That's a great story.
[01:02:20] Speaker C: Really admire them for that. Yes.
[01:02:21] Speaker B: Okay.
[01:02:23] Speaker C: But I have other friends, pastors in other places around the country who are in similar communities like your own. And so I think there are these networks out there. I think that will have to be part of the solution.
I'm also encouraged about some kind of experiments in intentional communities.
I think intentional communities can be both problematic because they can also exacerbate a sense of purity and homogeneity.
That's a problem. But there are other communities, some newer intentional communities of. Formed as a way that are intentionally pluralistic in nature, designed not to reinforce a homogenous sense of. Of. Of ideological purity, but are meant to cultivate, you know, a more diverse sense of who they are and learning to work together in a community across differences. So there are a number of experiments around, around the world, really. They're trying to do that, but I think those are some.
I'm encouraged by some of those examples. I don't know how much to hope in that, but I certainly hope that they are able to flourish and provide some models for working together.
[01:03:38] Speaker B: Yeah, thank you for that. That's really gets my attention when you talk about intentional communities, because we're a long ways away from the new monasticism. That was sort of a thing back in the emerging church movement. And so I'm definitely not at all aware of, you know, those sorts of efforts.
I also am way too old to feel like I could be a part of an intentional community anymore. I definitely thought that in my 20s.
But I'm glad those experiments are happening.
All right, I think we. We are just about ready to wrap up. I've. I've asked some of the questions that some of you shared with me in advance. Thank you for sending those out. But before we close it up and offer our thanks and our well wishes to David, I'm wondering if anybody else has any other questions that have come up as we've talked that you could sneak in. You know, maybe one more question before we wrap it up here.
Charlene, I think you're trying to ask. But you're muted.
[01:04:46] Speaker F: Carol.
[01:04:46] Speaker B: I'll ask. There you go.
Yeah, you're. You're still muted, Charlene. I don't know if you can hear us or not.
[01:05:02] Speaker F: Did I do it? Hello.
[01:05:03] Speaker B: There you go.
[01:05:05] Speaker F: This is a silly question, David. Where is that seminary located?
I think the one. I can't even pronounce it. Qua Q.
Do you teach there? Is that the one where you teach? Because you graduated from Princeton, right?
[01:05:25] Speaker C: I did, yes.
[01:05:26] Speaker F: Yeah, I did. I did a little homework.
But there's, you know, the one that's mentioned in your biographical. Whateverish.
[01:05:38] Speaker C: University of Kansas or Dubuque. Do you mean Dubuque somewhere?
[01:05:41] Speaker B: Dubuque.
[01:05:42] Speaker F: That's the one. That's the one. Where is that? I should have Googled it, huh? Yeah. That's a lot of time.
[01:05:48] Speaker C: That's in Iowa, right near the border between Iowa and Illinois.
[01:05:53] Speaker F: Thank you. I guess Texas, and my husband guessed Ireland.
[01:06:00] Speaker B: Did you guys, did you guys wager anything? Is somebody going to win something?
[01:06:03] Speaker F: We should have shucks. But Ed's not in the room, so I'm going to go tell him he loses and that it's in Texas and see what I can get out of it.
[01:06:14] Speaker B: Outstanding. I love that we all have dirt on you now, Charlene. We have leverage, so that's not hard to do.
[01:06:23] Speaker F: Thank you.
[01:06:24] Speaker C: Of course.
[01:06:25] Speaker B: All right, well. Well, thank you again, David. We really appreciate you giving us your time. It is not lost on us that you are in a different time zone, that it is later where you are than it is here. So we appreciate you being willing to come out, I'm sure, at the end of a long day and, you know, field our, you know, sort of wild questions about your work and also, like, read multiple books that you've written, apparently.
So that wasn't. That wasn't part of what you bargained for. But I'm glad that you were willing to jump in.
[01:06:54] Speaker C: It was a real pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. This has been great.
[01:06:57] Speaker B: All right, thanks so much. And everybody else, thank you for joining us. I'm going to go ahead and sign off and let you guys go back to your families and back to your late dinners, if that's what you're doing.
But thank you for joining us. And don't forget that next month, our book is Holy Disruption. And so if you need a copy of that, I have several copies in my office here. So I'll have those available this Sunday if you're interested. All right. Thanks so much.
[01:07:20] Speaker C: Thank you.
[01:07:29] Speaker A: Thanks so much for joining us for this episode of the Collective Table podcast. If you enjoyed the podcast, please consider leaving us a review. If you are interested in the broader work we do here at the Oceanside Sanctuary, please visit us online at www.oceansidesanctuary.org. we will see you next.
