Does the Bible Speak for Itself? | David Dault

Lauren Ranzino: The B-I-B-L-E. Yes, that's the book for me. Do you stand alone on the word of God, Chris? Yeah, I do. I'm Lauren Ranzino. And I'm Chris McLeod. And this is Holy Uncertain. Today we're talking about the Bible itself. Yeah. I mean, I feel like we probably were taught similar things about the Bible growing up, right? ⁓ what are all the words? Inerrant, yeah, divinely inspired. Sola scriptura, only the scripture. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I mean, I remember, did you have chick tracks in your house or your church, Chris? Do you remember those? Chick tracks. Like tracks that people would like leave for like waiters and stuff. That like give the whole like gospel message. But like I remember a specific track that's like, what is the Bible? And then inside was an ancient man writing with a quill, and like above him was like this God image that was dictating words. Right. That image, this was the idea of what the Bible was growing up, is like God is the author. Humans are the writers, but they're just the tools. They're like a typewriter, but like they're not the ones pressing the buttons. Like God is the one pressing the buttons. You know, from where I'm sitting, I have like a hard time with that. kind of relationship with the Bible now, you know? Like I don't have that same relationship. And I actually think it's like caused a lot of harm. Totally. And I think if you are a person who reads the Bible, I read the Bible still. I listen every day to the Daily Liturgy podcast, you guys. A little plug for the Daily Liturgy podcast. And so this is something I still have in my life, but I think coming from the quail God in the sky and they're the typewriter kind of image, it can be really uncomfortable to start to ask the questions of like, okay, in what ways have humans impacted this? And how should that inform the way that I read this Bible? And so today we're gonna we're gonna really look at this and ask in what ways is it being impacted by both me, by culture, by, by translation, all these kinds of things and and what might be a a more honest way to be reading this text? Totally. Who's our guest today, Lauren? Well, today we're talking to the perfect person, I think, to talk about this very subject, David Dalt. He's a theologian, a cultural historian who studies the culture of biblical publication. He teaches at the Institute of Pastoral Studies at Loyola University and is the host and executive producer of Things Not Seen, an award-winning radio show and podcast. His latest book, The Accessorized Bible, invites us to take a closer look, which is what we're doing today. At how we engage scripture, not just as sacred text, but as something that is surrounded with layers of interpretation, assumptions, and authority. And David challenges us to think deeply and clearly about our role as bystanders, participants, and what he calls accessories to the acts and decision we make in the Bible's name. Accessory like a bracelet or a necklace, like something you add on top, or accessory like, Accessory in a murder sort of he uses it in both ways. There are ways that like the Bible has been used to accessorize our ideas, right? And or to be a cultural thing. And that's just a reality. I had a Salty the Singing Songbook Bible as a child. That was an accessorized Bible by Salty. But then also the Bible is used in ways like an accessory to a crime. Throughout history, the Bible has been used in ways that are both wonderfully good, right? There have been a lot of good. The abolition of slavery, the Bible was used in that, right? So that was used as an accessory towards ending slavery. But on the flip side, the Bible was used as an accessory to perpetrating slavery as well, right? And so we're talking to David today about that. The Bible's ability to be used as that kind of an accessory and how do we look at that honestly? Why does that happen? And and how can we read this book in a way that ensures that we are reading it as the abolitionist and not the slave holder? All right, let's go talk to David. David, thanks so much for taking the time to talk to us today. Lauren and Chris, I'm so glad to be with you and thank you for taking the time to both read the book and to talk with me about it. And I'm really looking forward to the conversation. I've been on the receiving end of this statement. Don't argue with me, argue with the Bible. As if the Bible speaks for itself. And it usually comes on the tail end of some kind of debated topic within Christianity, like women's role in society. LGBTQ writes, can you talk about why it's rarely as simple as don't argue with me, argue with the Bible? And what people are really trying to say when they use that line. What a great framing of that. question and I've never heard that phrase ⁓ express it exactly that way before, but once you said it, like light bulbs went off in my head. So one one thing, Lauren, that I think we can sort of use to help us clarify is there are those that pick up the Bible as a way of starting a conversation and there are those that pick up the Bible as a way of trying to end the conversation. And so your ex your example of don't argue with me, argue with the Bible sounds like the latter. Like someone is is trying to invoke the Bible as a kind of magic authority that simply speaks for itself and anybody that reads it plainly will self-evidently arrive at the decisions and the position that you're conversation partner has seemed to arrive at magically and that somehow you're outside of the center for challenging or questioning. But having sort of studied the history of this, the 19th and the 20th centuries, we see the rise of what's called literary criticism. The idea that books don't just drop out of the sky fully formed, but they have histories and And the reading of those books has a history as well. And part of what I'm trying to do, particularly in the first half of Accessorized Bible, is slow the tape, as my friend David Dark would say, and to remind everybody that fundamentally what we're talking about when we're talking about a Bible is not some kind of magical oracle object. We're talking about a book, which means that it plays by the rules of other books. And so the short answer to your question is. ⁓ the people that try and shut down conversations and stop you from questioning and stop you from talking are probably not interested in your in your flourishing ultimately. And that would be an interesting piece of data to know about them moving forward. Yeah, I think too, you know, when we hear that kind of statement, it also is a community regulator statement. Because there's the people who make those statements, but then there's everyone who hears it as if it is like, ⁓ I have to believe this thing interpreted in this way, or else I don't belong to whatever this is. I'm I'm not I'm no longer following the Bible, which is code for I'm no longer following God, right? Which is code for you're no longer in our community, which is, you know, it's like a cutting off of someone by saying you don't believe in Bible or whatever that is. Yeah. Well, and Chris, may I expand on that for just just a moment? Because particularly in America, what we see is people who belong to certain kinds of Bible reading communities like to get themselves placed in positions of authority and policy making over others. And so it's not simply a matter of you read this differently than I do, you're not part of my community, but You are not part of the story that I'm telling on a public policy level. So you don't get access to bathrooms. You don't get access to food. You don't get access to the protections and the rights that citizens can expect in terms of due process. Because you have been defined as the wrong kind of character in the story. Now suddenly it's not simply I've shut the gates to my community, but rather you are shut out of community entirely. And I think that's part of the larger picture that I'm trying to paint. With the accessorized Bible, we're not just talking about differences of interpretive opinion. We're talking about differences of interpretive opinion that are then informing policy that causes real violence against real men, women, and non-binary persons. Yeah. Growing up, thinking back to like how I was raised and how, you know, I'm the the old brain was formed around this stuff and it's The Bible is the inspired word of God. God is the same yesterday, today, and forever. So the world might change around it, I was told, but the word of God never changes. But you know, obviously we live in a very different place and time today in 2026 than the text was written. And not to mention iterations between then and now in the way that the Bible has been shaped throughout cultures, throughout society. So does the culture shape Our interpretation of the text? Chris, such a good question. And let me jump backwards and then jump forward. So, in jumping backwards, I think about an a very early and somewhat controversial figure in the church, Origen. And one of the things that Origen says repeatedly is you can't read this book literally. If you read this book literally, you're missing so much of what this book is. There to do in your life. And so Origin is part of a community that is expanding in the early church the possibilities of what a Bible can do. And it is so much more than the simple literal words on the page. But let's grant for a moment the argument that it is the literal words on the page that are important. Okay. So I talk a lot about Acts chapters four and five. Which describes for us probably more clearly than most other parts of the Bible what the early Christian church was like. What we learn from Acts chapters four and five is that all of the believers held their property in common. And anytime that anyone was in the community that was in need, they would sell property and they would distribute the proceeds of the property to whoever had need. So This is where the Fabian socialists get the phrase from each according to their ability to each according to their need. Marx gets it from the Fabian socialists. And, you know, we we oftentimes think about socialism and and Marxism as being these sort of demonic figures in the Christian imagination, but they're getting it from the Christians in Acts four and five. And that's the plain sense of what's being said there. And it is underlined by the fact that when Ananias and Sephora try and Commit fraud in the community, they sell property, but they hold the proceeds for their personal gain. God strikes them dead. Okay, so there's not simply the plain sense on the page that this was how the community operated, but we have the plain sense on the page that God enforced how the community operated for the good of the community. All right. So that's that's the plain literal meaning of what's there in Acts four and five. I can walk over to my bookshelf and I can pull down the stewardship study bible. Which came out probably about 15, 18 years ago, ⁓ in its first edition, and it's endorsed by evangelicals like Dave Ramsey. But you go to Acts and you read Acts chapters four and five, and you'll find a footnote there at the bottom of the page. And the the footnote at the bottom of the page in the stewardship study Bible begins with the phrase, This way of living was not communism because. ⁓ my goodness. We have here a Bible. That has a plain literal meaning. The early Christians were communists. We have a critical apparatus, a footnote placed into the Bible to tell us what the plain text is telling you is not what the plain text is telling you. Instead, these were all good capitalists just like we're good capitalists. They were individualists just like we're individualists. They didn't really believe what the page says that they believed, even though the page tells us that God killed the ones that didn't believe it. So I mean I I I I got a little in the weeds there, Chris, and I apologize, but I'm trying to get at this question of, you know, how does the culture affect our reading? Well, we are constantly surrounded by a book that has a plain meaning, and we are constantly surrounded by interpreters who will tell us either to really turbocharge that plain meaning or to ignore the plain meaning entirely, or in the case of the Stewardship Study Bible, to completely reverse the plain meaning. For the sake of their agenda, not God's. Yeah, I think about Beth Allison Barr has a book called The Making of Biblical Womanhood that is so good. Yeah. And she tells the story of how the T Niv came to be and that they realized that they had gendered God throughout the text as male in places that the original text did not gender God as male. And so the TNIV, part of what they were looking to do was to reverse some of that translation mistake. And in response, and you have to correct me which version it is, the Southern Baptist Convention doubled down and put out, is it the contemporary English version? Yeah, the C E V, the Contemporary English version. The C E V, which was in response to double down and be like, Nope, super dude God. So man, this God. Yeah. And like double down on subjugation of women in the text and all of those kinds of things. And it's so insidious because we open these things and feel like this is just how it was interpreted. But there's choices that were made, which to your point is the accessorization of the Bible, right? Absolutely. And one thing that I want to make sure is clear to your listeners is. I am not suggesting that there is some proper reading, some proper interpretation that is somehow lingering behind that if we could just get all the moss and trash away, we would come to the truth of of anything here. Instead, what I'm trying to suggest is we can find clear evidence of communities repeatedly using this Bible. whichever version of the Bible that we might be talking about, whether the the T N I V or the C E V or the US C C B's New American Bible or whatever, we're finding again and again that communities are using the Bible for various types of identity support. So that's one type of accessorization, but also as a cover for the violence that they want to do. And so in that particular case, the Bible is showing up more like the accessory to a crime. And I'm not trying to suggest that if we could just get to the right reading, that that would go away. I think that there's always a threat that we have to own as readers of the Bible and as believers and professors of the faith in Jesus Christ. We have to own our history of violence, our history of exclusion. We have to own the ways in which we have used the text to push people out or to make them feel less than or to get in the way of their flourishing. And until we reckon with our own history and our own culpability, we're gonna keep deferring and pretending like, well, if we could just get to the right reading, then everything would be okay. I'm so glad you said that. Because actually on my bookshelf is the most, I'm gonna grab it. Hold on one second. Sure. It is the most raggedy Bible you'll ever see from when I was a teenager. And it was the contemporary English version. And I remember looking at it after reading that and being like, ⁓ this was the bad one. And then being like, but this, but this is the one. That I had when I was shaped to love people with my whole heart, right? And so I think even with all the layers of changes and even cultural influence that are on it, there is this level of like, what are we as humans bringing to this text? Because gratefully, at the time that I was reading this this one, it was focused on people and how can I love people better? And that was what I was gleaning. From the text in that moment, not the subjugation of women, which was apparently partially an intent. This is one thing that keeps me coming back as a person who's trying to be Christian, is that the gospel keeps ringing out even in these most unlikely of places. It just amazes me. You're saying how it's super interesting, how there's like it's not about getting behind to the to the real interpretation, or you know, if only we understood a little bit more. Then we would know. So so that's not the way we read the Bible. So then what what is the way? Like what are we trying to get to when we when we read the Bible? A lot of people ⁓ approach their relationship with the Bible and other people, and they think that their mandate is to get the other people to fall in love with the Bible. I reverse that and I think that the mandate of the Bible that if you're reading it properly, it will get you to fall in love with the people that are around you. And and falling in love with them is not some hallmark pie in the sky utopian sort of thing. It literally means that when somebody says to you, what you are doing is harming me, you stop doing that thing. And you ask the question, how can I make you feel more safe in this moment? And that is not dependent upon the ideological or theological position of the person interrupting you. It is as much a mandate that comes from your enemy or from the poor as it is from somebody that comes within your own family. Now we're never going to do this perfectly. I recognize that. But being willing to actually invest in the safety, the care, the flourishing of the people in your family is a great place to start. But if it only stays with the people in your family, then it becomes a kind of tribalism that I can find passages in the Bible that condemns that kind of tribalism. And Jesus seems to condemn that kind of tribalism. ⁓ the Roman soldier, the tax collector are also available to interrupt us and to ask for a better and more flourishing life as part of the system that we are participating in. And so even when I am looking beyond my family. I'm still as a person who's trying to be Christian and wanting to be considered Christian by my enemies and by the poor. I'm wanting to be available to that interruptive mandate for someone to say, I'm not safe yet. And at that particular moment, the question that we are to ask of the book is not what is the right reading of the book, but rather what resources can we pull from the book to help us to rethink our systems, to rethink our relationships, to rethink Our responsibilities. See, I did a good Baptist thing there where I did the repetition of the three Rs. but to do that to make this person around us feel better. The example that I give in the book itself is when Jesus is standing before Pontius Pilate, Jesus is bleeding, he has been tortured, and he's about to be handed over to torture. And instead, Pilate gets this sort of what is truth? Sort of quite like. And and so often we get distracted by, ⁓ no, what's the right reading here? The right reading is the one that makes people live better. The right reading is the one that stops people from dying. The right reading is the one that includes instead of excludes. The right reading is the one that expands the circle of love rather than contracting it. To me, that's my hermeneutic, that's my ethic. But it makes a lot of people mad, particularly online when I talk like this. Well, I have to say, if you're just responding back to them with Bible verses, then there's plenty of Bible verses to respond back in terms of like Jesus says very, very clearly, what is the most important law? Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself. He then goes to give parables that say, You're the vine on the branches. If you follow my command, then you will remain in me, right? And what is my command? My command is that you love one another. It I mean it is you say it's the love hermeneutic, but the love hermeneutic is the Jesus hermeneutic too, is it not? Yeah. It is. And at the same time, we have to reckon with Jesus withering the fig tree, and we have to reckon with Psalm 137 that says you won't be happy until you take your enemies and you bash their children's brains out against the rocks, and you have to reckon with the complete genocide of the Amalekites. So I mean so we we've got both this ⁓ interruptive support and care for You know, our neighbors and our enemies, but also we have this ⁓ unfortunate other piece that is just as much there in the text that pushes us towards exclusion and pushes us towards violence, which is why we can't let our our book do our loving for us. We have to make the predecessory choice prior to reading it that no hermeneutic is gonna make us harm another person. Man, that's good. Thank you. That's good. Like going in, when I sit down and read the Bible, it's like there's always choices that you make when you go in. Lauren, you mentioned like the subjugation of women. It's like, okay, I'm gonna sit down and read this Bible and look for places where I can like put women down or keep them out of authority or something like that. You can find that. That's that that's findable. Yeah, so so the way that I interpret the Bible when I'm Preoccupied with trying to get it grammatically correct or getting it ideologically correct, a lot of people suffer in those moments. And and that goes back to my Jesus before Pilate example. Like trying trying to to get the truth right about the text misses the truth that is right in front of you, which is I'm bleeding, I'm suffering, you're contributing to that, stop. And so if we come to the Bible thinking that that God won't be happy with us until we read the Bible right. And we're we're trying to get all of the grammar correct and we're and we're distracted by, you know, is is this person a sheep or a goat? Then we are doing a kind of judgment that I think is harmful. And and at the end of the day, what I'm suggesting is that prior to any reading, prior to any interpretation, we need to make a choice and we need to decide. That we will not use the Bible as an accessory to our violence. We will not use our hermeneutic as an excuse or a cover or a beard for our harm. ⁓ the Bible told me that you shouldn't be able to go to the bathroom in public. The Bible told me that you shouldn't be able to eat or be seen in public. The Bible told me that you don't get due process because you're not the right kind of citizen. And once we've made that choice, well, we just join all of the Christians who have engaged in historical violence and how has that worked out for us? Has that been evangelical? Has that converted people to the faith? No, it's caused terror, it has caused harm. And I think as we enter the third millennium of the church, we should maybe try a different hermeneutic. Yeah. I think that people will often use in the example that you gave of like excluding people from bathrooms, from society, from public life. Christians will often cite the the reference in the Bible where it talks about like if they're not following God, then to cut them off completely, calling what is harmful and hurtful and exclusionary, calling it tough love, right? And so I think that it's important to frame even what love is. I think there's a lot of accessorization on this idea of love. Yeah. So it does complicate it. Right. You gotta define that word. Yeah. What is love? Well, and and I appreciate the the the question and the openness of it. ⁓ I will for your listeners that don't see my face, I'm fifty-five years old. I grew up in the 80s, and so I have been haunted for more than 30 years by the question that the great 80s musician Howard Jones left with us. What is love anyway? And does anybody really love anybody anyway? And the the first thing that comes to mind in response to your question is. One of the very first things that the Third Reich did when it came to power in Germany, the Nazi Party, was it took over the nationalsocialistische Volkswollfert, which was the welfare program that gave bread to the poor. And so I'm not simply saying that if you do material actions that somehow you you are exempt from what I'm talking about here. Because we can all agree feeding a hungry person is a good thing. And somehow, nevertheless, the Nazi Party managed to take something good like giving bread to a hungry person and they turned it into a tool of exclusion and violence and death. It became one of the building blocks of well, some people get bread and some people don't get bread. Some people deserve bread and some people don't deserve bread. And so often the church does exactly the same sort of thing. We say, ⁓ well, everybody's welcome, but not you. And so when we come to love, we have to give up on. The arrogance that makes me think that I know what is loving for you. And and so to give your example of tough love, if if someone is telling me that the way that I am loving them is harming them or making them feel uncomfortable, and I keep insisting to them, saying, No, no, no, you just don't get it. I love you. You just don't and and I keep doing that thing instead of stopping that thing. I'm not loving them, I'm gaslighting them. They are literally telling me. That I am causing them harm, and I'm insisting and doubling down on continuing to do it. And so often we get so wrapped up in our thought of being the main character in the story and the beloved of God that we think everybody else around us wants to be minor characters in this drama that we're pulling. And that is a very harmful thing to do to people. And so A lot of what I'm trying to practice in my family, a lot of what I'm trying to practice as an educator, a lot of what I'm trying to practice in my relationships is allowing myself when the interruption comes to actually feel it and to say, I need to abandon my plan at this moment because whatever I thought I was doing here, I'm not doing that. And I need to I need to change in some way and I need to become engaged in listening to the person who is in front of me because right now they are the most important aspect of this relationship. They are the most important piece here. And And I I'm not saying that you just do that in a one-way fashion, because a truly loving relationship, you're gonna have that on both sides. Where where a person will be interruptible, but they will also be the interrupters at times, and the person on the other side of that relationship will respond as well. And so I think that we are so used to thinking that we get to define what love is for the other person that we have to slow down and we really have to be careful about how we talk about it. And so I'm trying to think about love as an other centered ethic. Yeah. As something that that a person can do with me in mutuality, but we do it by letting each other know where the harms are happening and then we address those harms. Yeah, I think about we just spoke with Dr. Scott McKnight and Adrian Gibson about their latest book, The Traumatized Church. And this sounds so similar to Safety, right? That safety is defined by the person who is needing to be safe. Yes. And so similarly, in that, love is defined by the person who is being loved, right? How do they feel loved? And love and safety are hand in hand. You know, as we were talking about the ways that culture and communities have shaped the Bible throughout history and just modern day. I think about this idea of biblical inerrancy. Yeah. The theological assertion that the Bible is absolutely without flaw. And I believe the churches I grew up in, it was in the like, this is we believe. Yeah, in the statement of beliefs. Yep. Yeah. The Bible is the divinely inspired, inerrant word of God or something to that to that. Yeah, without flaw, without error. And so, you know, in light of your work in the biblical text. What are your thoughts on inerrancy? As soon as someone wants to make the pivot to inerrancy and say the Bible is inerrant, my immediate question as a person who does material cultural analysis of the Bible is: which Bible are we talking about? The Protestant Bible is 66 books. My Bible as a Roman Catholic is 73. Several of my Orthodox friends have a 78-book Bible. Some of the Ethiopian Coptic have over 80 books. And if we get into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, they have an entire separate set of two volumes that they add to the New Testament. And so my question is, okay, which of those is the inerrant scripture that we're talking about? And as soon as you've made that decision, you've already made a kind of predecessory exclusion. You're no longer talking about the Bible. You're talking about your particular community's preference for a particular material object that has gone through an editorial and publishing process and it has a kind of provenance. And so you're affirming not something that came from God, but something that came from a publishing house, a history, a materiality. None of that is bad. That doesn't mean that somehow you've done something wrong. But I think that we need to own that instead of saying, well, this is God's word and everybody else has the wrong God's word. I like I I again, I as a Roman Catholic, I'm very used to people who are convinced that I cannot be Christian, that there's no possible way, which is why in part I'm hesitant to call myself a Christian, because when I use that term, I don't want to affirm something that somebody else is not necessarily going to recognize. And so when I talk to a person from the Church of Christ or I talk to someone from a Southern Baptist tradition or some other deeply fundamentalist tradition, I want to respect the fact that to them I'm not part of the family. You know, we have disagreements about what is the word of God. And that's the beginning, not the end of a conversation. And if we really want to be in relationship with one another, we have to honor the fact that neither one of us has the ability to stop that conversation by simply appealing to our book. I hope that that begins to answer your question, but I'm glad to go deeper if that if you like. I'm curious, you know, I I've heard a lot of folks say there's a translation process and all this, but the original text from, you know, Paul, from John, from these writers, the that would be the true inerrant. What like what how would you respond to to that? So if you go to seminary that teaches you originary languages, like I did, I went to Columbia Theological Seminary, studied Greek and Hebrew, part of what you learn is that when you're reading the Greek New Testament or when you're reading the Hebrew texts of what we call the Old Testament, at the bottom of the page is this Thick running commentary in small print, which we call the critical apparatus. And the critical apparatus, when it's up to date, tells you the box on the shelf where the scraps from the trash heap that were collected 75 years ago have been gathered so that this particular version of this particular portion of the text has been deemed to be the most accurate. We're so used to, you know, going to the bookstore or going to Amazon and getting a whole book. We have nothing like that with regard to the biblical text. As archaeologists have gone through the trash heaps of the ancient world, they have found fragments. And we have been reassembling those fragments, and we have only done a portion of the work to actually recover, reassemble. And so there's so much more that is still every year or every couple of years is being brought into the most recent version of that Greek critical edition or that Hebrew critical edition. And those little running commentaries at the bottom, the critical apparatus is being updated saying, now we've got new fragments from new boxes. And that tells us, you know, where this goes and where this goes. But we we can see this simply from differences in denominations. So some of your listeners may have friends or be related to people who consider themselves to be full gospel Christians, which means that they read portions of the New Testament that tell them that they can take up poison and drink it and handle snakes and they won't be bitten. Or if they are bitten, they won't be harmed. Okay. But that's not in everybody's Bible. It's not. No, you will find versions, you will find versions of the NIV, you'll find versions of the NRSV and others where it'll skip over those and it'll have a little footnote at the bottom saying some some early versions of the text included these passages, but they are not considered to be originary, whatever. And so All the time these decisions are being made, and there's a real politics around what gets included and what gets excluded. And so again and again and again, we're constantly coming back to who is making the choice before you even have the choice to pull a Bible down from the shelf. And yeah, I I think of your your wonderfully beat up version of the contemporary English version there, Lauren. A lot of people made a lot of choices about that book before you ever made the choice to read it. Yeah. I think this can be incredibly destabilizing for people who were taught it goes God, the Bible, everything else, you know, and God and the Bible are pretty one and the same for a lot of folks. But there is this term that I recently became familiar with called bibliolatry. Yeah. The idolatry of the Bible. I think if we're being honest, a lot of us were taught a Christianity that idolized the Bible in a way that placed the Bible in the same place as the God of the universe. But if we are to come to this, though, with your hermeneutic, we have the ability to engage with that God through this devotionally. Yeah. I'm very taken by this term bibliolatry. I've heard it before, but I'm glad to have it enter this conversation. One of the things that gets Us Catholics in trouble on a regular basis is Pope Benedict XVI ⁓ made a statement that then got incorporated into the catechism. And it's a controversial one for those that are more based in a theology of sola scriptura. But the the Catholic position is that Christianity is not a religion of the book, but rather it is a religion of the living word of God. And the way that I interpret that as a Catholic is that we have written texts. But the life of the faith is in the conversations that we have around those texts. The text is a starting point for the conversation to encourage and support the conversation. It's not there to end or to shut down the conversation. Yeah. I heard Tim Mackey from the Bible Project say once, the Bible is not the word of God. Jesus is. Amen. Yeah. And that's the Bible project. And so that really like has kept an itch in my head of like. How we're framing and how we're coming to this text. Yeah. David, for our listeners who do want to engage with the Bible, how can people read the Bible and not read it harmfully? Like what would you say people need to be aware of? What a good question. And I think part of the way that you begin to do this is to actually read the Bible. I I think a lot of people, much like Shakespeare and much like other classic texts. They're so convinced that they know what's already in there that they never take the time to slow down and actually read it. But if you actually read it verse to verse, chapter to chapter, there's a lot of confusing things that are happening in the text itself. And sometimes those are hidden by something like a chapter break. You may have something that is contextually causing friction. But then a chapter break happens. And if you only start with the chapter break, you get none of that friction and none of that context. And so actually slowing down and reading what the text actually is saying, I think is an invaluable part of this process. But another piece of that is to read it with other people and to read it aloud and to read it in conversation and to say, okay, when I'm reading this, this is what I'm getting from this, but what are you getting from this? And not to try and read to settle into one reading that masters them all, but to really live in the disagreements. And, you know, here again to read with your enemies, if you will, or people who you have been told ideologically who should be your enemies. As a person who oftentimes is lumped in with the more progressive side of the political landscape, I am called to read with people that disagree with me and who want a much more traditionalist or conservative set of policy outcomes. And that's not always a pretty process. That's not always a a comfortable process. But when we are actually able to engage in that process and have a dialogue, because so often, ⁓ both on on the progressive side and on the conservative side, we are trained to shut down the conversation and that that should be the goal of the conversation to win. But I I've been very influenced by a writer by the name of Paulo Frieri who wrote a book called Pedagogy of the Oppressed, where he says if you're beginning your education process with the end goal already in mind, you're not actually being educated, you're being indoctrinated. And so I don't want to read with others as a way of indoctrinating them into my particular comfort. And I I'm very reticent to be indoctrinated into somebody else's comfort. I would rather us be willing to journey with the discomfort and discover in the process solidarity with the really uncomfortable people in the world who are the poor. The people that Pope Francis used to refer to as the people beyond the streetlights. Like if we if we can live in our discomfort reading together and we can learn from that that there are other people who are uncomfortable in the world, that's a value to our reading together. But just trying to read to say, well, now we've got the master reading and we can shut the book and we can ignore the poor, to me that's a useless reading. We've been doing that for two thousand years. It's led to a world that is on fire and people are dying and children are being bombed. I've got no interest in that as a person who's trying to pursue a Christian project. I don't want to reproduce that kind of reading or that kind of world. I think too coming together to read, what it also does is bring people together, right? Like it is the start to being able to then move forward in what now after reading the text, which is ultimately the goal. We're looking at it to say, how do we live? And so if we're doing it together, then we're hopefully asking together, how do we live? Yes. But also how can others live? Yeah. And and I I've been thinking a lot lately about the idea of the household. And what got me onto this is the the Catholic catechism says that the primary educational unit of a society is the family. And that has been read in a kind of middle class, bourgeois, heteronormative, anti-gay kind of way. And I've been trying to get a more liberative reading of that particular teaching of the church. And so what do we do in a household? Well, a household is not a marketplace. In a marketplace we have winners and losers. But if in a household we have losers, then we don't have a home. We've got something else. And so in a household, everybody has to win. It doesn't mean that everybody gets everything that they want, but everybody has to learn to share. And there are times where I don't just get to have all the cookies, I also have to clean the toilets, you know, and and so learning to have those kind of pieces together, that is the uncomfortable work that we're about right now. But that that really is to me the Christian work, like learning to share this world. Pope Francis called it integral ecology, learning to have all of the goods of the world be universally destined to all the creatures of the world. And so, you know, what what can we do to make that a material reality and not just a utopian kind of in the sweet buy and buy, you know, we will live on the beautiful shore kind of stuff. And so this is what preoccupies me. on a regular basis, and I'm constantly trying to think through how can we build our relationships, our educational moments, our classroom moments, even conversations like this into a kind of little miniature household where we are for this brief period of time a family together trying to share in a way that everybody benefits and everybody flourishes. And it's not always easy and it's not always possible. But that's I think what we are trying to be striving for in the vision that I'm trying to put forward in a book like this. I mean the image of that though, extrapolating out, it really is so similar to this image of the kingdom of God that's given throughout the Bible, right? Yes. And the image of the early church that is snapshot of what is said to be the future aim, the kingdom of God in the world, where there is no more crying, there is no more mourning, there is no like we're where people who live here are living and flourishing and living full lives together in union with each other and with God. Well and and ⁓ just to expand on that, ⁓ dear friend of mine, Lisa Sharon Harper, often uses the phrase the kingdom of God, getting it away from the hierarchy and getting it back to the family, the kingdom of God. I don't know if that phrase is original with her, but I I I'm constantly interrupted by that phrase and thinking about what that might mean materially for people here and now. Yeah. Lisa was the first guest we ever had on this show. You started off with such a good guest. She is so amazing and wonderful. And she's continued to like influence almost every conversation we've had so far. Yes. Once again. On and off mic for me. Yeah, on and off. That's beautiful. And also a thing that I will be thinking about as we walk away from this. That's true, the kingdom of God. I love it. The kingdom of God. And in your book, there was a phrase that you used that was also ⁓ I believe it was Dr. Cornell West's phrase. Is it right? So it comes it comes from Cornell West and it's r r sort of ⁓ refracted through some of the writings of James Baldwin, but the phrase that I use is catastrophic love. But catastrophic love, as James Baldwin talks about it, is you know, you may have a very comfortable life. I live here on the south side of Chicago. But then he gives the example, you may fall in love with someone in Tokyo, Japan, and then suddenly everything that you loved about Chicago kind of withers away. And the most important place on earth for you has nothing to do with what is surrounding you, but rather it has everything to do with that remote area that maybe you've never even been to before, the place where your beloved is. And so a willingness to have the entire world be rearranged for the sake of the beloved is I I think part of this. We're so good, particularly in the church, at harming bodies in order to preserve the institution. breaking bodies to preserve the institution. And the question that I try and pose in that final part of the book is what would it mean to re reverse that and to start breaking the institutions for the sake of the bodies that are within them? To say that we're not going to preserve the reputation of the Catholic Church if it means that children get raped. And that maybe whatever it is that allowed for that to happen needs to be abolished and be crucified. And something else needs to be born out of that. But we're no longer going to either implicitly or explicitly tell the bodies that have been harmed for the good of the church, you need to shut your mouth. But rather, for the good of those bodies, we will shut the mouth of the church until we can say a genuine repentance and we can actually make amends. I don't know what it is like in other Protestant communities, but for me and for those like me in the Catholic Church, the fact that we have nearly a century. Of documented abuse of dear, precious, vulnerable humans that have been covered up for the sake of clerical reputation, it makes me want to burn the entire thing down. So I've had I've had the same feelings, David. I've had I've had the same feelings. And you know, because I've had the experience and I think many have of being told to change. Or the individual you if you wanna be a part of this, you gotta change. You gotta believe differently than you believe. You have to act differently than you believe. But to have the church say, No, no, no. Okay, we have to change because we want to show this person love. Like that that's a pretty like groundbreaking, revolutionary, different than I've heard way of running a church. Yeah. I believe in metanoia and I believe in repentance. I just think that it needs to be practiced at an institutional level and not simply an individual level. Just like there is such thing as bibliolatry, there's also such thing as and this is not a word, this is I'm just like saying church allotry, right? Like there is such a thing as worshiping the structures so much more, the authority and the safety sometimes that it feels within knowing what we should and should not do, that the the worship of that over the worship of our God who laid down his life for the world, right? And so that we as a church, if we are to be like Christ, which is what Christian means. Then we too must lay down our life. And sometimes that means burning down the structure that is no longer safe. Or we might need to move houses if it is a house that is unsafe for habitation. That is an act of worship, is it not? Right? Yeah. But but to to bring that full circle, for someone who is committed to preserving the institution, loving this way will feel like a catastrophe for them. It will feel like I'm giving up everything that is good in the world and God will now. Despise me because I have taken the precious thing and I've allowed it to be sullied by whatever. But we live in a world of catastrophe. Already people are harmed, they are dying, they are suffering. And for the church to pretend in its comfort like that's not happening, and to not go, again, that phrase from Pope Francis to the people beyond the streetlights and to say, this is where the center of the church is. To to pretend that the center of the church instead is with the comfortable, the good smelling people, the people that, you know, have all the riches, that that that's where God wants the center of the church, to me is to misunderstand the gospel. Yeah. I'm not speaking with any authority other than my own idiosyncratic reading, but that's that that's a piece that that we oftentimes, you know, we'll hear that ⁓ Zig Ziggler, ⁓ that great moral theologian and ⁓ you know, self-help guru, ⁓ used to say God didn't make the diamonds for Satan's crowd. Well, I mean, come on. We went to a school that was like the epicenter of the prosperity gospel. So you know even more than I am saying what I'm talking about. Yeah. Yeah. What happened to the love of money is the root of all evil? I feel like I've heard that phrase somewhere before. Somewhere. Maybe in a book, maybe. Well, you have been so generous with your time. We have one more question that we ask. What is something That you are uncertain about right now? Wow. What a good question. Because I am a good American, I am a control freak because I have been trained to be a control freak. And so so many things in my life are constantly trying to be managed that should not be managed. As a a person recovering from addiction, I I meditate daily on the serenity prayer, the things that I can change and the things that I cannot change, and the wisdom to know the difference. But I'm constantly, like many of us, trying to mix up those categories and manage the things that I cannot change. And so a lot of my uncertainty comes from waking up every day thinking that some problem is my problem to solve. And so I I want to acknowledge that and say I live in that struggle. But as a result of the ethic that I have been talking about throughout this hour, she's not a good moral compass for every subject. But I've been thinking a lot about the work of Hannah Arendt, who was a German Jewish philosopher from the from the middle of the 20th century, suffered under the Nazi regime. And one of the things that Arendt talks about is the idea of natality, which is where we get like neonatal and other sorts of words about birth. And her whole notion was that we are constantly, every moment with each other, creating something new and something unexpected. And that the real danger comes when we eclipse that natality and we try and turn it into fatality. In other words, I know the end of your story and I know how things are going to turn out. And your job is just to play a good role in the story that I'm dictating for you. That is a fatal approach. And by fatal, I don't mean killing, although sometimes it is that, but I mean instead that we're pretending like nothing new can be born in this interaction and no surprise can happen. And so as as I've been meditating on that, I've been running more and more towards uncertainty, trying to create situations in my family, situations in my conversations where I don't know what's going to happen. And when I feel that ⁓ uncertainty, to embrace it and to say something new is being born here. And I've been trained to be scared of it, but I think instead I'm gonna, I'm gonna welcome it. And sometimes that feels and works better than other times. Sometimes I have the spoons to do that and sometimes I don't. But on my best days, I'm running towards uncertainty with others. And we're creating something that hasn't been imagined yet. Because really everything that we've imagined just brings us right back to the same death we've been recreating for two millennia now. I love that. And hopefully we've done that in our chat today. Hopefully we've created something new that's that's never been dreamed of before. I have learned a lot and I have appreciated so much your willingness to think and to risk with me in this conversation. And I just want to say it's an act of trust and generosity to engage in this kind of conversation, particularly with a stranger like me. And so I am grateful that you all took the time and I I hope that this is not the last conversation that we have. Same. And I don't think it will be. Thank you so much for your time, David. You have a lovely day. This was a really great conversation. There's like exciting work to be done around like this harmeneutic of love that he talked about. That sounds really fun to practice, actually. Yeah. We're following Jesus in this faith. And Jesus' main command was to love one another as I have loved you. And so this idea of like rightly placing the Bible as a way to better do that very thing. To love each other well, that feels great to me. Right. You know, I just wonder if if it's not just the Bible, if it's actually like that's just the way to orient our lives. Like, we can do that with anything. Any say book that we read, movie that we watch, relationship that we have, meal that we eat, go into it with how do I love somebody better through this thing? Yeah. It's a spiritual discipline that I think is really worthy of a person's life, right? Totally. But and and it doesn't need to be obligatory, I guess. You know, I think a lot of times we have the like, ⁓ I should do that, or I feel guilty that I haven't done that thing yet, or I need to I probably should love them more. I need to do that. And it's like you sort of like belittle yourself a little bit, like, ⁓ get your act together. But there's a different why, I think. Yeah, I think it's the difference between, ⁓ I should exercise, I should, should, should, should, should. That being the purpose for why we exercise is I should. I should do this because it's good for me. It's the right thing to do. As opposed to I would like to be the kind of person who cares well for my body. And so, like to me, this is changing the why from a should to a formational practice that like. I want to be formed to be a person who loves endlessly. And I believe there's a lot of rich wisdom to glean from how I can love better. And that's what I'm going to look to this for is to love better. It will direct why we're reading things. It will direct a lot of other practices in our life. Then when the like question that maybe unsettles us or the person who unsettles us comes up. We have this formational like center of like, I wanna be the kind of person who loves well. I'm never gonna do it right all the time, but this is the goal of my life. And so even in this moment, I'm gonna aim to love even this person well. And if my reading of the Bible is doing harm, then I need to look again and not impose the harm on another person or myself. It's cool. I love it. It is cool. It is cool. And one thing I I kinda wanted to ask, but I was like, this is off topic. I was like, what about for people who like you say, read the Bible so that you don't make others feel unloved? What if you're the one that feels unloved? What do you what do you do? You know, like how do you communicate that to your friends who are like using the Bible in this way? I don't know how to do that. Mm-hmm. I mean, you saying that just now feels like you're doing it, you know? Like I think if you feel up to it when it happens. To be honest about how that makes you feel. Yeah. And maybe it is saying, I understand that you're trying to be loving to me in this moment by saying something like that, but it doesn't feel loving. Yeah. And so what would maybe be better is this, you know, and let them know how you would like to be loved. Mm-hmm. They might not do it, but they might not do it. Mm-hmm. But you've loved in your part, right? Well, try to. I mean, I probably not perfectly, you know. There's this Bible verse that says, if you speak with tongues of angels, but you have not love, you have nothing. And so to me, the like focus on the how-to in some of those things is the focus on the clanging symbols, is the focus on the like activity that looks religious, right? And it's not focusing on the love. And so to me, Chris, if you are seeking love or someone who's listening, Who has had a really hard time with the trappings of Christianity, but you're seeking love, right? You're going in the right direction. You're doing the same stuff. We are alike. It is incredibly a human and beautiful work to do. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Whatever you do, try to learn how to love people a little better while you're doing it, whether you're reading the Bible or whatever it may be. And If you just specifically want to show love to the hosts of Holy Uncertain, that's what our love language is. It is ⁓ liking, subscribing, sharing with a friend. Well, that's loving. Yeah, that's loving holy uncertain podcast. Yeah. And what an act of love. What an act of love. All right. See you in two weeks. See ya again in two weeks. Holy Uncertain is a blue elevator production. It's co-produced by me, Chris McLeod, and me, Lauren Ranzino. What do you think of when the words Bible or God come to mind? Email us at questions at holyuncertain.com. And as always, the biggest thanks to one of the great producers of all time and such a close friend. What's his name again? So the D, I think.