Systems, Virtue & the Body of Christ

00:00:01
Speaker 1: The world is becoming increasingly propicient at telling stories that deny God. As such, we need Thinking Christian to become as natural as breathing. Welcome to the Thinking Christian podcast. I'm doctor James Spencer, and through calm, thoughtful theological discussions, Thinking Christian highlights the ways God is working in the world and questions the underlying social, cultural, and political assumptions that hinder Christians from becoming more like Christ. Now onto today's episode of Thinking Christian. Hey, everybody, welcome to this episode of Thinking Christian. I'm doctor James Spencer and I'm joined by doctor Ashish Pharma, and today we're going to do a follow up episode to a conversation we had with David Van Dyke from Wheaton College. He runs the Marriage and Family Therapy or marriage and family counseling program there at Wheaton, and one of the things he talked about in the episode was this notion of systems. So when we think about marriage and family counseling, his argument was it's best to think about systems is about their relationships that are involved in a family and are involved in a marriage, and how one responds to the various relationships or other people within that system, the other factors within that system. I find it interesting just having done a lot of consulting over the years, you know, higher education consulting is largely about managing multiple different stakeholders, multiple different factors, and trying to help an institution understand how they should respond to all those different factors. I also find it interesting just from when we think through when we've had conversations about this before on the podcast Systemic Sin. How is it that we relate to the world differently depending on how we're embodied in the world, our socioeconomic status, various other issues. And so this system's thinking is actually a pretty crucial thing that we need to get our heads around. And I think that what we want to try to you today is think about what does systems thinking add to our understanding about what it means to be the Body of Christ. How does this manifest not only in a local congregation, although that's sort of a primary space for it, but also as the Body of Christ as a whole. And so we're going to start off a little bit and in one of Ashisha's wheelhouses virtue, and there's an interesting book equating virtue and addiction that we kind of want to summarize here, and so unless you have anything else to add I'll turn it over to you and we can kind of dive into that.

00:02:38
Speaker 2: No, that's good. Before I mentioned that what Kent Dunnington is doing in his book Virtue and Addiction, it's worth setting up what this is coming out of. From David Van Dyke's articulation. One of the things he said that that especially intrigued me. I think it intrigued you as well. And Dave Vandyck spent some time I'm responding or explaining, but he made a comment about how when he has a family in the room, he might have a child and parents that are coming at things from different perspectives, and what he's less concerned about is what the story is that they're telling, And that one struck me as interesting, not least because I thought, well, stories often help explain what's going on. But his point was not that the story is unimportant so much as he was trying to gauge how people are responding to those stories. So, in his example, there was a teenage kid who saw himself as disrupting the environment, and the parent's reaction to that analysis was to sort of grimace as I recall to sort of show exasperation, and the son's response was to smirk. And that was especially interesting because what it showed was not that the stories are different, but the stories that the two groups were inhabiting were coming out of different places with different sorts of reactions. Yeah, that do speak to as you're getting out systems, and I think that that system is something that's hard at times to grab a hold of. Systems can be scary to us because they're often invisible to us, invisible to the point where we react within them and can get defensive if someone tries to call it out. We, especially in Christian circles, I find, have trouble wrestling with that reality of systems. It's much easier to talk about individual right. I can take responsibility ostensibly for something that I'm doing that I'm aware that I'm doing, that I'm choosing to do. But how do I take responsibility for being in something that have less control over? And so we grab towards probably two extremes, and this is where Dunnington comes in, and the two extremes can often be on one side. Everything's wilful choice, right I choose to eat ice cream or I don't I choose to play basketball or don't. And on the other side there's the concept of disease, something like cancer or something like heart disease. I don't choose this. It's just something that happens to me, and it happens to me, perhaps for genetic reasons, perhaps from environmental reasons, but it's something that I'm in some sense a victim of. And so what he wants to say is that often the way that we tend to think of something like addiction is in one of these two ways. And it can be contentious, right those who want to say, well, it's your choice. The alcoholic has chosen to drink, and the alcoholic has chosen to be subjected to those forms of life patterns that just keep going back to it destructively. And the other side says, no, this person is a victim of a disease and can't help help him or herself. Right, And Dunton wants to say, it's not quite either. While he understands both extremes, and what he wants to do is he con compares it to virtue. So not to rehash what we've talked about in the past in terms of virtue, just quickly. Virtue has to do with character formation. It's less concerned about the precise response or action that one takes. It tries not to give moral content to particular actions, but rather tend to give ethical content to the dispositions that are formed. Why am I doing?

00:06:47
Speaker 1: What am I doing? Right?

00:06:49
Speaker 2: So that what I'm doing might be different. If I'm throwing a surprise party for my kid, not telling the truth about what's coming is very different then if I'm I'm hiding some sort of sin that I'm involved in, right, some sort of misadventure that I'm undertaking. If I'm hiding a person in my basement who's being searched for by the state in order to arrest and to persecute in some ways think Nazi Germany and comparable actions that might speak on the present. My choice to hide the truth is very different than if I'm stealing something and I want to protect my own autonomy in that sense, right, And the virtuous is concerned about what is it that, what is the disposition within myself for why I'm doing what I'm doing, And we often then tend to think of the opposite of that virtuous behavior as vice. But Dunnington wants to say, that's probably not the most helpful way to think about it, right, because the virtue is fundamentally about dispositions, the forming of habits, the character that forms, and acting out of that character in a way that tends.

00:08:02
Speaker 1: To be wise.

00:08:05
Speaker 2: Vice is not the opposite of that. Vice tends to be doing things out of love, just like virtue is, but just out of a misplaced love. Right, So, if someone has a love of money, they do things based upon a love of having that money, compounding that money, and if that means screwing over other people as a result, that's okay, because I got my money right, and may the best person win. Doesn't even want to say more. The more the more that you look at that, the less it seems like an opposite, and the more it seems like a foil. Right.

00:08:41
Speaker 1: But the true.

00:08:42
Speaker 2: Opposite, he wants to say, is to put addiction into this category, because addiction runs on systems, systems that can be invisible to us. And so he especially analyzes alcoholism, and he especially out and analyzes the people and the work the people involved in and the work of alcoholics anonymous a and what he notices after looking over you know, numerous many hundreds, as I can understand interviews and data points from within this is that there's a commonality that flares up and that people who find themselves in Alcoholics Anonymous find themselves there because they've started to come to the realization that they have a problem, and that problem is not something that they have any choice to overcome, not because their willfulness is not entailed in their choice, but because the addiction that they're now in is something that they do despite the fact that they don't love it. So he recounts that these alcoholics don't actually want to be drinking. It's an automatic response that's habituated in them based upon some other trigger. Right. That other trigger was often things like a rough work environment, rough family situation, something happens at work. They spiral and the well well made path, that groove that is formed by their actions that we tend to think of as habits, directs them to now I'm going to go to the bar. Yeah, they get to that fight with their spouse, and now they're going to go to the bar, or they're going to go pick up that drink, right, and just despite the fact that they hate it, because they hate what it does to them. They hate their dependence upon it. Their body is now dependent upon it, and they have to be they have to go to it. And so the work that makes alcoholics anonymous so so influential, so helpful to people. What don need to notice was the fact that they treat alcoholics as sort of that inverse a virtue, that habit formed addictive reality that they have to recreate pathways, They have to avoid those sorts of pathways in the first place. If the groove is there based on habit, then how do we avoid getting to that groove? If the trigger is my boss at work, how do I sit in that particular situation at work and not find myself slipping down into that groove? Perhaps it's the path that I take home. Perhaps it's the options that I now close.

00:11:23
Speaker 1: Off to myself.

00:11:26
Speaker 2: Because what he's doing there is he's recognizing that while willful choice is certainly involved and was involved in the formation of the practice, WillFull choice doesn't simply get one out of it because it's a system. It's a structure that has pulled us in. And I think the parallel here that we're talking about, or that we want to talk about, is that these systems, these structures that pull us in, that have us often unconsciously begin to form the way that we think about situations. They form the way that we identify ourselves within those situations. Right, Perhaps I have a tendency to consider myself a victim. I fall into that groove where it's now an automatic response something bad happens to me, I'm a victim, and I begin to dwell on those processes and there's no reflection on my own part within it. Right, Yeah, thoughts on that.

00:12:23
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, I think it's a really interesting concept. So as we think about virtue and we think about virtue formation, I think part of what we have to recognize is that oftentimes when we're trying to form virtue, there's a fake it till you make it sort of moment that you do right, And that is part of that habit forming aspect. You don't wake up one morning and have virtue. Virtue tends to be, at least in my understanding of it's something that is a desired state that's down the road, and you begin to live into that desired state. On the addiction side, what you're really I think, if I'm understanding his argument and the way you're articulating it correctly. What's really happening is there may very well be a desired state, but the path you're taking is always going to short circuit you getting there, And so there's you know, I think of it like one of the things I was thinking. You know, my wife and I used to have to go to Vegas on business fair amount. I had conferences out there or whatever, She had conferences out there, And if I ever went through the casino, I just know I really like playing cards. I like doing that kind of stuff, and so I never took cash or a debit card. Now, I didn't feel like I was ever going to be in danger of like sitting down at a table and blowing through our bank account. But I also didn't even really want to waste my time on it, and so I just wouldn't carry cash and I wouldn't carry a debit card, and so I effectively have no way that I can anything in a casino other than walk through it. Like that's the sort of behavioral change that it sounds like. Alcohol economis is trying to get people to do right. If you eliminate some of these factors that are going to enable a bad choice then you can't make that bad choice, or at least it's much more difficult to make that bad choice. Conversely, if you're pursuing virtue, there may be certain practices that you put in to say, no, I'm just going to do this. I'm going to do this on a daily basis, right, and I'm going to structure my life so that I do this on a daily basis. And in doing this on a daily basis, eventually it's going to form in me this sort of habit. Not habit in a sense of, you know, sort of an unthinking reaction necessarily, but habit in terms of a component of myself that now just begins to make sense, right, Like, this is now part of who I am. And I think that individually we can get we get a good understanding of that. I think where I would push in is say, I feel like it works very similar for organizations groups. When I've worked with colleges in the past, what I tend to see are a series of interactions that tend to lead to the same place, right and so, and then there are there are points where bad behavior is being enabled that keeps the whole institution from moving forward. There are points where the institution is trying to do good practices, but then those things may get short circuited by various other you know, whether it's financial resources or technological system problems, or just you know, sort of loud mouse within the organization who don't want something to go a certain way. And so you kind of see these dynamics within an organization. And part of the diagnosis that you do as a consultant as you walk in and you say, well, what's hindering you from heading to your desired state? Right? Where do you want to be and how how do you get there? Now you have to look at what would help you get there and what's hindering you from getting there, and how do we maximize what's going to help you getting there and minimize what's hindering you from getting there. And so I think my intuition is that this concept, this system's concept, this virtue concept, the addiction loops, that these can be applied within organizations and that they might be interesting to think through in terms of what happens at the church.

00:16:43
Speaker 2: Yeah, I agree. Anecdotally. One can look to sports cultures, right, we see certain organizations and sports that every other year, every third year, their general manager and their coaches are fired. How do they blow the team? And they bring someone new in who has this great pitch, and things start over and we end up in the same loop three years later. And what you start to realize is that you do have organizational cultures. Right, they're coming in and perhaps these people, these new people come in and they find themselves slowly slipping into and adapting to the organizational culture that is itself. You know, in sports terms, toxic, right, may not have moral detriment, but can't seem to get to the point where they move to new ways of thinking and build contender teams, or they themselves find themselves unable to push past certain barriers. Right, Maybe they notice these things, but they can't push past certain barriers that just exist organizationally. And what you end up finding is that these teams just get stuck there. They can't get out of it. And after the third or the fourth court coach change and the general manager change and the player overturn, you start to allies, oh, this is an organizational problem. Yeah, and sometimes you overcome that by the organizational heads realizing it. You know, it takes a lot of humility and firing someone and hiring someone else that is able to break through that barrier and create a new culture. And sometimes it's just you know, I think about my beloved Chicago Blackhawks, where it took there, you know, the previous owner passing away in the early two thousands to now allow a new culture to seep in that built what ended up being a Stanley Cup, you know. Culture.

00:18:37
Speaker 1: Yeah, but I think a Goo Bears too, that revolving door of quarterbacks that the Chicago Bears have.

00:18:43
Speaker 2: In Chicago Bears. Can't we get this unfortunately, you know, right, Chicago Bulls unfortunately.

00:18:49
Speaker 1: And I think it is.

00:18:50
Speaker 2: Owner, top down sort of dynamics.

00:18:53
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:18:54
Speaker 2: And you see same owner with the White Sox and using the same problems right right, Not to make this about Chicago sports, but you see those dynamics, and I think those transfer to church dynamics right where there's certain structural hindrances that are in place that keep us from being able to see other sorts of things. Perhaps those things are We've had centuries maybe not centuries that's too long, maybe decades long of social social issues that we elevate. It's above anything else that prevent us from being able to look at other issues or to look at those issues that we have from other angles. Right, maybe the problem isn't so much that our position is wrong, but the way that we look at it, the way that we should seek to engage it, are problematic. If I could be so bold, One of the major issues that have dominated conservative churches since the late seventies early eighties has been the abortion issue. In fact, it's been the issue now it's I think it's a more complicated issue than we've often allowed it to become. But if what we want to say here at the baseline is is that God values life, specifically the life of his creatures, human life that He's made in his image, and that we need to value it as well, that's a fair position, and I think that's at its heart what has driven the desire to uphold, you know, single issue voting sorts of things. But the thing that gets in the way is that it has resulted in such a deep embedded structural way of thinking that there's a failure to be able to understand what the other sides are trying to say.

00:20:36
Speaker 1: And it is sides.

00:20:36
Speaker 2: It's not one side or trying to say what might animate what they have to do and what they want to advocate also to see the complexity of the issue, right, which is now is not the time to get to do. But then finally a simple reality that often simple partisan politics has not yielded the sort of results that the common sense thinking within that structure has wanted to say, you know, and to be blunt with it, the common sense thinking is is if you have a particular position on abortion and that's tied to a particular party that says it champions that that you would therefore find that fewer abortions happen when that group is in power. But the numbers actually don't back up that stats. Ironically, the numbers work in the opposite direction, and so that's prevented thinking through more thoroughly. Maybe there's other ways to address this conviction that might otherwise be a good conviction.

00:21:38
Speaker 1: Right right, And I would say part of the challenge here, and I think what that issue particularly helps us to understand is that the how over the last since the seventies or eighties, you know, like whenever this really got going, the how has always been a more politically oriented how that's been the dominant how. How do we address the abortion issue? Will we address it through legislation, appointment of Supreme Court judges, and you know, political lobbying groups. That's how we do it. There's obviously other ways. There are more. You know, my wife and I are part of a because we out involved with foster care. Same group also helps single moms, right, gives them shelter and homes and those kind of things. And so those activities also go on. But what we often hear about what seems to be better funded, right, are these bigger political movements. And so we have to then ask ourselves a couple of different questions, which are, like, what is continually participating in politics in this way and really only focusing on politics in this way or focusing on it to such a dominant in such a dominant manner that the other things sort of diminished in comparison. How is that forming us? In other words, if we're talking about this in terms of virtue, formation and habit, do we really become political animals as opposed to people conformed to the image of Christ? Now the two aren't in my mind, the two are not isolated from one another. The difficulty is in the way I would sort of think about it is it's a primary aspect sort of problem. If I become primarily a political animal and also a Christian, I'm missing something somewhere. This is not the road to conformity to Christ. This is being a politically effective within a given nation. If, on the other hand, I'm pursuing Christ and conforming to his image, I think there's ample room for us to participate politically, but that will then be shaped to the degree that we are also conformed to the image of Christ. And so it's a difference in pursuits and how we go about practicing these things. But I think part of the mistake, and part of what we see in systems theory is that participating in a particular system usually is not a neutral activity. These things that we do, the practices that we engage in, they have a formative effect on us. They shape us in very particular ways and in ways to your point, that we often just don't notice, right, And so there's a sense in which I think that that's really part of that whole conversation that needs to happen, is not, Hey, is life important? Right? To a degree of view, yes, life is important? So now what do we do about that? How does the church respond to life being important, and how do we allow our desire to be like Christ shape those responses as opposed to allowing the mechanisms that we have around us in the United States and in our democracy to shape the way we respond to those things. Again, they may not be mutually exclusive, but I think the one has to come before the other. Otherwise we're inverting an authority structure, and we're changing our desired end really or desired end state to something other than conformity to Christ. I don't know whether that made sense, but I'll leave it there and let you respond.

00:25:35
Speaker 2: Yeah, it does make sense. It signals me to something else that David Van Dyke was talking about.

00:25:42
Speaker 1: Yeah, he was.

00:25:44
Speaker 2: I can't remember the exact terminology he used, but the idea that he was trying to put forth was trying to show when he's in that family family therapy setting, trying to show people on all sides the sort of the boundaries of themselves, which included the boundaries of their agency, included the boundaries of what they can know, what they can understand, in order to then to begin to appreciate that the other people in the room also have boundaries that are not identical to mine that include ways of thinking, ways of being that are not identical to mine, to then be able to pull back from what can be too easily habituated in us, which is someone thinks or believes, or acts differently than me. It is therefore an affront or an attack upon myself because my personhood is under assault from difference. He wanted to help pull back from that right now. Part of his intention was to be able to help people recognize their own boundaries in order to let go of certain things right in order to be able to say I can't control that. I'm not going to let that make me anxious.

00:27:00
Speaker 1: That's right.

00:27:02
Speaker 2: I want to extend that a little bit to say yes that and recognition of those boundaries hopefully helps me understand my finitude and the ways that I think, the ways that I understand the things that I'm aware of, so that maybe I can begin to think in terms of what is it that I can learn from you? How can I begin to understand you? How can there be you know? The German hermeneutical theologian or sorry philosopher Gottamer would say the fusing of horizons. It's the recognizing of the boundaries of my horizon, recognizing that there is stuff outside of it, to begin to expand the expanse of my horizons so that I can begin to understand things in a new way. Now, the way that I understand it when I'm talking to you inevitably is filtered through some of these both conscious and unconscious categories of mine, these structures. But hopefully in that process that makes me aware enough to begin to understand my structures at least a little bit more, which will enable me, hopefully to begin to, in the most generous sense, question them right, not to chop off the limb that I'm sitting on or the branch that I'm sitting on, but to recognize the limitedness with which I'm approaching things.

00:28:25
Speaker 1: Right.

00:28:25
Speaker 2: I think of someone I once worked with who would amusingly say every time he learned something and say, well, I learned something new. I guess I can go to bed, And he would say it jovially, and the thought process behind it was, you know, every day I should learn something new. And I appreciated that about him, and I've sort of adopted that both in its jovialness and and I think the practical life lesson than that of yeah, I should be. If I think I can approach a day without learning something, then that's a me problem and probably more specifically, a structure problem that's invisible to me. What can I say about that? Am I taking? Am I taking it too? Personally? When these young people think Lebron James is the best basketball boy that's ever played, Maybe I should But yeah, maybe I should back off a little bit.

00:29:12
Speaker 1: You know, it seems like a personal affront. No, I resonate what you're saying. I think, I mean, these examples are going to be individual, but I'll try to couch them back into a collective understanding. So there was a point where I was I had resigned as a dean, and the faculty members were kind of coming into my office and somewhere saying goodbye. Cordially, others were a little less happy with me, and so they were pleased to see me go. And one of the I was trying to practice this I had gotten into Edwin Friedman. He wrote a book called The Failure of Nerve and Nity, talks about being a non anxious present, having this self differentiate character. And one of the things that I noted noticed is I started to execute that like tried to really live into that was that it was easy for me, just my personality, to become fairly callous to what other people were feeling. And so by that point, I'd started thinking to myself, this can't become an excuse for me not to care about other people, right, because that's not really what I wanted to do. What I wanted to do was was to and I decided on this was to be recognize my own boundaries but also exhibit a care and a curiosity for the person talking to me. And so when I was sitting with this particular faculty member, he said something like, I think your resignation was a gift from God, and I'm so grateful that you're leaving, right, And I think it's the sort of comment, right that would elicit an angry reaction, But in the moment, I just thought, to myself, I wonder what's going on in his mind and like his emotions, his perspective that he feels like A he needs to convey that to me, and B that he's feeling that deep sense of angst about it, right, Like, what is it What's going on in him that this is such a crucial issue for him? Right? And I think that not being defensive in the moment helped that conversation go better than it would have otherwise, right, because my response then was conditioned on, hey, why don't you why don't you voice that a little differently, why don't you help me understand why that is? Like, what is it about something that I did, you know, or whatever, you know who I am, that you feel like it's great that I'm leaving. Help me understand it. And so we had a really ten conversation, fairly awkward, where he voiced some of his opinions, but I wasn't concerned about it because I knew he didn't really want to know the context in which some of the decisions I'd made had been made. And so it was like I had a job and I exercised my responsibilities with integrity, and I felt okay about it, and so I just really wanted to understand his perspective and see if I could learn anything from it. I say that it's sort of like when we're looking out at the world right as the church, sometimes I think what we want to do is we want to insulate ourselves from the world or say all the things that the world is doing are bad. Right. I had a gentleman asked me the other day while I was on Stand in the Gap, and the host asked me why I thought that so many political candidates have change oriented messages that they use during their campaigns. And my response was, is this, Like, it's because people are feeling a degree of pain and are looking for a change that will alleviate it. Like, we need to recognize that not everything is pernicious in politics. A lot of it is limited human leaders trying to figure out how to alleviate the pain that society is feeling, and doing so largely apart from God, apart from God's resources, without really factoring God in the equation. And so the decisions they make are reasonable from the perspective that they don't have any other framework other than I have these limited resources and I'm going to try to shuffle them around to solve certain societal problems. I always use the example of Pharaoh, and while I don't agree with his methods, right, if you just look at the logic he's using when he sees the multiplication of the Israelites, you can't fault him for exercising his responsibility. He's basically saying that the Israelites are multiplying, they're going to become more numerous than we are, and if an enemy comes, they're going to join with the enemy and defeat us. Well as a ruler of a nation, that's sort of important to notice, right, And so the way he responds to it, the things that he does, we don't have to agree with, but we can understand why he would do it. We can understand why he recognizes this as a problem as opposed to recognizing it as the blessing of God that he should really work with, as opposed to work against. And I think that there's a as we refuse to be defensive about some of these things, I think we can have more productive conversations, both within the Church and with with non Christians about some of these more contentious issues that tend to divide us as opposed to unitus.

00:35:12
Speaker 2: Yeah, a couple of examples there, we're really helpful to think through this. I want to take the last one, just in the interest of time, Yeah, and have a bit of a thought experiment as to what could have been the way that you describe Pharaoh. I think that's a really helpful way to take a character in the Bible, who might often be considered that other one whose boundaries outside of mind that it's very easy to dismiss right and just flatten out as the bad guy. But you've helped us look at him and say, well, from the framework of him being the ruler of a nation, his interest has to be in the good of that nation. I want to take that and think about that for a moment and think, so, where exactly was the problem? Right on one macro level, we could say the problem with his response was it was a failure to accept the God of gods right as the Old Testament would refer to Yahweh, Yeah, the God of Israel. But on a micro level, he's not even necessarily thinking in that sense. He certainly recognizes that that recognizes that these people, these Hebrews, were worshipers of another god. But he looks around and he sees a lot of different people worshiping different gods, and he doesn't have the same reaction to them that he has to the Hebrews. The fear of his and I think it's important to describe in terms of fear is that this is a group of people with the different God and therefore a different set of understanding the nature of the land that he was in, that was inside his lane and right, so he's operating on the basis of fear. That's a great thing to recognize there, and should he hopefully help us to stop and say, how much of my reaction is on the basis of fear? What am I losing? What do I think I'm losing when I draw these hard lines or when I react emotionally to these structural attacks. Am I losing anything at all? Am I on the non important level? Am I losing anything at all? When my brother in law tries to convince me that Lebron James is the greatest basketball player of all time? No, I'm not really losing anything, right, he doesn't convince me. But okay, yea, what so what what then.

00:37:46
Speaker 1: Is then?

00:37:46
Speaker 2: The is the counter to this that I want to say everything he said was garbage? Of course not. Of course Lebron James is one of the greatest of all time. Perhaps I had the greatest career, right, cool, Let's move forward. Yeah, So that that that dynamic of fear is something to recognize that I think transfers immediately. But then I think we can take that to another level and say, what did that fear cause him to miss? He failed to recognize that these Hebrew people actually had a stakes in his land as well, Right, so perhaps they would join with the outsiders. But why would they join with the outsiders when they've been with these Egyptian people at that point for generations?

00:38:27
Speaker 1: Yeah?

00:38:29
Speaker 2: Is there perhaps a way that they've been in that land, treated in that land that would cause them to side with foreign invaders that they don't know? What would what would create that alliance? And so one might think that rather than act out of fear, he could he could respond by saying, what is it that we can do in this land so that these people don't think that they have to join with other people against us? Perhaps the answer is that they have to then worship the gods of the Egypt. And if that's the case, Okay, I understand his response that, well, that's not going to ever happen. But it's not clear to me that he had to have that response because he's had generations of evidence that they could worship a different god and be there, Right, So what is it that he could do to help them feel like they belonged in that place?

00:39:21
Speaker 1: Now?

00:39:22
Speaker 2: If that seems like overly touchy of a reading of the passage. I think just the implication here is to think now about the Church of I think we tend to have these fears that if I allow someone to question this point of mine, that's going to result in some slippery slope that will eventually lead me into The words we've used off air are liberalism, or the words that I've heard are you'll be a postmodern or you'll be a heretic, which those three terms, in my understanding or my hearing, tend to be used a poorly and b synonymously. They're all the same thing. But the basic idea is they will reject what makes us who we are. But if that's the case, and we're talking about people who ostensibly love Jesus, we have to ask ourselves then to turn it back to our own question of what we can control. What is it that we think makes us who we are. Is it a confession about Jesus, Is it a confession about the nature of divine revelation that comes forth in the text, or is it a set of interpretations that we've decided must and can only be those interpretations? And I think, unfortunately it's often that last thing rather than the first two things. And to me that signals sort of what might be behind those invisible elements that cause us to be afraid.

00:40:53
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that's good. I think I actually don't think this way of understanding the Exodus narrative is out of bounds. And so when we read the Exodus narrative, what we find is that this is the Pharaoh who knew, not Joseph, and so he has no context for understanding why this multiplication is happening. He has no context for understanding how the Hebrews and the Israelites, and particularly Joseph ended up blessing Egypt. And instead of asking a few questions, he lets his fear wall him off from these other people, and he takes on a protectionist stance. And I do think that there's a real lesson there, even then when he's confronted, right, So, I think people sort of sometimes mishear me when I say this, but I would say his first acts against the Hebrews are done out of ignorance. This is Pharaoh accidentally being against God. He's not opting to go against Yahweh at this point. He just doesn't know what he's doing. He misrecognizes the situation, doesn't investigate it enough, and ends up going against the grain of God's blessing. Then as we fast forward into the narrative and we see that, you know, even when Moses is telling him, Hey, this is what's going to happen, this is how things are going to go down, he decides, no, I'm going to oppose this. This isn't actually going to happen. That's when it starts to get more willful. But you know, based on the conversation we're having right now, there is a systemic sort of practice that Pharaoh was doing here that ultimately he is He's doing the same thing over and over and over and over and over, and even after the Plague of the Firstborn, when he lets the Israelites go, he quickly changes his mind and goes after him, and so he is sort of stuck in this interesting cycle. But I think to your point, when we're as the church, when we're sitting back, we're afraid that we are going to dilute ourselves somehow, and so we have to pull back in and create like a hard boundary. I think that is problematic in a number of ways. I actually think this is the sin that we see God hold against the church in Ephesis and Revelation, that they've abandoned their first love. There are many commentators, myself included, who would argue that their first love. What's really happening there is that Ephesis is pulled back from the world, isolated themselves, and instead of compromising in the way that let's say, like the Laodicean Church does right by, you know, sort of participating in all these different economic practices and really becoming part of the Groco Roman world and all those kind of things, Ephesis is pulled back and refused to witness. They've refused to be that testimony that God calls us to be in the world. And so there's a there's a polarity there that we should recognize that it is possible on that reading of Ephesus to be too closed off in the world right to be absolutely right doctrinally, to be holy, to be uncompromised in sort of a purity sense, but still deny ourselves the basic functions of what the church is to do, proclaiming the Gospel out to the nations, making disciples. On the whole other end of that spectrum, there's a possibility of being so assimilated into the surrounding culture that no one can tell the difference between the church and the culture. Also a problem in the middle. There's this interesting negotiation that has to happen, and I think we're constantly sort of finding our way in understanding when are we closing ourselves off too much? When are we opening ourselves up too much? And that isn't going to be just a straight line down the road. It's going to sort of waver back and forth a little bit. It's going to oscillate. I think our trouble and the danger I see is that we pick a side. It's either the side of isolation and closure or the side of radical openness, neither of which does us any particular favors. One I think dissolves the boundaries. The other makes the boundaries far too narrow and rigid and divides the church. Either way, we're losing aspects of our identity on either one of those sides of the spectrum, when where we need to be is together, united in Christ managing our disagreements. One of my favorite passages, Roma's twelve to ten out do one another in showing honor right like this is the space we need to be in because that's really who we are. It's not that dine doesn't matter. It's not that the content of our faith doesn't matter, but it's not the only thing that matters. The way we execute that content, the way we think about it, the way we dialogue with one another, actually matters. It's constitutive of who we are. And I think that is that system's issue that we very seldom really deal with.

00:46:27
Speaker 2: Yeah. The only thing I'd want to add is that the degree to which doctrine matters is always as a pointing tool, right. It is what hermeneuticians would call second order, which is different than the way that David van Dyke would use it. But it's second order in the sense that it isn't. It's an interpretive grid, and so its role is always to direct us. And the question is to what well it's to direct us to life in and with God in Christ. Yeah, heart stop. And if the doctrine itself becomes the stopping point, then the doctrine actually is doing something as if it is first order, as if it is the thing itself. Yeah, And I fear that that's the rut the mind, the habit of the mind that we've allowed ourselves to fall into. Maybe that's a conversation for another time, but the historical theologian Hans Fry actually makes this point that in some ways the conservative and liberal trajectory as we think of twentieth century, nineteenth and twentieth and twenty first century Christian theology and the Americas are two sides of the same coin. They've both released the thrust of biblical narrative and replaced it with the second order things of On the conservative side, the doctrine as the thing itself, which is now no longer open for revision because the thing behind it, the biblical narrative, has lost its place as the primary reality. And on the liberal side things it's the ethical mandates, and now the ethical not surprisingly, also becomes lost and very easily codified rights and wrongs that itself doesn't fit the sort of dynamic that we see in virtue, which is the dispositional behavior, the drawing close to the right things to shape us dispositionally, and that's right. Thing that we want to draw close to is the narrative. And instead we draw close then to our structures, and the structures become violent, even to the point where virtue has become violent historically because of the structures drawn near to So I think that's where we want to make s. You know, the rigidity happens partly because we we misinterpret or mismanage these proximal goods, as folks like a Coitus would say, these things that are good as secondary things pointing to something else, and we make those proximal goods the ultimate good.

00:48:56
Speaker 1: What you're saying reminds me, Jeremiah said, Jeremiah seven is one of my favorite prophetic passages, and it's the one where you have the threefold repetition of the temple by the false prophets. And basically what we have in Jeremiah seven is this condemnation of a group of people who are are looking at the temple and saying, if the temple is still standing, God is still with us. If the temple is still standing, no calamity will befall us. Right, God is in some ways captive to the temple, and so as long as the temple is still here, we don't have to worry about anything. And Jeremiah steps in and says, no, that's not true. Second order, right, the temple is second order, And so I think that as we fetishize some of these things, right, as we look at the temple and say, oh my gosh, there's the temple, or as we do this with doctrine right a particular position, what that can start to do is to distort our understanding of our relationship with God, our relationship with others, and our relationship to creation. And that's what we really see in Jeremiah seven. It's Thomas Overholt wrote a little book called The Threat of Falsehood where he deals with Jeremiah seven a good bit, and essentially what he's arguing is that these false prophets are creating a false narrative and enticing the people to attune their lives to that false narrative, which ends up putting them at odds with God as opposed to cultivating allegiance to God. And I think, honestly we see this in Act seven as well. Another chapter seven that I like. But in Act seven we look at Steven's speech. So this is before Stephen is going to be stoned. He's been condemned of speaking out against the law and the Temple, and what he does throughout this whole speech in Act seven is he highlights all the different ways that God has been with his people outside of the land and outside of the temple. And what he's trying to get the Jews to understand is the category mistake they're making is that God always works here in this little box. And what Stephen is saying is, no, he doesn't just work inside that that little box, and he never has. You're ignoring pieces of the story to make it fit this this box that you've put God in, But he's not actually there. He's all over the place. He's doing these things outside of the land. He's you know, he's doing these things apart from the temple, apart from the tabernacle, like this is the God we serve. And so I think in both instances they illustrate the point we're trying to make, which is we can't pretend that we can close God in right, put God in a box and say this is what This is what God is, this is how God op rates, and this is the only way God operates. What we have are we have some guardrails, some soft guard rails to keep us within a certain span of Yeah, we know these things about God now as we live within those guardrails, whether guardrails is the right analogy or not, But we live within those guardrails. But that's all they really are. They're guardrails, right, They're the bumpers and bumper bowling right like that. We like they're just keeping us honest, but they aren't the thing that we're shooting for. And I think that's sort of those two passages I think highlight a good bit of what we've been talking about.

00:52:45
Speaker 2: Yeah, that reminds me of Augustine who speaks of the path and in his work on Christian teaching, he says the path is is there not because it is the end and of itself, but because of where it's leading.

00:53:00
Speaker 1: So it is to work.

00:53:01
Speaker 2: Lass, Can you leave that path and still get where you're going? It said, yeah, actually sure, but how would you know where to go?

00:53:09
Speaker 1: Right?

00:53:09
Speaker 2: If you get there? It sort of becomes an accident. The goal of the path is to make sure you get there. But the corollary to that that I think we're trying to get out here is it's also entirely possible the one walks the path and then they stop and just start to adore the path, you know, and they stop walking, they stop moving and become fixated with singing the praises of that path, being dedicated to that path, defending that path, right when that was never really the point of the path.

00:53:40
Speaker 1: Yeah, it was out. Maybe i'll close with this. We can keep talking. But I was at a coffee shop this morning and these gentlemen were sitting at a table over next to me, and they were doing a Bible study, and so I got up to use the restroom and I asked him to watch my stuff for me. And when I came back, they most of them had left and there were just a couple of guys there. And that's this one gentleman. I just said, Hey, where you guys go to church at? And he his comment was, he's like, oh, we all go to different churches. And so he's like, I went, I go to this Lutheran church just down the road. But you know, Bob's a Southern Baptist, and you know Joe goes to the Presbyterian church or whatever. And he said, we've been talking to him for such a long time, many years of getting a Bible study together, and it doesn't matter what church you go to. It doesn't matter, you know, what your doctrinal statement is. He didn't say it like that. But that's basically what he was saying. He's like, we just all get together and we try to understand what gods were to say. I was like, that's that's pretty cool, Like, you know, that's that's odd in a way and awesome in another right. And so I think it's good because obviously, and I listened in a little bit. It was hard not to listen to him. I mean, they're there are like six guys at a table right next to me, and so you know, you hear things, right, but they're discussing, you know, one of them's got the King James open, another one's got the NIV open. They're like actually discussing the passages and trying to figure stuff out and just having a good time together. They're not like there's no there was no animosity at the table. There's no yelling back and forth. It was just like, oh, you know, well I wonder what that is, and I wonder how that would work, and I want, you know, like it was just a lot of deliberation at the table. It was kind of fun to listen to. And I think that that in that I would didn't really think about it at the time, but it's sort of like, that's a great picture of what I think the church is supposed to be. Right, there are obvious disagreements at that table to guarantee, the Southern Baptist doctoral statement looks different than the Lutheran Churches doctoral statement one hundred percent right, like for sure, But it didn't matter. It didn't matter, And you could argue, all maybe they didn't understand it well enough or they don't you know, and it's like, well, no, I think they understand it well enough. I think they actually get what they're doing right, Like they have a vision for a unified church that transcends denominations and they're getting together to do something about it. Great, right, So yeah, just an interesting picture that you don't always see, right, You just don't always see it. We've gotten so fractured that sometimes I think we forget that we are all part of the same body. Indeed, any novel thought, novel thought right. Well, anyway, I found that conversation with Dave, Dave and Dyke really compelling. I've always been interested in the systems theory, and so I appreciate it. I'm this conversation about it with us or with me, and we'll close it out there. We'll probably revisit this some other time. We're hoping to have some of the marriage and family systems folks from Weeting on and and do a little bit more with them. I think it's really a fascinating field, especially as we think about ecclesiology. I've tended to approach that through sociology, but I do think marriage and family systems cuts a little different than sociology usually does, and so I find their stuff pretty fascinating. But anyway, thanks for the conversation, and thanks everybody for listening. We'll catch you on the next episode of Thinking Christian Take Care. I just want to take a second to thank the team at Life Audio for their partnership with us on the Thinking Christian podcast. If you go to lifeaudio dot com, you'll find dozens of other faith centered podcasts in their network. They've got shows about prayer, Bible study, parenting, and more.