When Your Interpretation Becomes the Authority | Inversion

00:00:00
Speaker 1: Hey, everyone, welcome to this episode of Thinking Christian on Doctor James Spencer. I'm joined by doctor Hiesh Pharma, and we're going to continue our series on the different diagnoses, the forces and conditions that tend to narrow the Church's vision. And so today we're talking about a phenomenon called inversion. And what I mean when I say in version is that our interpretive grids sort of take over authority from scripture.

00:00:26
Speaker 2: So we've all tended to see this happen.

00:00:29
Speaker 1: We've got some sort of a strong conviction about a particular way of interpreting one verse or even the whole Bible, and we decide that that interpretive grid is the only interpretive grid. We start thinking in terms of absolutes as opposed to thinking in terms of plausibility structures. And so I have a lot of convictions about different Biblical verses. I'm sure I Shoush, you do too. But I also recognize that a lot of times I I don't have everything figured out. And so I may think that a particular interpretation is plausible or even more probable than others, but that doesn't close off space for other interpretations to come in there.

00:01:15
Speaker 2: And so it was interesting this week.

00:01:17
Speaker 1: I was just having a little back and forth conversation, which I very seldom do on social media LinkedIn if LinkedIn even counts as social media anymore.

00:01:29
Speaker 2: This gentleman was asking.

00:01:30
Speaker 1: About the difference between Jesus and the Word of God. Right, don't we put our faith in Jesus and not put our faith in the Word.

00:01:37
Speaker 2: And how does authority work? And you know, those kind of things.

00:01:41
Speaker 1: And I gave an answer, and then he came back with, well, what happens when Christians disagree? Who's the authority then? And I said, well, the authority doesn't actually change, right, God's Word is the final authority for life and faith, So the authority doesn't change.

00:01:57
Speaker 2: We do.

00:01:58
Speaker 1: And what we recognize is that even though we may have convictions about these various texts, we may ascribe to a particular tradition that holds to a one position or another, and in that sense, we put ourselves under the authority of that tradition.

00:02:15
Speaker 2: But at the end of the day, we need to be.

00:02:17
Speaker 1: Recognizing that the Bible is the final authority for life and faith, and that doesn't change just because we can't agree.

00:02:24
Speaker 2: And in those.

00:02:25
Speaker 1: Places where we can't agree, we need to be thinking through whether or not we can actually.

00:02:32
Speaker 2: Negotiate with one another.

00:02:36
Speaker 1: Appropriate ways for us to think through the text and come out the other side with disagreements, but not disunity. And so I think that there's a sense in which, as we ask these questions, we are really talking about the authority of scripture in a lot of ways.

00:02:53
Speaker 3: And my.

00:02:56
Speaker 1: Discomfort a lot of times is that sometimes we take scripture and we subsume its authority under a particular interpretive grid, or we hook them so closely together that you couldn't pull them apart, and I think that creates more factions.

00:03:13
Speaker 2: Within the community of faith than we really need.

00:03:17
Speaker 1: So I'll leave it there and let you kind of wax philosophical for a minute.

00:03:21
Speaker 2: They're ashes.

00:03:23
Speaker 3: Philosophical is the word that comes to mind. The strength I think of the way that you're describing inversion is that it gives us a picture that.

00:03:31
Speaker 4: There's a lot to work from here. Yeah, because there's a lot of things that can immediately come to mind.

00:03:38
Speaker 3: Right when we think of inversion, we're thinking maybe upside down, we're thinking of the wrong thing on top, And I'm not sure that that's necessarily the way to think about it, right though. I get the benefit of that because it can be really easy to say, well, your tradition or your interpretive framework, or your imagination what have you.

00:03:58
Speaker 4: Has a lot of baggage time to it. So we just have to get back to the text.

00:04:03
Speaker 2: Right.

00:04:03
Speaker 3: The way that people tend to think of the reformations sola scriptura, right, that it's scripture and only scripture. We're getting rid of all these other things, or the way that as much as I like him, sometimes I fear and t Wright when he does is well, you're asking Reformation questions and I'm asking first century questions. Okay, maybe, but you're doing so from the for him twenty to twenty first centuries, and so you're really asking twenty the twenty first century questions too, right. And what I want to emphasize here is in version can't mean everyone else has interpreted baggage, but me and my crew we got it, that's right. I think what it points to is a failure to recognize that there is Okay, here's the fancy philosophical word forgive me everyone. We have a hermoneutical spiral or circle or feedback loop that's at play right where hermonutics says. The primary question is not necessarily how do I know that I know? But what is the process of understanding? And the way that I understand is inherently the drawing of things into my categories, my linguistic my language based categories. Right, So when I look at the lawn and identify something as a weed, I'm not saying anything actually about that green leafy thing with that certain kind of flower over and against the other green leafy thing with the flower that I do want or that I deliberately planted. Right, That those entities, those creatures in the garden and in the lawn, don't communicate with each other or view each other in those sorts of ways, or view themselves. It says something about me, says something about more than me, my community that has come up with a certain way of categorizing some of these versus others. Now, the goal here is to say, well, let's do away with the weed. Obviously there are reasons we've come up with the category, some better, some worse, Right, But the bigger question, hermoneutical question, is how did we arrive at this point and how does it affect that.

00:06:03
Speaker 4: We read the text?

00:06:06
Speaker 3: So I think when we're talking about this feedback circle. When you say in version, what I hear as having gone wrong is a failure to recognize that we have this feedback loop. Right, I encounter the text, but I already already encounter it from somewhere with some set of linguistic, conceptual, whatever.

00:06:26
Speaker 4: Categories that I inherit.

00:06:29
Speaker 3: Right, But those things can hopefully be challenged by the text and therefore begin to morph my categories, or maybe over time, as I engage with others interacting with the same text, even add new categories, or change categories or remove some categories. But then that should always lead me back to the text. And I think that that feedback loop is what's broken in what you're describing as inversion. Right, there might be the naivety of how I come to the text next, and there's a presumption of what I see in the text must obviously and clearly be true. Right. What the height of American evangelicalism in the early teen hundreds in Upstate New York would say, it's me and my Bible and the Holy Spirit, and the Spirit has led me to all truth. And this is what I have the Holy Spirit, and this is what I've come to understand so this must be the truth, and it doesn't work out so well when you have one hundred people saying that same thing and coming to one hundred two different conclusions.

00:07:30
Speaker 1: I agree that that is an excellent way of describing what I'm talking about when I'm talking about conversion or I'm sorry inversion inversion.

00:07:39
Speaker 2: And part of what I like about it is that.

00:07:42
Speaker 1: And I think this has always been a tension as I've thought about this issue.

00:07:48
Speaker 2: We always have to hit the ground.

00:07:52
Speaker 1: So when I was when I was an administrator in higher ed right, I knew that there were times when I just had to make a decision, and even though more discussion would ultimately be needed, you never really got to the bottom of an issue. In other words, there were always going to be some questions that were left unanswered, some perspectives that could be explored more deeply, you know, some areas of thought that we didn't, you know, just drill down to the very bottom of.

00:08:20
Speaker 2: But you didn't always have that kind of time. You had to do something.

00:08:25
Speaker 1: It couldn't just all be sitting around and thinking philosophically about, you know, what we should do next, Like, sometimes there just had to be a decision made and I tend to view what we do with scripture in sort of a similar manner, in that we are asked not just to know things and master scripture in a way that doesn't leave any room for doubt about what we understand about it or the interpretations that we have of it. We're asked to live it out, and that living it out requires us to wrestle with texts. It requires us to be in conversation with others. But then it also requires us to sort of put boots on the ground and actually move a bit. And I think that what you're describing that sort of hermeneutical spiral. It doesn't deny that you have boots on the ground, but it does require you to say, just because I put boots on the ground doesn't mean that I never circle back and reevaluate what's going on. It doesn't mean that I have to just keep trotting this way for the rest of my life, that this was the final decision I've ever made, and now all I have is this trajectory and this cadence and this way of walking. Right, you can always turn around and reflect and realize, oh, I should have been going ten degrees northwest as opposed to ten degrees northeast, and you can make those adjustments. And I think that's a crucial part of what I wanted to get at with invert, because I feel like sometimes we're closing ourselves in right. That problem of narrowing applies here to this notion of an interpretive grid, because these tend to close us off from opportunities that may actually be there. We just can no longer see them or unwilling to entertain them, because we become more committed to a system of thinking, a system of understanding the text, a set of interpretations of various texts that then require us to think of various aspects of the world as more relevant than others, and we close ourselves off functionally to almost everything else. And so I'll use a weight room analogy because that's what I do.

00:10:48
Speaker 2: Right.

00:10:49
Speaker 1: It's similar to going into the gym right and just doing beach muscles, but realizing that you also need to work, you know, some of the smaller muscles of the back and show because those are actually going to keep your joints healthy.

00:11:04
Speaker 2: And so even if you just want beach.

00:11:05
Speaker 1: Muscles, like big arms, you know, big chests, big shoulders, whatever you still have to do some other things to make sure that as you're building those other muscles.

00:11:16
Speaker 2: Your body doesn't just fall apart.

00:11:19
Speaker 1: Those other pieces have to be there, and I think that what happens sometimes is that we go full force on the beach muscles neglect everything else, and that is going to produce to in some degree, a broken body. It's going to give us more aches and pains than we really need when we could just throw in a few other of these exercises and attend to them appropriately and realize more than we're.

00:11:48
Speaker 2: Getting out of our current quote unquote workout.

00:11:53
Speaker 3: So I'm intrigued by that analogy. I'm trying to think as I think about the theoretical weightlifting that I'm not really going to do, that makes a lot of sense when I think about hermeneutically what that entails. Do you have some carryovers to our conversation that would we immediately say, yeah, I get that.

00:12:16
Speaker 2: Yeah, let me think through Deuteronomy. I believe it's twenty nineteen and twenty. I think I'm getting that right.

00:12:24
Speaker 1: I don't have my Bible pulled up right here, but maybe i'll check it real quick while well hand the mic over.

00:12:31
Speaker 2: But in Deuteronomy. I believe it's twenty nineteen and twenty. Israel has given instructions regarding conquest.

00:12:40
Speaker 1: They're going to go in and they're going to take over these other lands. They're supposed to conquer seven other nations. And at the end of these instructions, God says, by the way, you're going to find these fruit trees, don't destroy the fruit trees. You can eat the fruit trees, but don't just destroy the fruit trees.

00:13:02
Speaker 2: What a fascinating little verse.

00:13:05
Speaker 4: Yeah, I believe that's Teronomy twenty. I recall that.

00:13:08
Speaker 2: Okay, so fascinating little verse. Right.

00:13:11
Speaker 1: My guess is that people did not memorize that verse in I Wana. My guess is that it's not one that's going to roll off the tip of people's tongues. Even I have trouble, and I've been studying this, I couldn't remember what chapter and verse it was. Right, This is not John three sixteen, this is not Romans twelve one and two. This is this odd little verse buried down deep in the conquest narratives of Deuteronomy that gives us so much to reflect on and think about when it comes to what dominion is, How Israel's movement into the land was to preserve the natural elements of that land so that they could survive there. It just gives us all these different elements of theological reflection that most of us it is not intuitive that we would do just like hopping in and reading the letters of Paul. Now, what am I not saying. I'm not saying that there's a problem with the Letters of Paul, right. What I am saying is that you have all these other little muscles that if we read them, you know, if we worked them out right, if you went in, hopped in and read Deuteronomy, read some of those laws in Leviticus, read the weird sections of numbers. We usually think of those as negligible. But what I'm suggesting is, I think their core, because what they would do is they would add texture and challenge some of our settled interpretations when we run into a verse like that, or even believe it's Deuteronomy seven.

00:14:50
Speaker 2: I've been studying some of the conquest narratives.

00:14:53
Speaker 1: Deuteronomy seven talks about God is going to give the Israelites the land little by little, why so the wild animals do not outnumber them?

00:15:04
Speaker 2: What is that?

00:15:07
Speaker 1: Like those are interesting things that take a settled opinion where we think, oh, I got this, I know what the Bible's about, and then you run into these verses and you go or maybe I don't. Maybe I don't fully grasp everything that I've got there, And now I have more room to think.

00:15:25
Speaker 2: I can open up my interpretive grids.

00:15:27
Speaker 1: Can I can re evaluate those texts and my understanding of the Bible as a whole. So that's one example of this sort of not working out the beach muscles.

00:15:39
Speaker 2: In this illustration.

00:15:40
Speaker 1: The beach muscles would be something like Romans, right, and the smaller muscles that still need to be there to keep the joints healthier, like Deuteronomy seven and twenty.

00:15:52
Speaker 4: Okay, this is good. So the Deuteronomy twenty one.

00:15:56
Speaker 3: The reason I was able to say that's Tudoriny twenty is I actually used that passage. I'm sure it shocks you that I was using God's care for trees with my class, but I wanted to try to make the point because we have these questions, legitimate questions that surround the conquest narratives, and especially in a postgenocidal age right where we've seen so many atrocities in the world. It's an understandable question that arises as God commanding genocide. And we have this strange dynamic that appears in Deuteronomy twenty two. Strange dynamics. One is this near far business or perhaps that starts in chapter nineteen that I wanted to highlight students. But the other one was the trees one, because I could guarantee that these students who are familiar with these debates never once noticed this strange tree command. Yeah, and I think you're right about that, and I want to see you and I want to raise you even a little more to the beach muscles that we often tend to include worksite Galatians. Yeah, I forget the exact chapter. It's the chapter Paul is recounting the Jerusalem Council and that he had to confront Peter and he was then given a commission by Peter and James to be the one who takes the message of Jesus to the Gentiles, and that part we know. But at the conclusion of that same section, at the end of the chapter, and forgive me, it's what chapter four or something like that, Paul also says, and they instructed me to help the poor m which I already do.

00:17:32
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's like.

00:17:34
Speaker 3: A double thing there, Like no one that I ever here preached this passage or talking about this passage ever mentions that tag at the end as if it's just an adendom add at on and not part of what Paul saying and what the commission to him was. Never mind, the second part of that is, by the way, I already do that, So I'm just gonna keep doing it. But they just affirmed that might doing that is good and right, and to your point, we think in terms of doctrinal flexing. But that changes a lot, right because the ways that I've heard presidents of Bible colleges, pastors, Christian leaders talk about such things as helping the poor, they're always at best, extra things when we have our other ducks aligned. At worst, it's what those liberals do. And here we have Paul, you know, the chief the chief trainer in our Biblical weightlifting project, telling us, not only is that something that the commission that the council commissioned him to do, but he already doesn't.

00:18:42
Speaker 4: Right.

00:18:42
Speaker 3: So I think that's that's a beautiful way of saying it, and I think that changes everything, not just because it adds more to our picture, but it actually to your point of recalibrating. Might mean that we have to actually rethink what we're doing with these passages that we see them as first and four almost about some sort of abstract doctrinal discussions. Now, don't hear me as saying no, discussions are important. But I'm not sure that they have the level of intensity in the Biblical text, maybe not even in the imagination of these Hebraic thinkers who aren't thinking as Greek philosophers that we've given them to be in subsequent church history. But when we think about your inversion category and what that might mean in terms of the hermeneutical circle or spiral, however we want to put it again, it tells us that what we're doing with the text has to be attuned in some ways to hearing from the text, and not just simply going in with our lenses attuned to the sorts of data that we're looking for. Right, you're inclined to see only the things you're looking for, if you're inclined to only see squares, if your glasses are shaped, your lenses are shaped like squares. Right, But there might be a lot of ovals and circles, and you know, various other polygons that we're missing out. I think is kind of the point.

00:20:12
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think, just to sort of dovetail a little bit more on this, I had a conversation on Christian nationalism and dominionism here fairly recently, and one of the texts that I brought up was Deuteronomy too. Deuteronomy has a lot of rich texts related to the conquest, but Deuteronomy too is actually God saying you shall not go in and dispossess the Moabilides. And so what we see here is at the beginning of these sort of conquest narratives, the instructions that are given, at least with regard to the conquest, is that one thing that is often missing in Christian nationalism and dominionism is what are our limits? What aren't we supposed to do? That It's almost always framed in terms of the positive. Here's what we're supposed to do. We know what we're supposed to do, but there's never any thought given as to what we're not supposed to be doing. What are we supposed to restrain ourselves from? Because God has given that to another people, and the fact that we can't answer the question should give us pause about how sure we should be about the positive aspects that we're asserting. This is what we should take over, this is how we should proceed. If we don't understand what the limit is, it's unclear that we really understand what the movement forward should be. And I think Deuteronomy two and then into Deuteronomy seven and Deuteronomy twenty, that whole conquest sort of all those different conquest texts woven together. What you begin to understand is that that the Israelites conquest instructions can't really form conquest instructions for us, That these are very different things, and that because we don't have the full picture, it's it's very difficult for us to sit back and say, oh, this is something we should be doing now. I use that as an illustration just to say this is I think that there's a way in which that sort of ideology, that interpretive grid of dominionism and Christian nationalism have inverted, and so they no longer have to check in with the text. Deuteronomy too means nothing to them right there, It doesn't factor at all. And if it does it's it's quickly addressed and then swept under the rug. There's no wrestling with it. And and I think that that is a that is a good illustration of the way the way I see inversion working a lot of the time is that you have these counter narratives within the text that are not that are explained away. And now all I have to say. Sometimes I think it's very difficult to interpret the Bible and not have some of those texts right, and it just is like none of us have a full handle on this thing we call the Bible. At the same time, when I come to a verse that I can't explain, I think I tend to lean on the side of restraint. Let me not advance as quickly as I might have on the things that I felt sure about, because I've got this piece over here that is really telling me something very different, and I don't know how to explain it yet. And so I think there's this sort of on the gas off the gas kind of analogy that we need to have right that we're on some level, we've got to move forward in advance. We're trying to follow God somewhere, and you know, when we think we're following along with him. It's appropriate for us to make those steps. But at the same time, I think there's a way for us to sort of zoom past God, decide what our trajectory is going to be, and ignore all of these other texts over here that are saying something completely different to us, then go full speed ahead. And that subtle inversion puts us in the driver's seat. It sets our agenda as God's agenda right in a bad way.

00:24:35
Speaker 4: And.

00:24:37
Speaker 1: It almost makes it so that God's word is not determining our steps. We're determining our steps, and then we're justifying it with God's word. That to me is sort of the essence of conversion of inversion.

00:24:52
Speaker 3: So I think on a parallel round that also entailed the attempt avoid inversion or to counteract in version, entails not just looking at these smaller muscles and Deuteronomy and Leviticus and taglines andificaalations, but also interpreters that sit outside of our traditions, both today and in the past. Right because I think one of the things that you mentioned, which was that we can't fit every single one of these these little narrative structures into our theories or interpretive grids. And the reason for that is frankly, because it isn't it is an interpretive framework, right to take something that's a collection of wisdom, literature and narrative in letters and parable and some history like thing. And only what I mean by history like is it's not doing the history the way that we see the modern enterprise of historians doing history. That's all I mean by history like apocalyptic literature, revelation, like all these different sorts of modes of discourse that are joined together in one larger narrative continuity, let's call it. None of those things are philosophical discourse meant to give us abstract principles, whether ethical or doctrinal. That's a megaframework, right, the sorts of things that we think of in terms of our modern rubrics that we use to discern whether things are good or bad, theology right or wrong, theology right, orthodoxy, orthopoxy versus heterodoxy and heteropraxy. So to arrive at those other structures, it is an interpretive process. And those are interpretive frameworks. And because of the nature of them, they're not able to hold together. These various kinds of let's call them genres or forms of discourse.

00:26:51
Speaker 4: Right.

00:26:53
Speaker 3: But what's interesting is that what often distinguishes these interpretive frameworks is which elements or which directions or pathways within the text one group ends up taking hold of and holding as primary, and doing so can radically change the way that we see in the text, right, whether that be how do we understand justification by faith? Is it justification by faith alone? Does that mean faith and belief for themselves intellectual works that need to be done away with as well, right, like that's a luther thing. Or is justification by faith such that you show your faith by doing as especially James, but also.

00:27:34
Speaker 4: Really Paul talks about it, and Jesus talks.

00:27:36
Speaker 3: About going to lend us to this broadly speaking Roman Catholic way, right, And we can go on and on and on. I think what's important within this is that we have to be able to have the discipline to hear those from other traditions without that immediate knee jerk reaction of writing the snarky notes in the margin, so to speak. And I have in my mind the image of myself in grad school where I hated a particular book.

00:28:03
Speaker 4: It was a history program.

00:28:04
Speaker 3: I hated this historical work that I was working through, and I wrote these snarky notes in the margin, and years later I went back to it was thoroughly embarrassed as I looked at it, and I said, snarky, My snarky notes betrayed that I didn't actually understand fully what this historian was saying. Because I actually think this historian, whether or not I fully agree with them, was onto something here, and I failed to be able to understand it because I was too busy with engaging in some sort of apologetic exercise with him, but without him present.

00:28:39
Speaker 4: Right. But I think that that's how this inversion happens. We're so worried.

00:28:46
Speaker 3: About the other or even that third group, right, and that third group is probably the one that needs the advocating for right interpretively without saying everything goes right.

00:28:56
Speaker 4: But that's the juxtaposition. That's the back and forth.

00:28:59
Speaker 3: That's that we take, we get shaped, we take back to the text, we get shaped again, right, so on and so forth.

00:29:06
Speaker 1: Yeah, And I think this is largely what we mean when we say the Bible is, or at least this is largely what I mean when I say the Bible is the final authority for life and faith.

00:29:14
Speaker 2: It's final.

00:29:17
Speaker 1: I don't know that we ever reached that finality, but it does provide a set of constraints and guardrails for us, and we need to be able to discern when we're outside of those constraints and outside of those guardrails. Oftentimes we think about that in terms of just strict heresy.

00:29:35
Speaker 2: You know arianism or you know modalism.

00:29:39
Speaker 1: Like my mind goes back to that fantastic little video, the animated video the two Irish guys talking about the Trinity, right, like one of my favorite videos of all time, I think. But at the end of the day, I think there's also another way to air. I won't call heresy, but there's another way to err in this, and that is being too narrow. I think we see this in Act seven. It's a passage I think we've talked about on another podcast. But essentially what happens there is the people are accusing Stephen of preaching against Moses and the temple and the law, and Stephen, instead of addressing those points one by one, comes back and says, well, let's just take a look at this. Let's look at all the different times that God interacts with his people and works on behalf of his people outside the land. Abraham's called outside the land, Moses's call from Midian. There's holy ground in you know, in the under the burning bush in Midian. Right, even when Solomon builds the temple, we all know that God does not actually dwell in a house made by human hands. God transcends these human structures. And so what are we really talking about here? This is all within our tradition. All of that should have been a parent It wasn't anything even radical. Right, He's basically showing different place names and going God did stuff in Egypt, for instance, And so he's showing them, like all these different times that God works outside the boundaries that they themselves have set. And he's trying to help him understand that they've narrowed God too much, that their interpretive lens has become like blinders essentially. And at the end of that.

00:31:37
Speaker 2: Speech that he gives, what's fascinating is Stephen looks up and sees Jesus standing next to the throne, glorified his opponents.

00:31:46
Speaker 1: It says, they shut up their ears, run toward him and stone him, and so they clog up their sense organ so they can't hear.

00:31:56
Speaker 2: They can't.

00:31:57
Speaker 1: They don't want to hear this from him, They don't want to see this anymore, they want this to be gone. And I think that's the opposite error that we don't often really deeply consider. There's certainly a going outside of the boundaries sort of heresy that creates its problems, but I think there's also a resetting the boundaries to narrowly problem that we don't often address. But that is I think well illustrated in scripture and part of what can come out in our interpretive process if we're not careful. I think we have to sort of balance and negotiate these boundaries in a way that we're not on the other side of the fence outside in heresyland, denying something that Scripture is saying from an assertion perspective, like I'm going to say that the Bible teaches X, Y or Z, and it really doesn't. But we also need to be careful not to be so far inside the fence where we're saying we're going to say that the Bible can't.

00:33:01
Speaker 2: Teach X, Y and Z, that it can only teach these things.

00:33:06
Speaker 1: And creating a little box for scripture to sit in both ways are diminishing of scriptures authority in ways that I think Christians want to avoid.

00:33:18
Speaker 3: Yeah, agreed. And a further note, I think regarding our quick footedness to arrive at conclusions of heresy, along with the way that we tend to minimize the ways in which scriptural narrative is a development. And I don't mean that as a development from all the New Testament. I mean even the writing of Galatians is one whole letter. Writing Romans is one whole letter. To understand the conclusions that Paul's making, you got to understand the development, right, the same with every book in the Bible. Well, Similarly, the conclusions of heresy in church history, they're developments. There are no historical heresies even in the period, especially in the period of the Unifying Church, that the church arrives at that conclusion overnight, every single.

00:34:13
Speaker 4: One of them.

00:34:14
Speaker 3: We're talking quite literally years of discourse, involves many, many voices in a church far less fractured, expanding many geographical places to arrive at those conclusions, and sometimes even quite literally decades of discourse and revisiting and lots of councils. Right, even when we think of the Seven ecumenical councils. There are dozens of councils in addition to those, often that lie in between the ecamenical councils in which these things are being hashed out, and the conclusions aren't always the conclusions that the ecumenical councils eventually end up reaching. Right, So I think we need to be slow with that heresy. It doesn't mean there aren't such things as heresies, but I think to your point, heresy should not be that first button we reach for, and we certainly shouldn't be the ones who live in our in our armchair, or in our traditions, who get to decide once and for all time for the Universal Church what is and is not heresy, right.

00:35:17
Speaker 4: Because it's never how it was decided. Right.

00:35:19
Speaker 3: The people of Antioch didn't get to decide what heresy was anymore than the people of Alexandria, anymore than the people of her own But secondly, to your point, there's always been variety in the readings.

00:35:32
Speaker 4: Of the text.

00:35:34
Speaker 3: Right, I'm go and even think one of the passages that stands out to me Thomas Aquinas's commentary Hebrews, the ways that he marches through that and he says, here's what and he'll often say, here are four other interpretations of this passage, and he'll make it very clear none of them are heretical, even if he doesn't agree with some of them, and he explains why right.

00:35:59
Speaker 4: If you've ever read it, you know he's never.

00:36:02
Speaker 3: Afraid to go into incredible depth and analytic clarity to show you why he doesn't agree with something. But he's very clear at distinguishing between when he doesn't agree with something because he thinks he has good biblical and philosophical and theological reasons to disagree, and those conclusions that the church, not him, has declared his heresy. And he airs much more on the side of if you disagree with me, I think you're wrong. And here's why heart stop right than he does. I'm saying, oh, you're outside the boundaries and heresy things that are heresy more than him and more than his place, and.

00:36:43
Speaker 4: Time got to decide that. And I think that's instructive, right.

00:36:49
Speaker 1: I think so too, I think, and you'd probably know the history better than I do.

00:36:54
Speaker 2: I I've always sort of wondered and never bothered to check some of the quote unquote.

00:37:02
Speaker 1: Heresies and the quote heretics that advance them. My impression is that they were part of these conversations ongoing, and then ultimately, as the church decides these things are heresies, they either opt to change their views or not change their views. In other words, they're they're convinced by the dialogue that they're in the wrong, and they pivoted so that what they once thought became a heresy, but they don't actually become a heretic, or they decide to dogmatically hold these things even after these decades long conversations and ongoing dialogue, and then decide to stick with them and become themselves heretics. I don't know whether you have any insights on how often that happened or what right. I'm not asking for stats, but I can envision people sort of as they're navigating these things and trying to figure all this out.

00:37:58
Speaker 2: There are some really tough questions, and so it's not odd to me that people would come up with ideas that end up once they're sort of worked through, they don't actually work. This isn't what we were saying. That's not odd to me. Yep.

00:38:17
Speaker 3: So two examples chiefly come to mind. I'll start with the later one first, and that that's the Augustine versus Pallagious dialogue slash debate that turns into the Church's declaration in the West, especially on original sin and the way that it's taught, the way that I've often taught it, because it's shorthand and you're trying to move through a lot of material. It's Augustine versus Pallagius, Augustine's arguments when Augustus is able to declare Polyagias a heretic, and that's not quite right, right, it's not Augustine who got to say Pelagius is a heretic. It's the Church that said ultimately, Augustine's points are the ones that we feel make the best sense of the Biblical narrative, and Pelagius's points, which, in a nutshell, we're dismissing this idea that we ultimately had some sort of impediment within ourselves to keep us from the grace, from fulfilling the sorts of things that allow the grace of God.

00:39:21
Speaker 2: Right.

00:39:21
Speaker 3: So, for Pelagius, the issue was singularly environmental. It's what we needed was the right environment. If we fix the environment, we fix the ability of people to be able to make the right decisions and follow the right path to God, which ostensibly makes grace outside of us. Right. Grace is there, but grace is environmental, and Augusta's position was no, there is in fact an impediment within us, whatever you want to call it. Right for him, it's privation. Don't need to go into that, but it's the lack of something. We're missing something, and that's that fundamental connection to God is severed because of the fall. But it's the Church that, ultimately, over the course of a long period of time of this debate happening, that ultimately comes to the conclusion of we signed with Augustine. And the Pelagian view is a heretical position, but Pallagius is part of that conversation, and Plati just has the opportunity to say, okay, fair, the church is spoken. Not to my knowledge, and I'm hazy on this one. I don't think he took that option. I think he chose to remain outside and that was his choice. But the Church gave him an opportunity. But equally as important to your question is that it's not as if the Church then dug itself into the trench of Augustine's position and held it thenceforth forevermore. In fact, in many ways, what brings it's not the only issue, but one of the things that brings up the theological issues of the Reformation is a sense from some of these reformers, especially the Luthers and the second generation folks like Calvin, that Augustine's position had been compromised upon and we'd slipped into a new kind of let's call it semi Pelagianism, right, because that's the language that they were using. Now, is it the case that the Church had slipped from an entrenched position in Augustine, or in Augustine's theology, back to Pelagius and reaffirm something theoretical, Or is it more likely, which I think is the case, that the Church never actually baptized, so to speak, Augustine's position. They saw his arguments against Pelagius as setting up sort of the operating terms aid to work through. But the Church in and of itself, by and large took a variety of positions, some of which were on one extreme Augustine, but some of which were much softer, which they were still affirming those basic tenets of the bondage of the will without having this sort of hard line let's call them predestinarian, sort of total depravity kind of positions that come out of Augustine by the time.

00:41:54
Speaker 4: You get to a Calvin for instance.

00:41:56
Speaker 3: Right, I think that's really instructive, because that's that's a long and implicated conversation that we can't do justice to here. But it's to say that there's a lot going on, there's still variety, there's far from an entrenched position, and involves a lot of voices, right that passed through this period that we think of as the Medieval Renaissance or the Medieval an early version of the Renaissance that begins to reignite these conversations. The other debate that comes to my mind real quick is the one that we think of as the Aryan heresy, where they in three twenty five the Council of an Icia condemned the arian position, but it does so using certain philosophical language that was frankly loaded and not really settled as theological discourse, and so that actually created bigger problems because now it sounded like the Church was actually affirming some other version of Arianism even as it was rejecting the full on Arianism, so it gives to a neo Aryanan group that's much more philosophically astute than areas. It gives rise to these distinctions between what we think of as the Hamasseans and the Hamoyusians, which the short version of that is it was a language and philosophical category problem, and it didn't take until it took until.

00:43:17
Speaker 4: Three eighty one. So we're talking my Mathers r.

00:43:19
Speaker 3: Fifty six years later where the church finally says, okay, we get our missteps of the language, so now we're clarifying our language.

00:43:27
Speaker 4: And the clarified.

00:43:28
Speaker 3: Position was actually far less precise in some ways than the original, but it's because they recognize that more precise position in three twenty five actually created a whole other set of problems that they didn't mean to create.

00:43:41
Speaker 4: So it was a.

00:43:41
Speaker 3: Deliberate loosening of what they were doing with the language while reaffirming what we're certainly not saying is that Arius' position is okay.

00:43:56
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean that's really helpful because I do think it illustrates On the one hand, you know the fact that they loosen the language back up suggests that they're recognizing that they'd gone too precise, too narrow, they'd hem themselves in too much, and that they were, we might say, more sure about their position than they deserve to be sure. And so that precision suggests that they really thought they understood what was going on, or were really reacting to something in their environment right in that discourse and trying to close something down. But the willingness to go back and fix it says an awful lot. I think that's actually really helpful. And on the Augustine and the Pelagian sort of piece of this, what I find fascinating is, you know, the way you describe pelagiaus it's something in our environment. We still have conversations today about something in our environment. So while we don't I don't know that we'd want to call structural evil conversations Pelagian. But my guess is without having read all of Pelagius's stuff, right, my biggest exposure is from the King Arthur movie that Clive Owen was in. But I've actually read Augustine, but I haven't read Pelagias. But my guess is that if that's part of what he's talking about, he's also onto something. But once you start pulling that stuff too far, it becomes aberrant because you begin to leave other things out. And so, just having read Augustine, for instance, his Confessions.

00:45:40
Speaker 2: There's a line in there, it's one of my favorite lines.

00:45:42
Speaker 1: He talks about these offices that men occupy, where they are essentially drawn to the well done, well done of other men. And so in that little statement you have sort of the environmental because he is talking about this office that exists, but he's also talking about the lack within man. They're working together there, and so I think that there's just a realization that we need to have that we tend to think of these heresy orthodoxy as really sharp lines, and we have the benefit of years of discussion and dialogue to do that. But the reality is that a lot of this stuff was wrestled to the ground over decades and still leaves room for us today to argue about the jots and tittles of it. Even if we stay within a broad doctrinal position, there's still a lot about those doctrines. I mean, I even think about the conversations we've had recently about the Kenosis and Gregory of Nissa's difference from more standard Canotic Christology. It's fascinating stuff, and you can see how it would fit.

00:47:06
Speaker 2: But nobody's denying the doctrine of an errancy or I mean, the doctrine of the kenosis, right, They're both construing it in different ways, and I think in some ways we've lost the ability to do that, at least in certain circles.

00:47:21
Speaker 1: I would say, just from my Old Testament theologian context, the one that always pops into my mind is the creation narrative.

00:47:29
Speaker 2: The creation narrative.

00:47:30
Speaker 1: You have some people who, if you're not a seven Day you know, Young Earth creationist, you're reading the creation narrative incorrectly, and just from an Old Testament perspective, I sit back and say, look, I'm not sure that's the case. I think this narrative is doing something quite different than affirming a very specific historic, historic viewpoint of when the Earth was actually created. I don't think dating was ever the issue when these things were written.

00:48:02
Speaker 2: And in saying that, I'm not trying to sidestep the dating issues, although it's certainly not my specialty. But what I am saying is that there's more here. There's more here than that, and so just because someone doesn't come to the same conclusion on that issue doesn't mean that they're disrespecting the text. It may mean that they're looking at the text in.

00:48:23
Speaker 1: Its other in its sort of excess of that these different ways of seeing it. And so I don't think even the way that I would read Genesis one to one through two three, which is not necessarily the way that a Young Earth creationist would want me to read that text, I don't see it as being an aberrant viewpoint. There are a lot of scholars who read it in a very similar way that I would, and I don't really want to be closed in to the same ways that Young Earth creationists read that text.

00:48:54
Speaker 2: I think it's too narrowing. I think that creates more problems than it solves. Isn't negating their position, that's suggesting that their position is too close, and that if they would open it up a bit, there's probably a richness there that they would discover that is lacking.

00:49:17
Speaker 3: Yeah, I appreciate your bringing up that conversation because I think it helps me clarify to your point, the Augustine Pelagious dynamic and that and in a way that carries into that conversation to your point, the church wasn't saying no to structural evil in our language. When they said no to Pelagius, they were saying no to Pelagius stalling the conversation and refusing to accept that there is an impediment of sin that exists within us, right within our hearts. That was the problem. It wasn't a rejection of everything else Plagia says, right, And so to that point, to this day, that's an important part in the way that the Church articulates things that can't just be reduced to Augustine's remark. Augustine's remarks to players, and.

00:50:11
Speaker 4: It's not doesn't mean that Augustus was rejecting.

00:50:14
Speaker 3: What we would think of as structural evil. His big issue was to point to the impediment that exists within our heart and the bondage of the will that eventually the reformers also will take up and extreme forms. Right, But that doesn't foreclose against being able to say there are elements at play here that are important to the I think that speaks to the creation element here, because what's really interesting about this creation debate, as you know, is that it begins in a particular time and place that's politically and socially charged. If you go back to the le even the late eighteen hundreds before this issue was pulitic charged in the same way. The sorts of figures that many many would see as traditionalist, right, the Charles Hodges of the world, the bb war Fields of the world, don't have the sort of emotional concerns at play here.

00:51:18
Speaker 4: Right.

00:51:19
Speaker 3: In fact, Charles Hodge goes so far as just to take for granted that the earth is millions of years old, And yet he's one of those people seen as the defender the old Princetonian right, the defender of traditional ways. So what happens in the rise of the creation debates is often less about textual engagement and more about broader social movements that are underway that set up postures and defensiveness. Right, there's a desire to say that the Bible is trustworthy, and that begins to take the text to a degree.

00:51:55
Speaker 4: That frankly just isn't done in the text. Right.

00:52:00
Speaker 3: We've talked about in other context, Genesis won is a sinatic text, right. It's a written to Israel and Sinai, and it's written as a precursor to understanding who this people group of biblical Israel is that God has called out to do a specific work of redemption through that's supposed to be not just for their good, but for the ends of the earth, all the nations. Right, and so the telling of the Creation story is in some sense meant to be a telling of what God desires as the way that He organizes the world that sets itself in contrast to the ways that the kingdoms of the Earth, especially Pharaoh that they're leaving has organized the earth and setting up this contrast, then it helps us understand what biblical Israel was supposed to be that arguably never realized, arguably.

00:52:53
Speaker 4: A very different conversation.

00:52:55
Speaker 3: Than a modern conversation about radiocarbon dating or counting genealogical cycles.

00:53:03
Speaker 4: It's just not the point of the text. Now.

00:53:05
Speaker 3: It doesn't mean you can't have instillary judgments from that, But to look at the text in those sorts of ways, does that inversion work of it now ties ties textual understanding and interpretation into social moments.

00:53:22
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:53:23
Speaker 1: I used to try to illustrate this for students this way. I would say something like, over the weekend, I went to the hospital to visit my wife. Am I trying to prove the existence of hospitals. With that statement, I'm really not I'm conveying something that I did over the weekend. Now, am I assuming a hospital exists?

00:53:51
Speaker 2: Sure? I'm assuming that something there is something called the hospital? Right?

00:53:56
Speaker 1: And then you notice, well, why was I visiting my wife at the hospital? You know me well enough to know that my wife works at a hospital, so you might assume, oh, okay, she was working and James went to visit her. That's nice, But she could very well have been checked into the hospital as a patient and I needed to go a.

00:54:13
Speaker 2: Visitor for that reason.

00:54:15
Speaker 1: There are these layers within this communication right where we can infer things. There are reference there's a way to which all these different words correspond to a reality behind them. But unpacking them requires us to think through all the different contextual clues. It requires us to think about the intention. What was the intention of this speech? Many of the times that's implied in the grammar. Right, If I don't say there is such a thing as a hospital, I'm probably not trying to demand that you accept that there's this thing called the hospital. It's more of a passing reference. And so I think that when I do that with student, it sort of helps them understand that there are some things that are layered into any of our communications that we've got to unpack, but they still aren't the point of what's being said. And so I think a lot of times what ends up happening. And again I think this has unfortunately been tied in with inversion in ways that I don't think it necessarily needs to be, is that as we're trying to determine the reference, once we decide what that reference has to be, and being in very intentional with that language, Once we decide what that reference has to be, there's no other way to read it.

00:55:40
Speaker 2: It just has to be this, And we begin to lose then what's actually being done in the text? What's the text trying to do to us?

00:55:51
Speaker 1: That speech act theory would call it the ilocutionary force.

00:55:56
Speaker 2: What is this text trying to do to us? What's it really sort of pushing for?

00:56:00
Speaker 1: That's it's much easier to do, I think, on the level of a one sentence, just like the one I've given, But when we start to look at discourses more broadly, it's very difficult, I think, to discern how do we parse out all of these different reference and understand how these different discourses, longer passages Genesis one one through two three, what's that whole thing trying to do to us? What's it trying to convey? Whether, where's it trying to push us? Those are the bigger interpretive questions that when we start to close this stuff down, those I feel like get lost first, and they may be some of the most important things we could ever dig out of the text. It's really understanding how these big swaths of scripture are trying to push us towards something different. I think, you know, if we were just to read, you know, that Genesis one through four, let's say, which is usually the unit in between those totodotes, if we were to read those as just historical narratives, I think we're missing something, missing something big. They're obviously symbolic and sort of forward looking in ways that if we don't notice, we're really going to miss a lot of what's going on in those texts, and so I just think we have to be careful not to There's this great book written by Ronald Bert. It's called Brokerage. Enclosure has nothing to do with biblical studies. It's all about navigating organizations and what Ronald Bert says, is the people who are able to broker the structural gaps within an organization move let's say between when we are in distance education, let's say distance education, between moving in distance education to moving to the market department, crossing that structural gap, moving from distance learning to the IT department and crossing that structural gap. People who can do that are going to be at a much higher risk of having good ideas. That's almost a verbatim quote from Ronald Burt. And I think we're in a very similar situation here right when you talk about we've talked about going to other texts, right, reading these other texts that aren't usually read, incorporating those back in. We're talking about looking at theologians that may differ from us, that hold these sort of more you know, interesting positions than we do. Right, they're different positions than we might hold, understanding them where they're coming from deeply, you know, grappling with their positions. Looking at the historical theologians, and you know this structural gap in time that we have with them. I think the better we can bridge those structural gaps, the better ideas we are going to have about the Biblical text, and to me, that's just sort of makes the whole thing worth it. Even if you sit back and you say, well, I feel kind of unsettled with all my you know, I don't have like a clear interpretive grid that I can hold on to and say this is mine and it's closed off, and you know, I could put it in a little lunch box and carry it around with me. True, you do not have that, but I think you're at risk of having better ideas about the biblical text, and that to me seems like a great trade off.

00:59:40
Speaker 4: This is very related to conversations and creativity.

00:59:43
Speaker 5: At this point, we have no time to get into yeah, but what I do want to say quickly is that the idea of broker and gaps, the business of that is very much related, I think to the ways that we think.

00:59:55
Speaker 3: You know, as you get older, you start to get more solidified understandings, often reasons in the sense that you have a greater and greater grasp on things. But as you get more solidified understandings, your opportunity for creativity collapses because you're no longer engaging as charitably with those things that are outside of your systems. Right, And I think about that in contrast to children who are often much less sure about the definitiveness of these lines. Right. I have a daughter who's incredibly creative and also incredibly analytic, and we're taught that those things are two different ways of being, that the analytic ones are not the creative ones. But I think actually the creative analytic.

01:00:35
Speaker 4: Ones are the ones who do the most interesting things. Right, And I watch her.

01:00:38
Speaker 3: She'll walk over to the bag that has all the recycling stuff that is getting ready to go out, and she starts pulling them out, And my immediate inclination is, no, leave it alone. That's more garbage. I'm trying to take that stuff out. But you stop, you wait, you watch, you listen, and you realize she's doing some really interesting stuff. She's taken that recycling and she's made she's done her science experiment with them, or she's done crafty things with them.

01:01:03
Speaker 4: Incredible. But that's a capacity that we tend to lose as we get older.

01:01:09
Speaker 3: That maybe the commission to close us out is to fight that capacity, not because we don't want to have interpretive context, but because we need to constantly realize that whatever interpretive structures we're forming that are better and better informed, are still far from fully informed and need to be written in pencil.

01:01:28
Speaker 2: Right.

01:01:28
Speaker 3: We need to be able to erase them or erase lines, and to think about something new, right, not think of the newer work that's being done in crimodgy ways, but.

01:01:39
Speaker 4: Neither just simply accepting it. Right.

01:01:40
Speaker 3: That's the hermoneutical spiral of constantly reevaluating, constantly.

01:01:45
Speaker 4: Allowing the text to speak to the situation.

01:01:48
Speaker 3: And that's where the good creative energies will come back, and maybe we'll find there a fewer things to fight about.

01:01:55
Speaker 4: Without giving up the faith, without giving up.

01:02:00
Speaker 3: Scripture says as the place we turn to right as the authoritative voice and understanding what God is at work doing, but not necessarily assuming that we've got to figure it out.

01:02:15
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that's right.

01:02:17
Speaker 1: I love the creativity angle, and we'll we'll have to talk about that more.

01:02:20
Speaker 2: In a different episode.

01:02:21
Speaker 1: I'm reading the book you recommend it on beauty, and she talks about in there.

01:02:27
Speaker 2: I'm blanking on her name right now.

01:02:29
Speaker 1: I apologize with Natalie Karn's Beauty. She talks in there about the shift from artists to artisans and the different ways that creativity comes to be not just what you can do with some you know, with raw materials, but how you can think something new into existence. And I think often as we consider creativity, we can fight that creativity because we are so afraid of bringing something new into existence. But the reality is that when we're doing this with biblical studies, we're always looking at the text. We're trying to look at the text with new angles, and in that way we are exercising this sort of interesting.

01:03:16
Speaker 2: Mix of analytical tools, analytical site with a creative mind that says, I know I haven't understood the full pattern that God has given me, and I sure would like to. I think there's something to that, so well, we'll have to.

01:03:34
Speaker 1: Get into that in another episode. But you're right, we're kind of out of time today. But Bro, this is a great discussion. I appreciate it. And inversion is I think one of those things that we have to watch out for, and I think especially we have to watch out for it as we amp up our technology, and that'll be the next episode that we address. The next condition we address is amplification and the way that technology tends to amplify us and amplify our capacity in good and bad ways. And so we'll think about application in the next episode. But thanks everybody for being here, Thanks Ashish again for the conversation, and we'll catch you all in the next episode of Thinking Christian.

01:04:15
Speaker 2: Take care,