Dr. James McGrath, an esteemed scholar and returning guest, engages in a profound dialogue with Joshua Noel and TJ Blackwell regarding his latest literary endeavor, "Beyond Deconstruction: Building a More Expansive Faith." Central to this discourse is the exploration of faith reconstruction following the experience of deconstruction, a journey that many individuals navigate in contemporary religious contexts. Dr. McGrath elucidates the necessity of recognizing that faith can transcend rigid doctrinal confines, advocating for a more inclusive and expansive understanding of Christian belief. As he articulates his personal journey, he emphasizes the importance of humility and openness in fostering genuine community within the church. This episode serves as a critical reflection on the evolving nature of faith and the potential for unity amidst diversity within the Christian tradition.

Takeaways:

• Dr. James McGrath discusses the concept of unity within the church as articulated in Ephesians, emphasizing the necessity of humility in fostering communal bonds.
• The podcast explores the importance of understanding faith beyond rigid doctrines, advocating for a more expansive, inclusive perspective that embraces diverse beliefs.
• McGrath's book, 'Beyond Deconstruction: Building a More Expansive Faith', addresses the journey of reconstructing faith after deconstruction, focusing on positive affirmations rather than mere dismantling.
• A key takeaway from this episode is the idea that faith should not be viewed as a static system but as a dynamic, evolving relationship with God and community.
• The conversation highlights the significance of community in the church, positing that genuine fellowship can exist outside traditional church models, particularly for those who have experienced trauma in religious settings.
• Listeners are encouraged to approach differences within the church with empathy and understanding, recognizing the shared humanity that transcends doctrinal divides.

Ephesians 4, 4, 6.

In the Christian Standard Bible, say, there is one body and one spirit, just as you were called to one hope at your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all. So in the book of Ephesians, Paul is writing to the church in Ephesus about what it means to be the church.

David McGrath, how does this verse help us better understand the importance unity has to the DNA of the church?

Yeah, I mean, it's, it's this, this all encompassing vision, right. Of God that is sort of in all things. And, and lots of theologians have said this, you know, Paul Tillich in particular comes to mind.

But, you know, when we focus on our little commitments, you know, whether it's to a church, a denomination, a country, you know, something like that, that's when we divide, right? And it's when we really grasp that we're part of something bigger and that we're so small in comparison.

And our grasp of reality is just such a tiny little snippet of all it is that puts our nation, our religion, our family, our ethnicity, whatever it is, sort of in the context of this greatness that is God. And it's humbling. And if there's something that's crucial for unity, I think humility got to be somewhere high up on the list.

Yeah. Amen. Barely. Barely such things as we like to say when someone spits verse at us.

Hey, everybody.

Welcome to the Whole Church Podcast.

Possibly your favorite church unity podcast, but also totally cool if it's not because it would defeat the purpose if we were, you know, competing with other unity podcasts, of which one of us is more united than the others and more at peace with all men. It's like, yeah, you know, I don't think that works. So I'm Joshua Nol. I have one job.

It's to make that little rant that I just did, then announce the one and only pot almighty, tj Tiberius Juan Blackwell, and introduce him to his own show. So welcome to your show, tj.

Thank you.

Yeah.

Also for a bonus, I'll also introduce one of the world's greatest guests, return guest, friend of the show, great guy, Star Trek and Dr. Who, buddy of mine and only Dr. James McGrath. So glad to have you back, man.

Great to be back. Always great talking to you, man.

It's always great to just see you, talk to you, everything. Yeah, the little breaks in between beer camp. Like I have to have at least one or two podcasts to hold me over, you know. Yeah.

Speaking of theology, beer camp, people should check it out.

Oh, yes.

Kansas City this year.

Yeah, that's. That's where. That's where we first met in person, at least, you know.

Yeah.

And yeah, it's. It's just, it sounds frivolous and it is, it's just, it's hilarious.

It's good.

It's hilarious in all these different ways every year. But I, you know, I didn't expect before the first time I went, and it's consistently been every time I've been.

It's, it's, it's moving, it's profound. You know, it's, it's life changing, it's inspiring, you know, in its vision of the church and the church, you know, across difference.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's. Conceptually, it's just a little silly. And isn't that just the most unifying thing?

You know, I gotta agree with that. No, but. But do. I do love it. I think Trip put together something phenomenal and I think everybody should check it out since we're building it up.

I'll try to remember to put the link in the show's description so you guys can possibly join us. See all three of us there and some of our other friends. And it is, it is super serious and extremely spiritual, but also incredibly silly.

And there's probably going to be some drunken antics, you know, sprinkled in, and it's a good time.

Probably, Probably. But if you're not Familiar with him, Dr. James McGrath is a return guest. Like we said, he's a good friend of ours.

He's the Clarence L. Goodwin Chair in New Testament Language and Literature at Butler University. His PhD is from the University of Durham in England.

His interests include not only early Christianity, but also John the Baptist and the Mandeans, science fiction and the intersection of religion and science. He also runs a blog at Religion Prof. On Patheos website.

So if you're more interested in him, find him, check him out, read his other books that we're not going to talk about today. Yeah, but go to our website, purchase one of our T shirts. It helps promote the show, raises money for podcasting needs.

It gets others to know about the importance of our mission to educate and unite the modern church. Personally, my favorite, not to sound narcissistic, but my favorite is the one called TJ quote on the back. It's our most plain shirt.

It's got the logo on the front and nothing on the back.

Yeah, it's great. Yeah. Still proud of that one?

Yeah, it's pretty good. Also check out the Onazel podcast network website. The link is below for other shows like ours.

Yeah, yeah, I definitely think there's a few that you guys should check out. A few of them will be at the Ology Beer camp. Systematic ecology, Theology on the rocks.

We do have to move on to unifying things and we have a holy sacrament that we like to start with here. James, you might know about it. It's called silliness. The holiest thing imaginable. Today's is pretty straightforward.

TJ and I only first give you time to think about it. If you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be? Tdre?

Hard question. Hard question. I like a tree that's easy to climb.

But also you would be at.

Yes, it does. Also you have a little space to climb. So I'm going for like a magnolia tree. You know, not too old magnolia, that's.

That's grown too tall to really get into, but you know, good 70, 80 year old magnolia tree. That's. That's where I would want to be.

So I'm just doing my favorite tree to be cherry blossom, but I'm doing what kind of tree I am. I'm gonna go with a wild oak mostly because they grow in like the Florida region, largely near the coast, and they just don't grow straight.

They grow all kind of like weird, funky ways. And you're like, this doesn't make any sense, but it's kind of functional, I guess. I think. I think that kind of sums me up.

Like that guy's a weirdo, but I guess he's kind of functional. Yeah, I'll go with wild oak.

Yeah, it's actually there are a lot of trees I like and so it's kind of hard to choose, but I'm gonna go with redbud. I just like fell in love with those. Hadn't really been familiar with them before moving to Indiana and Indianapolis and just had one in our yard.

It's since departed this mortal coil, but for a while it just brought this, you know, this purple color. You know, this idea that a tree doesn't have to be green. Like when it's.

It is cool.

Yeah, it's. It's spring. It's. And you know, being. Being interesting and different. I mean, that probably is my mo.

Yeah, I'd say so.

I think you do a good job at it at least.

So my. One of my side goals for afterlife, I want to be composted.

They have like a human compost, like whole thing and it's super good for the environment apparently. And I want them to plant. I'm thinking like either a Japanese maple or cherry tree.

Yeah.

You know, if I'm going to become a tree, that's what I want to be.

I want to be a firework, personally. Cremation ashes in the firework go out with the pack.

I also learned that they've made more eco friendly ways to do cremation now. So that's kind of cool. But that's Scythian. Yeah, yeah.

So, James, for those who have not heard of you either on our previous show or through your own endeavors, could you share a little bit about your story with the church and who you are, what your interests are?

Sure.

So I mean, the things, the things that you mentioned, assuming anybody's still listening after that list of, you know, what I do, the kinds of stuff I research and write about.

Most of the time I work mostly on the New Testament and got into doing that precisely because I had this profound life changing experience in my teens, classic born again experience which I may have shared with people last time. And so I won't tell the whole story again.

But yeah, as a result of that, you know, and that's kind of what led to this book in a sort of indirect way, you know, that experience got me thinking, oh, I should do something related to this with my life. I the very least need to understand what this means for my life.

And so got me to Bible college, which got me on the path towards teaching and academic study of the Bible. And there's nothing like academic study of the Bible to challenge the assumptions that led you to study the Bible in the first place.

The assumption that this thing all fits together nicely into one systematic whole that gives you all the answers to all your questions. And so really that's sort of been my journey with the Bible.

And I've been fortunate enough to have communities along the way, churches, large or small, formal or informal, with official buildings or not, that have been supportive of the various phases of that journey, which has been wonderful.

So now I've settled in a local American Baptist church called Crooked Creek Baptist Church here in Indianapolis, where I live and where I work and I get to teach adult Sunday school. I'm also involved in music and things like that. And so, yeah, I think people are sometimes surprised.

They think that if you do the academic study of the Bible, even if you remain a devout Christian, somehow doing the academic study thing is kind of almost incompatible with or irrelevant to doing the church thing. And that hasn't been my experience. At all.

Yeah, it is weirdly common. You meet a theologian, they're like, yeah, I don't go to church. I read the Bible all the time, constantly. I don't go to church.

Yeah. You know, I will say from personal experience, I think it's hard to go to the same church.

I think that's what messes people up, is they decide that this isn't working for me anymore because now I realize much of what's being said is wrong, and I don't like this or that or whatever. And then they just, like, write all church off.

But, like, there's always going to be stuff you disagree with, but you probably find a church that you're, like, mostly jive with, enough that even though you might be, like, theologically, I'm unsure, you still enjoy it. Yeah, that's my thought.

Yeah. If you want to be an educator, then you should have some. You need to have some tolerance.

And obviously, when somebody's standing in the pulpit, then your expectations might go up. But think about music. You can't get people to being good at music without them being really, really bad at it to begin with. Right.

Beginning violin is not fun to listen to, experience there. And so, you know, I think the main.

The main challenge is if you're in a context where there is an openness to talking about things to say, you know, I think there's something that you might want to consider before you deck. Preach on that passage or something like that. And not everybody's open to that, you know, but I mean, I think there are.

There are certainly are congregations. There are ministers and pastors and priests who. Yeah.

Want that, you know, And I think oftentimes, you know, congregations and theologians who end up in congregations can forget that. Ministry is mostly, you know, it's caring for people, it's meeting people, talking about their situations.

There's limited room to actually keep up with the details of, like, New Testament scholarship or something like that.

Yeah. Yeah. Although a lot of them try.

I think I'll speak because I've mentioned this before, but, you know, it's always someone's first episode, I guess I remember for me, and maybe I always just. I hesitate using the word deconstruction, but fits our conversation.

So maybe it was like my deconstruction kind of thing, but it was part of, like, when I'm really starting to question things, I'm like, ah, I disagree with this or that. And it was funny because this wasn't part of why I left the church. I was at it actually had to do with location stuff more than anything.

But it just helped me a lot when I did leave. But as I know, for a long time I was going, and I was spending most of my time, like, I always had a notebook listening to pastor sermons.

I went to a Pentecostal church, so most of the service was the preaching. And I'm like, oh, he said this, he said this.

And for whatever reason, one that really sticks in my mind, this guy was introduced as, like, this huge Bible guy. He knows the Bible so well. And he started talking about how, like, it was something about the swords.

And he had a whole part of his message was like, jesus never told him to pick up the swords. And I'm like, yes, he did. Actually, that happened, like, a chapter before this. Dude. Did you read it? And it just infuriated me.

And then it's like, that ended up being the kind of stuff that I would focus on.

So I think it helped me personally, and I don't think this for everybody to go to a more liturgical church where, yes, preaching is still important, the homily is important, but the main part of the service is actually centered around the sacraments. Because then I'm not like, oh, well, you made it all about the Bible, and you didn't even get the Bible right.

And I'm like, well, okay, actually, maybe that's not the main point of the service, and I can calm down a little bit. So I helped him in. But, you know, everybody's different.

That is really funny because I know him and I know what Bible he reads. And it's like, dude, Jesus words are in red. He said it.

Yeah, yeah.

But it's good to go from, you know, if you find yourself getting angry at the sermons, you know, to move to a different church where you can be angry when they mess up the liturgy instead.

Yeah, yeah.

Working on your anger issues is also good, you know, if you can find a place where you can do that. Yeah, well.

And I think sometimes it's just you form resentment and you gotta work on it. And it's sometimes hard to work on your own resentment when you're still in the place that you kind of, like, feel it towards.

You know, I think you need a little bit of separation. Sometimes allows for healing. So maybe it was liturgy.

Really funny to be in church and look over and Josh is, like, furiously scrawling in his notebook.

Oh, yeah, I forgot you were there for some of the.

It's not. It's not that serious, man.

Oh, my God. You got that wrong. It's bad it was bad anyway. It is understandable, probably move on. So we touched on deconstruction.

That's part of what really grabbed my attention about this newest book you wrote, Beyond Deconstruction. Subtitle. My brain's skipping. Give me a second here. Beyond deconstruction. Building a more expansive faith.

The Beyond Deconstruction really grabbed my attention because I'm like, okay, I'm used to. James wrote a book. It's about John the Baptist. So, like, okay, this is kind of a different topic for you.

Like a different kind of material, I guess, to cover. So what is it that kind of drove you, inspired you to really tackle this as a topic?

Yeah, and the working title for much of the time was Reconstructing your faith about that. Getting beyond the part where you're pulling things apart. You're saying this doesn't work anymore. To really emphasize that.

It's about figuring out, once you work through that, how do you develop a sort of a positive vision about where you are and a positive way of articulating who and what you believe and what you're about. But the term deconstruction is such a buzzword now that Erdmans, the publisher, was like, yeah, that should be in the title.

And, yeah, they know their stuff. And, yeah, the book is really a reflection. It's the most personal book I've written. It's about my journey.

It's not some of the things I've concluded and the things I've wrestled with along the way, and this scholarly stuff is in there, but it's really about the process of working through faith, not losing faith. I don't know that I ever have said that I lost my faith. Right. It's that I lost beliefs. Right.

And one of the most helpful things on the way was realizing that my faith can be something other than a system of doctrine and dogma, which you take the package or otherwise. If you have questions about it, then you have to sort of apologize for. It's like, well, I'm still a Christian.

And realizing that Christianity has never been just one thing, that sort of the most conservative to fundamentalist versions of it are not sort of the default and certainly not the only form of this religious tradition has historically had or can have scholars, people who've gotten into study, academic study of the Bible because of their faith, have been doing the deconstruction thing for, you know, for way, way longer than the term has been used to refer to that.

And so it just struck me at some point in the past as like, should probably sort of share what I've learned along the way and how I came out as somebody who still goes to church and has a faith and is a Christian at the other end of this process and see if maybe that will be helpful to others. I also sometimes add that some of what I write might actually cause some people to have questions.

And so that, too, is a good reason to say, okay, let me leave a trail of crumbs. Here's how you can work through this and come out the other end with your Christian faith transformed. But there.

Yeah, quick rabbit hole, just because I'm curious for you.

And maybe it's because since you've been an academic, you probably had more of a framework when you first started hearing, like, deconstruction used more commonly. Did you understand it the way it was, you know, meant to be understood? Or, like, how did you first come across that term? Like, when you.

You know what I mean?

Yeah, No, I mean, it's.

If you're an academic of, I think, anywhere in the humanities, not just religious studies, never mind biblical studies or theology, the term deconstruction has this technical sense. This figure, Jacques Derrida, who did this work on literature. And it's like, that's not what people mean.

People who use deconstruction, for the most part, to refer to their journey of faith and sometimes their loss of faith or their transfer, the transformation of their faith, have not heard of Derrida and are not aware that they're doing anything like that. On the other hand, his. His approach to literature, the thing that was characteristic was like sort of noticing.

Noticing the gaps in the logic of the narrative and the holes and the things to be explored, and, you know, this character just gets to throw away mention. But what if they are actually, you know, doing.

And there is a similarity between that, I think, and sort of approaching faith, where it's like, well, what if this thing that everybody's been telling me is, like, really unimportant is actually really important, and this thing that everybody said should be central is less central than that other thing that actually Jesus talks about a lot more. You know, and so there's a sense in which there. There. There's a similarity. But, yeah, there's. There's also an academic instinct. You know, you are.

You know, you were griping about sermons sometime in the past, you know, and I was like, don't use that term because that term means this. Other than we can't control language.

Yeah, well, that's. It's still, to me, one of the Most interesting things when someone says it is to try to see what they mean.

And usually when it's an academic, I kind of already know what they mean, which doesn't make it less interesting, but it's like, less. I feel like I have to pry. Less, like, I already know what you mean when you say it.

But when other people, you know, they could be like, who's the skillet guy who, like, for some reason thinks deconstruction just means you left the faith and think the faith is wrong. And I'm like, that's not. Nope, that's not what it means. But then you have a lot of people who use it. Like, the.

I think the colloquial use of it now is more of, like, people who are traumatized by church, who kind of left the church and they added academic reasoning to it. Like, it seems like there's a vibe. Like, there's a group that this is the deconstruction group.

And I'm like, well, I think technically I did question my faith, like, evaluate it in a certain way. That might have been deconstruction. But if I use that term, I feel like people are saying I'm part of this group, and I feel like I'm not.

I don't really fit in there, you know? So, like, I don't feel comfortable because the colloquial use of it has changed so much, but I'm not sure.

I don't know, man.

You might fit in. I might fit.

You might fit in with the group.

We have a podcast. On a more serious note, my brain immediately always thinks of the food. Like, I'm like, deconstructionist. You know, culinary arts. Deconstructionist.

That's what my brain always goes to is, oh, yeah, we're gonna work and see. No, it's great. Disagree. I think when done well, it's just. It can be so pretty cool. Yeah, like, it just makes you think more about food, that's all.

And I like that. And maybe that's the point of faith, too. You know, deconstruction, you think more.

It's good.

True.

So, James, what's, like, the main audience? What's the target audience for beyond deconstruction?

Yeah, it's people who would say they've lost their faith, but still, like, feel at least some connection. Like, there are plenty of people who are, like, Yeah, I can't be a Christian anymore. And yet if you ask them, it's like, no, I really like Jesus.

Like, okay, you mentioned the term progressive Christianity. And for a lot of people, Christianity, if you don't specify otherwise, is the thing that supports nationalism, that supports.

It's the narrowest version of it. And historically, that's not the dominant form, certainly not the only form.

And fundamentalism in its modern form is a response to modernity, to science, to all this stuff that happened relatively recently in history.

And so I almost wish that we could say it's not deconstructionist cuisine, it's just food getting back to the basics, the core elements, and treating faith sort of in the same way.

But it's for people who have been questioning and who would say, a lot of, you know, I don't know what I believe anymore, or, I'm not sure I believe anything anymore.

And it's really just an effort not to reconstruct what you had before, and not to reconstruct any particular thing in place of what you had before, but to help with the process, right?

Whether you choose this label or that label, whether you like Christian with an added adjective or set of adjectives or descriptors, whether you say you're sort of an agnostic who really likes Jesus or whatever you might end up calling yourself, working through that process, getting beyond the I'm not this anymore to here's language I'm comfortable with to express who I am, right? And doing so in a way that recognizes that language is never going to be a perfect descriptor of things. Faith that's alive is vibrant and growing.

And so trying to put this is definitely not an effort to get people who've broken out of the box of one sort of faith to put it back in a box. But it's to make room for there being structure, right?

That when you recognize that, to use the analogy that I use in the book, houses are imperfect, right? And you bought one and it was a disaster and it collapsed around you. You might think, I can never trust a house again.

And yet finding, you know, finding the comfort to live in this imperfect thing that's built by fallible humans and to give it the attention so that you do as good a version of as you can just so that you know, you. You have an identity. You have a place to call home. You have a place to keep your stuff.

You're cooking utensils and whatever, you've got a drawer and all the other things that otherwise you have to do without Doing that for your worldview, really, that's for the people who need that. And I get the sense that there are a lot of people who've reached that point in their journey and are wondering, is this the end of the journey?

Is it just always going to be this point of saying, I don't know what I believe anymore. I. Or I'm no longer this. To help them find a way to move forward beyond that.

Yeah, yeah, not like that.

I know for me, as we get more acquainted with other people in similar circles, people that are going to be able to go to theology of your camp and that kind of thing. I don't know. For me, sometimes it gets a struggle because I'll hear like radical theology. And I'm like, man, that sounds really cool.

I think I could vibe with that. And then I hear there's Christian atheists.

And I'm like, I'm not sure how that's different from radical theology, actually, but I mean, cool, that sounds nice.

And then I'm like, I'm jiving with Lutheran right now and like, I'm with them, but then every now and then I'll hear something from somebody else from some other group, and I'm like, oh, man, that sounds cool. Like, I love Paul Tillich's like, ground of Bean.

But then when I really think of it, like, I'm like, I'm not sure if I can commit to the same ontological commitments that he makes here. And then I'm like, but how much of that do I need? So what I love about your book, this is the transition.

You don't seem to bog us down too much with a lot of that. It's more of like, instead of which, you know, camp of this area are we gonna settle in?

It's more of like, here are the stuff from the church, long tradition of the church that we actually maybe can still embrace and we can still use. And maybe you could almost title the book Beyond Titles or, you know, beyond the Christian name and more.

Just like, hey, let's just talk about the beliefs for a minute. Like, what can we hold? What can we not hold? For me, I really loved the credal stuff. You know, I do a kind of podcast with Josh Patterson.

We talk about rethinking comics and you know, he talks about how he with the more mystics and radical theology. And I make the claim. I'm like, I really like creole theology. So I like, I love that part. And then I love.

You talk about the church and the community as something maybe we want to hold on to. And I'm like, this is cool. So do you want to maybe.

Could you elaborate a little bit of, like, how did you choose which of these things that you were like, this is the stuff I think people can still hold on to comfortably. Anything get left out that you were like, I almost included this, but chose that maybe that could be left for a different book?

Yeah, I'm not aware of having left anything out, except that I think at one point I talked about one particular issue and one of the editors was like, yeah, you might lose some people if you sort of include that. Because there are some of my views in there, which I try to hold to tentatively and provide an illustration of that.

But at one point, I think I made some assumptions and was still not. Not quite broad and inclusive enough. And that's one of the great things about having a good editor to work with.

And really, that's the kind of thing that I think is supposed to be part of our Christian faith, right?

Is being open to someone saying, you know, you say you're trying to be inclusive, but there are people who you're excluding, by the way you're framing this or your assumptions about issues or things like that. So. But there were no omissions that I wouldn't view as positive contributions to the book.

And sometimes what you leave out makes a positive difference. But really, it was just an attempt to try and get some of the prongs that can be part of a worldview.

And at one point was going to try and write it for anyone who's trying to rebuild their worldview. And I was like, I'm a Christian. What I know is Christianity.

I'd love to know whether people who are in other faith traditions or coming through a different type of worldview collapse or rethinking would find this book useful. But I'm going to write what I know.

And for that audience, it really was just a question of figuring out what's the stuff that's been important in the journey.

Thinking about doctrine, finding myself having less confidence than I did previously in our certainty about sort of the innermost aspects of the divine nature and our ability to express it in language, and yet discovering that theology, once you realize the limits of human language, honestly, you can take it, and it's like, this is symbolic language, but we need symbols, we need poetry. This stuff is really important to us. We need to express it.

Putting some emphasis on community and putting some emphasis on what we do and not just what we say, what we affirm, what we think.

Really tried to just explore the kinds of things that would be, in my ideal version of myself, be part of a well balanced faith, as it were, and yet recognizing that for other people, especially if you come through a church, that overemphasized doctrine, let's say, then doing a doctrine detox or something and focusing on something else entirely for a while can be maybe what you need spiritually. It doesn't mean that that's where you're going to end up permanently. You're never going to explore doctrine again.

But trying to be balanced, but also give people room to focus on what they need at this particular moment based on what they've come through, what's happened to them, what. What they've experienced.

Yeah, yeah. So obviously they need to pick up the whole book to get a more total, total view of what James thinks on this.

But James, if you had to give like three main ideas or tools from the church or like tradition, whatever, that you think we absolutely should and, sorry, could and probably should hold on to, what would be your top three if you had to boil it down?

Yeah. It's like, wait, I've got like four main chapters and it's like you're only giving me three. How am I going to do this? Possibly my bad. Yeah.

I mean, I think the key things are to make room for, you know, to look for what the version of your faith that you've somehow become disappointed with or recognize the inadequacy of or whatever it is that you've experienced, figuring out what those other things are.

And so I imagine that for most readers of the book, one of the four things that are like the four main chapters about how you might reconstruct and rebuild and rethink were part of the problem for them. And so it's like overemphasis on what you do and not enough on belief. Too much emphasis on what you believe and nothing on what you do.

Emphasis on community, but in a way that's very much about conformity. Right. And recognizing it's possible to have genuine community that respects that you're on a journey that's not entirely like mine.

Or even if your journey is following the same path as mine, you might be at a different point in it. And it's not helpful to you or fair to you to expect you to rush along on it.

But yeah, I think one thing that kind of hopefully connects all of them is humility.

You know, that approaching others and community with humility, approaching our attempts to talk about God with humility, and approaching our values with humility. And recognizing that in all of these aspects of our lives, we're always going to still have learning to do and room for growth.

Yeah, definitely affirm that.

So it's sort of three in one. Very trinitarian.

I'm saying that sounds pretty Christian.

That's a good sound answer.

I did mention the creeds.

Yeah.

So many people who have deconstructed or just left the faith entirely, I like to call that detonated. Just to stay on theme, they report that the community is what they miss the most. Which perfectly reasonable to me, you know, it's the church.

That's what church is.

But how does your book speak to these people who miss the community of the church, but they feel as if they can no longer agree with or participate in the faith that they grew up with. Is like this even applicable to more conservative or like traditionalist Christians?

What are we?

What's the deal?

Yeah, and there are lots of different ways of being traditionalist, so it's fascinating. You know, I mean, I, Yeah, I got that start in the context of a Pentecostal church, so. Which is interesting point of contact we share.

Hey, we all three got that in common. DJ stuck with it. Yeah.

And you know, as somebody who also loves music, you know, I mean, I love, you know, there's things I still love from the music that I got the style of playing piano by the person who was the pianist, organist, slash youth leader.

Yeah.

In that context. But I also loved like the sort of Anglican evensong tradition and the choral music and the liturgical. And so community doesn't always take one form.

And if you've had way too much of the people always talking about the details of your faith journey in ways that just were maybe intrusive and not helpful and things like that, having someplace where you can just go and there's coral singing and you have a bit of space and you're connecting with people and you're doing this together. But it's not, it's like, okay, maybe this is just me as an introvert thinking that some people might find that helpful. Right.

But on the other hand, if we look at the early church we sometimes hear about, Paul was long talking. But the word that's used in acts, Right. When he talks for so long, somebody falls asleep and falls out the window. Right.

I mean, that's a lot of talking. But the word. Word means it wouldn't almost certainly have referred to dialogue. Right. And so it's not that Paul was preaching a three hour sermon.

Right. Which is. Was this some kind of like spiritual Filibuster or something.

It's like trying to, you know, or trying to do the, you know, like keep the floor so nobody else. No false teachers, or is it. Yeah, I think they're talking right and they're eating right.

And that combination, sometimes you do get tired, you know, by the end of it, you. Goes on for hours.

But realizing that Christian community was originally people getting together, eating and talking and making their shared faith part of the conversation. And if you do that, you are doing something that you can call a church if you want to. You know, the term church is not universally used for.

They start using it, but it meant a gathering, congregating, you're doing that.

And so making room for community, finding community, using online to supplement it if you don't have what you need close to hand, but also figuring out how to find others like you that you can get a cup of coffee with, get a beer with, get some, get some breakfast or lunch or dinner with and talk about these things for your mutual challenging, encouraging and uplifting.

Yeah, definitely love that.

So is there. I have two more questions. Very important. Is there one thing that you really wanted to get into, beyond deconstruction, that just didn't make it?

Yeah, no, there really isn't in a sense, but that's because there's so many things I've blogged about. I continue blogging.

And so I think there was a point where I thought that if you're gonna write a book, it's gotta be the decisive treatment of this topic. And I'm like this, this book is, I think, manageable length, you know, it's like readable. It'll help at that point.

And I think that the other things that I've been thinking about that are related to it are probably, if they become a book at all, they can become a different book and serve a follow up.

There are lots of questions about what does church look like in this era when it's no longer necessary to sit in a bunch of very hard benches and face in one direction and have somebody say stuff to you in order for you to get biblical instruction or exposition or things like that? How do we rethink it in light of the technology? How do we discover other possibilities?

Because community is something that still happened and something that humans still desire and gamers have community, geeks have community, and we find it, we make it happen, and it happens almost kind of naturally. I feel like there are things we could learn from the gamers and the fandoms and the others about church and creating Authentic community.

Rather than saying we've got to have community, because otherwise what we're gonna.

If we try and have community for community's sake, like trying to bring people into the church in order to keep the budget, it's like, no, that's not. You know, as soon as you get that sort of approach to it, it starts becoming self defeating.

Yeah.

And so I think there's potentially a follow up, but I think that's. That's a genuinely different book and it's okay if it. That's not in there.

Yeah, yeah, I, I want to speak to that. And I have a question before TJ finishes. For those who don't know. I'm a huge Kingdom Hearts fan. Video games, I love them. They're amazing.

Also read the manga and the comics and the short novel. Like, I'm. I'm crazy. It's fine. All Kingdom Hearts fans are crazy.

And that's something that, like, it's a community that I've reluctantly kind of joined up in, I guess because there's all these Facebook groups, Instagram, all this like different stuff. And like the thing that I love that I found a lot of fandoms are really toxic. Kinoht seems to be a lot less so.

And I think it's because it's just so absolutely absurd. We all just kind of upset accepted. All of our conversations are going to be absurd here. And it's just nice. It's nice to have that.

And it's like, I'm just gonna say real community doesn't happen online. I got to disagree because I've experienced it a few times. But I do want to ask one more thing.

Talking about beyond deconstruction, one of the conversations, I hear a lot of that.

I kind of want to hear your take on people talk about how, okay, after you deconstruct, you're rebuilding your faith, you have to get back in touch with that church in some way. And a lot of people who've gone through this and this kind of. Some of the people we've talked about earlier, they just feel so scarred by church.

The environment, the sound. Different stuff is triggering psychologically so that you don't feel comfortable stepping foot into a church.

This is a church unity podcast, so it's pretty relevant conversation, I think. As far as you're concerned, what would your advice be for those people who miss the community?

Stuff like you were talking about, like, we're gonna go grab a coffee. But like, maybe they agree with the creed and stuff.

They're reading your book and they like agree with a lot of this stuff, but like, psychologically they just can't bring themselves to step foot in a church again after whatever's happened to them. What would your advice be?

Yeah, I mean, trauma needs to be respected and taken seriously.

Right.

And so if somebody's had a traumatic experience in any kind of context. Right. I mean, there are people who can't go back to the house they grew up in because of the things that happened there.

They can't go back to a school where they had a traumatic experience. And on the one hand it's useful to work through those things because it's freeing. Right. Otherwise we're sort of held captive in a lot of ways.

Sometimes we're paralyzed by that trauma, but definitely don't rush anybody to that. Right.

And that's one reason why I think it's important to emphasize that as much as those of us who found communities that meet in traditional looking buildings and have some of those classic elements would want to say that we hope you find a community that's so different from the, the one that hurt you that you learn to trust other people again and learn to trust that you'll always be cautious and maybe wary, but recognizing that you can trust again and that not everyone is the same, don't rush anybody getting there and go to where people are. I mean, that's the thing that so many churches, conservative, liberal and everything in between.

We expect people to come to us or we do a really bad job of standing on the street corner doing the evangelism thing, but meeting people where they are and really being comfortable enough in our own faith and worldview that we can talk with someone. It's not all about, I'm going to try and persuade you so that you come to church with me.

Or I'm going to, we're just going to talk and I'm going to be a listener and I'm going to be what you need.

If you want someone to heal from church inflicted trauma, that's the best thing you can do, I think, is to be someone who is a Christian and who doesn't try to rush them to some sort of stage of healing, but who listens and genuinely hears and doesn't rush to defend the faith because this person was hurt.

There needs to be, you know, spending the rest of your life just talking about your negative experiences is unhealthy, but not having a, never getting a chance to fully express them and have them fall on sympathetic ears is also not healthy.

Yeah, I feel obligated to shout out A good example.

So often you'll hear people talk about Pastor Will this way, where they were like, I don't know if I ever wanted to be around pastors or church ever again. And they'll be like. But then I met Will, and he never pressures anybody. He just kind of wants to hang out. So I think that's a good example.

If, you know Pastor Will be like, Pastor Will. Yeah.

If you don't know Pastor Will, get to know him.

Yeah. Holy Trinity Lutheran Church on YouTube. Also the homily in network.

The homily.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

So, James, is there anything else that we should be discussing about church unity that can be learned from Beyond Deconstruction?

Yeah, I mean, I just hope that, you know, precisely by not giving a one size fits all vision of the church.

Right.

It actually is conducive to discovering the unity that makes room for difference. Because I think that's the only kind of unity that we can really have. Right?

Yeah.

When you try to have imposed conformity, it's stifling to creativity. It's, you know, people often end up pretending to be things that they're not, or hiding your questions, hiding aspects of themselves.

And so recognizing how to be who we are authentically, to have values and to firmly believe them and be committed to them and yet not be so committed that we stop recognizing that we have things to learn and could be wrong and so need to listen to others. That's, I think, the best thing to work toward unity.

Mm. Yeah. Which. This might be a cheesy time to plug this, but there is a shirt on the Amazon podcast network if you go to the Amazon network website.

Because what the network is really about is like, Christians genuinely engaging. And what I love about the shirt is like, genuinely engaging.

It has like church, pop culture, scripture, kung fu, the horror has a little list and at the end it says one another. And I think that's really the heart of what we want to do as a network.

So not just like me and tj, but like Theology in the Rocks, you got Lee and Christie doing something similar. Everybody at Systematic Ecology doing something similar.

Christian Ashley, from more conservative perspective, he is still trying to do something a little similar to this. And so I really appreciate what you said there, James, and hopefully we all take that to heart. Yeah.

So if you want to buy your own copy of Beyond Deconstruction, Building a more expansive faith. James, where should we go?

I think I'll just say go to your local bookstore. Pick one that is there actual place that provides that. And Order through them. That's probably good for me as an author to have people ask you for it.

But, you know, just, you know, we don't realize how much, you know, if there were no places to meet and get together and sing and do the church thing, you know, we'd be like, wow, we really lost. You know, we really threw the baby out with the bathwater.

And I feel like the same thing is happening with bookstores is that, you know, yes, you can get them online. You know, you can go on YouTube, listen to sermon. You can go online and buy your books. But that would be my recommendation.

You know, find, you know, find a small one that you know and, you know, if it's your favorite, just go there. If you don't have a favorite, ask yourself why you don't have a favorite bookstore and pay one a visit. That would be my recommendation.

But if you are.

If you are somebody who is struggling to purchase this book but you think it would be helpful, then by all means, go online and find the cheapest price you can find. Yeah, that's fine, too, right?

I'm a big fan of digital books, but also, since James didn't have a particular place, I feel like he'd be okay with me giving this advice to everybody, along with your local bookstore.

Public libraries are incredible places, and if you ask for a book, they'll bring it, and then not only will you get to read it, a bunch of other people will see it and have a better chance of reading it.

Oh, thank you. Yeah. I mean, you asked for a bookstore, and so my mind immediately went there.

But I don't think people realize that, first of all, you can recommend a book to the library and they will almost certainly get it.

My library has so many graphic novels because of me.

Yeah. And that does so much for authors. Right. I mean, library is getting them. You know, it's. People discover books that way.

People, you know, it's like, you know, but, yeah, I want the book to be useful to people. Yeah. I'm not thinking, you know, how many copies can I sell?

But actually recommending it to libraries is a good way to, you know, sell more copies and, you know, save yourself from having to pay for it. So please do that, Please.

Yeah.

Thank you.

I read both of you John books, but the more expensive one, that. That's how I did it. I didn't have to pay for it.

Good call.

Yeah.

And if you are a lover of your local library, head on over to Systematic Geekology. Support the All Reading Count series. All proceeds from the Merch.

All donations from those episodes go straight to your local library system or, you know, our local library system, but usually.

My local library, usually Josh's library, he.

Has to pay them because he recommends too many books and they're usually graphic.

Novels no one cares about.

Yeah, James, where else can our listeners follow you? What, what if they want more? Dr. McGrath?

Yeah, I'm, I'm Religion. Prof. All on Word, most places online, even on Reddit, you know, I'm like, you know, public about who I am there, you know, which is, that's a.

Pretty good tag to have. Like, I feel like I'm surprised.

I got to. Yeah, yeah, I got on. I got it on Twitter.

And then when, when I realized that students weren't getting my Matrix references anymore, my old blog name went by the Wayside and I called it Religion Prof. As well.

And so as long as you answer, you know, if you add James McGrath and religion Prof. Or if you put Religion Prof. And when Google asks, did you mean Religion Space Prof. You say no, you'll find me.

Nice.

Well, you know, you've been on before, so, you know, we do always like to ask our guest, our esteemed guest, if you had to provide a single tangible action that our listeners could go do right now that help better engender Christian unity. Unity in their local church, whatever.

What's something people could stop and do as soon as this is done, you know, to turn the podcast off, they're going to go do this thing. It's going to help better bring about unity. What would it be?

Think. Think of the person that you like the least. Probably someone you don't know directly. Right. Because it's always hard to.

Probably me.

The people it's easiest to really hate are the people we don't know at all and the people we know way, way too well.

Yeah.

But pick somebody that, you know, you really just have this sort of intense loathing for, which I think in our, our time, when we imagine ourselves as polarized, you know, and, you know, in fact, American parties are not as far apart as, you know, you'd get in a lot of other countries and think about that person.

Think about what it would mean to recognize that person as a human being of value, created in the image of God, as someone who, if they've, you know, they've been duped or been brought up or have found their way into thinking and a way of viewing others that you think is twisted and toxic and harmful.

What does it mean to recognize that they're human, to recognize that all of us can end up with those kinds of things and to view them through the lens of love and the hope for redemption, to not hope for their elimination, for their destruction.

But what would it look like to practically hope for and work towards winning them back to what you think is the truth and throwing them back towards love when.

When we dehumanize, even if it's someone where it's like, okay, this person, I think, really is evil and twisted, and it's like, it's very easy to do, but the more we make room for doing that, the easier it is to allow that to creep and to spread. And before we know it, we're disunified and divided from people that.

Even from people that share our commitments to love and inclusivity and are valued. Yeah.

So what changes if everyone can set aside that disdain?

I think it would be harder to convince people that they are, you know, that they're enemies when they're not.

And obviously, if more Christians in our country took seriously Jesus teaching about loving enemies, then even if they view these people's enemies wouldn't be such a big problem. Right. But, yeah, I think at the heart of the. The idea of loving enemy, genuinely loving enemies, is recognizing that this is.

This is a fellow human being. And if they're deceived, then, you know, try to undeceive them. And if they are twisted, then how does someone end up like that?

And, you know, because very few people think they're being evil. Right. They're often. They're just prioritizing themselves because they've been hurt and think that's the only way to survive.

Or they think that showing love towards their nation means hating other nations, and that's they're actually being loving and being defending. And so figuring out how to share it has to start with a recognition of humanity. Yeah.

All right.

Oh, yeah. So before we end the show, we like to do our God moment. You might remember that sometimes I don't.

But we're just gonna ask everyone to share more where they saw God in their life recently, whether that be a blessing, a challenge, or moment of worship, whatever it may be. And always make Josh go first to give the rest of us plenty of time to think. So, Josh, what's your. What's your God moment for us this week?

I'm gonna cop out a little bit here.

Awesome.

Yeah. But the. Woke up early this morning, read James Book, forgot to write an outline, went to work.

We were super behind because I haven't been there in several days, which just means we're Gonna be behind on everything. And then people just either don't show up and then want to be super late. And Crazy day.

Not as crazy as TJ's day, but crazy day drove home, had problems with some tech issues while I was trying to have a conversation with somebody about podcast things. Came home, brought up the outline, let the dog out. All built up all this, like, stress, all this stuff going.

And then, like, we start the little, like, podcast, like, ambiance music for the verse, and I start taking a sip of this beer right here, and I was like, I don't know. I felt all the tension lower, and I'm like, oh, yeah.

As much as we criticize church for, like, emotional manipulate, whatever, I'm like, you know, sometimes setting the mood with some music, having some, you know, wine at communion, whatever. You need that little bit of, like, slow down. And, you know, I just been thinking about that this whole episode. So that's. My God.

Yeah, I think. I think humans figured that out, like, 2,000 something years ago.

Yeah, I just forget sometimes, you know?

Yeah. No, it's a good lesson to relearn whenever. Whenever you can. For me, my God. Moment is every moment. Amen. Hallelujah. Whoa.

Yeah, but really, I. I got home last night and I got a text from my dad. I worked, like, 14 hours yesterday. Whatever. It's just a YouTube link. No, no comment. No Elucid.

No.

You know, it's just a link to a video. It's a Spanish Moon concert live. And somehow I laid in bed, I clicked on the video, and it looped the entire time I was asleep.

Nice.

I didn't answer my dad until this morning, but for, you know, four and a half hours while I was asleep, I just heard that the whole time. And I'm not insane yet, so thank you, God, and thanks to my dad, who answered me when I texted him at 5am and said, yeah, that's really good.

I was reading James Book right then when you were doing that. Yeah.

But those are the little things to me that makes it all worth it, you know? Also, the song is pretty good. Pretty good performers.

I'm not familiar.

You wouldn't be. So, James, do you have a God moment for us?

Yeah. I grew up in New York City. It's not known for. It does have some nice parks and places, but not known for connecting with nature.

That's not the thing that it does exceptionally well. And one of the things I love about Indianapolis is that there's, like, a creek that runs behind my house. There's this stuff Right in the city.

And so the weather's been getting better and I've been able to get outside, do some stuff in the yard. Was able to cycle to work today.

And recently trying to figure out, just make some decisions that I need to make before the end of the month about a sort of sermon series and things like that, what are the texts going to be, what do I want to do? And just spending that time, you know, that it's like getting yourself out of the office, getting yourself out of the workplace.

It's like it's so easy to cut those things out and say, I don't have time for that.

And yet the going for a walk, going for a bike ride, I often, you know, it's like the way I force myself, it's like, okay, I'm going to ride to work, you know, so it's like I'm doing.

It's transportation, but finding a way to make that something that you can pray, you can meditate, you can think, you can just have your thoughts wandering and not be specifically accomplishing something. Because particularly in an area like mine where a lot of what I do involves creativity and figuring out not just what am I going to talk about?

The syllabus is made from the start of the semester, but how am I going to talk about it, how am I going to illustrate it, how am I going to convey it, what's going to go into the book, what's going to be in the sermon, Taking time to not be doing, actively trying to achieve something else and just to think and let our thoughts wander. Just that has opened up God moments recently, but also has a history of doing so, which makes me wonder why I don't do it more often.

Yeah. Yeah, I love those moments.

Maybe you'll find out when you ride home.

Hopefully not.

But if you like this episode and if you didn't like this episode, please consider sharing it with a friend. Share with your enemies.

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Super important. Share with your cousins. They are obligated to eventually check it out.

The cousin contract when they first sign up to be related to you.

So you can check out our website to purchase one of the T shirts to help promote our show, help us raise money for podcasts basic needs, and to let others know about the importance of our mission to educate and unite the modern church. And Josh, are you wearing the TJ quote on the back shirt?

No, I forget what this one's called, but it's the one that's like, what happens when this person this person. Like a list of all the different kinds of people we've had on the show before come together.

Okay.

The whole church podcast.

Okay.

A lot of text. But I do like it. It's fun.

It's. It's the one that's like. Like one of those jokes, you know? Priest, rabbi.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That one's pretty good.

Yeah. Also check out some of the other shows on the Amazon Podcast network. We mentioned some earlier, so I'll mention some of the ones.

Theology Beer Camp, again, Systematic Geekology. Check that one out. Check out Theology on the Rocks with Christy Whaley and Leah Robinson. I think those are the only.

Oh, I'm going to be at the LGB camp. Check out Belivion Water. That's my other show. That's cool.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And we hope you enjoy the show. Coming up, we're going to have Dr. Thomas J. Ord on again to discuss his newest book, A Systematic Theology of Love, Volume 1.

Then we're going to be talking with Pastor Sarah Hinckley Wilson about her time as a pastor in Japan, as well as her podcast, the Queen of the Sciences. After that, we are going to begin a series on the behind the scenes of ministries, from the local church to publishing and more.

So big exciting things. We're finally hopping on the how it's made wave from 20 years ago. And at the end of season one, Francis Chan will be on the show.

Yeah, probably he doesn't know about it, but someone tells him, twists his arm, informs him that he's obligated. Maybe.

Yeah.