Ep. 427 Richard Beck Returns - Reading the Bible Through the Lens of Love

In this conversation with Richard Beck, author of The Book of Love, we explore what it actually means to read Scripture through the hermeneutic of love. Richard helps us see that we have to reckon with our attachment to God - whether we actually believe he's for us - because that fear or security shapes everything about how we read. We get into the violent texts of the Old Testament, why both conservatives and progressives have their own blind spots, how the Bible raises hard questions, and what seeing the cross through a hermeneutic of love looks like.

Richard Beck is professor of psychology at Abilene Christian University in Abilene, Texas, where he also lives. He is a popular blogger and speaker and the author of several books, most recently The Shape of Joy and The Book of Love. His published research also covers topics as diverse as the psychology of profanity and why Christian bookstore art is so bad. Beck leads a Bible study each week for inmates at a maximum-security prison.

Richard's Book:

The Book of Love

Richard's Recommendations:

What it Means to be Protestant

Connect with Joshua: jjohnson@shiftingculturepodcast.com

Go to www.shiftingculturepodcast.com to interact and donate. Every donation helps to produce more podcasts for you to enjoy.

Follow on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Threads, Bluesky or YouTube

Support the podcast and the ministry that my wife and I do around the world. Just click on the support the show link below

Bring meaningful conversations about home, belonging and loving your neighbor to your friends, family or small group. Download World Relief’s free conversation cards at worldrelief.org/shiftingculture

Go to eerdmans.com and use promo code CULTURE40 for 40% all books

Transcript

Richard Beck: 0:00

And that goes back to the attachment theory, war attachment figure is not an unpredictable emotional storm, God is steady and oceanic in his calm and in his love for

Joshua Johnson: 0:21

us, I Hello, and welcome to the Shifting Culture Podcast, which we have conversations about the culture we create and the impact we can make. We long to see the body of Christ look like Jesus. I'm your host Joshua Johnson. You know, most of us came to the Bible through someone else's anxiety, either a tradition that was afraid of getting it wrong, afraid of what would happen if you question too much, or afraid that God was keeping score, and that anxiety doesn't stay at the door. It shapes everything about how you read the Bible. Richard Beck returns to the podcast today. He's a professor of psychology at Abilene Christian University. His new book is The Book of Love, and at its core, it's asking a question that sounds simple but runs extremely deep. What if we actually let love function as the hermeneutic love, as the lens through which everything else gets read? We talk about why attachment to God is so crucial to how we read scripture. We also talk about why both conservatives and progressives have their own version of burying their heads in the sand, and how the Bible itself raises harder questions about violence and mercy than most of its fiercest critics would even dare. This is a rich one, so join us. Here is my conversation with Richard Beck. Richard, welcome back to Shifting Culture. Glad to have you back on.

Richard Beck: 1:51

Excited to be back with you again. Looking forward

Joshua Johnson: 1:53

to it. Yeah, we're gonna be talking about the book of love, your new book, and this book is really about how to read the Bible through the hermeneutic of love, that God is love. Why is this really important? Where did this first spark in you that this is something that we need to wrestle with, and actually start to have the hermedic of love.

Richard Beck: 2:19

As readers of the book will find out. It's dedicated to a gentleman named Landon Saunders, and I am the first ever senior fellow of the Saunders Center for Joy and Human Flourishing here at Abilene Christian University. And Landon passed away a few years ago, and in our last conversation, he was talking about our denomination, and historically our denomination had been fairly fundamentalist in the way we read scripture, and we've done a lot of harm, and he, one of the last things he said to me was, you know, somebody needs to write a book about how we could read scripture through the lens of love that we don't harm people with the word of God, and I kind of took that as something that I could maybe run with, and so I remember driving away from that conversation, writing in my notebook, The Book of Love. I began thinking through the chapters I'd want to write, not just to my own denomination, but also just to the wider, wider Christian community, and from there it expanded out to not just people kind of on the on the right evangelicals and fundamentalists, but also to progress liberal Christians about how they might be encouraged to read the Bible in better ways as well, and so that's how the book came about. Landon had a great quote I didn't make in the book, but it's guided my thoughts, shows up with the dedication, where he says, you know, if you, if there's something in your heart to exclude another human being, you could always find a scripture to do that, and so I wanted to kind of take that as an that idea and kind of write something that would kind of push us in more generous directions.

Joshua Johnson: 3:52

The beginning and the end, I think, is kind of crucial once we set up how we view the Bible, if we actually set up a foundation of of love or a foundation of life and peace, or or a foundation of violence is going to really reframe the way that we see the Bible, and if we're headed towards an end of the story where it's about violence and you know domination, control, as opposed to love, and you know, a slaughter lamb or crucifixion, that's going to shift things as well. Why do you think, like, the beginning and endings are really crucial as we start to sit in the whole story of the Bible?

Richard Beck: 4:38

No, that's a really insightful question, because I do, I take some preliminary chapters in the book to just talk about, well, preliminaries, hermeneutics, I talk about our attachment anxieties, our view of God, but I do try to read the scripture from Genesis to Revelation, so we, so we go through the whole thing, and so in the beginning I argue that what's at stake at Genesis. This isn't often what we think is at stake. I think skeptics and fundamentalists think that what's at stake in Genesis one is science, and I argue that maybe we've been missing the point about that, that I think what's at stake in Genesis one is science, but ontology. What do you think is primary? And I argue that it's primary, what's primary is life, an ontology of life, and by that I mean hope, and that's a place where I do think progressives struggle. I do think progressives typically see themselves as already reading the Bible as a book of love, but they might lack an ontology or an eschatology of hope that makes that ethic, that pursuit, and passionate pursuit of justice sustainable across the lifespan and from generation to generation. So I think hope and love are really important, but also, yeah, when we get to Revelation at the end of the book, I talk about things like Judgment Day, how we think about eschatology, and how, if there is a binary outcome of the saying, the damned, then then that, that rolls back into some prior issues, like that anxiety I talked about, suddenly, if you know, my, my, my soul is hanging in the balance, and I'm fearful of making a mistake, and that that anxiety crackles through the way we read scripture, and we become very conservative, and I don't mean that in a textual way, but, but, but very worried about making a mistake, and that inhibits our ability to kind of ask hard questions, to to be honest with our own doubts and be kind of courageous readers of scripture, because I mean we all need to go on a journey. What we believe when we're 16 is about scripture is gonna be different from when we're 66 but if you're afraid to even entertain questions because of like those eschatological fears, you're not even gonna go on that journey.

Joshua Johnson: 6:59

So then that means that attachment theory is really important to have a secure attachment to God, that God is, is for me, He loves me, He and like I can go to Him, if I make a mistake, He's not going to smite me down right away, I'm not going to be be anxious, and as opposed to what an anxious attachment of thinking that God is something else, and so for many people, since their, their attachments, as they were growing up, were I would say either they're different, right? They're they're anxious, or all three of the other attachments, other than secure, is it really important for us to go on the attachment journey, before we could actually even view the Bible through the hermeneutic of love, like, is is that a crucial step for us to be able to see

Richard Beck: 7:52

it? I mean, I think so, and I think one of the contributions of my book is that I'm kind of putting that on the radar screen. I think a lot of us just want to open up our Bibles and read it and begin there, but if you aren't dealing with that emotional work and that relational work, and one lens on that, it's not the only lens, but one lens on that is attachment theory, which comes from developmental psychology, initially about the relationship between a child and a caregiver, and how reliable they felt their caregiver was, or how warm and affectionate they were, and obviously, if you feel like your caregiver is warm and affection is for you, you have a secure attachment, but anxious or avoidant attachment, we're going to be worried about rejection sensitivity relative to hermeneutics, a secure attachment is going to have experience. The attachment bought is a secure base of exploration. I can take risk and I can explore, push myself, because I know that that I have a firm base. If you, if you doubt that, as we were describing with our attachment figures, or in this case, God, then yeah, I can't entertain maybe risky thoughts or other interpretations of scripture, because I fear that that attachment figure, in this case God, is going to be snap back against me, be be judgmental of me, and so I do think there's got to be some preliminary emotional relational work, and so in the first couple chapters I talk about how, if we want to step into hermeneutical self-awareness to actually just admit to ourselves that our rival interpretations of scripture, and that I am, I'm engaged in making some choices, then that awareness creates anxiety, attachment anxiety, this fear of separation, and that brings us then to the next chapter, where I talk about our view of God, like we got to begin there, and so those are, and those are all correlated pieces, there's a hermetical piece, there's there's an emotional anxiety piece, and there's kind of a view of God piece, and I really do think you got to get all of that working together in a healthy way before you can have. Any possibility of entering a hermeneutical discussion or deliberation with, like, a, like, an open heart that it feels the exploration feels safe, relationally safe between you and God.

Joshua Johnson: 11:55

That hermeneutic is really important, the attachment, the anxious attachments to move towards the secure attachment with God, and then our view of God. You talk through George McDonald and his thoughts on the love of God, that's been really beneficial for you. Helpful. What was your journey of seeing God as love like? How did you get to that piece?

Richard Beck: 12:20

Yeah,

Joshua Johnson: 12:21

that's

Richard Beck: 12:23

a long story, and I don't know how many, how much you want to hear about it, but, like I said, I was raised in a more conservative tradition, so I was formed into an anxious attachment, but as I began deconstructing, as what we would call it, I didn't have the word for it back then, but deconstructing and asking some questions about how could a good God allow this, or how does this doctrine make sense if God is truly loving, and when those scripts from your childhood are in your head, it's really hard to trust yourself, and I do think a lot of us have a felt sense about what is good and right, right, the true, the beautiful, and the good, and yet we have certain teachings or doctrines in our heads that don't jibe, and so you can not really trust yourself, and and so when I encountered George McDonald, who's a big influence on the Inklings, people like CS Lewis and others, he was a writer that kind of gave me permission, gave me the courage to trust that love means love, and I don't need to put an asterisk by it or qualify it, and I needed somebody like that in my corner, and this is obviously before the internet, when I had, you know, we can find voices that resonate with ours, so I think a lot of us, a generation or so ago, found a lot of those early searchings very lonely until we found community online, but, but back then George McDonald kept me company. It made me feel not crazy for being very fearless in reading every single belief through that prism of love.

Joshua Johnson: 14:02

What was it that he said that love is love, like non-qualifier? Like, what was that?

Richard Beck: 14:09

Yeah, well, he had a very hopeful eschatology. He believed that God has a parent's heart, and that God, as a loving parent, would never turn his back on his children, and that just made sense to me, that there would be no parent, no really loving parent, would look at their child, despite all the mistakes, despite all their waywardness, would ever renounce their children, and for me, biblically, if people are looking for biblical description of this, to me, I just kind of go back to the parable of the Prodigal Son, that the father's heart in that story, that father never rejects that son, that father waits for that son, and any separation. So, if you want to think about judgment, or how, or eschatology, for me, whatever, however we want to conceive of that, it's always self separation. It's the son that goes off from the far country, the father never experienced any sort of change, never needs a sacrificial mechanism to forgive that child. The parent's heart is just there on that front porch, waiting for that child's return. And so, for me, he gave me that, that vision of that mother's heart, or that parent's heart, and said God is like that, and actually infinitely better than that. Thus, any reading of scripture that would make me question that, or qualify that, or ever feel like that love could be somehow terminally severed, just would not ring true with me.

Joshua Johnson: 15:37

How do we get to that place of love without the asterisk? That's tough. There's so many concepts of what love is in this world. How do we get to this, this centering place of love, and what God is really like? What God's love

Richard Beck: 15:54

is, that's a deep question. And I don't know if I'm going to have, like, a completely satisfactory answer for just for everybody, because, depending on how they're, I do check two issues that come up a lot. Truth and justice are typically things that are used to qualify God's love. God loves you, and because He loves you, here is this truth that you must, you know, listen to and comply with, or God loves you, but God is also a God of justice, and so God's, you know, obedience to God's word and God's justice are two things that are put in tension with God's love, and I think we have seen how that can lead to some. Negative outcomes to where I love you, because I love you, you know, humble, you know, here's, here's what you must do, here's the condition you must satisfy, or I love you, but you know, I got to tell you that God is going to judge you ultimately, and here's the thing, is I think one of the things that that happens when we try to wrestle these questions, is we go to, we immediately go to very specific culture war or doctrinal issues, and draw a straight line from here's my definition of love to here's this particular belief about ethics or doctrine or eschatology, right, and readers of my book, they're not going to, they might be unsatisfied with this, but I don't try to draw straight lines from the word love to a particular doctrinal issue. What I do try to do, though, is open up a deeper conversation about some presuppositions, and we've already talked about one of those presuppositions, which is, you know, eschatological hopefulness, right? Fine. Truth, justice. Do you, though, think that you could be ever severed, that God would ever shut off his heart to his children? Let's, let's begin there at that view of God issue, because I think if we can get that right, and then certain implications, certain readings of scriptures become open to us, they become possible to us, so, so rather to kind of jump to the end of the story and go like, well, this is the this is the belief that I want you to have at the end, let me come back and just ask you a question about the heart of God, and then if you come to some conclusion about what the heart of God is like, then then then later on, then we can get to questions about, okay, so what does that mean for eschatology? If that's what God's like, what does that mean for eschatology? What does this mean for ethics if that's what the heart of God is like? What would God, what would God, what would a parent do here, a really loving parent do with their child. Let's get, let's agree on that, and then go downstream, because I think, like, your question is people want to jump around that, get to the issue where you agree or disagree, and we never really have a debate about, like, who do you think is good. The way I ask in the book is, like, do you think God is for you? Do you think He's for you, and if He is for you unconditionally for you, then what implications might that have for how we read the Bible?

Joshua Johnson: 20:12

So, if I'm reading the Bible and I believe to my core that God is for me and God is for humans, like His children, how do I read like the violent scriptures of the Old Testament, where in one view I could see God as a violent God, and another is if I'm reading that through the lens of love, sometimes I just don't understand it, because you know it feels very violent. How do we, how do we start to then like dig into the scriptures through this lens,

Richard Beck: 20:45

early in the book, have this chapter entitled"Don't be an ostrich, and by that, by that I mean mainly I'm thinking about people who read scripture literally, literally, or they have what's called a plain sense hermeneutics, just words on a page, and they basically say, I don't, I'm not interpreting the Bible, I'm not making a hermeneutical choice here, it just, the Bible says what it says, and so in that chapter I talk about, well, what you're doing is you're just putting your head in the sand, there are there are many different literal readings of scripture, you're making a choice, pull your head out of the sand, and that's what I call hermeneutical self-awareness, like, like, be honest about the choices you're making, and that's kind of pointed towards more conservative, let's say, of scripture, but I do think progressive readers of scripture have their own ostrich moments where there are parts of scripture they just kind of put their heads in the sand, they, they ignore those things, or even in the Bible we can call this like the everything but Jesus is problematic hermeneutic, you know, like the Old Testament is problematic, you know, like Leviticus, very problematic, the the harem passages that you know that destroy everything in the city, problematic. The apostle Paul very problematic, you know, the violence and revelation really problematic. But Jesus, he's all right, you know. So we just kind of stick our heads in the sand about all those texts, and just I like Jesus, and the rest of, I can get rid of, so a challenge in the book is to come back to questions. Okay, yeah, so how do you look at some of these more problematic passages, and and I do think there's listen, there's been a lot of good books written about how to, how to read the Old Testament passages, are these just human stories and. God has kind of pulled into those stories, and God, you know, has to extract himself from those stories later on. And what I, what I try to do in my book is not really take a strong issue on historicity. There again, I'm trying to work with some presuppositions, and so one of the things I try to look at is the way the scripture itself raises questions about those very texts, because what happens is I think we think that, you know, we read the book of Joshua and go like, well, that's really morally troubling, that's that's really problematic, and miss how the Bible itself beats us to the punch, the Bible is aware of those tensions, and if we let the story breathe, if we just don't look at that one text and go like, wow, man, they all went in there and killed all those people, but instead let the conversation that is happening in scripture unfold, if we're just patient and let it unfold, we've come to see that the Bible raises questions about violence in my complicity environments that are far more audacious, even some of its most fiercest moral critics would allow. So, for example, in the chapter I deal with that, I use how the book of Jonah raises audacious questions about what we might read casually in Joshua. So in Joshua, there's this casual violence that just seems toward these outsiders, and yet Israel herself puts a book in scripture, Jonah, where, where she's asking herself, Israel, in this instance, to consider God's audacious mercy to the Assyrians, who, who were the kind of the genocidal oppressors of of her nation, and God just kind of ends the conversation with Jonah with this question, should I not be concerned about those people? So my point being is like here in Joshua, you're like, you know, destroy all those people, and and then the then Jonah, in the same right same Old Testament narrative raises this question, like I'm actually concerned about those people. Now that's a paradox in attention, but my point is, is that as the story unfolds, as we read the history of Israel, and then Israel's reflecting back on that history, some questions come up that challenge prior narratives, and the challenge of Jonah, as I would argue it, is beyond what any morally modern enlightened person would be willing to dare to look across at one's sworn enemy and ask the question, maybe I should care about them, maybe God cares about them as well. So I don't settle the question, I think people will debate Joshua, but my point is the Bible's aware of the debate. Fact, the Bible raises the debate, and the way the Bible escalates the debate is beyond what most of us would even be willing to dare by way of love.

Joshua Johnson: 25:53

Seems like the prophets have a lot to say about that all the way through in the Old Testament. You write a lot about prophetic imagination, and here you write on the prophets, the first task of the prophet is to free God, to emancipate God from being used to legitimize oppression. Expand on the role of the prophets and how they could bring about a different vision of who God is for and what God is doing,

Richard Beck: 26:23

so I'm borrowing from the work of the late Walter Brueggemann, his book on the prophetic imagination, and Brugemon argues in that book that you know when Moses goes into a pharaoh, so that the entire social justice trajectory of the Western world kind of comes to that surprising moment where Moses says, let my people go, and that that what Moses is daring to imagine is a realignment of the sacred, where typically then and now the sacred typically legitimizes the current power structure and the current status quo, so God is sacralizing and baptizing the oppressive top-down power structure. Moses dares to emancipate God from that structure, and then re, and once God is set free, free from providing divine legitimization, God then is a, is allowed to take surprising solidarities, and in this case realigns not with the powerful, but with the slave. I mean, that was an audacious moral idea at that time, that the creator of all beings would be with the slaves, because it, in that ancient imagination. Slavery was a right of the victors. I mean, slavery was just that's what you did. You conquered a people when you enslaved them, and they worked for you, and they built your, they built your pyramids, and yet God was for them, calling for their release. And so, so that is what the prophet does. The prophet reimagines God's location, looks at a power structure, and says, I know you powerful people think that you are, you know, doing the Lord's will, or that you are a Christian nation, or you're a Christian empire, and God is legitimizing the status quo, but I'm here to say, as the prophet, that God is actually with your victims, and the prophet, so that's what the prophets are always doing, always doing this spade work, really. They're always up to up turning. It's that inverse version that we see all the way through scripture, where Jesus talks about preaching to the incarcerated, or Mary's Magnificat, right? He brings the powerful down. It's just all through scripture, the prophetic imagination just churns the world. But the other thing I would say that is interesting about Israel's prophetic imagination is that's Moses, that's Exodus, but then most of the prophetic utterance in the Old Testament is Israel doing that to herself, and again to me, that's the audacity of scripture. Where I mean, it's easy as a social justice warrior to point the finger at the oppressors and say, you know, you were illegitimate. It's much harder to point that finger like at myself. It's much harder for a nation, or a church or even a religion to look in the mirror and kind of go like, well, how am I, how am I implicated in this, and think about how much the Old Testament is prophecy, and how much of that prophecy is fundamentally self-criticism. Israel, Israel's prophetic tradition rarely, it does point the finger at the at the outlying nations, but it mainly points the finger at herself, and so to me that that is that prophetic capacity for self-criticism is so often eclipsed in nations and in churches where they're willing to kind of weigh themselves into balance and find themselves wanting,

Joshua Johnson: 29:59

it moves straight into I think that the Gospels of Jesus, where we could see it very clearly that Jesus is for the marginalized, he goes towards the margins. You mentioned earlier about a progressive reading of the Bible would be like Jesus and nothing else but, and we love Jesus, right? But then everything else is a little problematic, so it's had no sand. Right, then what do we do with Jesus as as Jesus reveals God's love to then like bring out a fuller reading of the entire book, the entire Bible?

Richard Beck: 30:39

Yeah, so I have a chapter on, like, just Jesus as a rabbinic teacher, and Jesus says the way, or as the Chinese translators of scripture would say, Jesus is the Tao, right, Jesus is the way, right, the moral, the moral path that we walk, and I think most of that chapter progresses are going to just love that, right, they're going to like, he reaches out for the marginalized, he shows power from below, a kind of a universal kindness and compassion, but there are other things that Jesus says that are more difficult, like one of the unique things that scholars will tell you, like if they, if you say, like, what was really new about Jesus's teachings in contrast with the Old Testament, you know, and one of the things is his interest in interpersonal forgiveness. You don't see in the Old Testament a lot of calling for interpersonal forgiveness, but for Jesus, you know, you know, let us forgive others as we have been forgiven. How many? Peter asked, how many times should I forgive? 70 times seven. This sort of like radical interpersonal forgiveness is, is really kind of unprecedented. You don't really see an example of that in the Old Testament. It's more about restitution, but, but forgiving 70 times seven is kind of a radical thing, and again, I think that pinches everybody. I don't, I don't know a single person, liberal, progressive, Republican or Democrat, that enjoys forgiving. In fact, you would even see in some progressive spaces Jesus' ethic of forgiveness again rendered problematic, you know. You'll see in some disc, some discourse on the left, you know, we don't want to be too quick to forgive. We need justice, we need truth telling, and I agree with all of that, but I'm just saying that there is a little anxiety there, even about, even about Jesus, it's. That's an example to say nothing about Jesus's love your enemies, so the Jesus for the marginalized love that guy, the Jesus calling me to love my enemies, the Jesus to extend universal kindness or unlimited mercy or forgiveness. I don't know, I don't know, maybe that's a little bit problematic, maybe that hasn't aged very well for us, so I do think there's always a little friction there with us in Christ. Even if you think you read the Bible as a book of love, there's aspects of that love to you to borrow from Dostoevsky, aspects of that love that make it a harsh and a dreadful thing. We kind of quail at the demand,

Joshua Johnson: 33:24

it's very demanding. So, what does that look like? How do we get then that friction as we're reading scripture, as we're reading the Bible, because a lot of people, they're very familiar, if they've grown up, if you're in a certain denomination, you're familiar with a certain reading, it's just there. Where does that friction come in? How do we get surprised by the Bible again?

Richard Beck: 33:51

Well, I mean, I would say read the whole thing, because again, I do think, and that's kind of one of the reasons why I wrote the book with this very ambitious attempt to surprise both progressive and conservative readers of scripture. We can literally go through the chapters that you and I, and I could kind of go like, yeah, I kind of wrote that for the progressives. Yep, I wrote that for the news, and even within chapters I kind of swing back and forth, and I'm like, you know, and so I think there's just a lot of confirmation bias when we read the Bible. I think we're so convicted by our, our values and our politics that we're really just looking for confirmation, and so I would suggest actually reading the whole of it and not just kind of tiptoeing around it, so for progressives, read the whole thing, let the whole story breathe, even the troubling parts. And for conservatives, you know, they have their canon within a canon too, you know, they take to around passages as well, and I would argue, like those that prophetic imagination, right? They're slow to be critical of their nation, they're quick to grab God to baptize their politics. They don't like the Jesus that sticks up for the socially outcast and the marginalized. So, I think maybe that's the biggest problem is people gravitating to the parts they like and failing to let the whole, the whole story kind of unsettle them a little bit, and I don't think we like to be unsettled. We want, we want a book that kind of go, like, yes, this is my, this is my worldview, that this book votes like I do, this, this, you know, book about the Bible, you know, can be weaponized for the culture wars, so, so everybody has to read this book, because it's going to confirm what we all believe, and so it becomes a tribal kind of thing, and I tried to resist that with, with what I, to like, let it all sit out there, it's probably going to do me, because I'm probably going to, like, have I'll probably never earn a five-star review, because the part of the book that you don't like, you'd be like, I'll take a star off for that, like, I'll probably just get a rack up all these three and four-star reviews, you know, because nobody's going to really like both of them.

Joshua Johnson: 36:14

We need to get to a place like that, though. Right? It feels like if we're in travelistic camps, if there's so many binaries, and we're just wanting to stay within this one camp, one, I don't think we're going to discover the God of love, or you know, Jesus is as the center, or you know what we're, you're seeing in Revelation is as Jesus is Lord, but as the slaughtered lamb this lord, like we're not going to discover all of this. How do we go through? I know you've.. I think you've gone through a journey where you've gone from camp to camp to something different, like you're.. you're able to do this work now. Yeah, how do we go on a journey into a place where we're going to sit with you? you know, Jesus as center lord, where we have all of it there, and we're not in these binary camps,

Richard Beck: 37:09

you know. Sometimes I despair about, like, if there, this can be made programmatic. Sometimes I think it's experiences in life that, that, that we have to have, and until we have those experiences, and to be clear, that doesn't mean a book like mine or your podcast can't find people at those liminal spaces when they're, when they're on the cusp of these, these transitions, and but I do think some, you know, to lean into. Or to the Holy Spirit, I do think people are on journeys and they come to moments, and that's when they kind of read a book or listen to a podcast, and they go like, and some, so for me that was like that George McDonald's encounter, like I just had some senses that that this wasn't working for me, and I do think there are people out there that are kind of in that quiet middle ground that are a little tired of how conversations about the Bible are pretty predictable, depending on who their echo chamber is, is, is, and they're kind of like, yeah, I think there's more here, and it's in life, is a little bit more complicated, or they've played that string out, so for me, you know, coming at things more from a liberal progressive perspective, to me it wasn't a renunciation of those things, as much as, like, I still think my ethical commitments, my concerns about justice, the prophetic imagination are like still just absolute bedrock, like, like, if the Bible does not have good news for the marginalized, then I don't know what we're doing, and so, like, that's like a really important part for me. That said, like, to go back to something I said earlier about hope, I also noticed among liberal progressive types, like, a lot of despair and rage that curdles in a cynicism, and checking out, and so I just kind of was like just attentive to those symptoms, and was like, well, well, what's happened? Maybe they don't have enough hope, maybe they've deconstructed their way out of even believing that there is, you know, good news at the end of the story, and so they're trying to build this fierce moral commitment on top of a hopelessness, and they're burning themselves out, like physically burn themselves out. So, so to me, I think it's just being attentive, like, like, do you feel well? Do you feel joyful and peaceful, and, and, and well, and if not, then in what ways might be certain parts of the way in the ecosystem of your, of your heart and your spirituality and your practice might need some fertilizing or attending to, and so rather than just like flailing around, maybe settle like pull back in and kind of maybe do like some some assessment and then might lead you into some more generous explorations.

Joshua Johnson: 40:12

Hope has been really, really, really a key word for you in this conversation. It's really important, and so where do we, we find eschatological hope, so that as this world, which is full of despair and cynicism, that we could grab a hold of that, and so the good work that we do can be built on a hope in the end, and not just, you know, the despair.

Richard Beck: 40:39

Yeah, and that's tough, right? Because I mean, it's one thing to just, you know, it's hard to turn hope into an imperative, like, hey, everybody, you know, be hopeful out there, you know, while the world's a dumpster fire, you know, wait, but there's that great line that Wendell Berry has at the end of his one of his poems called Practice Resurrection, and so I do think hope can be a practice, we could, we could, we could like practice resurrection, and again, you see that this is not news to people who've been walking progressive or social justice spaces, the need for hope, the need for self-care, the need for embracing, touching grass, as we like to say right now, we need to get grounded, I like the practices that come from those books, Every Moment Holy from Rabbit Press. I don't know if you've ever counted those books, but

Joshua Johnson: 41:29

yeah, I think we've, we've purchased so many of those for people,

Richard Beck: 41:33

and I think they're helpful because what they do is they can they connect the desolations, the mundane parts of life, and even the in the difficult parts of life, through liturgy, through practicing resurrection, kind of connect that desolation with transcendent purposes and goals, and that I think that's a good practice for me, at least, is I just like make myself a hopeful, but a liturgy before engaging in an act of justice. There's like liturgies they have for before walking in a protest. There's a liturgy before consuming social media. One of my favorites is a liturgy by one for those who are flooded with too much information, you know, or desolating news report, so those are those are I think ways of creating some scaffolding towards hope by bringing the transcendence into view, even in the midst of what might be a very dark and gloomy news cycle.

Joshua Johnson: 42:36

I think a lot of what grounds you is your prison Bible study. That you get to go into prison, and you can see hope, you can see love, and you'd see the transforming ways that the Bible and read through the God of love can actually make a big difference. How has that prison Bible study grounded you and shown you what you're writing about?

Richard Beck: 43:01

Yeah, because you would think that, and I've told this stories related to this elsewhere, because you would think being involved in prison ministry that I'm going to a very hopeless situation, but I've actually been the exact opposite. It's weird, I find that my kind of middle-class suburban highly educated affluent church is more fragile, you know, than incarcerated people are, whose lives are, and I've also observed this, even among the poor. In fact, we're seeing this. Some recent data has been coming out on how there is what they're calling the prosperity paradox, that mental health is inversely correlated with national GDP. The more affluent the country, the worse the mental health. The poorer the country, the better the mental health. So that's the prosperity paradox. So, what's going on, and in the end I think one of the answers is because incarcerated in the poor, because they live closer to their existential need, you know, I did a podcast about my prior book called The Shape of Joy, that they're that they're able to make what I describe in that book is that's this outward turn that they're the recovery community, community would describe it as like they've learned to rely on a power greater than themselves. I think affluent people have become so self-reliant that they've, they've lacked capacities for transcendence, and I do talk about this in the book of love, where I talk about how we need help, that we often think about the atonement through the lens of forgiveness, the people substitutionary and forensic metaphors, but but there's also a sense, like, we just need like some help, and help comes in a power greater than ourselves, and coming to rely on and surrender to that power, and so to me that's one of these I have learned from the incarcerated is to to stop relying upon myself to lean on a power greater than myself to restore me to sanity, is the way the recovery would would put it, that that's been probably the biggest lesson I've learned.

Joshua Johnson: 45:23

I think that's great. I mean, in that you just mentioned the atonement, so I'd love to just talk through, like, what kind of questions do we ask then about the atonement if we're reading, you know, this through the God of Love? Like, yep, like what does that look like to ask questions about atonement.

Richard Beck: 45:43

Yeah, well, thankfully, you know, the atonement is not controversial at all, and everybody agrees on

Joshua Johnson: 45:48

it. It's very simple.

Richard Beck: 45:51

Yeah, yeah. So, well, I try to tackle the death of Jesus and think through what does that, what does that look like, and I think I'm trying to do something that I haven't seen a lot of people try to navigate. Think on the conservative side, the atonement is pretty straightforward, like because we're sinners in the hands of an angry God, Jesus dies in our place, and God's wrath is literally satisfied, and that's what love looks like. Okay, on the progressive side, finding that whole idea of a god that needs to be appeased with a, with a death or the shedding of blood, they just kind of turn away from that and they completely moralize, and what saves us is Jesus loves us, and love for each other is what is what saves us, and so I try to walk in between those two. It's not a middle road, but I'm trying to hold attention that I think that is exposed on the on the cross, and in the, the, the idea I take is one that goes way back to the church fathers, where for the church fathers have said that, like, God doesn't experience swings of emotions, and if God is also love, and I combine those two, God doesn't experience turbulent emotional swings, and that goes back to the attachment theory. War attachment figure is not an unpredictable emotional storm. God is steady and oceanic in his calm and in his love for us, and if that's true, like you, and you just count on that love, then then if that's true, then what happens on the cross cannot be any sort of like change in. God's feelings, and that's where I push back against the conservative side, that we shouldn't say, 'Well, God was angry at me, and then Jesus dies, and then God changes to, because that's an impossible.. God doesn't like.. again, back to the parable of the Prodigal Son, God doesn't change, God's always love, and you can trust you can come home, and you're not going to get, you know, punished or yelled at. He's always for you, and that challenges the way the sacrificial, what I think is a really pagan way of describing what happens on the cross that I think conservatives struggle with now. On the progressive side, they're like, okay, fine, but why such a grit? Like, why does, why good, why, why could not God write like a big Valentine in the clouds? Like, dear humanity, I love you, big heart, like, why does he like, why is there a tortured person bleeding like, like, like it's gruesome, like that's a really weird Valentine card, and so for the progressives, I say yeah, but at the cross to everything that is everything that I've done in my life that has made me complicit in the in the the the, the tearing of Shalom also faces the music at the cross. God is not angry at me, you know. He's not, he's not thundering thunder bulls, but, but if, if I don't encounter back to that kind of moral self-criticism that Israel faces, if I don't take a hard moral inventory of myself, then love becomes saccharine. It's just cotton candy. God loves you, it's a sticky note on our mirror. God love, you know, I'm like, yeah, I mean, but are we going to say God loves you to sex traffickers and not there needs to be. Here's how. Here's why I say that the cross is this bivalent symbol that is simultaneously like a stop and a go at the same time, and the stop is is that bloody shock of like I'm complicit, but at the same time it it is, and you've already been forgiven, like, while you were yet sinners, while you were God's enemy, you were already forgiven, so, so, like, before you even did your crime, before you even existed, because that's the way Revelations describes Jesus, like the lamb slain from the foundation of the world, like before you even showed up, you were forgiven, like, like, by the way, don't worry about it, like, you've always back to the Prodigal Son's father, you're always safe, and yet there's also that stop sign saying, and yet all that is dark, all of the, all the ways you subtly baptized violence and oppression, the way you are complicit, like that, that, that is confront, like you were jolted to a stop there, and so that's why it's not a valentine, the cross is a sign of contradiction, there's a no, and yet at the same time it's, and you've been forgiven, and I think that's that's that's why we get, I think, confused by the cross. I think the concern is we pull those apart, and then the message, I think, gets distorted in us. So that's the difficult thing I'm trying to convey in that chapter, is this kind of simultaneity of stop and the go that we find at the cross that allows us to hold the tensions together to not let love drift off from the saccharin, everybody's okay, because, and if anybody knows that the world's not okay, it's progressives, right? You know, but it's also pushing against that tendency amongst evangelicals to think that, like, God is mad at me and needs to be appeased. That's not true either. So, so, anyway, that's my quick attempt to kind of like say that's that's how we approach the cross as a stop and a go.

Joshua Johnson: 51:54

That's that's really good, and that's that's helpful to walk us through what that looks like, what the cross looks like. Well, this has been a fantastic conversation. The book of love is available anywhere books are sold. Richard, where would you like people to connect with you? How could they, they read what you're doing every single day when you're putting out something?

Richard Beck: 52:17

Yeah, I have. I still have my original blog back from 2007 on Blogger. Can you believe that? That even still exists, but I do cross post it on Substack. That's where most people follow me. If you Google Richard Beck Experimental Theology, you could, I show, I'll show up in your inbox Monday through Friday, just writing about, you know, what I'm thinking about, and, and, yeah, you can find me on Substack. Right,

Joshua Johnson: 52:41

great. Before you go, I'd love to get a recommendation or two from you. So, anything you've been reading or watching lately you could recommend?

Richard Beck: 52:49

Oh, that's.. oh, that's fascinating. So, my wife and I are Jane Austen fans, and so on Brit Box is a really interesting series called The Other Bennett Sister. So, my wife..

Joshua Johnson: 53:01

really good things, yeah,

Richard Beck: 53:02

yeah, yeah. It's really good. It kind of takes this, this obscure figure and Pride and Prejudice, and kind of like reads the whole story from her perspective. And it's Mary, for those who know Pride and Prejudice, and she's like the quirky odd duck. And so, just kind of going back to what we were talking about earlier, about the marginalized, it's very interesting to like see her as this underdog and kind of root for this character, so we've been, we've been, yeah, we've been loving that. I also read Gavin Ortlund's book about, I think it's called Why I'm Our Protestant, or The Case for Protestantism, and I found that was really interesting, book two, because he kind of argues that Protestantism is one of its main features, it's its ability to fix itself or reform itself, like it has a capacity for fallibility, and I thought I've been thinking about that, like what does it mean to practice fallibility, you know, that, but to be able to look at a tradition and say, hey, maybe, maybe we were wrong, and we can fix it, and that idea being kind of, maybe you know, Protestantism gets banged around a lot, but that idea of like humility and fallibility is kind of being at the root of what it was trying to do, I really, I really liked that idea to kind of go like maybe, maybe the church got some things wrong, and so how can we kind of go back and like fix it? In many ways, I think we're always doing something like that, but it's an interesting book.

Joshua Johnson: 54:36

Yeah, that's great. Well, thank you for those, and thank you for this conversation. I really, really enjoyed this, and I love that it is not just a take of a conservative take or progressive take, but it is, how do we, how do we sit with these questions? What does it look like to view the Bible through God is love, and give us some hope as we journey on our way, so thank you. It was fantastic.

Richard Beck: 55:04

Appreciate it. Great conversation. Thank you.

Unknown: 55:06

Bye.